The persistence of inequality

Is inequality natural?  Yes and no.  We are born, of course, with unequal talents, abilities, situations and opportunities.  Nature has no obligation or apparent inclination to meet human notions of fairness.  Natural selection seems to be a costly blood-sport.  Antelope all run fast but some run faster, the rest die sooner.  Chimpanzees are all more-or-less equal in their natural situation.  Each individual must forage their own food.  Yet chimpanzee society is remarkably unequal, full of domination displays, ritual humiliations, and violence.  Male chimpanzees uphold a strict and brutal hierarchy, with only a few holding power and enjoying breeding privileges.  Female chimpanzees have their own distinct hierarchy.  Chimpanzee packs wage war against other packs.  Homo sapiens are primates too, not far removed from chimpanzees.  It may be that we have a genetic predisposition to inequality.  (Which is to say that we may have a natural instinct for displays of inequality, even if these expressions are artificially manifested.)  But through the greater part of the history of our species, we have lived as hunter-gatherers, a relatively egalitarian form of society (perhaps for want of opportunity to accumulate goods) though prone to status displays and inter-tribal violence.  Human inequality really took off with the settlements of the Neolithic period, and was amplified again as small communities became cities.  Cities both create and require civilization, being intimate associations of strangers.  Strangers require fairly extreme encouragements to live together in peace—inequality of power, authority and property seem to be part of the strategy.  But are they necessary?  Most of the differences between individual human beings in our contemporary world are human-made inequalities.  If they are human made, they should also be unmakeable.

The extremes of inequality we see in our modern world derive for the most part from the scale of modern economies.  The global economy has existed only a few centuries, as have mega-nations like the United States.  The scale of our national and global economies allows minor starting advantages to be greatly magnified.  A professional sports league can attract tens of millions of viewers within a single market.  This allows a few competitive events to raise large fortunes, even if the wealth of the average viewer is not significant.  The players with marginal advantages in skill or charisma will earn salaries far beyond those of their slightly-less-remarkable teammates (already substantial).  So with other forms of mass entertainment.  A single musician with even a slight edge in attracting attention can accumulate so many followers in a large market as to dominate the industry.  Average incomes of professional musicians scrape at the poverty level while obscuring the massive advantages enjoyed by a fortunate few.  The invention of film and the explosion of popular movie theaters in the 1920s allowed a few actors to become globally famous, wealthy, influential without ever setting eyes on the many unfamous who bought tickets to shows exhibited under their names.  A few unremarkable consumer goods became brand-names in the late nineteenth century as multi-city markets developed and retail chains proliferated.  Now a successful brand will eclipse all others not because it is a superior product but because its name and packaging are familiar (thus safe) to millions of consumers.  Brand recognition has become one of the major repositories of trust in our modern world.

Does this mean that globalization is the leading enemy of equality?  Indeed, globalization has made possible new scales of inequality, but it has also provided counterbalancing goods that cannot be brushed aside.  Billions of people have been lifted out of misery and squalor in the age of globalization.  It is currently unimaginable how the modern alleviation of material want could have happened otherwise.  Globalization has raised global standards of living, spread technologies and efficient practices, even raised popular awareness of global inequality.

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There may be advantages in certain kinds of inequality.  And if such inequalities did actually bring about better, longer and happier lives for a greater part of the population, they could be easily defended in the public realm (though the advantages would have to be carefully weighed against harms, such as environmental degradation).  Precociously-gifted inventors and entertainers clearly produce unique products that are desirable and rewarding to countless consumers, who happily pass their modest earnings to their benefactors.  (Various products that are beneficial to global populations—vaccines, supply chains, blockbuster films—are created by coordinated teams with a range of indispensable skills and talents.  But generally only a handful of the team members reap the credits and rewards.)  Others with more luck than talent (or fewer scruples) skim the profits of these massive and obscure markets to gain large fortunes—agents, smugglers, property investors, oligarchs, political insiders.  In any case, there is no reason to assume that the present and temporary resource monopolies enjoyed by a few talented or opportunistic individuals should ensure their permanent and unquestioned right to these resources.  The other members of the human community have needs too.  They are becoming better aware of the resources and advantages that they do not possess, and are acquiring votes.

