Inequality based on prior inequality

Many people think that grossly unequal outcomes across a society with respect to the amount and quality of social goods each enjoys are profoundly unjust. (By social goods I am thinking of things like income, wealth, power, healthcare, and education.) Why should some members of society have such a lower level of access to the things that constitute contemporary life? And if, as people like Amartya Sen maintain, some of these goods are necessary components of full human development, how can it be just that some people are less able to develop their capacities as full human beings (Development as Freedom)? So gross inequalities in the current distribution of social goods are bad enough.

But what if it is also true that a low bundle of social goods in one time period is the largest factor in determining a low bundle in the next time period as well? And what if that is true across generations as well as across stages of individuals' lives? What if current poverty of a family is itself a primary cause of the next generation's poverty? Is this not a particularly unacceptable form of inequality?

And yet this cross-generational transmission of poverty and reduced life chances is precisely what we observe. Children born into poverty have less access to crucial resources necessary to their personal and social development. They are exposed to opportunities that are very different from children in other levels of wealth. And, not surprisingly, their probability of winding up as adults in any more affluent segment of the population is markedly lower than that of other children.

So the phrase "the recurring cycle of poverty" is exactly descriptive of the social realities of our society.

What a progressive society promises is that every person will have a reasonable chance of success in life. That means that every person -- and every child -- should have access to the resources that are necessary for full personal and social development, in order to develop the talents and capabilities that will permit him or her to be creative, productive, inventive, and successful. A democracy based on the equality of all men and women promises exactly this -- the idea of unfettered social mobility and real equality of opportunity.

But it is quite evident that American society today falls short of this goal, in large ways and small. The likelihood of graduating from high school if you live in an inner city neighborhood in Chicago, Detroit, or New York is only a fraction of the comparable likelihood in the suburbs; likewise for college attendance and for eventual college graduation. And the likelihood of a high school senior from the lower-quintile of family income is only one-seventh that of a high school senior with the same SAT and high school qualifications from the top quintile of family income -- the same qualifications! (This example is taken from William Bowen, Eugene Tobin, and Martin Kurzweil, Equity And Excellence in American Higher Education.) So it seems fairly evident that opportunities are very differentially offered to young people, irrespective of "merit" or qualifications.

So where does this take us? It seems to convey a pretty deep issue about justice in our society: that we have done a very poor job of ensuring that persons from all levels of income and wealth have a decent chance at fulfilling their human talents and achieving their aspirations. And that is a pretty serious thing! And it also puts the spotlight on public education as a crucial component of a just society. If we were to succeed in providing effective K-12 schools to all children, and made it possible for every young person to pursue a university education at a good public university -- think of the step forward that this would represent in the basic justice of our society.

Voter decision-making

It is the night of the New Hampshire primary, and the pundits are at work.

But what can we learn about American political choices based on what we see during this election season? What do voters care about when they decide which presidential candidate to support? Is it issues and positions; personality of the candidate (likeability); rhetoric and buzzwords; their perceptions of qualities of leadership and effectiveness; party affiliation; or something else? And which of these groups of qualities make sense as a criterion for choosing a president?

Many of the interviews with prospective voters we hear on radio and television refer to personal qualities: "I don't like Hillary," "Obama is exciting," "Thompson is too boring." It is worth wondering whether these sorts of personal responses make any sense at all as a basis for choosing a president. What are we to make of the possibility that many voters base their preferences on features they might notice in a "speed dating" event (looks, style, charm)?

Would it not be better to have a president whose manners and looks we don't like but whose leadership competence is certain and whose agenda for change is one we can enthusiastically support? How can such superficial features as looks, style, and charm make a difference to a choice of this magnitude?

So what about judgments about leadership and effectiveness? This at least appears to be a rational basis for choice. If a president is inept at the challenge of inspiring citizens and other leaders to work together and to get things done, then his or her program doesn't matter very much; the leader will not be effective in implementing it. So favoring a candidate who has the hallmarks of competence and leadership effectiveness is related to the ultimate goal of having a president who can successfully manage the affairs of the nation. So attempting to assess the candidate's qualities of leadership and effectiveness makes sense as a criterion of choice.

