Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

3.2 Ends: what is wrong with inequality?
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis 31
Programs to assure a modicum of economic security for the poor and
guarantee equality of opportunity for all have faltered in recent years.
Other egalitarian initiatives have come under attack and suffered defections
from erstwhile supporters. Unemployment rates have risen in
some countries and real wages have fallen in others. Redistributive programs
have been cut and dramatic increases in measured inequality of
income have taken place in a number of countries. For the most
part, people have responded with resignation or approval rather than
resistance.
Among the reasons for this reversal, we think, is a growing ambiguity
in public sentiment concerning the requirements of justice and
scepticism concerning the possibility of achieving a more just distribution
of society’s rewards. Even Americans, no doubt one of the most
conservative of the world’s bodies politic, remain deeply committed to
equality of opportunity as a goal. But Americans, and others, are profoundly
divided on how to define this objective, and bewildered by
contradictory claims on how any of the competing conceptions of
equality of opportunity might be advanced through social policy. An
orphaned egalitarianism, detached from its erstwhile base in popular
movements for institutional change, has sought to defend itself on
moral and empirical grounds that many, even among the less well off,
find weak and uncompelling. Four sources of the demoralization of the
egalitarian project are notable.
The first concerns objectives. When applied to national aggregates,
both ‘equality’ and ‘income’ are depersonalized abstractions unlikely to
evoke visceral reactions or to move people to act politically. The standard
measures of inequality, the Gini ratio, for example, are abstractions
which are only with difficulty related to everyday concerns of
fairness and compassion. Knowing that the Gini ratio for male workers
is 0.42 evokes shrugs, which is not the case for the fact that a white
person whose income is below $7500 is three times as likely to be the
victim of rape, sexual assault or other violent crime as another earning
over $50 000. 4 Moreover, except among the very poor, income is surprisingly
weakly related to one’s reported sense of well-being. 5
Secondly, the concept of fairness, in the everyday sense of a level
playing field, no longer enjoys a consensus as to its implications. As a
result, the concept fails to provide much guidance in promoting egalitarian
efforts. Even so basic a concept as equality of educational opportunity
eludes definition, with proposals ranging from securing the