Income Inequality is Just Part of Inequality
Trilingual apartheid beach sign from back in the day (wikimedia)
I’m not in agreement with the overall thrust of Will Wilkinson’s paper on inequality for the Cato Institute, but one point that I think is in the spirit of what he’s saying was brought to mind by a question at last night’s event. The way I would put the point is that it’s a mistake to think of the world as composed of, on the one hand, “economic issues” in which we worry about wealth or income inequality and then on the other hand, “social issues” in which we worry about racism or sexism. Progressives ought to be concerned with a general issue of justice and social inequality, of which gaps in money income or wealth may be part.
And you really don’t want to find yourself suggesting, as I think people sometimes do, that we ought to be monomaniacally focused on the income gap question. After all, consider an African-American woman working as a nurse in North Carolina in the late 1950s relative to a white male executive at North Carolina’s largest bank. There would have been a substantial gap in their incomes. But if you flash forward to today and compare an African-American woman working as a nurse in North Carolina to a top executive at Charlotte-based Bank of America you’ll find a much larger gap.
Thinking about the issue more comprehensively, though, it’s of course clear that the overall gap in social equality between two such people is smaller today than it was in the days when the African-American woman would be explicitly excluded from a wide range of social practices and opportunities open to the banker. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that the decline of Jim Crow caused income inequality to grow thus forcing us to make an explicit tradeoff, but it’s still worth understanding which aggregate sets of social changes have and haven’t been for the better. What’s more, I have heard credible arguments that the successes of feminism in the late 60s and 1970s did play a role in increasing income inequality. I’m not sure whether or not that’s right, but if it is right you’d still want to say that feminism was an egalitarian force.
19 Responses to “Income Inequality is Just Part of Inequality”
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July 15th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
To be fair, Wilkinson’s paper was specifically looking at the income inequality divide, IIRC. I think it’s fair to look at a subset of problems in a research paper…
July 15th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Any thoughts on this as it relates to the idea of class-based affirmative action?
July 15th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Would somebody give a quick briefing on the putative benefits of income equality? Why wouldn’t that mean making everyone equally poor.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
A typical rightwingnut false dilemna. Nobody is calling for absolute income equality–but that does not mean we ought to be comfortable seeing the very rich use their political power to pull a reverse Robin Hood, which is what we’ve been seeing in this country since ‘80 or so.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
John Maynard Keynes from “The General Theory” in 1936:
“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and income.”
July 15th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I’ve heard some of those as well. The ones I remember basically amounted to saying that these things resulted in increasing integration of women into the workforce, which increased the overall size of the workforce drastically and thus helped constrain wages for everyone except those with extremely large wage premiums anyways (like professional positions).
July 15th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
No. The two are distinct in several different and important respects—historically, not the least.
Anti-racism and anti-sexism, as well as similar human rights issues such as anti-homophobia, are direct philosophical descendants of Enlightenment liberalism and are fundamentally about the impulse toward human universalism where we expand the circle to include those who were previously thought to be “other”.
The notion of “economic justice” is, of course, the corollary to this human universalism and in this sense it is qualitatively the same. However, the modern left/right division with regard to economics is really just the fork in the road of two formulations of how to work toward the liberal idea of economic justice. And as much as I hate to say this, in the same sense as human rights are essentially individual rights, it can be argued that the rightward path, which begins with individual (property) rights and economic self-determination, is more closely in-line with the liberal tradition of human rights by which anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia are best understood.
The leftward economic path is more concerned with egalitarianism, which we should all know is the Enlightenment value that is at odds with liberal individualism. On the other hand, it is also well within the liberal tradition of individual human rights because it identifies an economic exploitation that the rightward path mostly ignores.
In terms of world history, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the argument about economics became all-important. Economic changes happened more quickly than social changes; a society could be essentially as culturally conservative as it ever had been and yet economically very “progressive”. Market liberalism had been the prior progressivism, but it was superceded by socialism and thus the old liberalism became the new conservatism. And here the foundation of the modern left/right division came into being.