But it would seem that the most important question is that of priorities and goals -- the candidate's program. If we assume that each voter has a set of preferences and interests about national and international policies, then it seems logical to suppose that the voter's challenge is to decide which candidate will do the most satisfactory job of implementing those preferences and interests. On this approach, we might model the voter's task as, first, articulating his/her chief priorities for national public policy, and then assessing each candidate in terms of the degree of fit between the candidate's program and the voter's preferences. Essentially, this amounts to the decision rule: measure the candidates by the programs they promise to pursue, and choose that candidate whose program lines up best with the voter's preferences and interests.

Of course the situation is more complicated than this, in that each voter also reaches a judgment about "electability." Why would a voter cast his/her ballot for candidate X whose program lines up perfectly with the voter's preferences, if the voter also judges that X's likelihood of election is 10% compared to the 60% likelihood of election for candidate Y whose program is still pretty well aligned with the voter's preferences? So it seems rational for the voter to weight the judgment of consistency with my agenda by the estimate of the likelihood of the candidate's being successfully elected.

But let's turn the picture a little bit and consider parties and their programs. Policy implementation requires coordinated and disciplined efforts in the executive and legislative branches to enact legislation. So would it not be most rational to begin the choice process by evaluating the priorities and agendas of the parties? Why do American voters make their decisions on the basis of the personality rather than the party? Would we not be better off thinking primarily about the party's program -- as voters in many European democracies do? Here the first question would be: which party presents a program that best corresponds to my preferences and interests? And then, is the party's candidate sufficiently competent to give me confidence that he/she will be able to advance the party's program through legislation and public policy? And can I trust that the party's candidate is genuinely committed to the party's program?

All of these questions are subject to intensive empirical inquiry, and there are legions of political scientists who are devoting their energies to interpreting the thought processes and decision rules of American voters. (One whose work I have admired is Samuel Popkin and especially his book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns.) But is it possible that we might actually be a more effective democracy if we gave more thought as a society to the ways in which voters join with issues and challenges and shape their preferences, and try to find institutions that make for a more engaged and deliberative electorate?

Labor abuses in China

Today's New York Times has an important article about the conditions of workers in many of the factories in China devoted to manufacturing goods for export to the United States and other countries (In Chinese Factories, 1/5/08). The reportage is eye-opening but not surprising. Times reporters have documented excessive hours of work, pay that is lower than what Chinese law requires, working conditions that are chronically unsafe, and persistent exposure to the very dangerous chemicals that American toy consumers have been so concerned about. One of the authorities quoted in the article is Professor Anita Chan from the Australian National University, and Professor Chan has been documenting these conditions for years. Her book, China's Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (Asia and the Pacific), is a detailed and factual examination of some of these conditions. She documents the fact that the most vulnerable groups of workers -- in the range of tens of millions! -- are the internal migrants of China, who have left their home regions in search of jobs. Very significantly, Professor Chan bases some of her fact-finding on the slowly emerging field of local investigative journalism in China.

Why do these abuses occur? For several related reasons. First, the motive of generating profits in the context of a rapidly growing economy. Since China's industrial economy was reformed in the 1990s, permiting private ownership of factories and enterprises, there have been strong incentives to be successful in business and to become rich. There is tremendous demand for low-cost Chinese-manufactured goods, and great fortunes are being made in consumer electronics, toys, clothing, and dozens of other sectors. But the profit motive leads factory owners and managers to strive hard to keep wages and factory expenses as low as possible; and the vast population of poor rural people in China who are available for unskilled factory work makes the bargaining position of the factory owner very strong. (Chan documents some of the forms of coercion and intimidation that are used in some Chinese factories to keep workers on the job and to prevent them from leaving or resisting.) And, as the Times story points out, the American purchasers are insistent about cost-cutting and price-cutting on the finished goods. So the result is -- a chronic competitive "race to the bottom" in which each factory tries to produce at the require level of quality with the absolutely lowest level of cost; and this means continuous pressure on working conditions, health and safety conditions, and environmental effects.

So part of the story has to do with the economic incentives and advantages that factory owners have relative to a large working population that has few alternatives. But this part of the story is familiar from other economies as they have developed through intensive industrialization. It has been learned elsewhere in the world that the imperatives of profitability by themselves almost mandate the abuse of labor; so government regulation and inspection are a necessary part of a manufacturing system if it is to succeed in treating all the population fairly and humanely. We might have imagined that the Chinese government would have been prepared to provide the regulatory environment that was necessary to protect the best interests of farmers and workers; it is, after all, governed by the party of farmers and workers. However, this is not the case. China has been so concerned to support economic growth that it has been very slow to implement effective regulatory systems to protect labor and the environment. Moreover, the balance of power between factory owners and local officials seems to be tilted towards the owners; other Times reporting has documented the fact that local officials cannot impose their will upon the owners. And, of course, there is ample opportunity for corrupt collusion between owners and officials.

