The rising cost of inequality

The most overlooked and underappreciated form of inequality is that of situation or place.  Every individual human being is necessarily born and raised in a particular time, place and situation—and not in any of the others.  These differences of situation are not neutral or interchangeable—not remotely.  Virtually any child born in modern America has a profound advantage from birth—at least compared to the opportunities of a child born in a developing-world slum, or at any time before the twentieth century.  Yet a child born in west Baltimore to a poor black family will see many of those advantages only from a distance.  This may not be an uncrossable distance—if you prefer taking your evidence from unusual anecdotes—though for most such children it might as well be.  Even if the child in question has the notion and will (as well as the unearned talent) to cross that social barrier, those on the other side of the barrier will do everything in their power to keep that child from succeeding.  The child will have to compete against well-placed and well-tutored middle-class white kids from better-funded neighborhoods, whose parents will moan about reverse racism if they detect the faintest hint that a minority child got a place in a first-rank university that should have gone to their own brilliant darling.  Again, there are always a few who struggle through to tell their heart-warming stories—of sympathetic teachers, coaches, scholarships, and admissions policies at Johns Hopkins—but exceptions are by definition rare events.  A few beat the odds.  What of the rest—the shy, the late bloomers, the abused, the teenage screwups who have yet to put themselves on the straight and narrow?  But even these children will grow up in a world that gives them most of the material comforts that the majority of our species could never have imagined.

Now imagine a black child living in a slum in Nairobi.  Here they will not encounter the same sort of local prejudices to their progress (in fact, quite a different set), and they may enjoy much better standing and respect within their own community, but if they aspire to improve their situation, how will they do it?  The child in west Baltimore does not have to change countries or citizenship to step into a considerably better life, but the child in Nairobi who dreams only of creating the next garage sensation in Silicon Valley will first have a world to cross.  And why should the child from Nairobi be barred from such an ambition any more than the child from Baltimore?  If, in a fairer world, the accident of one’s sex or skin color should not matter to one’s ambitions, why should the accident of one’s birthplace or nationality?  Migration is ambition.  To travel to a new and unfamiliar country to better one’s life is a profoundly courageous endeavor.  To move to Silicon Valley to kick-start your dream is only slightly less a migration if you are born somewhere else in America.  Johns Hopkins is a world away from Baltimore’s poor neighborhoods, if only a few miles distant.  Why are some migrations considered legitimate ambitions and others criminal undertakings?

Migration is the most obvious means of overcoming the inequalities of place—and the most respectful to individual talents and freedoms—though privileged places will tend to resist such solutions in the same ways that privileged parents resist the educationally-upward ambitions of underprivileged kids.  Anti-immigration policies are invariably pro-inequality policies, though they tend to apply unequally to different sorts of disadvantaged individuals and groups.  Every dreamer who moves from a small town to the Big City for their ideal job is a migrant.  Every university student who travels across a state (or county) line to take advantage of the best educational opportunity they can find is a migrant.  Within a nation’s borders we call such individuals the best and brightest, the drivers of the economy, the hope of the future, the heroes of individualism.  Across national borders, we call them foreign agents, invaders, law-breakers, criminals.  A national border is merely an arbitrary feature of the landscape, so far as any ambitious individual is concerned.  They didn’t put it there.  Nature didn’t put it there.  It’s merely an artificial convention.  Once again, we, as social collectives, have made most of the barriers and inequalities of our present world, if only by leaving them unchallenged.

The growing and unequal burdens of climate change draw attention to the profound inequalities of place.  Small island nations are on the frontlines of rising ocean levels.  Their people will lose their homelands because of the activities of nations half a world away.  Some already-precarious regions—those that can barely sustain their existing populations, such as the Sahel in Africa—will become unlivable in the next generation as average global temperatures rise by a few degrees.  Millions of people will be forced out of the region by the behaviors of foreign places, with no corresponding right of refuge or compensation.  Where will they go?  Do they lose their human rights because of the accident of their birth?  Even within developing countries, the consequences of climate change are vastly unequal.  The poorest of the poor tend to live in the low-lying places most vulnerable to extreme climate events.  When the worst happens, they are more likely to lose everything (which was never much) and to have the fewest resources available to help them recover.  From those who have the least, the most will be taken.

But the unequal consequences of climate change will become increasingly apparent even within wealthy nations.  We’ve seen the previews.  The plight of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed the unequal consequences of wealth differentials.  The most advantaged members of that unfortunate community, with their own ready transportation and friends out of town, got themselves away quickly and found safe places to land.  The disadvantaged residents, without ready cash or available transportation—even public options became quickly disabled—had no easy way out and nowhere to go if they did.  Soon they were trapped.  And adding insult to injury, they were tagged as potential criminals—looters and opportunists.  American armed forces were used not for rescue operations but for securing the property of those who had successfully fled.  The response of federal agencies mirrored the elite status of those who ran them and of the politicians who funded them.  Most of the recovery cash went to those who already had dependable insurance coverage.  The rest were out of luck—the same who never had much of it.  This event was a chilling portent of future climate catastrophes, indicating how political elites will likely treat the lower-status individuals who will be most significantly harmed by the coming generations of climate change.

