Ideas - White Wine with Lunch: How much luxury is reasonable for one person?

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Is there a luxury you would never give up for your ideals? An all-purpose deal-breaker? IDEAS producer Tom Howell investigates how wanting a nice lunch in a restaurant intersects with morals and politics — with the help of a restaurateur, an economist, an anti-poverty campaigner, and a light golden Chablis.   

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. The other day around lunchtime, I stopped in at a popular restaurant in my city. The other day around lunchtime, I stopped in at a popular restaurant in my city.

I had asked an acquaintance, David, to meet me for lunch. He suggested this place, and I said, what a great idea. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. The idea of going out for lunch. It's not high on the list of the world's important concepts. for lunch. It's not high on the list of the world's important concepts. No rival to the Copernican revolution. Not as complex as string theory. Less studied by historians than the role of hubris in undermining the goals of the European enlightenment. Set against ideas like these, perhaps, hey, let's go have lunch somewhere, doesn't sound like it deserves close examination.

Nevertheless. What do you mean by that? The aspects of myself that relate to having lunch? You mean like the collective societal impact of millions of people all wanting to take a lunch specifically? Well, the rest of them would get a bit full. I think the sort of context of your lunch seems like quite important, really. I think a lot of us are dealing with this

cognitive dissonance. He would not go on any dinner or any meal that cost more than the weekly benefit for a family of four at the time. On this episode, we examine how committing to a moderate level of luxury affects a person's range of responses, whether it's to inequality or impending doom. Ideas producer Tom Howell takes it from here. It's 1.30 p.m. at L'Express in the Montreal neighborhood known as the Plateau. I'm having lunch here with the owner of another restaurant. I am David Ferguson.

I'm the chef-owner of Restaurant Gus in Montreal and Rue Beaubien. And you've been in the restaurant business since you were a... 16, so I think 37 years. I'd asked David to help me with, let's call it an ongoing awareness issue. I know how to go to a restaurant and order some lunch for myself, but it's been starting to nag at me that in doing so,

I may be asking for a bit more than I realize. I figured David could point out some of these hidden aspects. L'express is like, oh, here we go. Are we ready? Yes, we are. All right. Or do you go first? I will order gazpacho to start, please.

Sorry, a gazpacho. Gazpacho, yeah. And then David's going to order what he wants while I think a little bit more. I'll have the rillette. Rillette? Actually, no, I'll have just a green salad. Just a green salad? Yeah, a green salad followed by a steak tartare.

I'll have the grilled salmon, please. The grilled salmon. And do you want something to drink? A glass of wine, a beer, a cocktail? What are you doing? I know I'd like a glass of white wine, but I haven't looked at the ones yet. I'll take the um the Riesling by the glass. Did you want to do a bottle? No but the glass is good. Yeah I think so. I'll try the Chablis then. Try the Chablis. Do you guys want some bread and pickles? Yeah please. Sure please.

Like L'Express is like old school. One of the reasons I chose it's my favorite room in the city. The first thing you notice is there is no music. Music. To have a restaurant with no music is a blessing sometimes but it's also interesting because it's all hard surfaces but the way it's designed like we're in the back section here and and we have this lovely atrium, and this is breaking up the sound, and the way the wall dips there breaks up the sound. So it's a lot of very subtle details that makes the room comfortable. So you and I, we can talk at a comfortable level. Yeah, not too bad, and I'm very sensitive to that.

And yet, we don't really hear the conversations next to us. Therefore, we also feel comfortable talking about whatever we want. Our waiter appears he's got two wine bottles with him. Oh, it's very dry. Yeah. You get a fresh bottle. That can't happen every time. Cheers. Cheers.

What I was saying about the old school is that it's very professional service. You have a waiter. Then you have sweet tours who are bringing all the dishes and the bread and the pickles. You have a bartender. And you never feel when you're here that things are out of control. I haven't seen anything dropped yet. Oh, you missed it before you came in. But it was funny. The woman dropped something over there, the server, right away. Calmly, a buster or teammate came out, cleaned it up. No reactions. No nothing. Just this happens.

No reactions, no nothing, just this happens. It's a part of the business. Nobody going, you know, ah, you know. The one thing I try to say to explain to people is that the one ingredient that... Bon appétit. Merci. Bon appétit. Merci. Bon appétit. The one thing that makes any meal taste bad is anxiety. If you are in a restaurant and you're anxious about,

and am I going to get served, especially at lunch, usually you're a little pressed for time. If you can go to a place that you know you're not going to have anxiety, it elevates everything else around it. That's another reason why I chose here, is that I've never had any anxiety here, other than the bill sometimes. A lack of anxiety. This is a hidden quality of a great lunch at a restaurant. A lack of anxiety is also precisely what was recommended to me on a related topic by a different David. Hi, I'm David O'Leary and I am founder at Kind Wealth.

