Why does Economic Inequality Matter?

Recently I read through Harry Frankfurt's new book, On Inequality, the two main theses of which are that inequality as such (whether income, wealth, or of some other sort) is, in itself, morally irrelevant, and that what really matters is that everyone have enough.  Not surprisingly, the book is carefully argued, yet I remain unconvinced, and I want to take a minute to think about why.

I won't summarize the argument of the book.  Suffice it to mention just one consideration Frankfurt puts forward over and over again.  Suppose that I have enough money that, while I can't have everything I want, I am comfortable and never want for anything important, like food or healthcare or money to pay for my children's education, and suppose you have twice as much.  In this and like cases, Frankfurt points out, it is not clear that the mere fact that you have more money than I do entails that there is anything amiss here.

This argument seems plausible, so far as it goes.  I think Frankfurt is right to say that inequality is morally irrelevant in this case and others relevantly like it.  But I am not sure that it shows that there is nothing amiss in the staggering levels of economic inequality we observe today in America and globally.  (If the word "staggering" seems excessive to you, take a look at this, this (from which I pulled the chart below), this, and the first chart in this article.)  It seems to me and, apparently, also to many others, that something rankles in the fact so few have so much in a country and a world where so many have so little.  But if Frankfurt is right--as he seems to be--that inequality as such is morally irrelevant at least in cases like the one I mentioned in the last paragraph, what is it that rankles?   Why exactly does economic inequality matter?

Wealth inequality in the US.  Notice that the top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.  Likewise for the top 5% versus the bottom 95%.

Of course, increases in inequality may well have effects worth worrying about.  For instance, income inequality appears to be strongly correlated with the increasing politic polarization we've seen in the US in recent years, and there even appears to be some reason to think the increase in inequality we've seen during the same period played a part in bringing about the increases in polarization (source).  That is really interesting, but--to be clear--I don't want to focus on that here.  Instead, like Frankfurt I want to ask:  is there anything wrong with economic inequality just by itself, whatever its effects?

Near the end of the book, Frankfurt suggests inequality might be of concern in some cases because it signals a lack of respect (pp. 76-77).  I think that's plausible, but the suggestion needs further elaboration Frankfurt doesn't give it.  What reason might those with relatively low incomes or relatively little wealth have to feel disrespected?

Perhaps it is the fact that they are struggling to meet their basic needs even as others have many times what they need even to live very satisfying lives.  Frankfurt is right that, in general, it is a terrible thing when people don't have enough to live reasonably satisfying lives, of course.  But what he seems to miss is that the fact that some people have so much less than they need is made worse than terrible by the fact that their neighbors could so easily help but don't.  When that happens, a situation that was already terrible becomes appalling, and those who are struggling might reasonably feel that they are not being given the respect they deserve merely in virtue of the fact that they are human beings.  That is, I am suggesting, if one person is struggling to meet her basic needs, and another has vastly more than he needs by any reasonable measure, the first is entitled to some of what the second has, and the fact that they are not getting it might reasonably be taken as a sign of disrespect.

That is one possible answer, anyway; here's another.  It seems clear that a human being can only work so hard--at some point, you have to eat and sleep, at least.  So consider a situation in which two people are each working as hard as a human being can possibly work but are earning different amounts of money.  What could justify this?  Perhaps the value of the work they're doing.  If one is working to create an even higher-definition TV and the other is trying to cure cancer, for example, it seems appropriate that the latter earn more than the former.  But there are limits here.  For one thing, it is not plausible that any jobs employers are actually willing to hire people to do are so useless that the people who do them don't deserve to make enough to get by. Moreover, it is hard to see how any kind of work could be so valuable that people who do it deserve to make 300 times what people doing some other kind of work make.  And yet this is precisely what is happening in the US.  Today many full-time workers struggle to get by (for instance, adjunct professors who have to rely on food stamps), and some American CEO's make over 300 times what the average worker does, up from about 20 times in 1965 (source).  And so, it can seem, people's incomes are not in sync with the value of the work for which they are paid.  This state of affairs offends meritocratic sensibilities and does so, moreover, precisely because of the magnitude of the inequalities in play.  (Of course, things are even worse if we look at the broader global picture, in which 2.8 billion people live on less than $2/day.)