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Political inequalities have always mirrored inequalities of wealth and social status.  One can undoubtedly find examples of politicians and transformational figures (Gandhi, for example) who rose from relatively humble backgrounds to high office or positions of public influence, but such stories are memorable and resonant precisely because they are rare.  (Virtually all popular politicians have some origin story that they can spin to advantage, but few among those born in disadvantaged circumstances ever rise high enough to use such narratives of struggle to political advantage.)  Most politicians and high-ranking bureaucrats actually come from prosperous families (or at least ambitious middle-class ones), receive advantageous educations, and enter careers that allow time and money for campaigning.  Because politics is about exposure, and exposure requires money—lots of it—and money requires connections, elite networking becomes essential for political success (in most cases).  Nothing attracts money like money does.  To reach office you must either have money or attract money—though already having money tends to attract a lot more of it.  (Elites also fall for confidence tricks—those who already have money and influence must clearly deserve more of it.)  So the fundamental requirement for office becomes one’s ability to attract money for the purpose of campaign spending, which if successful attracts even more money for more spending.  This is not all that matters for political success, but it seems to be an indispensable requirement.  And so inequality of wealth is merely one of the specific barriers to political equality, though it infuses the rest.

Those who already command resources (that is, the wealthy) already look like winners, to elites and non-elites alike.  This gives them a profound starting advantage in any political competition.  Our present political realities (meaning our prevailing attitudes concerning politics) further embolden inequality with a winner-takes-all mentality.  Those who win a political competition win not merely a larger portion of the power of that office but all of its power.  In a parliamentary first-past-the-post type of election, a candidate only needs to win more votes than any rival candidate—which means that where there are five competing, one might gain office with little more than 20% of the votes cast.  But this will be the only candidate elected, whose voice alone (from your local district) will be heard in the coming parliamentary context.  In a two-way presidential context, one may win all of the presidential power for the next several years with no more than 50.1% of the popular votes cast, or less than 50% if the American electoral college so decides.  And that one individual appoints all of the cabinet ministers and diplomats and ranking civil servants and wields all of the legislative vetoes.  In most democratic elections these days, the winning party gets barely half of the popular vote, often less.  Yet the winning party, which becomes the governing party, acts and speaks as if it has a mandate from The People (all of them!) to implement its platform in toto—that is, to shape the legislative and administrative environments as it wills.  It behaves as if justice demands that it get its political way in full measure—and assumes that all popular grievances will thereby be redressed.  It is very difficult for winning parties to remember that they govern for those whose voting preferences were denied, but whose wishes have not magically disappeared.  They remain citizens and have just as much claim to national resources as the winners.  The winner-takes-all model seems to assume that those who lose elections (and who are mathematically likely to be, in many cases, the majority of the population) deserve nothing and no consideration.  If winners deserve to win, then losers deserve to lose, and they deserve to go on losing after the election is done and gone.  If there are costs to be borne, the losers shall bear them.

Much the same happens in international politics—that is, power contests between nations and regions.  The winner-takes-all model of politics (not to mention warfare) makes international disputes very difficult to resolve in a fair and even manner.  Inequalities cross borders.  Those with present advantages use those advantages to squeeze more advantage out of their international rivals, or even allies.

Power is the exercise of advantage over others.  It can happen only in a social context.  Power is inseparable from social inequality, both in inputs and outcomes.  To seek power is to desire inequality—the seeker usually assuming that the inequality will work in his own favor.  Should we desire such a thing?  It is a very human thing to do, and so we may expect to find a great deal of power-seeking in any human society.  Yet humans also have keen notions of justice—though it is perhaps more accurate to say that they feel injustices very keenly, especially when they are on the wrong side of them.  It is hardly imaginable that any individual member of any society would desire that others exercise power over them.  We think power is abusive when it works consistently against us.  So how do we reconcile such profoundly incompatible desires—to exercise advantage over others yet be protected from any such exercise by others over us?  When we begin to recognize and acknowledge these inconsistencies in our own social practices and aspirations, we are faced with a choice.  We can either privately resolve to be the winners of such contests (by whatever means necessary!) or else to negotiate with the others a set of rules (which we promise to abide by) that minimize the ability of the advantaged to exercise power over the less fortunate, as well as to limit the vulnerability of the less advantaged to be subjected to such power.  These rules will compel us (and others) to curb some of our natural desires and instincts.

What can we do about political inequalities?  What should we do?  The two questions are not quite the same.  But they constitute the remainder of our public discussion.  This is exactly what democracy is about—negotiating broadly-acceptable rules, procedures and compromises.  The best answers are seldom obvious.  The solutions offered, even those attempted, will turn out to be imperfect.  But we should keep in mind that the practical point of the exercise of democracy is not to eliminate all inequalities or create a perfect society, but to move in the direction of a more just and equal society.