This failure to regulate has been evident in other areas besides labor; the Chinese government has shown itself to be unwilling or unable to enact effective environmental regulations or to establish an effective regime of inspection and regulation for foods, drugs, and other potentially harmful products. It appears that middle-class Chinese consumers themselves are now expressing anxiety about the absence of this kind of regulation within their food and drug system.

So what other avenues exist for improving the conditions of workers in China?

There are three possibilities -- all mutually compatible. First, workers themselves can protect their interests in fair wages, safe working conditions, and limited hours of work -- if they are permitted to organize in unions. Woody Guthrie had it right: as individuals, workers are weak, but together they are strong. It seems inescapable that a major part of the problem is the enormous imbalance that exists between the powers associated with ownership and management, and those assigned to workers and their organizations. So a more just China will need to permit the development of real independent labor unions that work hard for the interests of their members.

Second, labor mobility can improve the conditions of labor everywhere. It is not an accident that some of the worst abuses documented by Professor Chan have to do with the forms of coercion that factory owners use to keep workers in their factories. If workers can vote with their feet, then we would expect that they will migrate to factories and other employers who offer better conditions of work and pay. And this will force employers to bid for qualified labor on the basis of improved working conditions.

And finally, there is obviously a role for consumers and companies in North America and Europe in all of this. North American consumers benefit from the low manufacturing costs currently available in China; but these low costs are unavoidably associated with the labor abuses we see today. We have a model for how international companies can take responsibility for the conditions of labor and environmental behavior, in the form of the Fair Labor struggles of the 1990s on university campuses in the United States. Large apparel manufacturers took on the responsibility of subjecting their suppliers to standards of conduct, and they subscribed to third-party organizations that undertook to "audit" the level of compliance with these standards by the supply chain. (Visit the Fair Labor website for an example of such an organization.) As the Times story observes, this is a tricky business, given the substantial degree of sub-contracting that occurs in the manufacturing process in China. But it can have a measurable effect.

China is plainly destined to be a major economic and political power in the coming fifty years. But to succeed in creating a society in which everyone has a continuing stake in a good quality of life and a fair deal from society, it will have to solve the problems of regulation of labor, health, and environment. And this will mean a degree of redistribution of China's wealth and power towards its poorest people.

Perspectives on us

My idea of a really gifted social inquirer is Studs Terkel. This isn't because Studs is a methodologist with a research plan and a falsifiable hypothesis, a dependent variable to track and a research strategy on a bunch of independent variables. It is because he is a voracious listener -- he is interested in people, and he is aware that every person's story has the potential for breaking new ground on his own understanding of how our society works. And he uses an active, sympathetic intelligence as his research tool, to draw out of his ordinary people the most amazing insights into how they've experienced their lives -- as service workers, as civil rights activists, as policemen and women. What Studs finds is the great breadth and depth of human experience, human histories, and human coping, embedded in the thoughts and life moments of ordinary people. And he sheds a bright light on how varied human experience is -- even in the same city (Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco). It's a little bit like the way that the early biologist van Leeuwenhoek described his amazement in the 1660s at looking through a microscope at clear water, and seeing thousands of tiny organisms. Terkel discovers nuance, variety, and drama, in the most ordinary and apparently mundane experiences of ordinary people. (Studs has just published a memoir that is well worth reading -- Touch and Go: A Memoir.)

But there is an insight in this for all of us. We can each learn from Studs' ability to connect with the most varied group of people. Most of us live our lives in deliberately familiar circumstances. We talk to the people we know (often about pretty trivial things). We visit the places we're comfortable with. And we recreate a pretty repetitive and stereotyped world of experience for ourselves. When we think about people in other circumstances than ours -- for example, the Egyptian cabdriver who takes us to LaGuardia -- we fall back on stereotypes about the other person rather than extending our own understanding of the complexities of the world around us. (Why is this man, trained as an engineer in Cairo driving a cab in New York? What circumstances in Egypt led to his emigration? How does he experience New York? What does he think of Fifth Avenue? Does he have healthcare? What does he want next in his life?)

