on the term "wealth inequality".?
“Income inequality” (more descriptively, “wealth inequality”) is a poor term to adopt in the current debate, because in the context of that debate, the manifestation of “inequality” seems to imply a wrong and the consequent need for equalization – there is also the equally untenable implication that this should be a strict equalization, whereas of course it is actually the degree of difference between the wealth of different groups, and the relative size of those groups (“1%,” “99%,” and so on), which distresses most of those who raise the issue. Thus, under these misimpressions, some less thoughtful Republicans meaninglessly complain that their opponents actually advocate wealth redistribution, somewhere between what Robin Hood and what the communists of history did, or purported to do.
In fact, “income inequality” is meant not to stand on its own as a political fact, but rather to describe or at least point to a broader set of socioeconomic circumstances which themselves require correction, and for reasons not including unequal distribution of wealth itself. (Familiar elsewhere, these circumstances include various arrangements which cause wealth to accrete disproportionately in sectors where a certain threshold of wealth already resides - thus the barriers to socioeconomic mobility for those outside these sectors, and so on.) This correction would result de facto in less wealth inequality of the type at issue, but not as a result of direct action (i.e., of wealth redistribution); by analogy, a sore throat from streptococcus is not simply to be soothed with liquids, etc. — rather, the soreness signals the underlying presence of a bacterium that must be treated with antibiotics if it is to retreat (and take its throat symptoms with it).
Put another way, then, wealth inequality is a symptom of an underlying problem, and treating the symptom alone here is, as often enough in medicine, an ineffective and indeed entirely harmful idea (which, again, given America’s political culture and the failure of wealth redistribution in the communist states of the twentieth century, few would really advocate, and which wastes time and resources in our debates). If economic inequality’s underlying conditions can be treated instead, then inequality of the degree that distresses so many will hopefully disappear — but again, not because we abrogated it directly. Indeed, in this case – by contrast with the strep throat – we cannot afford to treat the symptom at all, but only the underlying pathology.
“Inequality” here also makes us think of other large political wrongs, such as deficits in due process or equal protection — and yet the latter are legal as well as political wrongs, and so pledged to direct remedy. Wealth equality of any degree is not guaranteed in law, but many forms of equality which are legally backed — freedom of political speech, due process, the protection of rights in commerce and contract, etc. — tend to promote that condition.
Rougher: The term wealth inequality – or rather its implied, desirable obverse, “wealth equality” — also suggests a synchronic “snapshot” of the economy in which all wealth, if not basically equal, should still fall within some narrow range of variation. (This is more or less in line with Jeremy Waldron’s characterization of a distributive “dividend” scheme; what follows is in one sense an attempt to make the soul of such a scheme less communistically eccentric.) Once more, virtually no one actually intends this idea, but the misimpression of the naked term is still instructive, since just perhaps, we might well wish a diachronic picture of the economy, sampled over time, to show wealth rising and falling among different groups. In other words, “wealth equality” probably can (and should) never mean that every individual/family enjoy resources within a certain range at any given time, but it might more constructively mean that every person has a very strong chance to do so at different times in their life (varying with periods in their own careers, conditions in the economy, and so on). It is certainly possible that one might wait across generations for such movement — e.g., a man might have grown children before he reaches his own economic upswing (though of course he will hope for this even more where his children are concerned), or he may have enjoyed this prosperity earlier on and hit a downswing in later life. And there may still be those who do not attain to this golden period in their lifetimes. The good here, however, is that as many people as possible “cycle through” a range of prosperity at some point, and that they be able to look forward to the possibility of doing so again.
This “cycling” is really another way of talking about economic mobility, and beyond old stereotypes such as the notorious, and perhaps now fading, faith of the American poor that they may well one day be rich (thus, it has been pointed out, their frequent support of inheritance tax elimination, etc.) — though now such cycling is potentially imagined as a new up-and-down mobility within a single lifespan, let alone between generations; and the “range” of wealth referred to is another word for the middle class – imagined not as a vague overall income/assets bracket, but more as a proportion of an individual’s life spent in a certain kind of prosperity and economic activity. In a crude sense, it helps maintain that version of the ancient “wheel of fortune” in which liberalism still believes: like the real and utopian political systems in which citizens have the chance to “rotate through” offices of power, this is a slightly more utopian hope that people could rotate through a certain amount of ecomonic power. People will be have less or more at different times, but the point is that those with less at any point have the opportunity (the remaining touchword in the debate) to accumulate more — including cases in which those with less are seeking to return to a prosperity they once had. If this were the reality, then it would be easier to countenance the situation of those who, through the inevitable action of accident and economic bias, remain wealthy all their lives. I believe that it would also become easier to help – and not just to countenance the suffering of – those who may still be left behind. Like those deliberating in Rawls’ original position, we would have all “been there before,” and as of right, could well be there again.
This diachronic “sharing of the wealth” — even diachronically considered — may not sound any better politically than the “snapshot” variety aspired to by communism, etc.. Except for this: is it possible that entirely constitutional reform of our economic arrangements might make this sharing happen, again, in a de facto fashion? That appropriate economic change within the framework of capitalism might express itself as this more mobile wealth, a wealth which, in the natural economic course of things, ideally passes to and from an individual at least once in his/her lifetime, and which therefore – within the best frameworks of liberalism – no longer gets “stuck” in sectors of accretion out of all proportion to labor, luck and circumstance?
