People may be as equal as the teeth of a comb, but what about all those different combs?

–It just isn’t that values about (in)equality are socially constructed. It’s that a smothering paste of statistical generalizations or macro-principles cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of all those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.

–So what?

The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties us into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, is to have more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even more into global capitalism or not?

There are, of course, those who insist such is not a binary value choice. Many with bank accounts also work to change the upper reaches of financial capital. But there are also those aiming for the lower-reach specifics: Surely, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.

–Insisting on case-by case looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by a policy narrative that assumes the world is irreducibly colonized by capitalisms and their inequalities.