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MADRID - Spanish riot police said Thursday that the long hours they have been required to work this week to prevent protesters from gaining access to Madrid's main square "is not tolerable for much longer".

Why this absence of political ambition? What explains the rioters' genuflection at the altar of "crude materialist, market-driven hedonism"? To zone in on the answer, we need to step back and remind ourselves how strikingly unequal distributions of income and wealth impact how we interact with "things." In relatively equal nations, societies where minor differences in income and wealth separate social classes, people typically do not obsess over "things," the baubles of modern life. The reason? If nearly everyone can afford much the same things, things overall tend to lose their significance. People in more equal societies will be more likely to judge you by who you are than what you own. The reverse, obviously, also holds true. "As inequality worsens," as Boston College economist Juliet Schor has explained, "the status game tends to intensify." The wider that gaps in income and wealth go, the greater the differences in the things that different classes can afford. In markedly unequal societies, things take on ever greater significance. They signal who has succeeded and who has not. In London, the developed world's most unequal city, these signals may dominate daily life as ferociously as anywhere else on Earth. Their incessant repetition drowns out the socially cohesive signals that people see and hear and feel in more equal societies, the sense that "we're all in this together." "Let this week be a wake up call," London's Compass think tank observed right after the heaviest rioting. "There is more to clean up than broken shop windows."

The blazing infernos which took hold in the UK's biggest cities have shocked British society. It wasn't a desire to protest that drove the brutal looters onto the streets, but pure consumer greed. Bankers, politicians and media moguls have made this greed socially acceptable. Education grants for children from low-income families - abolished. Also abolished in many areas were youth centers and help centers for the unemployed and pregnant. In the Lewisham area alone, five libraries were closed. What happens next? Where does it end? What is the limit? There is none. In the London borough of Haringey, which includes Tottenham, 75 percent of funding for youth services will be cut over the next three years. This miserable life of drugs, loitering and weapons in neighborhoods which were devastated by the policies of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and never fixed by Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, is the fate of those dubbed "NEETs" in the UK. It stands for "not in education, employment or training", and there are about 1.2 million people who fit the description. They rule their local areas under the law of the jungle, with a deep sense of uselessness in a world where almost every recreational activity costs money; money which they don't have.