There is a connection between this fact about our customary narrowness and "stereotyped social knowing" and the educational importance of diversity. The idea is that when universities succeed in recruiting a diverse student body, there is a greater chance that students will get to know each other better and more deeply, and will come to have more knowledge -- and a more active desire for knowledge -- about the life experiences and perspectives of others. So racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, or age diversity in a university community is a crucial component of the social learning, the cultural cognition, that we want young people to acquire. By living, working, and learning together young people are in a better position to see the world more fully and to understand each other more deeply.

Of course this theory doesn't work as well in practice as in theory. Young people still have the choice of self-segregating and confining themselves to the familiar. So it is important for faculty and university leaders to create the situations on a campus that break down the barriers. (It is often observed that theater programs and geology departments often have the best success in engaging students across racial or ethnic lines. And a plausible theory of why this is so is that both programs involve extensive group work, field trips, and team cooperation.)

But there are other mechanisms for creating a broader social knowledge as well. For example, programs of national service like AmeriCorps and CityYear can give young people a deep and transforming experience of relationships across class and race lines -- and the cross-culture learning that takes place there seems to be more profound. Could a mandatory year of national service be a viable mechanism for breaking down the forms of separation and mutual misunderstanding that we find in our society?

Another avenue that is available to all of us is the national oral history project called "The Story Corps." (Portions are played on National Public Radio and the archives are maintained at the Library of Congress.) This is a different kind of oral history project -- ordinary people talking about a single incident or moment in their lives. By listening to a number of these stories, you can get a much greater appreciation of the richness of experience that the diversity of our society represents -- and the depth of insights that ordinary people bring to interpreting their experiences.

But back to Studs Terkel. What does he have that most of us lack? Mostly it is the curiosity to get a real understanding of the other person's microcosm, and the courage to engage in the conversation. These are things we all can learn -- and our understanding of the multiple social worlds we inhabit will be much the richer for it. So I for one want to go out of my way to connect better with people in ordinary social contact, in a way that lets me get a little bit better idea of how they experience their lives and what singular features of experience their worlds contain.

(Some of Studs' best work is found in Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do and Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. But to really get a feeling for his mind, you need to hear some of his radio work.)

Is there a right to healthcare?

It is worth unpacking, first, why healthcare is so crucial to everyone's life. Everyone faces illness and accident in life. Maintaining and restoring health and function are crucial to our quality of life and our ability to live fully, freely, and independently. So access to healthcare is one of those core needs that are so closely connected to a good human life that they can be regarded as an essential human good (for example, nutrition, education, and freedom). A life deprived of access to decent healthcare is likely to be one of unnecessary pain, anxiety, and limitation.

The medical resources that are available today for addressing the challenges of illness and disability are incredibly powerful, compared to the first half of the twentieth century. But they are also very expensive -- socially and privately. Insurance is a way of spreading out these costs over a population of people with varying levels of risk; each contributes part of the cost of this risk-sharing system, and each is assured of help when the occasion arises. And people lacking health insurance are faced with cruel choices: do without the effective therapies that exist for their illnesses; or do without other crucial things like food, gas for their cars, or paying their rent.

This gives us reason to judge that healthcare is not simply another consumable resource which people have more or less of; it is a good that a decent society needs to ensure that no one is deprived of. Like hunger or illiteracy, it is a social bad that a decent society must be urgently concerned about.

Could a just society take the position that healthcare is simply another private good that people need to purchase with their own resources? That depends essentially upon the circumstances of social inequality. If in fact everyone in society has sufficient income to purchase healthcare or private insurance, then the "private good" approach may be sustainable. In a society in which there is substantial inequality and poverty, however, this position is untenable. Low- and middle-income people do not have the resources to purchase healthcare as a private good. And if social arrangements required this, then unavoidably there would be a disadvantaged population which was more disabled, more ill, and less long-lived than the more affluent population. This is plainly not a just or defensible outcome -- anymore than starvation or malnutrition in the midst of plenty is a just outcome.

The general answer our society has provided rests on two legs: employer-provided health insurance and state-funded insurance programs for the elderly, the disabled, and extremely poor children. What this system leaves out is a very large population of ineligible uninsured adults. And there are tens of millions of people in this situation. What does our society do to handle this situation? Very little. Basically we require hospitals to provide free care to extremely ill uninsured poor people, and we provide no avenue to affordable insurance for this group beyond the emergency room.