Kind Wealth is a financial planning practice. We do advice-only financial planning. It means we work with our clients to plan out their financial futures and make sure that their entire asset picture maps and is organized and aligned in a way that will help them reach their financial goals. And tell me your slogan. Yeah, I mean, we've got a few, but one of them is money doesn't have to be mean. There are several layers to that. But at its heart, what we are trying to do is make sure that we understand our clients' values before we talk to them about their goals to help ensure that we map out goals

that actually reflect what a life well lived looks like to a client. I asked David O'Leary to help me figure out what it would take to justify one aspect of my lifestyle, namely the part where I take myself out to a nice restaurant for lunch at least once per month, sometimes more. I told David ahead of time I would not accept stop doing it as his answer under any conditions. We're living in an age where there's a lot of money gurus talking to you about, you know, the reason you're not reaching your financial goals

is because you're buying a latte every day at Starbucks. And it's just that type of mentality I don't think is helpful. The reason you're not reaching your financial goals is because you're buying a latte every day at Starbucks. And it's just that type of mentality I don't think is helpful. What people spend their money on and what benefit it brings to them is very personal. You know, I think about the single mother who's new to Canada, raising three kids and working two full-time jobs. She needs a coffee every day to get through, and that's part of her day that she really you know who's to say that she shouldn't be spending that four dollars a day on that what's that doing for her mental health and so having these blanket statements that you know you need to cut out your monthly lunch or your daily coffee or whatever those things are i think are unhealthy

attitudes towards money what we would typically typically do with clients is start with, what are your long-term goals? What are your values? What do you care about? What matters to you? And if a life well lived looks like, hey, I'm going to enjoy myself while I'm here. I don't need to have a lot of, I don't have kids and I don't need to give away a lot of money to leave beyond the grave. And I just need enough for myself. And you're well on track to that, then enjoy that, you know, enjoy your money, enjoy going out to the restaurants and spending it because you don't have the goal to do all of these other things. Can you work out the economic requirements that someone has to go through before they are able to feel comfortable having that kind of lunch once a month? What sorts of things would they probably need to have taken care of and have in place, I guess, in order to have that luxury?

Yeah, I know. So I understand what you're going for here. I don't think there are hard and fast rules or even particularly valuable rules of thumb for this type of thing, because, again, there's a value tradeoff. I mean, how much value are you getting from it? And from it? And for one person versus another, that could be a very different number. So to express it as a percentage of your income, for instance, and say, well, it shouldn't be more than 5% of your monthly income that you're spending on this type of thing just isn't a helpful metric because we can't apply it. It's just people are so different. What I would say is I think the healthier approach is to say the vast majority of Canadians don't have any idea about how much money they need to be able to do the things that they want to do. David O'Leary could clearly tell that I was having some anxiety concerning my having great lunches, but not really about affording them or feeling guilty for blowing money on a luxury. My problem with lunches takes a bit of work to pin

down. If I want to justify morally, I guess is probably what I'm saying, the level of bourgeois life that I'm living. Do I have to? I mean, is there anywhere that you think I should start if I'm trying to look at like, what is a reasonable amount of luxury for one person to have in the society? Yeah, so I know where you're coming from here. This is something I think a lot about personally. I really think this is a personal moral decision. I mean, we can always think of extreme examples. Like if you give away everything.

Yeah, you either give it all away or you literally give nothing away and you're spending it all on Lamborghinis and yachts and all those things. And I think Jeff Bezos buying, you know, a $500 million yacht and they've got to bring down a bridge because he can't get it in. I mean, it starts to get on the borderline.

You know, is it clearly on the excessive end of things? But for, you know, for each of us, you know, I specifically don't try to get into that game because I think a couple of things. One is, A, everybody's got a different moral compass, I guess, and what they feel good about. But B, where you are at a particular stage in your life, you may just have altering views.

So, for instance, if the David O'Leary of today met the David O'Leary of 10 years ago, I think I would judge that David O'Leary very harshly. Tell me more. It's just I was indoctrinated in free market capitalism, spent zero time thinking about charitable issues and causes and others who were in need. I just, I wasn't, I wasn't malicious. I just didn't, it wasn't under my radar. I didn't think about it. I didn't care about it. I thought, you know, charity is not something I'm interested in. Other people do that type of thing. And I had a bunch of experiences in my life that, from meeting my wife to traveling through

sub-Saharan Africa and living in South Africa for a while, that really opened my eyes to a lot of what was happening in the world. And for me, my need for like how much of my time, energy, and money needs to go towards helping those who don't have the same opportunity as us changed radically. The David O'Leary at the peak capitalism time, like, what do you remember about that? So studying, I studied an MBA and did the CFA designation, which is, you know, sort of a, in the investment industry, one of the gold standards, worked in on Bay Street. And it was all about financial security, I need to make sure that I have enough and I'm going to invest.

