Why are we still talking about inequality?

Perhaps you are uncomfortable with the drift of this discussion.  Equality has never existed and never will! you would say.  It’s a waste of time to talk about something that can never be changed.  Indeed, the single-minded pursuit of social equality will divert valuable attention and resources from other, more manageable problems.  (Just imagine a government bureaucracy that existed for no other purpose than to spot social inequalities and trample them out of existence.  There would be precious little left for anyone at the end of the reckoning.)  Nevertheless, the various inequalities that do exist in our contemporary world have profound effects on the daily quality of life of people living right now.  In fact, most people are on the wrong side of one or more kinds of inequality.  We hardly need argue that equality must be pursued for its own sake until some perfect version of society is achieved.

We only have to picture a child born into a neighborhood blighted by poverty, violence and insecurity—a child with little chance of receiving even a minimal quality of education or degree of personal attention.  By situational and institutionalized neglect she is deprived of the opportunities that children elsewhere take for granted, or even awareness that such possibilities exist.  Now imagine that this child has remarkable talent and a fair bit of grit—though in danger of going unrecognized in her present situation.  Not only is this individual child robbed of her potential accomplishments by accidents of birth and circumstance, but society at large is robbed of the public benefits of her talents and ambition.  She loses her most-fully-realized life.  We lose what she might have given us.  Some will say that if she were really so talented, she would rise above her circumstances regardless of obstacles.  But we only ever hear about the very very few who manage to do so, never about the many more who might have done but did not.  Would you be content if your own offspring were forced by circumstance to face such hostile odds?  Children deprived of opportunities by profound inequalities will be unable to add much to the collective civil good that makes all of our lives better.  And some will become a burden on society who did not have to be.  Inequality of opportunity harms the best outcomes for everyone.

Conservatives like to argue that inequality is not a public problem because everyone has the opportunity of joining the elite.  Any individual, by dint of talent and hard work, can rise to the top.  (Rising is a favorite trajectory among meritocrats, who serve up heartwarming stories of individuals who have managed to rise out of disadvantage and poverty.)  They seem to imply that every individual in a free society has exactly the same opportunity of rising to the top as any other.  Do we actually find such freedom?  If it were true that everyone had an equal chance of rising to the top of society (“the top” being measured by lifetime earnings), then we should expect to see something like the following.  Imagine a cohort of 20-year-olds, living in the same country under the same laws though representing the full breadth of society—some already in the top quintile (because of family wealth), some down in the bottom, the rest in the middle quintiles.  (A quintile is a statistical term meaning any of five equal groups into which a population may be divided.)  Now imagine the same cohort fifty years later, at the end of their working lives.  If they had all enjoyed an equal opportunity of “rising” (that is, of reaching an income suitable to their particular talents, educational attainments and hard work), then we should expect to see about as many end up in the top quintile who started in the lowest quintile as those who began in the highest.  In fact, we should expect to see at the end of fifty years roughly equal representation in the top quintile from all the five initial quintiles.  And we should expect a significant number who began at the top to end up at the bottom.  Is this what we find?  Hardly.  Empirical studies fail to bear out this optimistic scenario.  There will always be a few in the top quintile who began in the bottom (“See, it can be done!”), but nothing like the proportion we should expect to find from lower quintiles.  There will in fact be many, many more who end up in the top quintile who also began there—far more than natural talents and hard work could possibly explain.  One’s advantaged position at the end of life has something to do with one’s inherent talent and hard work, but a great deal more to do with one’s inherited advantages.

There has never been anything like a level playing field in any civilized society.  Life is less a competitive game on a football pitch (if it were, Brazilians would be the world champs) than a race up an obstacle course where the competitors begin at profoundly different starting positions and face entirely unequal hurdles.  The wealthy kids start halfway up the course, gifted with the best running shoes and protein drinks and supported by dedicated parent-coaches who hire experienced trainers to get them past the easy stuff and find shortcuts around the more difficult barriers.  And they get cheered all the way.  The poor kids start hungry and shoeless, have to scale many more exhausting hurdles before they even reach the place where the rich kids began, and receive little help and few cheers as they clamber over an endless array of barriers, many thrown up after the rich kids have already gone by.