If we start with the commonplace that analysis and deliberation center around what is known or not, then the boundaries of the known blur not just into the unknown, but also into the preknown.
The latter is the preexisting knowledge that one is born into and “takes for granted.” In his essay, “The Well-Informed Citizen,” Alfred Schütz, the sociologist, described it this way:
The zone of things taken for granted may be defined as that sector of the world which, in connection with the theoretical or the practical problem we are concerned with at a given time, does not seem to need further inquiry, although we do not have clear and distinct insight into and understanding of its structure. What is taken for granted is, until invalidation, believed to be simply “given” and “given-as-it-appears-to-me”–that is, as I or others whom I trust have experienced and interpreted it. It is this zone of things taken for granted within which we have to find our bearings. All our possible questioning for the unknown arises only within such a world of supposedly preknown things, and presupposes its existence.
One consequence of ignoring the blurred borders of preknown, known and unknown is: We end up acting as if it does not matter that it takes preknowing and knowing-enough to avoid entering into the unstudied conditions of the unknown. If Schütz is right, the preknown is where we “find our bearings” with respect to the known and unknown.
II
So what?
Against that backdrop, all the talk about “unintended consequences of human action” begins to look unintentionally simplistic:
“Unintended?”: When the preknown is the platform that has nothing to do with intentions but that enables us to take our bearings so that other factors in the known and unknown carry the weight of argument about “unintended consequences.”
“Consequences?”: Rather than that blurred borders of knowing, preknowing, and not-knowing we chalk up also to contingency and exigency.
“Unintended” + “consequences”?: When too often what we are really dealing with are contingencies with disproportionate effects about which we have little or no causal understanding.
To rephrase the point, “unintended consequences of human action” is a coherent phrase only by missing the rest of that overwritten palimpsest called “human action,” off of which the phrase is cobbled together and read.
Principal source
Schütz, A. (1964). “The Well-Informed Citizen.” In: Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. Edited and introduced by A. Brodersen. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Remember when those orbiting twins of freedom and necessity shone brightest on the intellectual horizon? Now it’s capitalism all the way down. And yet the minute you differentiate that capitalism you are back to limits and affordances, constraints and enablements–in a phrase back to the varieties of freedom and necessity. Or if you prefer: back to when blindspots are also strengths.
None of this would matter if the macro-doctrinal and micro-personal were nowhere alike. But the doctrinal and personal are conflated together in at least one major public domain: namely, where stated policies become more and more like memoirs, and where memoirs are cast more as policy statements.
II
Sallie Tisdale, writer and essayist, draws the upshot:
Today autobiography seems to be a litany of injury, the recounting of loss and harm caused by abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. The reasons for such a shift in focus, a shift we see in every layer of our social, cultural, and political landscapes, are beyond my scope. One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe. This is the problem of memoir; this is the consolation of memoir. Scars are fine; I have written about scars; it is the focus on the unhealed wound that seems new.
Memoir in this shift ends up as a “grand reveal.” Now, of course, policy and management should be concerned with abuse, racism, abandonment, poverty, violence, rape, and struggle of a thousand kinds. It’s that exclusionary focus on the unhealed wound that is the problem, at least for those who take their scars and wounds also to be affordances, enablements and strengths as they move to the way-stations in-between macro and micro.
To collapse this complexity of memory and experience into “identity” and/or “politics” is to exaggerate one set of meanings at the expense of the others. To quote Tisdale again: “I used to think that I would be a good eyewitness. Now I no longer trust eyewitnesses at all.”
III
So what? To update a once-ubiquitous expression, both freedom and necessity are the recognition of how unreliable we are in eyewitnessing what is right in front of us.
Other sources
David Caute (1971). The Illusion: An essay on politics, theatre and the novel. Harper Colophon Books (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London).
For instance, with regards to the Migrant Victim Narrative, migrants and refugees using smuggling services are almost never only victims, because they need to overcome considerable obstacles and need strong willpower in order to bear the costs and risks usually involved in moving. Yet the images and stories of migrants dying while crossing deserts or seas, or of migrants abused and exploited by smugglers and employers, are the ones that dominate the headlines.
Without denying the realities of extreme suffering and exploitation, the problem is that such narratives typically deny human agency involved in most forms of forced and precarious migration or represent them as an irrational act. In reality, people can be victims and exert agency at the same time in an active effort to defy or overcome constraints. Most vulnerable migrant workers, including victims of trafficking, see an interest in migrating despite being exploited, if only because the alternative of staying at home was worse for them. Therefore, they avoid being ‘rescued’ as in practice this usually means deportation and loss of investments, income and livelihood (e.g., Costello 2015; O’Connell Davidson 2006; Weitzer 2000; Parreñas 2006). For this reason, one of the slogans of anti-anti-trafficking activists has even become ‘rescue us from our rescuers’ (de Haas 2023, 311).
The point is not to trivialize abuses and extreme exploitation, but that reducing migrants and refugees to passive victims is simplifying the reality. Crucially, this ignores the rather inconvenient truth that, for most of them, immigration is a rather deliberate investment into a better future, that most ‘victims’ have migrated out of their own will, essentially because leaving was still much more attractive than staying because of the real hope for a better future that migration represents for millions of people around the world, particularly in the form of labour opportunities and the ability to send remittances back home (Agunias 2009).
This is not to morally justify human rights abuses, or to deny states’ responsibilities in upholding the rule of law and preventing exploitation by criminals and employers, but to acknowledge a lived reality in which migrants exert their agency within such severe constraints.
The implicit underlying assumption often seems to be that migrants, particularly when they are perceived as poor, uneducated and non-Western, somehow do not know what they are doing and that they would have stayed at home if only somebody had told them about the terrible circumstances in which they have ended up. On a deeper level, this seems based on often barely conscious, colonial stereotypes of non-Western people as somehow less capable of thinking, acting, or speaking for themselves (see Said 1978), or to act in their own best interests. In other words, such patronizing, condescending victimhood narratives continue to portray the non-Western and low-skilled other as ‘less rational’ who must be ‘sensitized’ and ‘informed’ about what is best for them: staying at home. . . .
Here I focus on what a socio-cultural perspective has to say about infrastructure repair that a socio-technical perspective might wish to pursue further. Since my work is from the socio-technical perspective, it’s only fair that I not try to summarize positions from a socio-cultural perspective but quote from their work directly:
For all of their impressive heaviness, infrastructures are, at the end of the day, often remarkably light and fragile creatures—one or two missed inspections, suspect data points, or broken connectors from disaster. That spectacular failure is not continually engulfing the systems around us is a function of repair: the ongoing work by which “order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” . . . .
It reminds us of the extent to which infrastructures are earned and re-earned on an ongoing, often daily, basis. It also reminds us (modernist obsessions notwithstanding) that staying power, and not just change, demands explanation. Even if we ignore this fact and the work that it indexes when we talk about infrastructure, the work nonetheless goes on. Where it does not, the ineluctable pull of decay and decline sets in and infrastructures enter the long or short spiral into entropy that—if untended—is their natural fate.
Jackson S (2015) Repair. Theorizing the contemporary: The infrastructure toolbox. Cultural Anthropology website. Available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/repair (accessed 24 September 2015)
The nod to “sociotechnical systems” is welcome as is the recognition that these systems have to be managed–a great part of which is repair and maintenance–in order to operate. Added to routine and non-routine maintenance and repair are the just-in-time or just-for-now workarounds (software and hardware) that are necessitated by inevitable technology, design and regulatory glitches–inevitable because comprehensiveness in analysis and operations is impossible to achieve in complex large-scale systems.
For its part, sociotechnical research on infrastructures calls into question any assumption that macro-designs control every important micro-operation, an assumption also very much questioned in this socio-cultural perspective, e.g., “approaching infrastructure from the standpoint of repair highlights actors, sites, and moments that have been absented or silenced by stories of design and origination, whether critical or heroic.”
Also, the socio-technical perspective I’m familiar with focuses on the systems operating longer than some expect. A famous theory of large-scale tightly coupled, complexly interactive hazardous technologies–Normal Accidents Theory–predicts far more major accidents and failures than have occurred in critical infrastructures, to date.
Not only is this better-than-expected operation because of repair and maintenance but also because real-time system operators seek to preclude must-never-happen events like loss of nuclear containment, cryptosporidium contamination of urban water supplies, or jumbo jets dropping from the sky. That these events do from time-to-time happen only increases the widespread affective dread that they must not happen again.
From the socio-technical perspective, the “end of infrastructure operations” isn’t decay, decline or entropy as much as system failure and immediate emergency response, including seeking to restore, as quickly as possible even if temporarily, water, electricity and telecoms to survivors. In this view, any “new normal” could be indefinite “recovery,” or attempts to do so. Systemwide failures are often attributed to a range of socio-technical factors, from “operator error” to uncontrollable exogenous shocks like earthquakes or hurricanes and tornadoes, among others.