Did you have a fancy car or were you just slucking it away? Yeah, sure. I mean, it depends on what you're... I had a BMW for a while. It's pretty fancy. Sure, yeah. It's not a supercar, but it's certainly more than I needed. But for me, it was meeting my wife.

And then because of my wife, she was a humanitarian worker, spent time in Sierra Leone, doing some volunteer work there. And Sierra Leone is very visible poverty and pretty heartbreaking circumstances after a brutal long civil war. And so that really just was the start of the rocking me out of my complacency, seeing firsthand the lack of opportunity for a lot of folks there that, you know, who are no different than me just by circumstance of where they were born. And so that started to unlodge it. And now I've spent a lot of my time thinking about how do I use my background in the investment markets and in the finance world to make a positive impact. And that's

where I think if we help people reach their own goals and get that, I'm going to be okay. I think a lot more people will start thinking about the types of issues you're wrestling with, which is how much should I be spending on myself versus doing other things with it either for myself or for my community or for others. And do you mind sharing just personally, is there a line that you can define or is there any sort of luxury you wouldn't do now or Or where does it start to feel like, is this too? Yeah. So cars is a good one, right? Like when I was a kid, a supercar like a Ferrari or Lamborghini seemed like the dream. I wouldn't even feel comfortable driving one anymore. It just seems like just such an impractical, excessive expense that, you know, and then

when I think about what I could do with that money instead, it's just for for me personally, and I saw, I was driving downtown the other day and somebody drove past in a Lamborghini. And when I was, again, 10 years ago, I would have been staring at it going, that's so cool. And today I looked at it just thinking like, oh, it's so excessive. Who needs, it's so impractical in a country like Canada to waste so much money on a car like that. I mean, again, I try not to judge too much, but it's hard not to when you see such excessive spending on an impractical good. Right.

Brilliant. Thank you so much, David. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. A close-up encounter with poverty may well cause a wealthy person to change their politics. It opens them up to new ideas about what counts as fair. Possibly it ruins Lamborghinis forever. It can also alert the comfortably off person to their own precarious position. This came out the other day. I was enjoying a seasonal dish of lamb engulfed in fresh mint leaves, plus a glass of red wine,

at a restaurant, this time in Montreal's Upper Plateau, with my wife Linda. She was once a well-off 20-something, raised among Canada's comfortable class, traveling the world for the first time with her backpack and exploring India. It's very upsetting when you are from outside that environment and you have no experience of being surrounded by people who are so much poorer than yourself. But I think for people who live there and are used to this, it just is life.

We have sort of artificially created a situation where you don't see how much better off you are than other people. But in many parts of the world, you see it all the time. And it's just part of the fabric of your day to day. I mean, I guess like my family who live in Brazil, it's like they... My aunt came to Toronto and she took the subway. And she was like, oh my God, you can just take the subway. And I was like, how do you mean? And she was like, well, in Rio, it's too dangerous because the gap between the rich and the poor

is such that there is a lot of violent crime. When I visited my family there, the fear is you get kidnapped. You look like a person who is not in extreme need. People are in extreme need. It's reasonable that they would think. You see the point of the kidnapper. Yeah, of course.

This would work. You just kidnap someone, their family will pay, you send them back. No hurt, no foul, of course. This would work. I mean, you just kidnap someone, their family will pay, you send them back. Like, no harm, no foul, sort of, you know. Like, as long as you don't actually hurt them. And I mean, who said that they got to, you know, live behind this fence and be in this situation where they're fine when you aren't? Like, it is extremely obviously unfair

it's another hidden ingredient of a truly great lunch David Ferguson neglected to mention this one the quintessential pleasure of savoring a grilled salmon while not being kidnapped maybe Maybe David felt he had implied it. The one thing that makes any meal taste bad is anxiety. When you really get into this, the structural requirements of one nice restaurant lunch per month extend pretty deep. In this lunch, like what else is going on in your life?

Like are you having a lunch and you're taking a lunch break from your job of, you know, drilling oil or selling oil or doing something harmful? Or are you taking a break from your job, you know, fighting for climate justice or something? I think the sort of context of your lunch seems seems quite important, really. Mmm. Meanwhile, in another part of the city, I'm still having lunch with David Ferguson. Can I see?

Wow. What did you get? The tartare. Should I pass you the sauce piquante, please? Yes, sure. I don't know about the sauce piquant, if you will please. The sauce piquant. We... People have to be able to have expendable time. There's expendable money and expendable time. And you have to have those two come together. And right now, the people in this room, right now, have the choice in their lives.