What do others think?  Have I put my finger on the problems with economic inequality?  Have I missed something?  I'm genuinely asking here:  I'm not sure myself whether or not I buy all this, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

The Nature of Philosophical Expertise

On June 22nd this nice piece by Tania Lombrozo called "Why We Need Philosophers Engaged In Public Life" was published on NPR's 13.7 blog.  In general I'm sympathetic to the piece and agree with its main point--that it would be a good thing if philosophers were more visible in the public eye and played more of a role in important debates.  But the article ends with the following passage, which--while striking--seems to me a bit misleading, and I want to explain why:

When a political issue concerns the economy, we often turn to economists — they're quoted in news stories and interviewed on air. When a policy issue concerns the environment, we sometimes hear from ecologists or biologists of an appropriate ilk. But when it comes to the kinds of issues we've confronted in a single week of news — issues about race, identity, moral responsibility and more — we rarely hear from philosophers. I think it's time we did.

I worry that this passage presents an inaccurate picture of the nature of philosophical expertise, in effect assimilating it to other kinds of disciplinary expertise.  Here's the problem with that assimilation.  With respect to experts in the other fields Lombrozo mentions--ecology, biology, economics--two things seem true:

1. The fact that they are experts in their fields is, all by itself, reason to think they might be worth consulting if we have questions about some subject in their field.
2. The fact that someone is not an expert in some field suggests--defeasibly, of course--that he is not as good a resource in such situations as someone who is.

Trouble is, neither (1) nor (2) is true of philosophers, at least not with respect to the kinds of issues in the public discussion of which Lombrozo would like to see philosophers involved.  As for (1), the fact that I have whatever degree of philosophical acumen I have managed to garner in my time in the field does not by itself make me any more worth consulting about the obligations of the global rich to the global poor or the extent to which being trans-racial is like being trans-gender, sinceas it happens, I am not especially well-informed about these issues and have not seriously thought about them more than or even as much as many non-philosophers.  And as for (2), the fact that someone is not a philosopher does not entail that they are not just as or more worth consulting about these things than me or, for that matter, any other philosophers.  I am positive, for instance, that many people in the black and LGBTQ communities have much better thought-out views about the latter issue than I--a straight, white, cisgender man--do, since they have probably thought about the relevant issues more than I have and have certainly had relevant experiences I haven't had.  Philosophical expertise would thus seem to differ from economic and other forms of disciplinary expertise in both these respects .

So in what does philosophical expertise consist?  If we can't make some sense of this, it will be a mystery why there is anything at all to Lombrozo's suggestion that it would be a good thing for more philosophers to weigh in publicly on political and other significant issues.

Here's an idea.  Ideally, a philosophical education consists in exposure to wide range of debates and a relatively low degree of specialization on any one of them (relative, that is, to the degree of specialization necessary in, say, physics).  This is why (1) and (2) above are false with respect to philosophers.   But that is not to say that philosophers don't, in the course of their education, acquire a sort of toolbox that helps them to engage in whichever debates they set themselves to thinking about more productively.  In order to do philosophy competently, I need--for example--to know what a "counterfactual" is and what people mean when they refer to the "contrapositive" of some claim.  I need to be able to determine the structure of arguments I encounter, and I need to be able to understand what people are talking about when they say an argument is valid or sound and determine for myself whether or not they are right.   And I need a broad acquaintance with the history of ideas, on which contemporary philosophy inevitably builds, even if not always consciously. In all of this, philosophers typically differ from those without any philosophical background and so are better-positioned to come up with clear and interesting ideas when they set out to do so.

A natural answer to our question, then, is that philosophical expertise consists precisely in possession of this toolbox--that is, the knowledge and skills that are instilled by a good philosophical education and that enable philosophers to be productive in their work.  It is primarily because they have this toolbox, and not because they have mastered any particular debates, that philosophers have a useful role to play in public life.  For if this is the nature of philosophical expertise, it would seem to follow that, if a philosopher were to set herself to thinking about some issue in light of all of the relevant information and with all of the relevant experiences, she would be more likely (though by no means guaranteed!) to come up with something interesting, helpful, or enlightening to say than someone without philosophical expertise but whose situation was otherwise identical.