英国essay范文：Cities, poverty and inequality in the UK

英国essay范文-英国的城市、贫困和不平等。在全球金融危机和紧缩教条之后，贫困和不平等受到了学术界和政策界的新关注。为了本文的目的，特别有趣的是，看看节俭政治的赤裸裸版本，以及它们如何助长了现有的社会经济贫困，以及它们如何与追溯到撒切尔主义经济学和巫毒经济学的更深层次的政治相一致。本文将着眼于英国，特别是伦敦、曼彻斯特和格拉斯哥，梳理围绕贫困和不平等的主题，以及它们是如何作为威斯敏斯特政策和决策的直接结果而活跃起来的。总的来说，贫穷和不平等是多方面的概念，不应被视为纯粹的经济概念。它们与遗产和集体记忆相交，因此，城市与不平等之间的关系将是动态和复杂的。下面就一起欣赏这篇英国essay范文。

Introduction 简介

Debates on poverty and inequality have been always heated and topical. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the dogma of austerity, poverty and inequality received a newfound attention from academic and policy circles alike. What is especially interesting, for the purposes of this essay, is to look at the bare version of austerity politics and how they have fed into existing socioeconomic privation and how they are aligned with more deep seated politics dating back to Thatcherite economics and Voodoo economics (Harvey, 2005).

This essay will look at the UK and specifically London, Manchester and Glasgow, and tease out themes around poverty and inequality and how they have been animated as a direct result of policy as well as decision-making at Westminster. By and large, poverty and inequality are multifaceted concepts and should not be seen as purely economic. They intersect with legacies and collective memories and the relationship between cities and inequality is therefore going to be dynamic and complicated.

This essay first turns to delineating what cities, poverty and inequality are taken to mean and locate this discussion within a larger theoretical current and critique. The argument that will be proposed is that poverty and inequality are, put simply, manifested in their fullest extent in global cities, as they are the immediate receptors of government policy and dialogue. Although regional cities and towns are also affected, the ‘contagion’ of policy is a lot weaker and their relationship obscure. To provide evidence for this argument, this essay will examine three different socioeconomic phenomena that have stark implications for poverty and inequality, namely neoliberal austerity politics, a protracted housing crisis, and finally, deindustrialization and a one-sided focus on the City. The essay concludes with a couple of policy recommendations as to how to curtail the rise of inequality in cities.

本文首先描述了城市、贫困和不平等的含义，并将这一讨论定位在更大的理论潮流和批判中。将提出的论点是，简单地说，贫穷和不平等在全球城市中最充分地表现出来，因为它们是政府政策和对话的直接接受者。尽管区域城镇也受到影响，但政策的“传染”作用要弱得多，它们之间的关系也不明显。为了为这一论点提供证据，本文将研究三种不同的社会经济现象，它们对贫困和不平等具有鲜明的影响，即新自由主义紧缩政治、旷日持久的住房危机，最后是去工业化和片面关注城市。本文最后就如何遏制城市不平等加剧提出了几点政策建议。

Why global cities? 为什么是全球城市？

As briefly mentioned in the introduction, this essay identifies and looks into global cities as opposed to a nation as a whole. This is because the latter is more abstract and generalized, and relies on more macroeconomic assumptions. In contrast, the former is the ‘playground’ of policy and dialogue, being their proximate receptor and their locus (Musterd and Ostendorf, 2013). That is to say, global cities, in a way, symbolize what policy underlies and is about. The direct consequences that accrue allow an observer to make more credible and robust points about its relationship to inequality and poverty (Sassen, 2011). For example, if this essay were to take up national inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, the concepts would become harder to discern and the implications unclear. Much of the theoretical literature has homed in on the root causes of inequality and how this deleterious phenomenon has come about (see Atkinson, 2015). Although this essay will later touch on and attempt to trace why inequality exists and is magnified in cities, it is noteworthy that most of the research into inequality shies away from looking at the direct results it has on life in global cities. 

