“ According to Magne Mogstad, a Norwegian economist at the University of Chicago, Nordic countries primarily reduce economic and social inequalities by narrowing the differences in pre-tax income. They achieve this through a centralised system of wage bargaining that lifts wages at the bottom end and compresses them at the top. Because wage compression deliberately flattens the hierarchy of status we place on different types of work, a person’s value is more than her “marginal product”, in economics jargon. The fact that a doctor and a plumber can live a life with similar standards or expectations makes it easier to believe that we are all in this together. The moral philosopher Elizabeth Anderson describes this as “relational equality”. The point of equality, Anderson argues, is equality in social relations. “