Yeah. It's hard for a lot of people to get out for lunch. You have those people, those places that you can get in and out in ten minutes. Yeah, It's hard for a lot of people to get out for lunch. You have those people, that places that you can get in and out in 10 minutes. Yeah, but that's no fun. Well, that's right. But this is a crazy luxury. I don't think people realize

what kind of a world you have to be living in to be able to go out and sit in a room like this and have a proper lunch. We are really blessed, especially with all the horrors of the world that are going on right now. Like, we should never take this for granted. Like, I always say, like, my job's expendable because our industry is expendable. We're not a necessity. When you're in another part of the world where you have a war,

you have famine, the basic necessities are not provided. This is a luxury. And I never forget that. I try never to forget that. What if we made a lunch like this, instead of making it a luxury, we made it a duty, like paying your taxes. You're asking a restaurant owner, what would you think about? What if you had to come for a nice lunch at a restaurant once a month? You know, there's various things that because you have a duty to do taxes, society has to supply certain things. What if it was a duty to go out and have a nice lunch at a restaurant? Who would pay for the lunch?

I'm talking like once a month. Yeah, but that's a huge cost. I don't know how you would justify that. Listen, if you were to say that everybody has the right to have enough of an income, like a base level income, the guaranteed income. And that in that, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone got, I don't know, a ticket. Lunch voucher.

A lunch voucher. Again, it is, and I wish, let me put it this way, I wish that everybody could enjoy it. I wish, okay, let me put it this way. I wish that everybody could enjoy it. I wish everybody could, because I do think that moments like this should be cherished. It should be accessible. But this is one of the few jobs left that is so labor intensive that you have like like if you think about from the moment this cow was born raises cattle slaughtered transported butchered transported came through the door here butchchered again, seasoned, organized.

Somebody took the order. You know, there's probably like, this dish was manhandled by 15 different people. Like, I'm always keeping my prices as reasonable and accessible as possible. But still, it's not cheap to eat at my restaurant. I would never say it is, but a lot of restaurants are a lot more expensive. But that being said, I think across the board, restaurants, to be a living wage for people to work in them, they should be a lot more expensive. It is one of the few jobs, few industries that you still cannot escape the human in it.

And therefore therefore it makes it not as permittable for other people for everyone to enjoy it because to enjoy that kind of labor unless we are looking at something where you know Karl Marx and you know labor theory changes and all that stuff it's going to be expensive it's going to be expensive. I'm reading a biography of Karl Marx right now. From what I can tell, my nice lunch in a restaurant would not be safe in his hands.

Marx relished the idea of people like me losing their nice lunches that most people can't have. He thought we had it coming. They must ceaselessly be taught that what seems so secure in existing society is, in reality, doomed to swift extinction, a fact which men may find it difficult to believe because of the immense protective facade of moral, religious, political,

and economic assumptions and beliefs, which the moribund class consciously or unconsciously creates, blinding itself and others to its own approaching fate. Those are actually the words of Isaiah Berlin, summing up Karl Marx's predictions regarding the bourgeoisie. Thankfully, for me, there are other opinions out there. People who see a future where I continue to enjoy my nice lunches once per month while inhabiting a fair and equal society. I would say they are compatible, but I think those of us that are able to access what might be considered as a privilege of a nice lunch should be doing everything we can to fight for better working and living standards for folks that aren't able to access the same things.

I think a lot of us are dealing with this cognitive dissonance, right, between the lifestyles that we have, especially those of us who have nice lifestyles, and the knowledge that it's probably unsustainable. Art and culture can now become a powerful rebuke to society, not so much, as I say, by virtue of what it says or states or shows, but simply because of the strange, pointless, intensely libidinal thing that it is. It's one of the few remaining activities in an increasingly instrumentalized world which exists purely for its own sake.

One of the other members of that extremely small and privileged category is God. God exists purely for his own sake, but also potentially human beings. The point of political change, on this view, is to make that condition increasingly available to as many men and women as possible, so that they too could live for the pure delight of it, or to use a technical theological term, for the pure hell of it. On Ideas, you're listening to White Wine with Lunch, a documentary by Tom Howell.

We're a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus.

Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. ShortSighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted from CBC's Personally, available now. An ocean scientist recently spoke to the New York Times for their podcast called The Interview.

She turned the tables and asked her interviewer a question. What is it that you don't want to give up? David Marchese is the interviewer. The scientist is Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson. And what she's asking? What is it that you don't want to give up? It's an ambiguous question because David Marchese has been describing feeling anxious for two different reasons at the same time.

First, what should he be willing to sacrifice in light of what climate scientists are warning us about? Second, what does the future look like for David and his lifestyle if the world fails to meet targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions? The world fails to meet targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. You know what the thing I don't want to give up is? I don't want to give up the range of possibilities for my kids. You know, they're seven and nine. And I, you know, these are totally selfish things to bring up. But, you know, like.