正如引言中简要提到的那样，本文确定并展望了全球城市，而不是整个国家。这是因为后者更为抽象和概括，并且依赖于更多的宏观经济假设。相比之下，前者是政策和对话的“操场”，是它们的直接受体和所在地。也就是说，全球城市在某种程度上象征着政策的基础和内容。由此产生的直接后果使观察者能够就其与不平等和贫困的关系提出更可信和有力的观点。例如，如果本文以基尼系数衡量国家不平等，概念将变得更难识别，含义也不清楚。许多理论文献都关注不平等的根源以及这种有害现象是如何产生的。尽管本文稍后将触及并试图追踪不平等存在并在城市中扩大的原因，但值得注意的是，大多数对不平等的研究都回避了它对全球城市生活的直接影响。

How do we explain poverty and inequality? 我们如何解释贫困和不平等？

Next, this essay turns to defining poverty and inequality. There is a presumption in favour of conflating these two to purely economic phenomena to be addressed by economic solutions. However, as will be examined, the case study of Glasgow is a powerful rejoinder to this conflation. Namely, it is a city that has competitive economic infrastructure and results, and yet lags behind in other crucial holistic social measurements. More broadly, poverty and inequality, as stated are complex and multifaceted. That is why it is suggested that the Gini coefficient is a fundamentally limited and misguided measurement to marshal in this essay. Instead, what would be more relevant would be more relevant is to look at the likes of Amartya Sen (2005) and his work on human capabilities and how potential can be frustrated in myriad non-economic ways. For this reason, this essay cannot properly infer from London’s high economic performance that it adequately caters to the problems of inequality and poverty. Put simply, that a global city grows does not mean that the least well off are benefiting as well. By taking this comprehensive approach, this essay will discuss how complex policy has complex consequences on people’s lives and general levels of contentedness.

接下来，本文转向贫困和不平等的定义。有一种假设是赞成将这两种现象合并为纯经济现象，通过经济解决方案加以解决。然而，正如我们将要研究的那样，格拉斯哥的案例研究是对这种融合的有力反驳。也就是说，它是一个具有竞争力的经济基础设施和成果的城市，但在其他关键的整体社会衡量方面落后。更广泛地说，如上所述，贫穷和不平等是复杂和多方面的。这就是为什么在本文中，基尼系数是一个从根本上限制和误导马歇尔的测量方法。相反，更相关的是看看Amartya Sen和他在人类能力方面的工作，以及如何以各种非经济方式挫败潜力。因此，本文无法从伦敦的高经济表现中正确推断它是否充分满足了不平等和贫困问题。简而言之，一个全球城市的发展并不意味着最不富裕的人也会受益。通过采用这种综合方法，本文将讨论复杂的政策如何对人们的生活和总体满意度产生复杂的后果。

The trajectory of inequality 不平等的轨迹

Inequality is, by no means, novel. This discussion is embedded in a global debate about what gives rise and momentum to inequality, especially following the global financial crisis of 2008. In the core of the Western world, inequality has run amok in the past few decades, despite the fact that they have rendered modest economic growth in general (Piketty, 2014). This puzzling reality has been the subject of a lot of academic debate and contributions; some scholars have suggested that inequality is not inevitable but, in fact, beneficial, as it makes people more driven and aspirational, and more likely to celebrate and mimic such role models as Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet (Lippman et al., 2005). According to this line of arguing, inequality is seen to be a by-product of entrepreneurial ability and prowess.

不平等绝不是新鲜事。这一讨论植根于一场全球辩论中，辩论的主题是什么导致了不平等及其势头，尤其是在2008年全球金融危机之后。在西方世界的核心地区，不平等现象在过去几十年中肆虐，尽管它们总体上实现了适度的经济增长。这一令人困惑的现实一直是许多学术辩论和贡献的主题；一些学者认为，不平等并非不可避免，但实际上是有益的，因为它使人们更有动力和抱负，更有可能庆祝和模仿马克·扎克伯格和沃伦·巴菲特等榜样。根据这种观点，不平等被视为创业能力和能力的副产品。

