Getting Radical About Inequality

"Getting Radical About Inequality" is the title of a recent excellent David Brooks column in The New York Times. The column lets us in on a key feature of the human psyche that predisposes all of us to creating situations of inequality in a society.

French Sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu

The insight comes originally from the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu held that each person possesses two important things, a "habitus" and one or more sources of social power which Bourdieu called "social capital."

A habitus, says Brooks, is simply, "a body of conscious and tacit knowledge of how to travel through the world, which gives rise to mannerisms, tastes, opinions and conversational style. A habitus is an intuitive feel for the social game. It’s the sort of thing you get inculcated with unconsciously, by growing up in a certain sort of family or by sharing a sensibility with a certain group of friends."

You could call the habitus a personalized, idiosyncratic "lens" through which each of us perceives all social relations in our society. This lens gets shaped for each individual person by virtue of his or her upbringing and life experiences. And none of us views how social relations ought to transpire in exactly the same way: "You say toe-MAY-toe and I say toe-MAH-toe."

Social capital is anything we bring to the marketplace of social relationships that helps us

• get ahead
• gain power
• attain "distinction, prestige, attention and superiority"

Brooks talks of various categories of social capital:

We all possess, [Bourdieu] argued, certain forms of social capital. A person might have academic capital (the right degrees from the right schools), linguistic capital (a facility with words), cultural capital (knowledge of cuisine or music or some such) or symbolic capital (awards or markers of prestige). These are all forms of wealth you bring to the social marketplace.

Brooks adds:

We vie as individuals and as members of our class for prestige, distinction and, above all, the power of consecration — the power to define for society what is right, what is “natural,” what is “best.”

It is, accordingly, our arsenal of social capital with which we must vie. All of the things we truly seek in our society, in the view of Bourdieu, require us to compete with the soft weapons of social capital in order to sell ourselves in a "symbolic" marketplace.

Boosting our own status necessarily implies that as we rise, someone else has to, relatively speaking, lose ground. Inequality is an expectable outcome of the dynamics which Bourdieu identified. Brooks:

... Bourdieu reminds us that the drive to create inequality is an endemic social sin. Every hour most of us, unconsciously or not, try to win subtle status points, earn cultural affirmation, develop our tastes, promote our lifestyles and advance our class. All of those microbehaviors open up social distances, which then, by the by, open up geographic and economic gaps. 

Bourdieu radicalizes, widens and deepens one’s view of inequality. His work suggests that the responses to it are going to have to be more profound, both on a personal level — resisting the competitive, ego-driven aspects of social networking and display — and on a national one.

Here, then, is the deep lesson we all need to learn, if we are to quell the political chaos and offset the economic injustice that plague our society today.

"Getting screwed" economically in America

I think economic anxiety is what's driving our rancid politics, and that this is what made a Trump victory possible last November. This idea is the basic takeaway from Franklin Foer's article in the July/August 2017 issue of The Atlantic: "What’s Wrong With the Democrats?"

Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Maine)

Foer talks in the article, towards its end, about the "great hope of the populist left" of the Democratic Party, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Maine, who may run for president in 2020. If she does, her campaign will focus on "the idea of fairness." Put bluntly, fairness simply means "people shouldn't get screwed."

Today, just about everybody below the top (say) twenty percent of income earners — everyone who is not upper middle class or higher — is afraid they will get screwed. If it doesn't happen to them, it will happen to their children or grandkids.

Sen. Warren thinks it is mainly "business concentration" — not enough market competition — that leads to income inequality and people getting screwed.

Foer writes:

Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectors — the way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. What’s more, a small set of institutional investors — BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard — holds stock in a vast percentage of public companies, so even sectors that look somewhat competitive are less so than they appear. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders. The same is true for Apple and Microsoft. 

... As a senator, [Warren] can see how the ills of finance—the industry’s concentration, its abuse of political power — have been replicated across the American economy. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemies — oligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy. “When Big Business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting.” ... “Competition in America is essential to liberty in America.” 

... if [Warren] does run [for president], she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. It’s not a terribly complicated case to build, since the headlines are so packed with the ... exploits of those firms: the continued predations of banks on their own customers; airline overbooking; life-saving allergy injections that cost hundreds of dollars; cable companies exacting ever-higher fees; the exposure of low-level workers to such erratic hours that it becomes impossible to establish a daily routine; a broad indifference to consumers.

*****

Even if Elizabeth Warren stays in the Senate, it's obvious she thinks breaking up the economic "behemoths" would make life better for just about everybody below the upper middle class — if not everybody beneath the top one percent. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that she can succeed in bringing this about, either as a senator or as president. My question is: Wouldn't it help our politics immensely?

I think it would. For example, Foer mentions that a major strain of Democratic thinkers have been driven in recent decades by "identity politics," the perceived need

to combat the bias and discrimination that [this strain] believes is built into the system. What it seeks isn’t just the protection of minorities’ and women’s rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them.

Well, it was another "identity group" which feels marginalized — whites without a college diploma — that put Trump over the top last year. In other words, today we have a large number of identity groups, each clamoring for recognition and help — typically, at the expense of other groups. It's a classic case of "there isn't enough to go around, and we need to make sure we get our share."

Stanley Greenberg

Foer describes how this same sort of dynamic propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House by winning the 1980 election. There was much economic dislocation and anxiety then, too. After Reagan won, a Democratic pollster/political scientist, Stanley Greenberg, was dispatched to Macomb County, Michigan, just outside Detroit, to figure out why Reagan did so well. Greenberg hosted focus groups among the disaffected people, mostly white, who had voted for Reagan. He found much seething resentment of black people: "African Americans, [the disaffected] complained, had benefited at their expense."

Greenberg returned to Macomb County following Trump's victory last year and hosted focus groups again. Now, he finds, Macomb's resentments are targeted not at blacks so much as at immigrants. Same dynamic, though a different target.

The upshot of all this seems to me to be that:

1. If we could only expand the economic "pie" faster than it has grown since the Great Recession of 2008 — indeed, faster than it has grown since about 1970, when income inequality started to widen — we could ease economic anxiety mightily and get Americans pulling together politically more than they have done in many years.
2. In order to get faster economic growth, we need to do what Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for: breaking up the market "behemoths" that are prospering greatly at the expense of ordinary Americans of all races, ethnicities, genders, etc.

And so be it!