So, back to our question here : do people have right to healthcare? My answer is that it is a requirement of basic justice that all members of society should have access to healthcare, because this is essential to living a normal human life; that our society essentially recognizes this fact about justice (witness the emergency room contingency); but that this society does a simply terrible job of satisfying this requirement of justice. The tens of millions of people who are uninsured because they cannot afford to privately purchase health insurance are sufficient evidence for that.

So what is the solution? It seems inescapable that there needs to be a system of publicly provided and means-adjusted universal health coverage. This doesn't mean a national health system. It doesn't even necessarily mean a single unified national health insurance program, or abolition of private insurance. But it does mean that we must succeed in designing and implementing an affordable option for those not served by the current patchwork quilt of coverage systems. (Several states such as Massachusetts and Maine have made bold attempts to do this.) To date, however, we have not faced up to this simple requirement of justice. Let us look at the moral issue honestly and let us design a just and sustainable system.

(Philosopher Norm Daniels has thought about these issues deeply for many years. His recent book, Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly, is a great contribution.)

Gradient of justice

Given that there is significant injustice in our society, and granted that we are a long ways from a society that establishes what Rawls called the circumstances of justice -- can we at least have the confidence that we are moving in the right direction?

Some people would argue that our society is doing just that. They sometimes point to the fact of rising nutritional and health status in the poorest 40 percent of our population during a 50-year period, and they might say that the situation of institutionalized racism -- and with it the circumstances of middle-class African-Americans -- has also improved measurably in 50 years.

Unfortunately, these impressions are misleading. In fact, it is more likely the case that inequalities of income, wealth, and well-being have worsened in the past twenty years. Lower-middle income and poor people have the smallest share of the nation's affluence that they have ever had. And many of the programs designed to provide a social safety net have been gutted or have disappeared altogether.

And on the racial justice side -- if general social racism has diminished, the depth of racial inequality and lack of opportunity in large cities has almost certainly increased in thirty years. The lack of opportunity and hope that exists in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Oakland is truly staggering -- and it is worsening. This wall of deprivation is drawn largely along racial lines. And all too often this impacted lack of opportunity leads to crime and violence.

So we don't seem to be on a trajectory of general improvement when it comes to social justice. The myth of the "trickle-down society has turned out to be more trick than truth. The benefits of economic growth have not lifted the lower middle class. This growth has not dissolved the knot of urban poverty. The public is turning its back on public schools -- surely one of the surest mechanisms of greater social justice over time. And we don't seem to have a public commitment to the basic value of allowing all members of society to fully develop their talents. Even more disturbingly, we seem to be entering a period of time that will involve even greater economic anxiety. And anxious times seem to bring out the worst in people when it comes to competition for scarce resources and opportunities.

What we seem to need is a greater sense of community, a greater recognition of our inter-connectedness and inter-dependence, and a greater common commitment to making sure that our society and its policies work to improve the lot of all its citizens. But most regrettably -- this sense of the strands of community is exactly what is most imperiled by the facts of current inequalities. It is difficult to maintain the strands of civic commitment to each other when fundamental inequalities separate us further and further.

So perhaps we ought to consider the unhappy possibility that our society may be inching towards the deepening chasm of inequality that characterizes South Africa, Mexico, or Brazil today. And if this is true, then the future is ominous.

A good society ...

What sort of society should we aim to achieve in the twenty-first century?

Here is one clear vision. It is a society based on equality and dignity for all citizens. It embodies the idea of social responsibility — the conviction that society has some meaningful obligations to all its members. It embodies institutions that somehow effectively assure a reasonably high minimum quality of life for all. It provides real equality of opportunity for its citizens. It avoids discrimination among citizens based on gender, race, ethnicity, and other irrelevant factors. It is a democratic society: individuals have genuine opportunities to discuss and influence the decisions that affect them — both public institutions and private. And it is a society that commits itself to environmental sustainability and progress towards global justice.

This vision entails numerous rights — rights of expression, association, and participation. And it implies the guarantee of quite a number of social goods by society to all citizens — education and training, access to healthcare, policies that assure housing and food under all circumstances, …

The existing state-society configuration that best matches this set of values is Scandinavian social democracy — of the 1970s. (See Esping-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, for a good discussion of Scandinavian social democracy.)