{"id":12531,"date":"2015-09-07T15:57:58","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T19:57:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multiplier-effect.org\/?p=12531"},"modified":"2015-09-07T15:57:58","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T19:57:58","slug":"is-economic-inequality-immoral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/is-economic-inequality-immoral\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Economic Inequality Immoral?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Harry Frankfurt, whose formal concept of “bullshit<\/a>” is indispensable to both professional and everyday life, recently published\u00a0an article<\/a>\u00a0for Bloomberg View arguing that (1) economic (income and wealth) inequality is, in and of itself, morally insignificant and (2) “egalitarianism” (being concerned about economic\u00a0inequality in and of itself) is harmful. The article is an excerpt from a book<\/a> he has coming out at the end of the month.<\/p>\n

According to Frankfurt, egalitarianism is loosely based on\u00a0the belief that\u00a0“the possession by some of more money than others is morally offensive.” This\u00a0belief\u00a0is false, he says, and it leads us astray.\u00a0Frankfurt suspects that what\u00a0most of us\u00a0are really — and justifiably, in his view — reacting\u00a0to when we express moral reservations\u00a0about inequality\u00a0is the potentially abject condition\u00a0of those lower down the income distribution; not simply because there are others who have more, but rather if those in the lower income or wealth percentiles do not have enough resources\u00a0to achieve some substantive standard of well-being\u00a0(“not a relative quantitative discrepancy but an absolute qualitative deficiency”). In other words, it is poverty, or, more broadly, the condition of not having “enough,” that is morally significant, rather than monetary inequality per se:<\/p>\n

“Mere differences in the amounts of money people have are not in themselves distressing. We tend to be quite unmoved, after all, by inequalities between those who are very well-to-do and those who are extremely rich. The fact that some people have much less than others is not at all morally disturbing when it is clear that the worse off have plenty.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frankfurt goes further: not only is egalitarianism based on a false belief, it is itself morally disorienting. Being overly focused on other people’s incomes\u00a0— on the mere quantitative relationships between incomes\u00a0—\u00a0he argues, interferes with our ability to determine our own substantive\u00a0economic needs and interests. (“A preoccupation with the condition of others interferes, moreover, with the most basic task on which a person’s selection of monetary goals for himself most decisively depends. It leads a person away from understanding what he himself truly requires in order to pursue his own most authentic needs, interests, and ambitions.”)<\/p>\n

From this perspective, it would seem to\u00a0follow that a great deal of economic research on patterns of income or wealth distribution not only dwells\u00a0on\u00a0morally insignificant issues but, to the extent it is motivated by egalitarian concerns or draws public attention to supposedly trivial monetary differences, such\u00a0work\u00a0“contributes to the moral disorientation and shallowness of our time.” In\u00a0fact, if we buy all this,\u00a0we might even\u00a0be compelled to say that income distribution\u00a0research\u00a0is less significant (and more harmful) than ever these days, since, as those who study the US distribution\u00a0have pointed out, so much of the action\u00a0lately is focused on the increasing distance between the top 1 percent and all the rest (or even the top 0.01 percent).<\/p>\n

What should we say about this?<\/p>\n

First, even if we\u00a0grant Frankfurt everything he argues for, this would not necessarily require us to disregard economic inequality or do nothing to remedy it. There are other reasons to worry about inequality. There is, for instance, a\u00a0macroeconomic case. Papadimitriou, Nikiforos, Zezza, and Hannsgen argue that the growing disparity in the US income distribution\u00a0has been a major contributor to financial instability<\/a>\u00a0and threatens the sustainability of economic recovery. There are also normative political reasons for being concerned about excessive amounts of wealth and income being concentrated in the hands of the few. So even if we’re persuaded by Frankfurt, we would have to weigh these other considerations (macroeconomic, political, social, and so on) against the moral harm he believes results from preoccupation with income differences.*<\/p>\n

Second, the implications of Frankfurt’s argument are not necessarily<\/em> as conservative (for lack of a better term) as some\u00a0might\u00a0imagine. In fact, his “doctrine of sufficiency”** could\u00a0have quite radical policy implications.<\/p>\n

Even if what we really care about is the “absolute qualitative” condition of citizens, rather than the “relative quantity discrepancy” in their incomes, there’s no particular reason why the former needs to be identified with some concept of a minimally tolerable, bare bones standard of living. Our substantive conception\u00a0of the kind of\u00a0life or capabilities that we would like every\u00a0citizen\u00a0to be able to access\u00a0might end up requiring material resources well above, say, the official poverty line in the United States\u00a0(we might care\u00a0more\u00a0<\/em>about the condition of those who do not have regular and stable access to food and shelter than we do about, say, the time squeeze experienced by middle income families — but this doesn’t mean that only the former can be regarded as morally significant).\u00a0In other words, “enough” might end up being quite a lot. And if that were the case, a Frankfurtian doctrine of sufficiency might\u00a0still entail\u00a0redistributive policies of some sort.<\/p>\n

All of the above\u00a0is based on\u00a0accepting, for the sake of argument, Frankfurt’s premises and conclusion, but of course we needn’t do so.\u00a0Branko Milanovic\u00a0has written a blog post<\/a> taking issue with Frankfurt, and\u00a0Tom Masterson notes<\/a>\u00a0that Frankfurt’s\u00a0argument seems better\u00a0aimed at those who call for equality of outcomes (rather than, say, equality of opportunity).<\/p>\n

One final, trivial, comment. Surely the experience of growing\u00a0inequality of incomes<\/em>\u00a0itself plays a large role in stoking relative\u00a0status anxieties\u00a0(keeping up with the Joneses and all that).\u00a0<\/em>Even if egalitarianism in Frankfurt’s sense also plays a non-negligible role\u00a0in our “moral disorientation and shallowness”\u00a0(and that seems doubtful), it might still follow that\u00a0securing\u00a0equality of outcomes would, on the whole, serve an important (in Frankfurt’s view) moral purpose: namely, helping individuals focus on determining their “authentic,” substantive needs rather than being distracted by insignificant contrasts.\u00a0I don’t mean to suggest that this is anything like a\u00a0compelling basis for defending egalitarian (equality of outcomes) policies, but it is an odd result of the Frankfurtian view, perhaps.<\/p>\n

* Based on a 1987 paper<\/a> of his on the same topic, it’s quite likely\u00a0Frankfurt would have no problem with this line of\u00a0argument.<\/p>\n

** A\u00a0phrase from the ’87 paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry Frankfurt, whose formal concept of “bullshit” is indispensable to both professional and everyday life, recently published\u00a0an article\u00a0for Bloomberg View arguing that (1) economic (income and wealth) inequality is, in and of itself, morally insignificant and (2) “egalitarianism” (being concerned about economic\u00a0inequality in and of itself) is harmful. The article is an excerpt from a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[1050,46,252],"class_list":["post-12531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-distribution","tag-harry-frankfurt","tag-inequality","tag-poverty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12531"}],"version-history":[{"count":60,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12604,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12531\/revisions\/12604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/multiplier-effect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}