However, it is unlikely that this line of thought captures the deep and perplexing character of inequality. To rebut the claim that inequality is a fair reflection of talent and ability, this essay makes a contention that it is rather the result of collective deliberate decision-making (Stieglitz, 2012). This becomes particularly evident in global cities where the contradictions therein highlight that it must be more than just a lack of talent or luck that is holding people back on such a large scale. London, for example, boasts the City which is undeniably the globe’s foremost financial center and also the silicon roundabout, a very promising and booming hub of entrepreneurs. Yet, it also has areas like Peckham. Inquiring into the latter’s residents’ attitudes, it becomes plain that they feel disillusioned and failed by the capital of the United Kingdom (Glaeser et al., 2009). This area offers another side to London’s ‘success story’, as it tends to be hosts of endemic crime, destitution, childhood obesity and other negative manifestations. Therefore, to say that inequality is down to the genes you are endowed and the aspirations you form is too simplistic a story for global cities.

然而，这种思路不太可能抓住不平等的深刻而令人困惑的特征。为了反驳不平等是人才和能力的公平反映的说法，本文提出了一个论点，即它是集体深思熟虑的决策的结果。这在全球城市中尤为明显，其中的矛盾突显出，阻碍人们大规模发展的不仅仅是人才或运气的缺乏。例如，伦敦以其城市而自豪，无可否认，它是全球最重要的金融中心，也是硅环岛，一个非常有前途和蓬勃发展的企业家中心。然而，它也有像佩卡姆这样的地区。调查后者的居民态度，很明显，他们对英国首都感到失望和失败。这一地区为伦敦的“成功故事”提供了另一面，因为它往往是地方性犯罪、贫困、儿童肥胖和其他负面表现的宿主。因此，说不平等是由你天生的基因和你形成的愿望决定的，对于全球城市来说，这是一个过于简单的故事。

Another instance in which it is seen that people are adversely affected by phenomena outside of their control is that of the prolonged housing crisis that London is witnessing (Harford, 2014). Due to unprecedented demand and people looking to move in, house prices have been on a perpetual rise. What has enabled this rise has been the power that landlords have in that they can charge disproportionate amounts to tenants but they can also fund their own mortgage by letting out properties (Harford, 2014). This translates very negatively for people from lower socioeconomic strata, as they lack comparable access to credit to begin with. That is why they turn to the state and council houses which cater to that. However, the latter have also been penetrated by private landlords leading to the perverse situation whereby council housing is owned privately and can also be overcharged. This is down to political choices regarding allowing the right to buy these kinds of properties, but also creating a generally more permissive framework to buy and let property. At the same time, those at the top end of the economic spectrum have benefitted from more generous inheritance and high property tax offering a glimpse into how glaring inequality can become in global cities. To contrast that, note that Berlin has recently introduced rent controls to avoid a similar scenario (Vasagar, 2015).

另一个可以看出人们受到其无法控制的现象的不利影响的例子是伦敦正在经历的长期住房危机。由于前所未有的需求和人们希望搬入，房价一直在持续上涨。促成这一增长的是房东拥有的权力，他们可以向租户收取不成比例的费用，但他们也可以通过出租房地产来为自己的抵押贷款提供资金。这对社会经济较低阶层的人来说是非常不利的，因为他们从一开始就缺乏类似的信贷渠道。这就是为什么他们求助于满足这一需求的国务院大楼。然而，后者也被私人房东渗透，导致了一种不正当的情况，即议会住房是私人拥有的，也可能被收取过高的费用。这取决于政治选择，即允许购买此类房产，但也创造了一个更为宽松的框架来购买和出租房产。与此同时，那些处于经济领域顶端的人受益于更慷慨的遗产和更高的财产税，这让我们得以一瞥全球城市中的不平等现象会变得多么严重。相比之下，请注意，柏林最近引入了租金控制，以避免类似情况。

It is therefore clear that people living in London have vastly different and unequal access to the most important asset of their consumption lives, namely their house, which has bad implications for their psychological wellbeing and the extent to which they can provide for their families sustainably. Big cities cannot afford to have these kinds of contradictions run within them, whereby lower strata segregate from the mainstream in the own communities and refuse to engage with political-decision making and active citizenship (Wheeler, 2005). This, in turn, exacerbates the already unsteady relationship between cities and inequality, as these groups lose morale and incentive to engage with common goals and agendas.

