On more than one occasion over recent months I’ve
heard or read something actually defending inequality. After
a lifetime of hearing about the idea of “liberty, equality and
fraternity”, I was hearing educated people saying inequality
is what keeps the system going - a motive force propelling our
society to ever new heights. At first, I found it hard to believe
what I was hearing. Then, I thought perversely, if a little
inequity is good for us, a lot of it must be better. After all,
that seems to be the operating principle of the people currently
in power in the nation’s capital. They keep pushing in that
direction.
“The accepted view in social science is that inequalities
are an inevitable condition of economic success,” economic professor,
Jacques Mistral, a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government, commented back in July. He went on to note that
the number of people in the U.S. without health insurance is
growing and poverty rates here are “the highest among all Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, in particular
for children and seniors.”
Earlier this summer, belittling those it says
“who would discredit American capitalism,” the editors of The
Economist magazine wrote: “Any system in which the spoils
are distributed so unevenly is morally wrong, they say. This
newspaper disagrees. Inequality is not inherently wrong.” The
editors went on to say inequality is not wrong if the society
as a whole is getting richer; there is a safety net for the
“very poor” and everybody has the chance to climb up through
the system. Of course, that’s not saying much positive about
the economic situation today – at least in this country. The
safety net is being shredded, and the most tattered parts are
those designed to help the very poor. As far as everybody –
“regardless of class, race, creed or sex” – having the ability
to move upward, well, there’s ample evidence it just ain’t happening.
In June, The Economist did a special issue
on “Inequality and the American Dream.” It described the U.S.
as a country “that tolerates inequality” and concluded that
“… every measure shows that, over the past quarter century,
those at the top have done better that those at the bottom”
and “the gains of productivity growth have become increasingly
skewed.” Simply put, the editors acknowledge that while more
and more wealth is being created, those who already have are
having more and those who have little are having to make do
with less.
But here we are - in the richest country on the
planet where one in five children lives in poverty. Where a
worker who earns the minimum wage takes in $10,700 which $6,000
below the federal poverty level for a family of three. Sixty-one
percent of minimum wage earners are women, many of them single.
While corporate profits have soared, inflation-adjusted
wage growth has stagnated and the wages of the lowest paid workers
amongst us have not kept up with inflation. From 2001 to 2003,
inflation-adjusted income among households in the lowest 20
percent of the population decreased 5.1 percent.
Much is being made by some commentators about
the income differences between workers at the lower end of so-called
middle class and those employed at the higher level, more-skilled
jobs. Much of this is statistical mirage. Income inequality
is growing for the 80 percent of American workers who are characterized
as "production and non-supervisory." – that is, the
working class.
Between 2002 and 2003 the number of Americans
in poverty increased by 1.3 million and poverty rates for African
American and Latino workers stood at over 20 percent. At the
same time, real income for the bottom 40 percent of African-American
households fell by nearly 6 percent
The income disparity of African American families
as compared to whites actually increased over the past decade.
As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman
recently observed, “economic disparities in New York, as in
the United States as a whole, are wider than they have been
since the 1920's.”
Enter the “Bell Curve.” That’s the title of the
1994 book by early neo-conservatives Charles Murray and Richard
Herrnstein's that asserts intelligence is largely a matter of
birth, that there is little chance of altering that fact, and
that poor people and African Americans in particular, are thus
overrepresented among the unintelligent. Their screed was widely
denounced for its racism and sloppy scholarship. Reactionary
commentator Pat Buchanan, however welcomed it as shooting “a
hole straight through the heart of egalitarian socialism which
tried to create equality of result by coercive government programs.”
Those who would have us believe that inequality
is not only inevitable naturally return to this discredited
view over and over because its thesis advances their idea of
the inevitable rise to dominance of the “cognitive elite” under
conditions of advanced technology and globalization. They maintain
that the U.S. is becoming a genetic “meritocracy.”
On October 5, The Economist returned to
the subject of inequality in a special edition titled: “The
Search for Talent.” In it, the term “Bell Curve” appears twice.
In an editorial comment, ominously titled “the Dark Side,” the
magazine said: