August 5, 2010
Equality, Equality
Stuart White has been explaining why John Rawls’ Difference Principle is not “empirically refuted” by the arguments of Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level. It’s good stuff, and you can read it whilst waiting for the second part of Stuart’s “political philosophy and the left” interview.
I’m particularly interested in the following:
“A final point. There is a danger for egalitarians in overinvesting in The Spirit Level. It makes a strong case that economic inequalities have negative effects on the well-being of a society (and not just its materially poorest members). But reservations about its claims are by no means confined to the right; see, for example, Claude Fischer’s essay in Boston Review. And what if, in fact, further research showed that all of the book’s claims are false? Would this imply that existing levels of income and wealth inequality are fine?
I certainly don’t think so. That’s because I think a great deal of existing material inequality is intrinsically unfair, independent of whether or not it lowers overall or average or majority well-being. And perhaps some of the reasons why such inequality is unfair are those set out in the work of John Rawls?”
I agree. I too am an egalitarian, hence at some level I believe that inequalities are objectionable in themselves; that their mere existence provides reasons (though not necessarily decisive reasons) for their removal.
But as soon as those words are on the page a host of qualifications crowd in:
* What about inequalities that are the result of some people working hard and others being lazy – surely we should tolerate (at least some of) those? – The “luck egalitarian” complaint.
* What if equality makes the worst-off worse-off, and the least advantaged would do better in a society which tolerated some inequality because the richer would drag up the net social advantages, including those of the poorest, with them? – A Rawlsian concern.
* What if, in the short term, a focus on equality is too impractical and too difficult to achieve, and what really matters is getting the least advantaged into positions of basic sufficiency, with concerns about equality being deferred until later? – A “sufficientarian” response.
* What measures are you using to define “equality” – wealth, income, access to resources? – and shouldn’t you be more interested in the capabilities that people can exercise than their bare stock in units of material goods? – The “capabilities” objection.
Note that these qualifiers are all located within a broadly leftist approach, and can all lay varying claims to being egalitarian. Anybody who has stepped into the minefield of contemporary political theory’s discussion of equality will testify to how confusing and overwhelming much of the literature is. (Though anybody who wants a clear introduction can do no better than the little book Equality, by none other than Stuart White).
Indeed one of the most basic problems for egalitarians may be explaining why we think equality is important in the first place. It may seem obvious, but it isn’t (go on, just try it in the comments if you don’t believe me). Fundamental values are complex and explaining why they are fundamental can be very trick, as Bernard Williams reminded us.
Nonetheless, let’s return to Stuart’s warning: that the left not over-invest in The Spirit Level. I think he’s right for the reasons he gives. But what interests me is why people might be tempted to over-invest in that work. The answer, I think, is that it offers a simple, easy and convenient diagnosis and correlate solution: inequality is bad for everyone, so reduce inequality.
Given the complexity of egalitarian thinking, and the problem of explaining why equality itself is so valuable, The Spirit Level offers a very appealing prospect because of its sheer simplicity. Unfortunately it’s almost certainly a chimera. Claude S. Fischer and David Runciman have already raised serious concerns about Wilkinson and Pickett’s methodolgy, explaining that the data they utilise to reach their conclusions is just too complicated to straightforwardly yield what they want.
It would be nice if egalitarians could unite around a simple set of demonstrably true propositions, not vulnerable to empirical refutation, allowing us to side-step all the difficult philosophical concerns about what equality means and why it’s important. But unfortunately – though unsurprisingly – equality (and egalitarianism) are nothing if not fiendishly complex.
Similarly, if we knew in advance that The Spirit Level could be effectively employed in day-to-day political debate so as to force egalitarian concessions from the right, then its instrumental value (i.e. its political efficacy) might trump deeper conceptual concerns. But we don’t know that. Indeed if The Spirit Level were to become “refuted” in the popular mind, the harm to egalitarian causes could be very great if the right accordingly claimed it had “proved” that inequality doesn’t matter.
Yet my hunch is that even knowing this many leftists would (and will) continue to over-invest in The Spirit Level regardless. This is because I’m cycnical about people’s political preferences; I think most of us prefer straightforward and easy propositions that we can use as sticks to beat our enemies with, rather than difficult and complex ideas that don’t clearly point in any one comfortable and pre-approved direction. I might even go so far as to say that it’s a human, all-too-human tendency. And I might also suggest that it’s about time political philosophy started paying more attention to this.
Tim Worstall said,
August 5, 2010 at 12:46 pm
On the equality bit…..I think that it’s a very deep rooted human thing to desire (and even strive for, at cost to yourself) “fairness”. The money game in experimental economics shows that clearly enough.
But fairness and equality, while perhaps related, or even two parts of the same spectrum, are not in fact the same things. It’s entirely luck that the bloke with the big dick gets the bangin’ blondes but while we all recognise that this isn’t equality few really take it to be unfair. We certainly don’t agitate that such blondes be more equally shared (at least not if we don’t own a hydrogen peroxide bottling plant).
On TSL, the thing that really got me about the book was what they did in the first few paras:
“What if equality makes the worst-off worse-off, and the least advantaged would do better in a society which tolerated some inequality because the richer would drag up the net social advantages, including those of the poorest, with them? – A Rawlsian concern.”
They entirely closed off that possible response to their (ahem, to use the word loosely) data.
They did this by stating, correctly, that money is of diminishing utility. And extra $ to a rich person is of less use than and extra $ to a poor person.
They then extended this to the arguable point that this is why increasing the general wealth of an already wealthy society doesn’t improve happiness very much (I say arguable because there’s an awful lot of research that shows that it’s the growth in wealth, not the level, which provides the happiness. A rich society with no growth is an unhappy one).
Fair enough even if I disagree. But by the end of the next page they are saying “as the rich countries reach the end of the real benefits of economic growth”.
See what they’ve done? Jumped from diminishing marginal returns to no returns at all. Which neatly closes out the idea that we can argue against their redistributive efforts by pointing to their possible effect on future growth. ‘Coz that growth doesn’t have any benefits.
Peronally I decided TSL was crap from that point on but maybe that’s just me….
Paul Sagar said,
August 5, 2010 at 12:54 pm
“It’s entirely luck that the bloke with the big dick gets the bangin’ blondes but while we all recognise that this isn’t equality few really take it to be unfair. ”
On the contrary, many egalitarians do think it’s unfair insofar as TBWTBD was born with his BD, and did nothing to deserve or earn it. (They may not think any action necessarily follows – other important moral concerns likely trump any attempt at “redistribution” in this case – but that doesn’t mean they don’t think it’s at some level a case of unfairness, of undeserved inequality).
“We certainly don’t agitate that such blondes be more equally shared (at least not if we don’t own a hydrogen peroxide bottling plant).”
Agreed. But that just tells us that other moral considerations are more important – e.g. that people ought not to be redistributed (or for that matter, BDs) – in this case, not that it isn’t still a matter of fairness/inequality.
Tim Worstall said,
August 5, 2010 at 12:59 pm
“On the contrary, many egalitarians do think it’s unfair insofar as TBWTBD was born with his BD, and did nothing to deserve or earn it.”
At which point I shall have to retire from the debate, simply assuming that such egalitarians have passed beyond the parody frontier.
Tim Worstall said,
August 5, 2010 at 12:59 pm
Sorry…”parody singularity”.
Paul Sagar said,
August 5, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Tim,
I don’t think it’s particularly unreasonable a position to take.
Consider: somebody is born big, strong, athletic, good-looking and healthy. Somebody else is born small, weak, unathletic, ugly and sickly. Neither of them deserve this state of affairs – we do not deserve our genetic makeups, after all. Accordingly, it seems right to say that it is unfair that the former was born with a better body than the latter.