What to my knowledge has not been pursued in the socio-technical literature is the following from a socio-cultural focus on repair:
Attending to repair can also change how we approach questions of value and valuation as it pertains to the infrastructures around us. Repair reminds us that the loop between infrastructure, value, and meaning is never fully closed at points of design, but represents an ongoing and sometimes fragile accomplishment. While artifacts surely have politics (or can), those politics are rarely frozen at the moment of design, instead unfolding across the lifespan of the infrastructure in question: completed, tweaked, and sometimes transformed through repair. Thus, if there are values in design there are also values in repair—and good ethical and political reasons to attend not only to the birth of infrastructures, but also to their care and feeding over time.
That the values expressed through repair (we would say, expressed as the practices of actual repair) need to be understood as thoroughly as the practices of actual design reflects, I believe, a major research gap in the socio-technical literature with which I am familiar.
II
Explicit consideration of an infrastructure’s life brings together the changes to an infrastructure’s material form over time and the (often unequal) embodied labor that is embedded in these transformations. Life phases identified in the literature include destruction, decay, ruination, repair, maintenance, and rebuild (Anand et al., 2018; Humphrey, 2005; Simone, 2004). While these terms are often used to capture infrastructure not “in order” or “working to standard”, collapsing these phases, or ignoring their particularities, means missing how materiality in these various phases is connected to infrastructural labor, and how fluidity and transitions between decay and repair mobilize particular affective responses and actants.
Far from a linear trajectory, the relationship between infrastructure and socio-ecological relations involves ongoing negotiations between institutions and individuals through phases of decay, maintenance, and repair. Indeed, Barnes (2017) finds that maintenance is not an “inherent good”, but rather a “field of socio-material contestation” (148). She observes that maintenance of irrigation works occurs at multiple levels: on an individual level farmers are responsible for maintaining irrigation ditches, although blockages (and lack of maintenance) may actually be advantageous depending on where along the system one farms; on an interpersonal level between farmers as they negotiate communal relationships; and between farmers and state irrigation engineers, as the latter choose how and when to “assert control” over the infrastructure through annual maintenance. Socio-ecological relations, thus formed over and through infrastructure, are not always constant or consistent.
Ramakrishnan K, K O’Reilly, and J Budds (2021) The temporal fragility of infrastructure: Theorizing decay, maintenance, and repair. EPE: Nature and Space Vol. 4(3) 674–695
Repair and maintenance of plant and equipment are often treated as part of normal infrastructure operations, e.g., under the heading, “routine outages.” So the caution about conflating the phases and missing their particularities is very well taken, in my view.
So too the point about the wider dependencies that form with respect to infrastructure users and nonusers. A “road transportation catastrophe” due to a massive earthquake isn’t just about that infrastructure. Large socio-technical systems, like roads, have evolved over time, one feature of which has been their evolution of worker schedules (x weeks on, n days off) and remuneration packages that made pre-disaster commutes worth it.
A socio-technical perspective asks: Are these arrangements still worth it? How are the latent and manifest vulnerabilities posed by new arrangements, post-disaster, more compatible? Answers would require careful attention to vulnerabilities arising out of designing new infrastructures as well as arising out of infrastructures as they actually have been repaired, restored, recovered and maintained before and after previous disruptions and disasters.
Finally, I cannot over-stress the importance of this notion of infrastructures fragility, contrary to any sturdy-monolith imaginary one might have to the contrary. One can only hope, for example, that wind energy infrastructure being imposed by Morocco/Siemens on Western Sahara is so fragile as to require endlessly massive and costly repairs and maintenance–but I confess that is my management take from a socio-technical perspective.
Traffic congestion is routinely described as a mess, but rarely analyzed for the different messes that it is.
To see how, start with a simplified assumption to be problematized shortly: The net monetary value of any transportation system aggregated across all car users increases with the number of cars using that system up to the system’s carrying capacity for cars, which if exceeded leads to a decline in net value. This is shown in Figure 1’s net monetary value curve, AA’, which falls after reaching the system’s limit in carrying more automobiles (CC):
Assume the only value of interest is the value of the transportation system to car users. Assume initially that CC is fixed and that the current number of cars on system roadways exceeds that value. It may be possible to add new roads and new lanes over time, thus moving CC to the right (“supply management”). It may also be possible to reduce the number of cars to the left of CC by congestion pricing, vehicle taxing, and other tolls (“demand management”). Assume, however, that such interventions are not possible anytime soon (or if possible, their effects are not to be realized soon).
What can the transportation professional do instead in the face of car congestion?
II
Further benefits follow from other ways to increase the value of the transportation system, even when it is not possible to increase the number of cars on the roads, e.g., through reducing average car size or narrowing lanes. Value also increases, ceteris paribus, when the number of passengers in a car increases (this being, the important issue of increasing shared mobility and/or the number of uses to which the car is being put by its users).
