Unequal Inequality
President Bush just spoke of "income inequality" for the first time, Tyler Cowen (the most impressive mind I’ve met) said last week that "inequality as a major and chronic American problem has been overstated," while Brad DeLong just said that "on the level of individual societies, I believe that inequality does loom as a serious political-economic problem."
I find it striking that these discussions focus almost entirely on the smallest of these seven kinds of inequality:
Inequality across species
Inequality across the eras of human history
Non-financial inequality, such as of popularity, respect, beauty, sex, kids
Income inequality between the nations of a world
Income inequality between the families of a nation
Income inequality between the siblings of a family
Income inequality between the days of a person’s life
Consider that "sibling differences [within each family] account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality" and that "eliminating income inequality within all nations would reduce global income inequality by no more than one-third." So why do we talk mainly about financial inequality between a nation’s families, when each of these other six inequalities is arguably larger?
DeLong’s excuse is that "It is hard … to envision alternative political arrangements or economic policies during the past 50 years that would have transferred any significant portion of the wealth of today’s rich nations to today’s poor nations." But surely we could have transferred wealth if we had wanted to, just as parents could teach their children to share income if they wanted. We could compensate for unequal beauty by transferring from the pretty to the ugly. And we could reduce species and era inequalities by sacrificing less for rich future generations and sacrificing more for other species.
Clearly, we do not just have a generic aversion to inequality; our concern is very selective. The best explanation I can think of is that our distant ancestors got into the habit of complaining about inequality of transferable assets with a tribe, as a way to coordinate a veiled threat to take those assets if they were not offered freely. Such threats would have been far less effective regarding the other forms of inequality.
Added 5/7/07: There is also a huge ignored inequality between actual and possible siblings.
Personally, I feel a visceral disgust whenever I think about how unequal the numbers 14 and 38 are.
I agree that inequality is not inherently bad in that I don't think most humans have a direct moral instinct to abhor inequality. It's only bad insofar as it reflects or causes lack of fairness. Since inequality and lack of fairness are so strongly correlated, many people have probably been trained to automatically disapprove of inequality. I think in America today inequality does frequently both cause and reflect lack of fairness. So while it may sometimes be imprecise to malign inequality directly, I don't think it's inappropriate.
As for sibling inequality, I'm sure many less successful siblings feel and express great resentment over the perceived advantages of their more successful siblings. They don't expect the government to interfere because the unfair system that caused the inequality is at the family level and dictated by culture. This is in contrast to inequality caused by Wall Street excess.
At least international inequality is a huge, huge, huge subject of discussion amongst activists, government, NGOs, and political philosophers and theorists (in the latter category, check out the burgeoning literature on global justice).