Now, the next response may well be: “well unfortunately life just is unfair”. And indeed that may even be the correct, and final, response (but it may not, either). But the point is, there’s nothing whacky or weird about thinking that undeserved disadvantages arising from the lottery of birth are unfair. Surely, any disagreement should be about whether we do anything about that unfairness.
Mark said,
August 5, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Tim,
**Surely** it’s more ridiculous to be concerned about an equality of mathematics education (for example), something which most of us hate and spend our lives trying to escape, than it is to be concerned with an equality of fucking. Which most of us are rather interested in.
The social systems under which we live obviously determine the sexual experiences we have – though I can imagine that bashful English egalitarians might have difficulty talking about the subject without schoolboy giggling.
Chris Snowdon said,
August 5, 2010 at 2:30 pm
What if equality makes the worst-off worse-off?
This is the key question. Relieving inequality is too often confused with making the poor richer. This is understandable because when we talk about poverty in this country we mean relative poverty, which is closely related to inequality. Some people say they think The Spirit Level is intuitively correct, but is it really intuitive to believe that society would improve if the poor got 5% poorer so long as the rich got 20% poorer? According to The Spirit Level, it would. Not only would things get better for the poor but, still less intuitively, things would get better for *everyone*.
There are things we can do to make the poor richer which might also reduce inequality eg. raising the tax threshold to £10,000. This should make the poor richer, but if the rich find ways to get even richer in the mean time would that matter? I don’t think so. The important thing to do is to stop taxing the poor and if it reduces inequality as well, then great, but that is not the objective.
Alternatively, we could round up all the millionaires and sail them to the Antarctic. That would reduce inequality but would it improve the lot of the poor?
I can’t see how, and yet according to The Spirit Level’s theory of psychosocial trauma, it would.
This is the problem with conflating better living standards for the poor (the traditional aim of the left) with reducing inequality as an end in itself (the aim of The Spirit Level). They can be compatible, but not necessarily, and if you focus only on inequality, you risk treating the symptom rather than the disease.
Luis Enrique said,
August 5, 2010 at 2:41 pm
It might not be unreasonable, but is it interesting? Nobody thinks the allocation of big dicks is “fair”. I hope political philosophers have more to do with their big brains than point out accidents of birth have nothing to do with “fair”. As Tony would say, whaddya gonna do? (apart from invest in researching dick enlargement technology).
Actually, now I think about it, perhaps what happens to you in life is such a big blurry mess of accidents of birth, things you choose because of accidents of birth, and things you choose because you’re you, that figuring what we ought to try and compensate for, and what not, is too difficult, and a general emphasis on equality at least limits the penalties of unfair.
As a practical matter, I think just trying to crudely fix equality can go awry (the familiar distortion of incentives arguments) so ideally trying change the available choices, and attacking the mechanisms that amplify and replicate inequalities sound like better plans, at least in principle.
I don’t recommend it, but here I have a long discussion with Tim and his commentators, trying to convince them they should worry about relative poverty and inequality, with limited success (I come across the argument: “most poor people are arseholes” and Tim surprises me by saying he just doesn’t particularly care about the welfare of poor people in rich countries). But I try to push an instrumental argument – rather like the Spirit Level – inequality does bad thing to society, which I figured might stand a better chance of winning over bloggertarians.
I guess another argument is to show how little outcomes have to do with things like ability and effort, but that’s a tougher ask. For a start, lots of people are absolutely convinced that if you keep your nose clean and your head down, you can work yourself out of poverty and build a decent life for yourself.
Mark said,
August 5, 2010 at 3:22 pm
“For a start, lots of people are absolutely convinced that if you keep your nose clean and your head down, you can work yourself out of poverty and build a decent life for yourself.”
You can work yourself out of absolute poverty.