It is only within the exceptional American perspective that the transcendance of economics in defining the left/right political division is ignored or misunderstood. This is because the American socialist left was mostly stillborn. The American consensus, almost entirely across the left/right spectrum, is the conservative economic preference for market economics and property rights. Perhaps because of this, and because the US has always been something of a social experiment, cultural liberalism came to the fore and, only here, began to define the left/right distinction.
Outside the US, it is commonplace to favor far-left, “progressive” economic policies while simultaneously favoring rightist cultural policies which are opposed to anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia. It is both intellectually suspect and empirically wrong to assert that the economic and cultural left are essentially linked. They are not.
All that said, if Yglesias meant to argue that there are causal relationships between, say, the social injustice of racism and economic injustice, then I’ll agree wholeheartedly. But this isn’t about the political spectrum with regard to economics. It’s simply the practical matter that the cultural injustices will, and have, naturally manifest themselves economically—whether we look at socialist or capitalist societies. From a theoretical point of view, both the socialists and market economists will argue that their systems are, by nature, blind with regard to the cultural injustices to which we are referring.
I don’t intend to validate the American libertarian abstraction (which isn’t really coordinate—it merely replaces the de facto American bivalance with one derived from a cherry-picked notion of human liberty). The notions of “liberalism”, “progressivism”, and “leftism” are complex with regard to both culture and economics. The attempt to unify all of this into a single abstraction is the self-serving attempt to simplify in such a way that one can dismiss the entire group of one’s political opponents as being essentially philosophically wrong.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Would somebody give a quick briefing on the putative benefits of income equality? Why wouldn’t that mean making everyone equally poor.
As usual, you’re being disingenuous, but I’ll play along. What we think of as perhaps a better situation for income disparity is along the lines of Europe, where CEOs make 10-50 times the salary of their lowest-paid worker. Here, that figure is orders of magnitude higher. Obviously nobody is calling for everyone to be made equally poor. You seem to think there’s absolutely no problem, though, with having a giant underclass living paycheck-to-paycheck by necessity and an extremely small percentage making most of the income. And as usual, you, who are not in that class and never will be, spend so much time fighting for its interests. Why, I’ll never know.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Cue to libertarians on why massive income and/or social inequality is inherently good.
July 15th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
This is less about the advantages of equality than the drawbacks of inequality, but, you know, removing them would be advantageous, so there you go.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-harvardberkeley.htm
July 15th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
The other argument as to why feminism might have increased inequality goes like this: Back when the old boys networks were stronger, more of the top corporate hires were mediocrities. Now the route to a top job is open to more people, and is more dependent on academic achievement. This means that the people who reach the top are more competitive, and more able to squeeze the maximum reward out of the system.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Income/wealth equality is first priority because, as Sally Bowles sang: Money makes the world go round.
Government can’t make someone like another but it can enforce wealth/income distribution laws.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
It’s pretty obvious from Wilkinson’s desperate kitchen sinking he doesn’t really give a shit. (The way he blows off Robert H Frank is pathetic.) I feel dumber for having read it.
He doesn’t really address the social consequences of inequality. He completely ignores the stresses of socio-economic status on health outcomes. Inequality is bad for the health of poor people and rich people. Robert Sapolsky (”Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers”) is all over this. Here’s his article “Sick of Poverty”:
http://www.cranepsych.com/Psych/Sick_of_poverty.pdf
It seems like Wilkinson trying to create a New Libertarian Man in the style of the New Soviet Man. Like, “inequality isn’t bad if you just pretend you don’t know how fucked you are. If you just didn’t worry so much it wouldn’t be so bad!”
July 15th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Re: Outside the US, it is commonplace to favor far-left, “progressive” economic policies while simultaneously favoring rightist cultural policies which are opposed to anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia. It is both intellectually suspect and empirically wrong to assert that the economic and cultural left are essentially linked. They are not.
