Wealth & Money Quote by Polly Toynbee

Toynbee’s line is built like a two-part trap: first, a moral claim dressed as a practical one; then, a diagnosis of the culture that keeps us from acting on it. “Inequality makes everyone unhappy” refuses the comforting story that inequality is only the poor person’s problem. It frames inequality as social pollution: it corrodes trust, heightens status anxiety, and makes even winners live in a brittle, defensive kind of prosperity. That move matters because it yanks redistribution out of charity and into public health. “Well within the remit of the state” is the pivot: she’s not pleading for generosity, she’s asserting jurisdiction. If inequality is a collective harm, government intervention isn’t nannying - it’s basic maintenance.

The second sentence borrows the logic of diminishing returns, but Toynbee deploys it as cultural critique. “More money gives less extra happiness” nods to a now-mainstream body of behavioral economics, yet the sting is in the word “addicted.” Addiction implies compulsion, not choice; it suggests we’re being acted upon by incentives, advertising, and political narratives that equate growth with virtue. The subtext is a quiet indictment of a system that converts insecurity into consumption and then calls it freedom.

Contextually, this is classic center-left British commentary in the post-Thatcher era: a rebuttal to market triumphalism, and an argument that the state isn’t the enemy of liberty but the only actor big enough to counter a wealth-and-status arms race we no longer control.