Daniel T. Rodgers on equality and inequality

Age of Fracture is one of the most stimulating books I’ve read in a long time. But then I’m especially interested in its subject matter: What happened in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Rodgers is an intellectual and cultural historian at Princeton. In a series of chapters, he examines specific subjects in depth — the language of presidential speeches, the concept of power, economic theory, race relations, feminism, a sense of community, nostalgia for the past. In each case he finds a “fracturing” of society. You could also describe it as a transition from a sense of society that is coherent and holds common values to a concept of society that emphasizes the individual. In each of the areas Rodgers discusses, it’s clear that this transition serves a conservative political agenda. What’s especially exciting about the book is seeing the same intellectual transition occur in so many different areas of social, political, cultural, and economic change.

A Theory of Justice

Here is Rodgers’ concise summary of the premise of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. (“The closest thing to a book that people are ashamed to admit that they have not read.”) (emphasis added in the following quotations)

The question with which Rawls began was explicitly a thought experiment in the justice owed by each to all. Imagine men and women coming together to form a society. Imagine that they did not already know, or guess, the place in that society that would ultimately be theirs. Imagine them to be intensely self-interested but blocked, for the moment, from knowing anything specific about their talents, their property, or their social assets. What principles of justice would they choose?

Rodgers goes on to explain Rawls’ conclusions:

Society’s original contractors would not choose utilitarianism. … Choosing the principle of simple equality would be naïve.

But being prudent, and knowing that once their veils were lifted they were just as likely to find themselves at the bottom as at the top of the heap of personal and social assets, they would choose a principle of justice that kept its thumb pressed on the side of the least advantaged. They would tolerate those inequalities of wealth and advantage that the economic system required to make everyone better off. But beyond that they would be consciously redistributionist, working continuously to raise the well-being of those who were the worst advantaged in society up to the point where that effort, in impinging on the productive capacity of the system as a whole, no longer brought any further gains. They would choose an “egalitarian conception of justice, “ by which inequalities in wealth and authority would be deemed to be just, Rawls wrote, “only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular for the least advantaged members of society.”

The rage for equality is a wicked project

A few pages later, Rodgers has this to say about equality:

On one principle libertarians and conservatives agreed: that equality was a fatal ambition for a just society. “The passion for equality … is always dangerous to liberty because it is a passion for power: the power to impose one’s ideal of justice-as-equality on other people,” the neoconservative Irving Kristol hammered home the argument throughout the 1970s. Equality was the authoritarian dream of the “new class”; it was a denial of nature, which only a government-directed state could satisfy. In the conservative reviews Rawls was condemned as a modern Rousseau, the “prophet … for the most zealous egalitarians,” apologist for the “army of government equalizers” who were already on the march. Rawls’s cautious, prudential argument for equality could not be uncoupled in the minds of conservative intellectuals from their distress at the new affirmative action projects, their anger at busing for racial equalization, and their recoil from the gender-blurring prospects of the Equal Rights Amendment. The once common distinction between equality of opportunity and the (dangerous) passion for equality of results fused into a general criticism of equality-driven politics in all its forms. Freedom, merit, and excellence: these, not equality, were the aims of the good society. Michael Novak put the conservative consensus succinctly in 1990: “The rage for equality is a wicked project.”

Modernity as the great economic equalizer. Not.

And here’s Rodgers on inequality:

Of all the assumptions Rawls took on board, the most erroneous, as it turned out, was that modernity would, by itself, be a great economic equalizer of human conditions. That presumption was a commonplace among post-World War II social scientists: that as productive capacity grew, it would steadily reduce, bit by bit, the enormous economic inequalities of precapitalist societies. Rawls’s redistributionist justice was imagined as facilitating a process that was, at some level, already in gear. The year 1971, when A Theory of Justice appeared, however, was almost the last in which that assumption still held. By the mid-1970s, the engines that had worked in the United States to diminish income inequalities since 1945 had quietly slipped into reverse. Real median wages for working men stopped growing in the early 1970s and remained essentially stagnant thereafter, despite the resumption of general economic growth after 1983. Wealth generation became more and more concentrated at the top, where wealth already existed. The trends combined to widen the income gap between the richest and the poorest fifths of the population each year almost without interruption from 1971 until the mid-1990s.

The “great U-turn,” Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone called the phenomenon in 1988. Although their findings were disputed at the time, by the mid-1990s economists across the board had come to accept the point that income inequality in the United States was on the rise. The explanations were multiple and varied: one could point to the absorption of millions of new women into the paid labor force and its inevitably depressing effect on wages; one could point to the intensifying pressure from lower-wage labor markets abroad and from a migrant, transnational labor force competing for jobs in the globalizing economy; or one could point, as Bennett and Bluestone did, to the collapse of labor unions and the breakdown of the system of corporatist accommodation between big labor and big business of the 1950s and 1960s. Whatever the case, arguments about equality would now be played out against the realization that long-term economic equalization could no longer be counted on to do its historic work.

Rodgers’ writing style is a bit Germanic – often there are so many clauses between the subject and predicate that you need to read (or reread) slowly. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however, when dealing with the subject matter he’s discussing. The jargon-free vocabulary makes Rodgers’ thought entirely accessible.

Inside Job

Speaking of the concentration of wealth at the top, I just watched Inside Job (it’s available through Netflix). I can’t recommend it highly enough.

There’s an op-ed in the Times that compares employment opportunities for recent college grads in the US with the comparable situation in volatile Middle Eastern and North African countries. Tens of thousands from the “desperate generation” in Portugal staged a protest on March 12. “How much longer until the rest of the rich world follows their lead?” the editorial asks. Watch this documentary and find a reason to be angry.

The director, Charles Ferguson, made a good point in this interview with Charlie Rose. It’s unfortunate that “culture war” issues divide the political parties in the US, since the explanation of the global financial crisis presented in this documentary could and should unite them.

Resources:

Image: Hastings Center

Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

Charles Ferguson, director, Inside Job

Matthew C. Klein, Educated, Unemployed and Frustrated, The New York Times, March 20, 2011