Luis Enrique said,
August 5, 2010 at 3:37 pm
Mark,
(first, some people would say very few households in the UK experience absolute poverty, in which case I’m not talking about absolute poverty)
yeah, I know I probably could work myself into a better position if I found myself dumped on the dole in a council flat in Sunderland. I’m less sure it’s so easy for all the members of the 22% of UK households on less than 60% of median household income.
I don’t think it’s very helpful to think “what would I do” in that position, I don’t think this it’s helpful to think of an undefined “you” (as in “you can work your way up”), And I don’t think it’s helpful to think about what’s “possible”, I think what matters is how difficult/easy things are. I think it’s important to think about (the full distribution of) the people we are actually talking about. The 22%, and how things are for them. Some of them, sure, no doubt could have exerted some effort and get themselves into a better position, other less so. But that’s a long way from establishing that most of them could comfortably off, if only they applied themselves.
Mark said,
August 5, 2010 at 4:33 pm
Yes, of course, there will be people incapable of working their way up from poverty, for whatever reason – but surely it’s equally unhelpful, if not downright poisonous, to propagate the idea that possibility or potential is an irrelevance.
Dan said,
August 5, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Indeed one of the most basic problems for egalitarians may be explaining why we think equality is important in the first place.
Yeah, I’m with Nozick on this one: equality as a legitimate goal of politics is so often assumed, but very (very) rarely ever argued for. All the serious arguments I’ve ever seen have been arguments for mere equality under the law, which stops well short of the material equality that egalitarians are so concerned with attaining.
Luis Enrique said,
August 5, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Mark,
agreed. In retrospect, in my last comment I wasn’t really responding to what you wrote but how the “you don’t have to be poor if get off your backside” is sometimes deployed by others.
Mark said,
August 5, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Luis -
“Most households who spend some time in the poorest fifth move in and out of the poorest fifth, with only a minority (around 20%) persistently in the poorest fifth.”
http://www.poverty.org.uk/08/index.shtml
It doesn’t seem to be that difficult.
Luis Enrique said,
August 5, 2010 at 5:03 pm
ah, that’s interesting. I’ve written about the error of using static income distribution data, and ignoring how people move around the distribution over their lifetimes before. So I should have been thinking about that possibility.
Luis Enrique said,
August 5, 2010 at 5:06 pm
still, if you look at averages, persistent poverty (which perhaps might look like moving back and forth between the poorest fifth and the next quintile up), might still be hard to escape. The page you link to says: A sixth of the population – around 10 million people – are in the poorest fifth of households at least two years in three
Peter said,
August 5, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Dan,
I’m not sure that this is fair. I think plenty of arguments have been offered by the various stripes of egalitarian. Sure, you may not think that they are good arguments, but that’s a different issue. ToJ-era Rawls, for example, would presumably claim that diversions from equality that aren’t justified by the DP or a lexically prior PoJ are not justified because the PoJs that would legitimate them would not be chosen in the OP . Now, maybe that’s not a very good argument (I think there’s a lot to be said for it though), but it’s an argument.
In the luck egalitarian camp, Dworkin has his reasons for thinking that greater material equality flows from equal respect and concern. Maybe he’s confused about this, but still … it’s an argument. No doubt other stripes of luck egalitarian would have their own arguments.
TomJ said,
August 6, 2010 at 10:45 am
I can’t defend equality as an ideal. I have never intuitively seen why equality is something worthwhile in itself. I’m sure there are arguments in favour of it, but none of them jump out at me as being obvious.
What is obvious is that a lot of right-wingers jump on the promotion of equality as evidence for the left’s perceived authoritarianism and/or promotion of the “mediocre” at the expense of the “talented”[1].
So from a practical, political street-fighting perspective is it possible that the equality dog just won’t hunt. Why doesn’t the left simply argue that it is the function of a good society to provide a decent standard of living to everyone in that society, no matter what their circumstances? Further to this why don’t they argue that this standard should be as high as practically possible (fulfilling the difference principle)?