I assume you care about other people on the planet besides your children. My wife. Selfish reasons can be highly motivating. We might prefer to notice virtuous reasons for the way we behave, but our more selfish wants and desires can exert a constant force. Ideas producer Tom Howell takes a treasured luxury from his own life, a pleasant lunch in a restaurant with a glass of white wine, and he goes looking for signs of its interference with bigger, seemingly more important topics. We stop working. We don't schedule meetings at 12 o'clock.

There's no team huddle. There's nothing. Paul Taylor is co-founder and co-managing director at Evenings and Weekends Consulting in Toronto. It's not just about the nice to have of stopping work during a lunch hour, even stopping work at five o'clock. It's an equity-based intervention. For us, it's been one of those ways that we push back on those oppressive organizing principles that tell us we are nothing but mere cogs in whatever institution or organization we're working in, but in fact we're people. Evenings and Weekends gives advice and services to non-profit groups, social justice organizations,

that sort of thing, and as a business, they aim to live up to their own values, not just advocating for more fairness, but being fair while they're at it. It means breaking with some conventions of the business world. You know, this very thoughtless approach sometimes to just throw into a job posting, you know, post-secondary degree. Well, we don't all have the ability to afford to go off to some place outside of our community for four or whatever, however many years, and study and then come back.

So ensuring that conversations about income are transparent, having a transparent pay grid that includes the amount of money that I get paid, and also introducing policies that tie what the lowest-paid person makes within an organization to the highest-paid person in the organization. Far too often, CEOs and even nonprofit leaders, although we need incredibly experienced and thoughtful non-profit leaders, we seem to sometimes see the same kind of income inequality. And we see impacts of organizations get built on the backs of low-wage workers within those organizations.

And I think that's not okay. What experience do you have personally with people who are very poor? I grew up in a low-income household. I was raised by a single mom. We were on a social assistance. I've spent time in food bank lineups. I've spent time, you know, the communities that I navigated as a child were low-income communities. And certainly, you know, I'm an optimistic person. So I believe that like in one of the richest countries in the world, things don't have to be this way. Poverty could potentially, one day, not potentially, but poverty, I think, belongs in our history books.

I want to make sure that we can all dream in color and reach for the things that bring us joy and make us happy and make us feel as if we are fulfilled. Tell me more about some luxuries that you allow yourself. I got a smoker, and it feels like the most luxurious thing I've ever owned. And I think probably based on my lived experience of poverty, it took me maybe three or four years to convince myself that I could and should have one. I would look at them, I would see them in flyers, and I would think about the families that would have them and what

they would be smoking. But it took me a long time to really believe that I should and could have one. Separate the could and the should there. Well, one, I could, I'm now in a position where I can afford to have one. And I should have one. I'm feeling like I should have one because of the amount of joy that it's brought me. You know, I spend hours researching and thinking about and learning about different things that I can smoke and a lot of trial and error. But you know, It sounds to me like could was a less difficult one. And that should was more what you were thinking about.

Exactly. Exactly. That was the part that I really wrestled with. I didn't see myself as being somebody that should have a smoker, you know. In case you've never seen one, a smoker is a bit like a barbecue. It's for cooking meat at low temperatures using smoke. You know, I thought of these folks that live in the big houses in the suburbs, perhaps with a nice big, huge backyard.

I certainly am not one of those folks. I live in downtown Toronto with a sliver of a deck. But yeah, if I am enjoying this smoker so much, so I talk about it with anybody that will listen, it's brought me a lot of joy. So I'm glad that I leaned into the reality and the fact that I should have a smoker. Is there a luxury item or a luxurious activity that you would not allow yourself on the grounds that you couldn't really enjoy it due to the unfair distribution of resources in society, even though you technically could have it? Oh, yeah. I struggle with the concept of, to be quite frank, home ownership.

We live in a world where many people measure their success on one, whether they're able to afford a home and two, how large it is, how many bedrooms and all of this. But I'm really a firm believer that we, you know, housing, if housing is truly a right in this country, just like food is also a right, we actually need systems in place to make sure that everybody can access those things. So for me, it's a very hard one to participate in home ownership. You bought a house or you bought an apartment at some point? No, I'm a renter. Yeah, absolutely a renter.