因此，很明显，生活在伦敦的人们在获得消费生活中最重要的资产，即房屋方面有着巨大的差异和不平等，这对他们的心理健康以及他们能够持续供养家人的程度有着不良影响。大城市承受不起这种内部矛盾的影响，即较低阶层与自己社区的主流隔离，拒绝参与政治决策和积极的公民身份。这反过来又加剧了城市与不平等之间本已不稳定的关系，因为这些群体失去了参与共同目标和议程的士气和动力。

Neoliberalism 新自由主义

The global financial crisis has made a case that the United Kingdom’s government has heated and that is in favour of austerity politics. The government has engaged in discretionary benefit cuts and also has increased tuition for tertiary education, both of which disproportionally hurt the poor and therefore augment inequality. In seeing benefits reduced, a person in a big city faces profound adversity. Compounded by the housing crisis and general inflation, this person is likely to have his livelihood eroded. Their children will also have to take bloated student loans, and that is if they can afford to hold off working immediately after school. Recently, the UK government has engaged in a bait-and-switch policy whereby benefits to the poor were cut yet that was supposedly counteracted by the introduction of a ‘living’ wage (O’Connor and Gordon, 2015). Again, this example demonstrates that inequality is not an inevitable result of human nature and a random distribution of talent, but created and magnified by governments and collective communities that have bought into the austerity dogma. This has been criticised by high-profile academics such as Pikkety (2014), Stieglitz (2012), and Atkinson (2015).

全球金融危机表明，英国政府态度强硬，支持紧缩政策。政府采取了自由裁量的福利削减措施，还增加了高等教育的学费，这两项措施都不成比例地伤害了穷人，从而加剧了不平等。看到利益减少，大城市的人面临着巨大的逆境。再加上住房危机和普遍通货膨胀，此人的生计可能会受到侵蚀。他们的孩子也将不得不接受巨额学生贷款，如果他们能够负担得起放学后立即推迟工作的话。最近，英国政府实施了一项诱饵和转换政策，即削减了穷人的福利，但这被“生活”工资的引入所抵消。再次，这个例子表明，不平等不是人性和人才随机分布的必然结果，而是由政府和集体社区创造和扩大的，他们接受了紧缩教条。Pikkety、Stieglitz和Atkinson等知名学者对此提出了批评。

The seeds of inequality were perhaps planted by Thatcherite economics and a legacy of tough-love when it comes to trade unions, workers, and the welfare state. Following Thatcher’s election, the government introduced a series of neoliberal reforms that placed socioeconomically vulnerable people in an even more precarious situation, stripped of participation in unions, their jobs, if they worked for a factory that closed down, and livelihoods as regressive taxation took its toll (Harvey, 2005). One of the most important features that is relevant for the purposes of this essay is that of deindustrialization and how it has engendered a deep north-south divide in the UK that is persistent and difficult to address. Through a strong and remorseless focus on the service industry, which was hailed as forward-looking, efficient and innovative, the UK’s industrial base concentrated in cities like Manchester and Glasgow (less so) took a back seat to the city of London (The Equity Trust, 2014). The latter has been consistently nurtured with state support and policy ever since at the expensive of other sectors, such as the manufacturing one which used to make up the backbone of the British economy. Instead, now it is, broadly speaking, lagging behind in terms of productivity as the latest findings of the CDI show (The Equity Trust, 2014).