I just don’t see what the fundamental philosophical argument for inequality *is*. As others have pointed out on this thread there are plenty of ways in which diverse human beings are going to be unequal in basic biological terms. Hence inequality falls into the set of things that are beyond the realm of politics and must simply be accepted as facts of life.
If the “Spirit Level” puts forth a decent instrumental argument in favour of equality then fine – let the argument for equality be instrumental. But I still do not fully understand why the left is so keen on equality in and of itself.
[1]: Obviously right wingers feel no compunction to explain why the “talented” are intrinsically more deserving than the “mediocre”, but that is beside the point.
Marcus Warner said,
August 7, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Interesting post and discussion.
As someone who politically believes in equality being an explicit goal (well perhaps the Crosland notion of ‘more equality’), I will happily admit to lacking the intellectual theory to advance that case.*
But might that be a boon, rather than a hurdle? I ask because there is no need to explain through theory or objective proof the feeling that you get as a everyday person through a modicum of equality. Lending your butty a twenty sheet for a night out so he can join you on said night. Or giving up some of your assets to improve someone less better off than you, or indeed in most team environments.
Perhaps I am being simplistic, but growing up in the Welsh valleys, there is someting so utterly unshakeable as being all in this together, and pulling together to help each other out. Perhaps the left, for all its noble intellectual endeavour, should worry about making the emotive case for equality, rather than proofing it’s objective worth. It is hardly like the right do so for neo liberal economics is it?
*Of course I value and engage in that debate and see its value.
Tim Worstall said,
August 7, 2010 at 8:41 pm
“Perhaps the left, for all its noble intellectual endeavour, should worry about making the emotive case for equality, rather than proofing it’s objective worth. It is hardly like the right do so for neo liberal economics is it? ”
Ah, but, this representative of the neo-liberal right (even though I insist that I’m actually a neo-liberal lefty) does indeed make exactly that argument.
So, you wanna reduce absolute poverty? Great, we’ve found this system, capitalism, markets, globalisation, some mix of the three. We do know it works….we can see it working, we can see the historical evidence that it’s worked.
Objectively, as Lenin’s Tomb would say, we know how to alleviate, abolish even, absolute poverty. So, if you wish to alleviate, abolish even, absolute poverty, you too should be a neo-liberal, arguing for capitalism, markets, globalisation, no? For we’ve actual proof of the objective worth of the system…..
Paul Sagar said,
August 7, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Tim, whilst you’re certainly not saying anything stupid, I think it’s equally obvious that sensible leftists (like me) can accept what you say but consistently hold that capitalism brings along with it other things that we ought to worry about – pick from the usual gladbag of inequality, exploitation, environmental destruction, and even the “grubbiness of the sentiments” (as GA Cohen put it) that powers the market system.
What’s interesting is that these disagreements are nothing new. They go back to at least the 18th century. Indeed, I’m planning a blog post on precisely one angle of this issue, in which I also intend to show that Adam Smith was a lot closer to people like me, whereas you have more in common with the French Physiocrats – whom Smith was particularly opposed to – than the man who’s name your think tank has appropriated.
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Tim Worstall said,
August 8, 2010 at 8:13 am
“consistently hold that capitalism brings along with it other things that we ought to worry about”
Sure….which is why we should be working to ameliorate (at the very least) those bad things while keeping the system itself for its results. Rather than as some lefties put it, wish for a different system altogether…one which, well, at the very best, because we’ve not tried it yet (for of course no one is proposing those ones we have tried and yet have failed, not even Lenin, he’s arguing for “true communism”, not that nasty Soviet stuff), we don’t know won’t have the same or similar downsides without the good bits either.
“inequality, exploitation, environmental destruction, and even the “grubbiness of the sentiments” (as GA Cohen put it) that powers the market system.”
Grubbiness of sentiments is a good one….seriously, Cohen said that? I thought he was meant to be some great socialist philosopher and his argument was simply that capitalism is icky? Jeez.