a house or you bought an apartment at some point? No, I'm a renter. Yeah, absolutely a renter. And I've really resisted outside forces that have suggested, well, shouldn't you, you know, I guess the same, shouldn't you buy a house? And same is true for a new car. I have an old 1995 Toyota Camry. And when I'm not on that, I'm either walking or cycling. Do you think you would hate the process of if you dallied with the idea of actually buying a house, it sounds like you might be able to, do you think you would just find it so horrible? Well, I would struggle with it. Morally, I'm not sure that I believe that housing should be commodified

in the way that it has been. It's something that we can only access if we can afford it. It's not just about home ownership for me. It's even about renting a nice apartment. Yeah, these are things that fundamentally I think we have commodified in ways that make them absolutely inaccessible to too many people. And these are not only rights, but necessities, food and housing. Paul Taylor's willingness to forego luxuries,

to stay consistent with principles of social solidarity, has to give out at a certain point. We all have a line that can't be crossed. If someone came for my smoker, I'm very likely to chain myself to it. You know, we have developed a deep bond. I'm sorry, but I would struggle parting with it. I'm sure my neighbors smell it. And I think I would be prepared to chain myself to it if my

neighborhood came at me to try and remove my smoker from my grips. That's the first thing that comes to mind. The U.S. has its latte-sipping liberals. Ireland has its smoked salmon socialists. Here in Canada, we call them champagne socialists, probably. That term was coined in 1906. A character in a novel introduces a distinction between beer socialists, who want everybody to be as miserable as they are, and the champagne kind, who want everyone to be equal on as they are, and the champagne kind who want

everyone to be equal on a level that suits their own standard of living. The novel is called Blind Alley, and the character in question points out how silly champagne-drinking socialists are, because, quote, there is not enough champagne, green turtle, and truffles to go around. So if you're someone who wants fairness, but you don't want to be a champagne socialist, what you need to do is pick a standard of living that could theoretically be possible for everyone to have. But how are you supposed to figure out what that standard is?

I am Francisco Ferreira, and I'm the Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies at the London School of Economics, where I also run the International Inequalities Institute. What's so hard about measuring inequality? Well, the first thing is you've got to decide inequality of what. So is it of income? Is it of wealth? Is it of years of schooling? Is it of opportunities? And each of those will present their own challenges. Some of them are related to the data that we need to get. Capturing the incomes or the wealth of very, very rich people is typically a challenge.

Let's steer it towards trying to work out for sure that the inequality we're talking about is unfair. What happens when you're trying to do that? The dominant view these days, I would say, in political philosophy and normative economics is whereas inequality due to some effort that you put in or how hard you work may be acceptable. Inequality due to race or gender or family background or how well educated your parents were, how rich your parents were, where you were born. All of those, and those are very substantial. All of those are unfair. And most people feel nowadays that, as Jerry Cohen, a philosopher, says, the currency of egalitarian justice, the sort of metric that we need, is to say, well, actually, inequality of outcomes, you know, we should have as little or as much of it as is consistent with having no inequality of opportunities. That's what we should try to minimize, inequality due to factors that people inherit rather than exert in their own lives.

We've done a few episodes on ideas recently about the American philosopher John Rawls and his theory of justice. you to imagine if you were designing the society you want to live in, but you don't know where you're going to be in it, like what your role is, what your social status is, what your family background would be, what sort of society would you design? And is there anything you want to be sure that you got to enjoy no matter where you landed up? Do you know about John Rawls and his theory of justice? Yes, I do. I recently discovered this from my original position. I decided that what I would want to be able to be sure of is to be able to have at least one nice lunch in a decent restaurant with a glass of white wine at least once per month. Can you help me begin to figure out what that value means in terms of trying to reconcile

it with a fair world? Well, those of us who work on this area of inequality of opportunity have borrowed a lot from Rawls, including his maxim in idea, right? His idea that inequalities can be tolerated so long as they're organized to the greatest benefit of the most disadvantaged group. So that means not everybody has to be identical, but has to have the identical incomes or wealth. Some inequalities may be acceptable,

but only provided they work in society to generate the best possible outcome for the most disadvantaged group. How might that differ from equality? Well, it may be that if you need a system of incentives and rewards that, say, allows people who are particularly creative or innovative or well performing in some way to retain a little more of their earnings, and that generates an efficient society that could provide better outcomes for the most disadvantaged than one in which these incentives were absent, for example.

So if we think in those terms, then there are two ways, Tom, in which you could fairly have your nice lunch with a glass of white wine once a month. One of those ways, perhaps the ideal one, is one in which everybody else can do the same in your society. And if everybody can do that, then you are in that world where the opportunity for that kind of well-being, for that kind of experience is available to all. all. The other way in which you could do that is if maybe you don't live in such a prosperous society and perhaps the most disadvantaged group, the children of some ethnic minority with parents who are less educated, less well-off, so those who share characteristics that place them through no fault of their own at the bottom of society, if they're not able to do it, then the only way you would be able to do it is if in the scheme of incentives that's out there to reward efficiency, to promote efficiency and growth,

you were one of those people that somehow were able to retain some of the rewards to your efforts or innovativeness or inventiveness or what have you. Let's just return to the real world. I'm aware that not everyone can go for a nice lunch in a restaurant and that some of the reasons why I'm able to do it myself are unfair. If I'm trying to work out how much of that unfairness is necessary for me in order to enjoy this. What am I going to first?