So wealth inequality—that is, unequal control of resources—does matter to the well-being of a society at large, and is therefore a legitimate public concern.  Some inequalities of wealth and income are transient, temporary, fleeting—such as the relative poverty of a college undergraduate or a new homeowner.  Just as a student submits to temporary penury for the promise of future prosperity, so other inequalities of wealth can be rectified with time.  Thus present inequalities of wealth and income may not in themselves be the most pressing of civil concerns.  Why should I care if someone else has a bigger house or fancier clothes if I am content with mine?  If they enjoy expensive ski vacations, that’s hardly my worry.  But such differences matter more to the public if they create costs that must be borne by others.  Another individual’s private jet or gas-guzzling Hummer matters to the public if it squanders resources that might better improve the lives of marginalized individuals or creates environmental consequences that affect the well-being of humanity now and into the future.  Your wasting of scarce resources is definitely my concern.  You cannot claim the immunity of private ownership if your choices consistently harm the well-being of others.  In such cases, your claims of ownership have moral and political consequences.  The rest of us will make those claims our business.

And differences of wealth would matter less if they did not reinforce and perpetuate the many other forms and degrees of inequality—social, political, educational, health-related and situational inequalities.  It is no coincidence that those who have the advantage of wealth simultaneously enjoy countless other advantages—greater political clout (politicians know exactly who their donors are), wider educational choices, access to advantageous health opportunities and the best health care (they are not quite the same), not to mention superior social prestige.  Wealth advantages would matter less to society at large if the other advantages of inequality were more evenly dispersed.  Let us a consider a few of these so we can get a sense of the degree to which differences of wealth matter to overall inequality.

Differences of sex, gender and race—mere accidents of birth—become social inequalities only when noticed and amplified by social prejudices and custom.  The differences of birth occur naturally.  The inequalities are constructed socially.  That a child is born female and, for that distinction alone, is barred from educational and professional opportunities is hardly the will of nature, only of the society that invented the limitation.  The pigmentation of one’s skin is equally fortuitous, and should be equally unimportant.  (If you are not sure, describe the process by which you earned your worthier skin color and sex.)  Such distinctions of birth were not chosen and should carry neither advantage nor stigma for the individual.  The cost of rectifying whatever social consequences they generate should be borne by society at large—in the form of attitudinal changes—and official redress where unequal treatment has demonstrably occurred.  In other words, whatever markers an individual happened to be born with and could not have chosen should not be held against them.  (This applies equally to other birth differences that we have traditionally called disabilities—a prejudicial word if ever there was one.)  Some will defend such distinctions as our customs.  But unlike the accidents of birth, customs can be selected for change.  The notion of human rights was created precisely to defeat such murky excuses as custom.  If there really is social utility in giving preferential treatment to certain accidents of birth, then you may name the utility and show that the resulting public benefit is substantial enough to justify inequality of treatment.  (And you may not cite the present advantages of those receiving favor.)  If there is no such utility, then the custom has no business surviving.

The same applies to other accidental distinctions.  Individuals have no more control of their place of birth and parentage than they do of their sex, skin color, or sexual preferences.  (Yet their lifelong attitudes and expectations will largely be imprinted by these early environments.)  Those with birth disadvantages are frequently denied means of improving their situation.  A child of illegal immigrants had no choice about her circumstances—why should she be denied legal protections, education and health care?  Should she be punished and discriminated against even if her parents were at fault?  Yet so many of our unequal social outcomes depend on such accidents of birth and situation.  The most basic educational opportunities are determined by geographic location.  University acceptance often rides on parentage, upbringing, and previous educational opportunities.  A small disadvantage at birth will be magnified at every step of a child’s progress to adulthood.  She may reasonably be held responsible for her own conduct and expectations once she gets to university or the adult job market, but she had little control over how (and if) she got there.  Early advantages comprise nearly all of the difference.  Wealth and privilege are the most important of these early advantages.  (The vast majority of citizens of modern developed nations tend to identify themselves as middle class—even if they enjoy advantages well above the median family income—probably to disguise to themselves their own privileged route to social success.)

Inequalities matter, from the beginning to the end of an individual’s life.  But this does not mean that every form of inequality is automatically an injustice, or deserving of an intrusive state answer.  Sometimes we attack inequalities symbolically (Oh, it’s just your white privilege talking! or That’s what a boomer would think!), fixating on one distinction as if it stands in for all the others.  No single inequality is so important as to push aside the rest.