The rich: we hear too much and know too little

As the Sunday Times Rich List publishes its ranking of Scotland's wealthiest people, it reveals that two things can be true at the same time – we hear far too much about the very wealthy and yet we know far too little about them.

The former is straightforward. There are many academic studies on how wealth is represented in the media and how the wealthy approach management of the media and the findings are consistent. First, wealth and the interests of wealth are disproportionately covered in the media.

To take a simple example, share prices are of direct financial interest to fewer than one in six people in Britain but are dominant on television news. News about wages or income inequality (which are of interest to many more people than that) get nothing like as much airtime.

What is more telling is that across the media as a whole, wealth is almost always portrayed positively and the lives of the rich are not only massively over-represented but generally presented as aspirational. Wealth is presented as good.

This is reinforced by the fact that one of the most commonly represented groups in TV news and current affairs is 'experts', and experts themselves tend overwhelmingly to frame wealth as good and the wealthy as 'deserving it'.

By comparison, the middle classes are the group which sees themselves most on television (particularly during daytime) and their interests are generally taken to be 'common interests'. But the working class are seldom portrayed at all outside soap operas and are often framed in news stories as feckless or racist or against multiculturalism. The 'underclass' comes off worst, almost always covered negatively and often scapegoated as the cause of bigger social problems.

None of this is surprising given that studies have repeatedly shown that the very wealthy spend a lot of time trying to stay out of the media but control its narratives. The super-rich generally do not like to be singled out individually but they do have a very strong interest in manipulating the media to represent their interests as a 'public good' – which explains a lot of the above.

So we hear and see too much about the very wealthy and it functions more like propaganda than analysis. And yet there is a flip side to this.

Common Weal is in the final stages of editing a new report on inequality in Scotland [all data below forthcoming; incomes are net post-tax] and there is an issue that repeatedly crops up – the data on the top ten per cent of the wealthiest is barely useable. If you look at what that band is covering it is easy to understand why.

In Scotland, a household with two newly qualified teachers on standard starting salaries are on the cusp of being in the top ten wealthiest households and may be in the top ten depending on their tax situation. At the top of that band is Anders Povlsen who is worth £8.3 billion. Scotland's top ten per cent wealthiest households go from two newly married 25-year-old teachers renting a small flat to members of the global elite rich list.

The 'wealth curve' of the other 90 per cent is fairly steep (going from a bit over £16,000 post-tax annual income at the top of the poorest ten per cent of households to about £62,000 at the top of the 90th decile) but it becomes exponential in the top ten per cent. The problem is, we don't know where.

There aren't enough people in the top ten per cent of wealthy households for current sample data to tell you enough to understand exactly how wealth is spread in that group or how much wealth they have at all. There is really comparatively little income wealth among 90 per cent of the Scottish population.

To show that, a panel of randomly selected citizens were asked to produce a list of what is the basic minimum that they thought people should be able to do to live a 'decent life' – not just surviving but able to socialise, pursue a modest hobby, go a family holiday in the summer. The cost of that lifestyle was then calculated.

For a household of two adults and two children living outside London, the cost of a decent life is a salary of at least £72,000. That is gross salary while the numbers above are post-tax net income. But you can see that, among 90 per cent of the population, most are hovering around or are well below the 'decent life' figure.

And then we don't know what the top ten per cent has or who in the top ten per cent has it. If you lionise the wealthy and their interests on the evening news but then fail to collect data to show how corrosive this is on wider society, we will be talking about 'budget black holes' for a long time to come.