Crisis, welvaart en verdelingsstrijd

Samenvatting

In the Netherlands, redistribution of income was a source of social & political conflicts throughout the early 1970s. From 1975 on, as unemployment increased & the overall growth of real wages slowed down, these conflicts were generally expected to escalate. The opposite happened: the distributional issue became less controversial. Widely shared equity considerations forced a conservative government to implement a moderately egalitarian income policy, which the higher income groups hardly opposed. The economic crisis was generally considered to justify more than proportional sacrifices on the part of these groups. Examples from other periods & other countries suggest that this combination of crisis & harmony is not at all unusual; some of the more severe distributional conflicts took place in years of uninterrupted economic growth. Investigated is the kind of social & economic conditions that produce harmony or conflict regarding income inequality. The possible forms of interplay between simultaneously pursued wage demands from different income groups are investigated, especially in terms of implications for distributional harmony & conflict. Modified HA.