By Göran Therborn
The evidence that unequal societies inflict great damage on the lives and health of their citizens is clear. Why does it matter and what can be done? Göran Therborn thinks big.
There are at least three quite different kinds of inequality, and they are all destructive of human lives and of human societies.
The first is inequality of health and death, what might be called vital inequality. Here, hard evidence is accumulating that health and longevity are distributed with a clearly discernible social regularity. Children in poor countries and poor classes die more often before the age of 1, and between the age of 1 and 5, than children in rich countries and rich classes. Low-status people in Britain die more often before retirement age than high-status people. Vital inequality, which can be measured relatively easily through life-expectancy and survival rates, destroys millions of human lives in the world every year.
The second is existential inequality, which hits the individual as a person. This kind of inequality restricts the freedom of action of certain categories of persons, for instance that of women and other marginalised groups in public spaces and spheres. This form of inequality means denial of (equal) recognition and respect, and is a potent generator of humiliations – for women in patriarchal societies, for indigenous groups in the Americas, for poor immigrants, for those of low caste, and for black people or stigmatised ethnic groups. It is important to note here that existential inequality does not only take the form of blatant discrimination; it also operates effectively through more subtle status hierarchies.
The third is material or resource inequality, which means that human actors have very different resources to draw upon. There are in turn two aspects here. The first is access to education, to career-tracks, to social contacts, to what is called “social capital” (in conventional discussions, this is often referred to as “inequality of opportunity”). The second is inequality of rewards (often referred to as “inequality of outcome”. The latter is the most frequently used measure of inequality – the distribution of income, and sometimes also of wealth.
The production of inequality
Inequality can be produced in four basic ways:
* exclusion: meaning that a barrier has been erected making it impossible, or at least more difficult, for certain categories of people to access a good life.
* institutions of hierarchy: meaning that societies and organisations are constituted as ladders, with some people perched on top and others below.
* exploitation: meaning that the riches of the rich derive from the toil and the subjection of the poor and the disadvantaged.
* distantiation: meaning that some people are running ahead and/or others are falling behind.
The historical importance of these mechanisms in generating the configuration of the modern world is hotly disputed. It can be argued that exploitation, though the most repulsive generator of inequality and still a significant feature of today’s world, is not the major force. A major role is played by organisations and societies that are permeated by subtle hierarchies of social status: these create inequality through their unequal allocation of recognition and respect, the limitations they impose on the freedom to act, and their impact on self-respect and self-confidence. The existential inequalities of these social hierarchies in turn have serious psychosomatic consequences.
In the course of the 20th century there was a substantial income equalisation in most western countries; but class differentials of life-expectancy widened, particularly among men. In 1910-12 an unskilled manual worker in England or Wales had a 61% bigger risk of dying between the ages of 20 and 44 than a professional man; by 1991-93 this extra risk of early adult death had risen to 186% (calculated from R. Fitzpatrick & T. Charandola, “Health” in A.H Halsey & Josephine Webb, eds., Twentieth-Century British Social Trends [Macmillan, 3rd edition, 2000]).
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