Notes on Inequality

Of all our motivations, greed is the most quantifiable. This fact explains why statistics on economic inequality are more compelling than “data” on gender, cultural or age difference.

Recently, I was reminded of a great thought experiment in economics: imagine witnessing an hour-long parade of society’s earners in which each man’s height corresponds to his income. Call the average man 5’10’’, then someone earning an average income will appear that tall, if less then shorter, if more then taller. What you would actually see, in any modern economy, is forty-five minutes of insects and midgets and dwarfs jogging past, then ten minutes of six and seven footers. In the last few minutes, giants ten to thirty feet and more. In the waning seconds of the parade, things get weird, as the paraders—rock stars and athletes—get so huge you can’t see their heads from the ground. Finally, at the very end, Bill Gates’s sensible shoes descend like the trademark Monty Python foot and squish everything.

As economic pornography, this vision allows different forms of voyeurism. First off, it seems hard to reject the idea that the giants are unjust and have somehow appropriated their stature from the vertically challenged. The whole thing reminds me of an Industrial Worker poster of the nineteen-teens: Pyramid of the Capitalist System (click to enlarge).

This image makes the same height = riches parallel, with a good dose of medieval Wat Tylerism (note the 3 estates of the realm on top). The nefarious Capitalists are just above the oppressed masses, living it up, and surely, as Marx noted, taking the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

But getting back to the parade of inequality, some problems come up. How can you prove that the riches of the wealthy belong to the poor? When I pull his string, my talking Nietzsche doll says that this statement makes no sense—that it’s just a symptom of our Christian slave morality. As all my aristopals who were kicking back poolside in St. Petersburg 1917 keep telling me, had they known all along that the poor in fact own everything, they would have had no incentive to earn or at least preserve their ill-gotten fortunes. The point got them nowhere. And Russian backwardness is as topical today as it was in 1750.

Vast economic inequality is one of those dreary facts of life that gets along just fine without philosophical justification. Scottish Enlightenment Economics, objectivism and supply-side economics make virtues of self-interest and even avarice, but the truly rich have never wasted their time with such salon-conversation stuff. Why should they? It’s always been the task of cheap job-seekers to write the government and academic documents cloaking laissez-faire in the spirit of the times.

The Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy are a lightning rod for what passes for debate on this issue. To hear many commentators tell it, the cuts are not only unjust but insane, bankrupting Washington in an anti-New-Deal Skull and Bones ritual suicide. This last charge is scurrilous. The administration knows what it and the Democrats will never say out loud: the wealthy create wealth for investment, the poor, by definition, do not. You can question the social justice of tax cuts but not their viability as a strategy for propping up the economy in a difficult time (whether it's the optimal strategy is another question). The treasure of the wealthy does not just go into stuffing their mattresses and wife-swapping: it must be spent outside the black market or invested. But seeing the cuts as an effect rather than a cause of inequality doesn’t make for exciting, politically-polarized editorial copy.

Aside from the American government, Wal-Mart takes the most flak for unpatriotically “creating” inequality. The Matterhorn of this brand of blarney is the shoestring documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Ex-employees complaining of racism on the job (something minorities with no education or skills never find outside Wal-Mart), mom and pop’s hardware store forced to shut down (no interviews with customers—they have none), enabling thieves and rapists to operate in their parking lots, the Bentonville cabal’s inexplicable reluctance to don Santa suits and give its millions of Bob Cratchits generous benefits packages, and other crimes against humanity.

Pull the other one. No doubt upper management are cynical plutes floating fag jokes at the golf club, but they work for an American public corporation designed to turn a profit for its shareholders. The worst that can befall them is termination. To hang onto the Marxist fantasy and The Capitalist Pyramid, you have to equate Karl’s English midlander, cigar-chomping, wife-swapping venture capitalists with today’s salary-leeching, health- and self-conscious, psychoanalyzed, interchangeable MBA’s. As such, they’re at least entitled to pass the buck.

I’ve never been to a Wal-Mart outlet and I don’t particularly regret it. I see Wal-Mart as a successful exploiter of inequality, not the cause or even the catalyst of inequality. Like McDonald's or the corporation in abstracto, ad nauseam, Wal-Mart presents a brand-name soft target for the weekend culture jammer. A free market means agents are free to act as Wal-Mart acts. And consumers are free to buy their tv dinner trays there. Revel in your superior taste if you like, but leave them alone. Freedom means inequality and suffering for most: your freedom is naught when you’re at the mercy of everyone else’s freedom. In a perfectly egalitarian world, no one has to get hysterical because we’re all 5’10’’ and we all work and shop at the same place for the same pay. I can hear the greeters now: "Welcome to Gulag-Mart! Welcome to Gulag-Mart!"