Even when (especially when?) the initial conditions of a major issue are complex, the cognitive disposition is to see, really see, the issue as if in the clear light of day and around which we can walk and examine from all directions, including close-up and at a distance. Yet instead of clarity, though, we miss much as the issues come to us perceptually as fragmented herms, partial torsos held on thin shafts, more an etiolated Giacometti than bodied Rodin.
Each issue marks what is not (no longer) there as also being present. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and J-J Rousseau’s The Social Contract have a good many implications for inequality, but their resonance for that topic is also as fragments of larger unfinished works the authors never got to write. This too is markedly the unfinished business of any complex policy issue as more can and must be said but hasn’t (again, think inequality).
The methodological imperative in better understanding debates over (in)equality is: First, differentiate. How do our fragments of understanding differ? Much debate remains at the macro-principle node, e.g., we all have equal rights. Yet from the get-go, exceptions have been read-off the macro in the form of specific contingency scenarios, i.e., people are in principle equal but people are not born with equal potentials. Contingency scenarios qualifying the reading of macro principles – “It’s always a good principle, even as it needs modifying here. . .” – litter debates over (in)equality.
Genetics is of course not everything and we find vast differences in human-by-human particularities in virtue of different life experiences, lived contexts and tacit knowledge. Equal at the macro level, the most obvious fact at the micro-level is how unequal we are in so many respects. Equal like the teeth on a comb, but, oh, the different combs!
Macro-principle, principle-based contingency scenarios and micro-experience are not the only nodes around which equality debates cluster and organize. The gap between macro-principle on paper and system behavior in practice is everywhere evident when it comes to (in)equality. Systemwide pattern recognition, this fourth node, is populated by all manner of trends and statistics that show, e.g., just how unequal income, wealth and consumption distributions are within and across countries. Indeed, the shortfall between equality as professed and equality as realized is benchmarked by this gap between macro-principle and the empirical recognition of systemwide patterns.
The upshot is that the macro-node in these debates formalizes as principle what others cannot help but seek to informalize through exceptions and contingency scenarios. The micro-node informalizes what others cannot help but seek to more formalize when they talk about systemwide patterns emerging across different cases.
Of course, nothing stops a person privileging one node over another, or some over others. In doing so, however, the person foists exaggeration on the rest of us. There is a world of difference between privileging one node from the get-go versus answering the question, “What do we do here and now for this (in)equality,” only after first assessing the four nodes with their conflicts and examples.
So what?
It just isn’t that values concerning (in)equality are socially constructed. It’s that the thick paste of macro-principles cannot stop the 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. Inequality and equality, like congeries, have always been plural nouns.
For example, 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 people global financialized capitalism. What, then, has more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even further into global capitalisms or not?
There are, fortunately, 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 comparisons looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by any macro-policy narrative that abstracts the world into one that is colonized or fragmented everywhere and all the time by capitalisms and only by their inequalities.
For more on inequality from this perspective, please see When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 