Once other net benefits are added, the net monetary value curve rises, illustratively, to AB in Figure 1, with a gradual, delayed decline after CC being reached. More multiple-use vans on the road replacing existing vans and vehicles increase the value curve before carrying capacity is reached. Once carrying capacity is exceeded, the time lost being stuck in traffic will be offset for some period by being able to do more things in one’s vehicle than before.
—Diagrammatically, the increment in value between AA’ and AB, particularly after CC, is the value car users attach to a good mess coming out of the bad mess of the formal transportation system.
This is the value car users attach to producing a mess (AB) better than the one (AA’) that would have happened instead. Other things equal, the aim of transportation professionals is to enlarge that increment. For example, not only do professionals want people “to get their best ideas” while stuck in traffic, they want more people to do so.
III
The simplified figure suggests two other ways to change net value. One is to redefine carrying capacity; the other is to redefine the “transportation system” and its services of interest. Carrying capacity has been a popular concept in modeling traffic congestion, its intuitive appeal being that there must be a limit to the number of cars that a system can accommodate, other things constant. As other factors are rarely constant, carrying capacity is necessarily a variable rather than a given.
This leads to the second way to alter net value. Just what is the “transportation system” being evaluated in terms of a good or bad mess? It need not only be the “official” system discussed so far. It is possible to redefine the transportation system of interest by changing the scope and knowledge bases for the “system” being analyzed and managed.
How to do this?
IV
Imagine you are a professional in the Regional Transportation Authority. You have just undertaken a stratified random sample survey of RTA residents as to what they perceive to be locally successful transportation interventions about which they have first-hand knowledge. Focus groups and public meetings have subsequently been held, identifying other perceived successful interventions in the region.
Assume the current list identifies interventions that include traffic calming sites in some neighborhoods, increased off-street parking in others, widening streets at different sites, adding bicycle lanes in another set, and so on. Your task is to determine an implied or de facto “transportation system(s)” that link these discrete (groups of) sites together.
The implied systems, if any, are more than street networks that connect the sites concerned. The existing availability and distribution of garages for cars, both above and below ground, connects sites as well. Yet the RTA currently does not consider the de facto, informal network of public and private garages to be a major point of intervention in improving the formal, official transportation system.
Your challenge in the constructed example is to ask, What are we missing by focusing only on the formal transportation system and in answer to see what could or does connect sites of successful interventions into a system or network that can be supported by transportation professionals.
V
One such informal system is illustrated in Figure 1. Here the transportation system is an informal one, i, implied by the connected sites, with its value curve ACi and its carrying capacity, CCi (which would now be recast in terms of local knowledge and familiarity with specific traffic patterns).
Diagrammatically, ACi is the net value car users attach to a good mess that could go bad at some point near or after CCi. If traffic professionals cannot squeeze good messes out of the bad mess that congestion has become (i.e., realize and increase a value increment between AA’ and AB), they can identify, protect and enhance different systems that are not (yet) bad messes.
What should the professionals do if there are neither informal systems to be improved nor any value increment to be realized in the formal transportation system? The “best” they can do under such circumstances is to try to keep Figure 1’s AA’ as “close” to the left of CC as possible or on the non-declining portion of AA’, should it exist, after breaching CC. Barring either, the professional is left with trying to halt or delay the further decline of AA’.
VI
Four kinds of good messes are, in other words, to be distinguished in the constructed example. They are the product of two states and transitions, namely, what start out as good or bad messes and what end up as more of a good mess or less of a bad one. Table 1 summarizes the four positions:
Table 1: Four Types of Good Messes in Traffic Congestion
In case it needs saying, each is a good mess in its own right, though perceptions and expectations about the four cells vary considerably.
One space spreads through all creatures equally –
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go
flying through us. Rainer Maria Rilke
but,
They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I've never seen people, or humanity.