I would strongly argue, at the least, that markets and capitalism are not the same thing for a start. Then that inequality is an outcome of our being a social species where the mating prospects (of the male especially) depend upon status. Capitalism/markets might result in (although not depend upon) an open system of income and consumption inequality but every human society has had a status hierarchy and thus inequality. Yes, even the mythical hunter gatherers…..we can see from DNA studies that the distribution of children is wildly unequal….the majority of men who ever lived did not have them, the majority of women who did did. That’s proof, in such a social species, of status inequality (that is, that some men got laid enough to have children, others didn’t)
Exploitation I’m afraid I reject entirely. Far too Marxist and “surplus value”y. There most certainly have been societies which did exploit…slavery being one of them. But the mere existence of profit isn’t proof of exploitation. I can and do argue that the higher income the worker gets by using the capital of the capitalist (that higher productivity which results from the use of capital leads to higher wages, as we know) is just as much the worker exploiting the capitalist.
That either capitalism or markets are uniquely, among socio economic systems, responsible for environmental destruction is also to be rejected. Shit, you ever seen the Soviet Union? Smelt it? And long before any socio-economic systems existed or hunter gatherer forefathers ate their way through the megafauna of every place they reached.
You appear to be attributing to one socio economics system all the ills of the human condition. Naughty.
“in which I also intend to show that Adam Smith was a lot closer to people like me, whereas you have more in common with the French Physiocrats – whom Smith was particularly opposed to – than the man who’s name your think tank has appropriated.”
That will be interesting to see. For I doubt you can do it. Just as an example, on matters envornmental. Commons problems….the London Congestion charge (or road pricing on a larger scale) is a solution to the commons problem of free at the point of use road space. It’s currently regarded as a great lefty triumph, Ken brought it in, whoopee!
It was first proposed by Alan Walters (yes, Maggie’s favourite economist) and championed for decades by the ASI. Underneath the rhetoric of all markets, all the time markets (to counter fools like Cohen who reject them as icky) there’s a very stong current of, well, markets are good but they’re not perfect and here’s what has to be done to make them better. Well judged interventions in short. We’re in favour of carbon taxes for example (thinking that cap and trade gives to much power to politicians to fuck up), entirely happy with progressive taxation as we’ve argued through before and so on.
Nakul said,
August 8, 2010 at 1:56 pm
@timworstall:
Excellent arguments against something (i.e. capitalism is *uniquely* responsible for said ills) that Paul never asserted in the first place.
But time now for today’s Cohen quotation:
‘… Karl Marx says of the capitalist market that “there alone rule freedom, equality, property [inc. self-ownership] and Bentham [=utility maximization]” … Whether or not Marx was right to draw a special connection between those values and the market, they are certainly the chief values of liberal capitalist civilization, and they are the values that therefore preoccupy its political philosophers. …
‘Chief among the conflicts of value that capitalism displays is that between equality and utility. Its rhetoric endorses both, but its reality sacrifices equality to utility: it relies on injustice to produce human happiness [footnote: I do not say that it succeeds. I do not reject critiques of capitalism that focus on the misery it produces. I am developing a different form of criticism.] When Thomas Nagel declared that “what capitalism produces is wonderful,” a sentence which, I must admit, jarred me, before I saw its point, he did not mean that it was morally attractive — that, as some think, it gives everyone her proper due. He meant, rather, that it delivers the goods.’ (Rescuing Justice and Equality, 12-3)
Mark said,
August 8, 2010 at 2:32 pm
Tim-
“the majority of men who ever lived did not have them, the majority of women who did did. That’s proof, in such a social species, of status inequality (that is, that some men got laid enough to have children, others didn’t)”
I don’t think this is as much a result of status, as of violence. Apparently, men have been and are far more likely to be killed by violence than women. Wouldn’t this explain the fact that men have been less likely to reproduce successfully?
If our culture can limit violence, perhaps it can provide us all with more or less equal status?
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