Sorry, thank you for jumping in to help me. Yeah, no, no, I just want to understand what you mean by necessary. So how much unfairness is necessary? So you're asking how unfair it is that you are able to enjoy that while others aren't? That's a good first one. And then my second one is going to be how unfair am I asking it to be? Am I desiring unfairness in order to allow me to continue having my lunches? Those two are closely related, I guess.

So one metric is how many people share circumstances, share personal characteristics that they are not responsible for, that they were born with, okay, which preclude them from having a nice lunch in a restaurant with a glass of wine? So how many people, because of the accident of their birth, are not able to do that? That is a measure, and you are. That's a measure of how unfair it is. So if you live in a society in which 99% of the people are not able to do that, you know, in parts of Malawi, for example, or Papua New Guinea, then it's actually quite unfair that you are just because you were born in a different population group. Unless, as I said earlier, there's something really special about you that society decides, you know, should allow you to retain those rewards because they're actually going to benefit everybody else. You know, you invented the COVID vaccine or something like that. I haven't done anything that good. Yeah. So if you haven't, then it'll be a function of, you know, how many people are below you in

some sense, particularly how many people are below you in the sense that they cannot afford to have that glass of wine, through no fault of their own. I'll give you an example of a particular hero of mine who did have a specific thing that he set a limit on, and it had to do with restaurant meals. Really? And that was Anthony Atkinson, the late Professor Sir Anthony Atkinson, who's one of the great minds on studying economics of inequality and poverty. And Atkinson, when he was at LSE, decided that he would not go on any dinner or any

meal that cost more than the weekly benefit for a family of four at the time. I forget exactly what the benefit was called, but there was a social benefit that the UK welfare state gave people. And, you know, it would not be impossible in London to go for a meal, a very nice meal that costs more than what a family would get for a week. And he said, I'm not comfortable doing that. So there you are. He used the policy parameter of the country he was in to answer your question, Tom. I'm very glad to hear that someone's been down this road and come up with an answer. Although that sounds like quite a high bar. What people can live on for a week. I guess I should go find out what people do live on for a week.

And he did put the limit on of Britain. Yes. And Rawls, that you've been basing your question on to some extent, had a very different view about inequalities outside borders, right? So we tend to think of Rawls as a great egalitarian because of the theory of justice. But in The Law of the Peoples, which is another book which is less well known, he argues that we don't have the same kinds of social contracts and responsibilities to people outside our countries. That sounds like wishful thinking. Well, at least it would make it easier for him to join you in your nice lunch. Oh, so you're saying I have to follow him.

I have to cut off the rest of the world in order to make this at all manageable, because what people earn in a week measured globally is not going to get me much lunch. Right. measured globally is not going to get me much lunch. Right. I mean, so the World Bank estimates that there are roughly 600 million people who live on the equivalent of, I think it's $2.15 now in purchasing power parity terms per day, per person. I've seen some of those people during my work in Africa, and they tend not to have electricity. They tend to live in shacks. They tend to eat very poorly.

They tend to struggle to get a basic meal in front of their children. They tend to collect their own firewood. There's a lot of people who live like that in the world. Still, it's fewer than 10% of the world's population. But there it is. They're there. So if we wanted to set your bar close to the 10th percentile and say, look, I'm not going to have my lunch with a glass of wine if it costs more than, I don't know, the weekly allowance for a family in the bottom 10% of the world, then you wouldn't have any wine

worth drinking. No. cold, then you wouldn't have any wine worth drinking. But if you did 10% of Canada or maybe 25% of Canada, then maybe you would. But again, you're not comparing your life with them, right? You're just saying the cost of that particular meal would be what they live on. The thing about inequality is that when we start thinking in these terms, which, you know, I like very much your question, and putting something that many of us take for granted, like that meal, out in the context of what people can afford, you know, global inequalities are staggering, are just staggering. Speaking of the entire planet, morality isn't the only thing I have to worry about.