I've seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by an unpeopled space. Fernando Pessoa
II
I in fact believe that we possess valid criteria for judging when criticism is good and when it is bad…But I also think it is a mistake to assume, and self-defeating to pretend, that these criteria are simple and obvious….To get progressively clearer to the multiple and interdependent discriminations involved requires the evolving give-and-take of dialogue…[W]hen a proponent says, ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ his interlocutor will reply, ‘Yes, but. . .’ M.H. Abrams, literary critic
The motto on his shield is a bold ‘YES BUT—.’ Dwight Macdonald, the critic writing of himself
Remember, I started out learning and appreciating literature at the time of the Black Arts Movement, when people were saying, ‘Look at what’s around you. Look at the people around you. Look at all that music around you.’ I was learning poetry at that time. So I was learning poetry when people were saying, ‘We don’t need no poems about trees. We need poems about the people.’ That was one of the things that you would hear from the people who wanted a certain kind of community poetry. But see, you’ve got a guy like me who’s listening to that, and I’ve been twelve miles out on the Bermuda reef and working in Alaska. My job was with nature. So when I picked up the Black Arts Movement, I picked it up with, ‘Yeah, yeah. But—.’ Ed Roberson, poet
Economists long insisted that the heroic stakes were framed around Market Competition versus State Planning, with Competition winner of the palm. Who needs Illiquid Government when you have Liquid Markets, right?
Odd then that economists began to agree that the maintenance of the storied perfect competition (all price takers and constant returns to scale) would have undermined entrepreneurial capitalism as actually practiced.
Odd that a major winner of always-late capitalism would not have been possible without imperfect competition (some price makers and increasing returns to scale) and an important role for—guess what?—government policies to foster technological change. Odd that, after all those storylines about the rising tide of market liberalization lifting all ships, it turns out that still-liberalized capital markets continue to be associated with rougher seas of financial instability.
Even odder is that implacable criticism economists levelled against price-setting by planners who couldn’t possibly process all that complexity when everyone knows that price discovery through markets does so much better. In the aftermath of 2008, however, economists told us that even core market mechanisms like auctions—Léon Walras must be turning in his grave!—can’t work because of the sheer complexity of the instruments of financial economists to be auctioned—which meant the defamed planners had to get involved anyway. Odd that economists also told us we needed dark pools and out-of-sight markets because price discovery, rather than being the raison d’être of markets, is merely a public benefit that markets may, but need not, provide.
To be fair, markets manage some risks better than government, but only those risks and certainly not the uncertainties that can come with their managing those risks through markets. The management of the latter has been placed in the hands of government and regulators.
There’s no part of the economic stories told us that even an eye-dropper’s worth of realism wouldn’t improve.
Stanley Cavell, the philosopher, wrote that “there is always a camera left out of the picture,” by which I take him to mean that were we able to bring it in, a very different picture would result.
A wonderful story passed on by the poet, Donald Hall, illuminates the point. Archibald MacLeish told him about the actor, Richard Burton, and a brother of his:
Then Burton and Jenkins quarreled over Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Jenkins said it was a bad poem: disgusting, awful. Burton praised it: magnificent, superb. Jenkins repeated that it was nothing at all, whereupon Burton commanded silence and spoke the whole poem, perfect from first syllable to last. MacLeish told me that Burton’s recitation was a great performance, and when he ended, drawing the last syllable out, the still air shook with the memory and mystery of this speaking. Then, into the silence, brother Jenkins spoke his word of critical reason: “See?”
And do you see the camera you’re holding to frame this?
II
Go look for one of those early 20th century American landscape paintings by, e.g., Redmond Granville, of wildflowers spreading across fields or Edgar Payne of a remote lake in the snowy Sierras. Then look at virtually the same painting, but this time with a young woman in her calico dress or cowboy on a horse.
In an instant, this painting dates the preceding one. What had been an idealized-now flips to a historicized-then. If you wiil, it reframes it. Public policy is full of such flips and reframing: reforms that work on paper but date immediately when real people with real problems in real time enter the picture—both as subject and as frame.
Two drivers of not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty are often conflated—information overload and cognitive undercomprehension.
Think of information overload as: The “right” information is actually there but hidden in the info glut around us. Cognitive undercomprehension, in contrast, is: Our cognitive limitations undermine our ability to recognize anything like “the right information” for the matter at hand.
Overload means we would be high-performing analysts and managers if only we were to tease out the right information from all the noise obscuring it. Undercomprehension means we are held to such high-performing standards we couldn’t possibly know the right information, even if it were in front of us before our very eyes. “I could do my job if only I had the right information” is not “No one could do the job I’m tasked with, whatever the info available.”
II
Two upshots deserve emphasis.
First, at or beyond the limits of cognition, not only are prediction and forecasting difficult, so too is identifying counterfactual conditions, not least of which is what would happen if overload and undercomprehension were absent or otherwise ameliorated.
Second, arguments asserted as policy relevant because of their diamond-sharp clarity rarely get beyond the magic stage. They misdirect us from better identifying any overload and undercomprehension already present, were we only to look for them. They don’t want you to see the shadows as their flashlight is too bright.
Source
Sartori, G. (1989). Undercomprehension. Government and Opposition 24(4): 391–400.
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.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 