Keith Ellis,
This is very true. I would quibble with you in that I think one can make a good case that some ‘rightist’ cultural policies are actually good for women, but that said you’re right on the main point. The average peasant in Egypt or Bolivia is likely to be very much _economically_ to the left, but probably not on board with the feminist cultural agenda.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
There’s a reason they used to say “labor rights are civil rights,” and why the 1963 March on Washington was a march for “Jobs and Freedom.” It’s because economic and social injustice is inherently intertwined.
To take your example of the black woman as a nurse in North Carolina in the 1950s vs. the bank manager – first of all, she was insanely lucky/talented to become a nurse at a time when most universities that offered nursing programs wouldn’t accept here. Second, she probably couldn’t get a job in most southern hospitals, or if she did get a job, it would likely be confined to the black ward. After the nurse gets off work, chances are she probably would take a segregated bus line (which she nonetheless has to fork over quite a bit of the bus’s profit margins to ride) to a segregated neighborhood. Her neighborhood is segregated in part because the bank manager would refuse to give her a loan to move anywhere else – not necessarily because of his individual racism, but because it’s bank policy to follow FHA guidelines, and FHA guidelines say that racially-mixed neighborhoods are unsound risks. So she gets home to her segregated neighborhood, where there aren’t enough streetlights and the road doesn’t have decent paving because no one who lives in that neighborhood is allowed to vote, and even if they were they were gerrymandered into five different districts, so the city councilman and the state rep don’t take their calls. She might purchase some groceries for dinner, but man it’s hard to get that nurse’s paycheck to stretch because there are virtually no stores in her segregated neighborhood and the ones that are there put their prices up because they know they’ve got a captive audience. So let’s say she gets home and her kids are doing their homework, except they’re using history textbooks that are forty years old because the state doesn’t give much money to “colored schools,” even though they might only live a couple blocks from a working class white neighborhood that has better funding. Her kids are struggling through the book because there’s fifty kids to one schoolroom, and the textbook they’re reading tells them that Reconstruction was a conspiracy of evil radical abolitionists to punish the south, that “darkies” are incapable of governing themselves and ruined the state, and that the Redemption of North Carolina by the Klan was a noble endeavor. Maybe she tries to help them through their homework, but she’s tired from a 12-hr shift, and it would cost more than the family could ever afford to send them to Howard (because the UNC won’t accept them).
In that situation, you can’t disentangle the economics of Jim Crow from the society of Jim Crow. It’s all part of the same thing.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
The benefit of income inequality for pooter is that he gets to laugh at poor people, while being gainfully employed as a taint-waxer for the wealthy.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Matt, I’m not sure I get what the example of the Afro-American nurse is supposed to be doing. You hung it out there like, hey, this is self-evident. Uh, what is the point? that everything is hunky dory for African-Americans? Or something? Or not?
What is should prove is: the top executive at Bank of America will be a lot less hurt by equality-making policy, now that he’s increased by a couple of magnitudes his head start over everybody else. If you can live – as conservatives like to say – on 60,000 dollars now like you had a million in 1950 – just look at the PC! and the hedonic improvements in your breakfast cereal – why, then, the same increases happened at the top, plus of course the real increase that happened when they, like, stole all the wage gains over the last twenty years using their nifty monopoly power in the labor market for top execs. So, if you have a million dollars, it is like you have 10 million.
So, tax them as though they have ten million dollars. It will be fun, and they’ll never notice.
July 16th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
It’s interesting that Yglesias uses a picture of African apartheid, which was designed by white South African skilled labor unions who also happened to be budding socialist.
July 21st, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: And you really don’t want to find yourself suggesting, as I think people sometimes do, that we ought to be monomaniacally focused on the income gap question. After all, consider an African-American woman working as a nurse in North Carolina in the late 1950s relative to a white male executive at North Carolina’s largest bank. There would have been a substantial gap in their incomes. But if you flash forward to today and compare an African-American woman working as a nurse in North Carolina to a top executive at Charlotte-based Bank of America you’ll find a much larger gap. [...]