Natalia? Hi there! I'm already recording so we can get our hellos. Hi! Oh, hi there! Let me turn off this. Oh, thank you so much. A less hospitable climate may cause such huge and deadly problems that it's tempting to say the fate of my lunch doesn't matter very much. But, and I'm aware this could sound selfish, it matters to me. Hi, I'm Natalia Gomez. I'm a professor at McGill University in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. And my research focuses around climate change and the response of the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to warming and how sea levels are going to change around the world and impact coastlines and communities in the future. You've done a bit of communicating this to the public already, right? You've been on Quarks and Quarks and stuff? Yes, yeah yeah a few from a scientific point

of view do you anticipate any just sort of built-in contradictions that would make it impossible for me to go out for a nice lunch in a restaurant down the line i mean i think uh taking a step back there's this idea that addressing climate change involves giving things up and making our lives worse. But actually, it will make our lives different and often in better ways that we'll see the impacts of maybe even more immediately than we will having avoided some of the worst consequences of climate change. So, for example, addressing climate change makes the world a more equitable place. I'm into some more equity, sure. I mean, I want people to be happy, generally speaking,

but up until it comes for my lunch. Like, am I still going to be able to have my lunch in this scenario? Yeah, so what's served in the lunch might be different and better. I guess I just said salmon. It'd be sad to see salmon go, but you know, still have lunch. The restaurant does need to be above water. Yes, that's true. Yeah, and maybe one more point about that. It's so easy to get frozen in all of the ways that we live our lives that are not sustainable right now. And part of that is just the structure of how society works right now. We can waste a lot of our energy trying to make these decisions of that in the end are in terms of actual carbon

emissions are a very tiny negligible contribution and from on ato-day basis. It can free you up a lot to think on longer term. It's never really occurred to me that my particular lunch is so carbon-using. I mean, I suppose if there's meat in it, you could argue. Let's just imagine for the moment that I'm not all that moral and not all that concerned about the fate of the world and so on. But is there a sense in which the melting glaciers are coming for my lunch? I mean, yes, I think they will impact for the global coastline, which in turn feeds back into a lot of other parts of life and decisions and available resources inland as well. Most people, the population by far is concentrated around

coastlines in general. And so our way of life and what we have access to and the resources that we have to sort of have a nice fancy life lunch on a coastline might look different because of the melting glaciers. Even if I'm having it in the plateau and I'm nice and above the sea level, I suppose they've still got to bring food to me on a truck or some conveyance. Right. That's it, right? It affects things like transportation, where people live, who's serving your lunch, these sorts of things. Maybe you won't be the most impacted person sitting in the plateau at high elevation eating lunch.

There are certainly other people who are already impacted by sea level rise now in a really serious way. Right. If your city or your town or your home is disappearing underwater, you probably aren't just going to stay there. So I suppose that could impact the ambience in my restaurant. you probably aren't just going to stay there. So I suppose that could impact the ambience in my restaurant. If the bottom half of Montreal went underwater, it probably would have an effect on a restaurant in the plateau, for instance. Yeah, so in Montreal, we're sort of far enough inland that we're still affected by flooding a lot,

but it comes a lot from weather and sort of hydrology, more local effects than rising ocean water levels. We're sort of far enough in to the St. Lawrence River to be protected by that. But we are, due to climate change, facing flooding in this area quite regularly, recently, especially in the last few years. And so maybe your restaurant won't have power, for example, or maybe you won't be able to get to the restaurant at some point not necessarily directly related to sea level rise but related to

climate change people could be fighting yes right this is maybe more of a uh rate gets on the edge of my expertise here please Please, predict a political environment for the next 50 years. My hope is that we all radically respond at a scale that's appropriate to the scale of the problem we're facing. So right now we're not recognizing the scale of what needs to happen and how quickly in order to really avoid some of these

worst case scenarios. The world is changing. That's sort of a trueness outside of climate change even. But we're really clinging to exactly how things are right now is not sustainable. I think rather than sort of being scared of losing that, though, what we could be doing is thinking, hopefully, and dreaming and visioning what the world could look like in the future. So if we headed in the path where it would be ideal, you know, what would that look like? Well, it would be a glass of wine with a nice restaurant and a lunch for me. There's a future world in which, you know, I would like it if more people could have that, partly because I would feel less bad about my, you know, having things that other people can't have kind of thing. But I mean, can you picture that sort of world where more people are able to live comfortably like that? Does it make any sense to you?

more people are able to live comfortably like that? Does it make any sense to you? Yes. So I think that, so this is great to think, okay, here's what I would like. What would need to happen in order to have that? You know, if we address climate change in the ways that will have the biggest impact on the future response of the planet, it will enable more people to have livable lives. You know, we need to do some work to get down to how that would play out in how many people will drink wine over lunch. But if we were really addressing, adapting to the changes that are happening, reducing the worst case scenarios and really taking action to zero greenhouse gas emissions, then I do think

a comfortable lunch, whatever that might look different in different places, could be more accessible to more people if we do it right. Thank you so much for humoring me through this thrashing about to solve my life. Thank you. It was a fun conversation. about to solve my life. Thank you. It was a fun conversation.

You were listening to White Wine with Lunch by Ideas producer Tom Howell. Thank you to Julia Freeman, David Gutnick, and to all of our guests. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.