不平等的种子可能是撒切尔主义经济学和对工会、工人和福利国家的残酷爱的遗产播下的。撒切尔当选后，政府推出了一系列新自由主义改革，将社会经济弱势群体置于更加不稳定的境地，剥夺了他们参加工会的权利，剥夺了他们的工作，如果他们在一家关闭的工厂工作，剥夺了他们的生计，因为倒退的税收造成了损失。与本文目的相关的最重要特征之一是非工业化，以及它如何在英国造成了持续且难以解决的深刻南北差距。通过对被誉为前瞻性、高效性和创新性的服务业的强烈而无情的关注，英国的工业基地集中在曼彻斯特和格拉斯哥等城市（不那么重要），落后于伦敦市。自那以后，后者一直在国家支持和政策的推动下发展，其他部门的成本都很高，例如曾经构成英国经济支柱的制造业。相反，正如CDI的最新调查结果所显示的那样，现在，从广义上讲，它在生产力方面落后。

(source: The Equity Trust, 2014)

The graph above shows pay gaps between the rich and the poor in different regions in the UK. It is clear that the pay gap in London is the most glaring, although London is by far the highest growing city. This is because the service industry caters mainly to the wealthy and lacks the traditionally job-creating economic multipliers of the industrial and manufacturing sectors that have suffered.

上图显示了英国不同地区的贫富差距。很明显，伦敦的工资差距最为明显，尽管伦敦是迄今为止增长最快的城市。这是因为服务业主要面向富人，缺乏传统上受影响的工业和制造业创造就业的经济乘数。

Conclusion 结论

In conclusion, this essay first took up the ambitious task of delineating what is meant by poverty and inequality, which are inherently complicated concepts. It has also attempted to come to grips with global cities and why they should be viewed as the main reference point in any policy discussion about poverty and inequality. The relationship that this essay identified is, by no accounts static. Rather, it evolves with time and changes in government and collective dialogue. This essay has also aimed to dispel associations between growth and inequality throughout by pointing at the example of London and Glasgow, both of which should alter the reader to the holistic and insidious ways in which inequality and poverty work. The roots of inequality and poverty have also been briefly explored, looking at how they are not novel but the result of long-lasting legacies and engrained ways of political thinking. It has finally turned to how important and telling the current context is in terms of how inequality sustaining policies have been legitimized under the guise of austerity and in the name of balanced budgets.

Bibliography 参考文献

Atkinson, A.B., 2015. Inequality: What Can Be Done? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Glaeser, E.L., Resseger, M., Tobio, K., 2009. Inequality in Cities. Journal of Regional Science 49, 617–646.

Harford, T., 2014. Why a house-price bubble means trouble. Financial Times. 

Harvey, D., 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lippmann, S., Davis, A., Aldrich, H., 2005. Entrepreneurship and Inequality. In: Lisa Keister (Ed.) Entrepreneurship, Research in the Sociology of Work. London: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 3–31.

Musterd, S., Ostendorf, W., 2013. Urban Segregation and the Welfare State: Inequality and Exclusion in Western Cities. London: Routledge.

O’Connor, S., Gordon, S., 2015. Summer Budget: Osborne makes bold bet with “living wage.” Financial Times.

Piketty, T., 2014. Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sassen, S., 2011. Cities in a World Economy. London: SAGE Publications.

Sen, A., 2005. Human rights and capabilities. Journal of Human Development 6, 151–166.

The Equity Trust, 2014. A Divided Britain? – Inequality Within and Between Regions. London: The Equity Trust.

Stiglitz, J., 2012. The price of inequality. London: Penguin.

Vasagar, J., 2015. Germany caps rents to tackle rise in housing costs. Financial Times.

Wheeler, C.H., 2005. Cities, Skills, and Inequality. Growth and Change 36, 329–353.

英国essay范文首先承担了一项雄心勃勃的任务，即界定贫困和不平等的含义，这是一个内在复杂的概念。它还试图解决全球城市问题，以及为什么应该将这些城市视为任何有关贫困和不平等的政策讨论的主要参考点。英国essay范文中确定的关系绝不是静态的。相反，它随着时间的推移以及政府和集体对话的变化而演变。本文还以伦敦和格拉斯哥为例，旨在消除经济增长与不平等之间的联系，这两个城市都应该让读者认识到不平等和贫困的整体性和隐蔽性。还简要探讨了不平等和贫困的根源，探讨了它们如何不是新颖的，而是长期遗产和根深蒂固的政治思维方式的结果。它最终转向了当前环境的重要性和重要性，即维持不平等的政策是如何在紧缩和平衡预算的名义下合法化的。本站提供各国各专业essay写作指导服务，如有需要可咨询本平台。