What do you think produces inequality in society

[J.K. Gregg]

What causes inequality? Individuals do. Not all people create the same amount of wealth. Some are naturally gifted. Others spend years in college becoming professionals. Others yet spend ten or more years out of work raising children and must relearn skills and regain experience. But unlike dictators in the Soviet Union who lived lavishly while others starved, or while Egyptian slaves built massive and lavish monuments to Pharaohs, capitalists built wealth. Tyrants took wealth by force. Capitalists, not those rent-seeking bastards who wield political power with Washington surrogates to hamstring their opponents, real capitalists build wealth. Steve Jobs built wealth by designing products that added enormous value to his customers and shareholders alike. And there are thousands of people out there just like Jobs, with great ideas ready to be developed into things of enormous value.

Income inequality is an effect. The cause is the difference in people's economic production. Criticizing income inequality is like complaining that a computer carries a higher price than a paper clip. Price reflects an object's market value, and the money someone earns reflects the market value of his work.

[pricklysponge]

[JDHURF]

[Medius]

There isn't just one kind of inequality.

Physical Inequality
Ability Inequality
Legal Inequality
Financial Inequality
Social Inequality

Physical Inequality:
Completely luck. Whether you are born with a non-functioning limb or lose it in an accident, not a lot of control over this one.

Ability Inequality:
A lot of this has to do with training and upbringing. This is generally something people have to overcome themselves and only presents a problem when opportunity is restricted. You can't make someone have abilities, but you can make it easier for them to acquire ability.

Legal Inequality:
This is simply the function of a bad government. As long as all people are treated equally under the law, this should not be an issue. The fall-out from past legal inequalities may, however, carry forward in the form of reduced Ability across entire segments from previously restricted opportunity.

Financial Inequality:
This is a difficult one as many wouldn't agree with the concept of financial equality. Capitalism does not even try to create financial equality. Capitalism simply protects people's ability to keep what they've earned and provide a protected way to funnel wealth back into an economy. With regards to equality, the best ways to make capitalism equal is not directly, but through harnessing its nature. Provide an equal playing field, where anyone can enter into the economy and work towards their goals and maximize competition so that nobody is given undue protection simply by their wealth. We generally fail at this in the US, where big companies are protected financially from poor decisions for the sake of employment.

Social Inequality:
This is generally an amalgamation of all of the inequalities. You can find yourself in a lower social status by accident of birth, by a lack of ability, due to your lack of wealth, or legal status. Then again, this also assumes that the top social structure is the elite wealthy social stratus. For many, that isn't the case. Some people put the rich at the top, some the entertainers, other the intellectuals, some favor the thrill seekers, and others favor smaller social circles. I think social equality really only comes into play where it limits or facilitates opportunity to participate. Short of that, it is preference.

Personally, I would suggest we focus on Legal Equality and demand this always from our government. Second to that is taking care of those who are physically limited from participation. Then work to maximize opportunity, so that people have the greatest chance of living the life they want.

Short of a scientific breakthrough, we will never have Physical Equality without hobbling everyone down to the lowest possible physical state.

We will never have Ability Equality so long as we have freedom of choice.

Financial Equality would require a whole new system that somehow fixes the lack of innovation and motivation that comes from having a life in which you are provided for regardless of achievement.

Social equality, without a reinforcing legal inequality, is just an illusion.

[The Comrade]

there's a very simple anthropological explanation for hierarchies and inequality.

the rise of agriculture and the growing complexity of societies necessitated surplus. naturally someone needed to control that surplus, and someone needed to be able to use it appropriately. with that came writing, to keep records, and suddenly you had a class that did not produce something for the sole survival of a group. well they need to be fed, so you start to get take from the poor to give to the rich kind of things. magnify the incalculable variables of 8000 years of history and you have the entrenched system of oppression and inequality we have today. if anything capitalism is just a codified version of this, not a cause of it.

[pricklysponge]

[JDHURF]

I have to go to work, like, right now, but these last two posts are really good and I want to respond. I will expand after work.

Medius is right that there are various forms of inequality. You are elaborating upon a point of mine. I also agree that physical inequality exists and cannot be made equal, the same goes for ability inequalities, but what matters here is that even with physical inequalities they are not used to support, say, social inequality. I don't even believe that physical and ability equality would be desirable. That would be horrifically boring. Also, someone with less ability in one area usually make up for that with more ability in another area. This is the potential for complimentary social cooperation, which I would much prefer to some scifi nightmare of boring, perfectly similar and equal people.

I'm not quite sure I follow your comments about financial equality. You say it would require a whole new system. Are you saying that capitalism involves a "lack of innovation and motivation that comes from having a life in which you are provided for regardless of achievement." Or are you ascribing this to a conceived alternative? I need to know before I can respond more fully.

Comrade is absolutely correct. The advent of agriculture and surplus paved the way for the inequalities that resulted from leisurely classes that dominated the surplus and the tribes and societies in which they existed. The earliest forms being gerontocracies and shaman/priestly castes buttressed by young warrior clans.

Edit, prickly posted while I was typing this. I don't have time now prickly, I have to go. I can't even read that post yet. I did catch your last question and, no, we are not in agreement on that. More later tonight.

[broken robot]

Ok so jd on the one hand is saying there are structurally autonomous forms of power and oppression whereas prickly is saying that all forms of oppression are necessarily linked to the capitalist system though they didn't originate along with it. I'd agree with prickly, insofar as what makes capitalism distinctive is its universalizing and globalizing potential. Other systems of oppression are necessarily "local," meaning a chiefly order that defines relations of power and inequality in the South Pacific isn't structurally seeking to expand itself across the globe, transforming all societies in its image. Capital on the other hand, despite all its immense local variations, is inevitably defined by the simple logic Marx underlined: money invested in the production of commodities which are realized on the market for a surplus that is re-invested in production, or m-c-m'.

Now some have come to argue that the notion capital expands across the world is analogous to the notion that European rationality, the idea that Europe and its forms of social life such as liberal democracy are the pinnacle of human achievement, encompasses the world and progressively defines our modernity. The school of Subaltern Studies makes this connection between capital and Enlightenment, and it has contributed to the support for various social movements in the Third World that reject Enlightenment notions of progress in favor of re-vindicating local forms of tradition and grassroots struggle. Gustavo Esteva and his affiliation with the Zapatistas is a good example. Finally though the Marxist riposte presented by David Harvey and others is that we must engage with the globalizing tendency of capital by offering a counter-tendency that can achieve the same globalizing potential.

I think my own position is based on prickly and Harvey, though I'd add you need to be sensitive to the question of scale and the ways in which capitalism is inevitably messy. It's produced out of a conjunction of local and global factors in each context, say multinational corporation sweatshops in South-East Asia and labor force recruitment from local villages. These conjunctions of local and global come to redefine these very same notions of scale, forcing us to ask what exactly is "local" and what's "global". From the opposite perspective, in terms of movements against inequality, another example people have been using is the transnational indigenous movements that simultaneously assert via global advocacy the power of local traditions to secure the environment and political rights.

So back to the original question of this topic, I think there are different modes of inequality broadly speaking between those that are defined by some sort of local logic and those that are intrinsically globalizing, such as capital, and they interact in messy ways but ultimately any resistance to both modes of inequality would need to incorporate a global dimension.

[J.K. Gregg]

[Medius]