Inequalities

Just as the reality of pervasive inequality has shaped the organization of modern society, the twin concepts of inequality and equality have continuously informed social thought. We experience inequality directly when we recognize that some people have fewer opportunities than we do, and others more; some are treated worse, others better; and some have less desirable lives that we pity, but others we envy. Our thinking about inequality involves powerful ideologies of equal rights and equality that reflect social theorists’ repeated efforts to solve the intellectual problem of inequality and address the tensions and adaptations that it produces. Only a society that harbors inequality will generate the idea of equality; others do not need to. Although inequality has pervaded all societies with recorded histories, the modern concept of social equality emerged only in the 17th and 18th centuries, as thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau produced ideas of a natural order based on equality. Using these Enlightenment ideas, people could blame inequality on specific social institutions and groups, rather than accepting it as God’s will or a tragic fact of life, much like disease. This shift in thinking helped inspire the social sciences, as well as motivating numerous utopian efforts to imagine a world without inequality. Our ideas about inequality and equality derive from our experience of inequality and our efforts to understand it and judge its moral implications. Like those before us, we live and breathe inequality every moment of every day: all our interactions, our relationships, every aspect of social life involves and responds to inequality. While we all continuously experience inequality, the meaning of that experience differs according to our status. The poor know the wealthy have more and live better, but they do not know how it feels to have that freedom, that sense of privilege, to feel superior in one’s identity. Those on top know it is hard and potentially grim to be poor, but they cannot know how it feels to know that the good things in life will never be possible, to feel that your own life can never have the significance that “better” people enjoy, to know that you cannot give your children a chance at a good life. Building on shared experiences, people of similar status create understandings of the world that congeal into culturally sustained identities and worldviews. People of similar social status have more contact, interact as equals, have analogous experiences and histories, perceive each other as more understandable and accessible, and reinforce each other’s perceptions. People of similar economic status share neighborhoods, schools, colleges, houses of worship, and places of recreation such as parks or bars. People tend to marry those who share their location in the status hierarchies that dominate our lives. Women feel more comfortable with other women, and men with men. Because people generally wish to feel they are just, worthy, and sensible, they develop elaborate justifications for their place in order to confirm their worth. People of similar status comfort each other because they share the same rationales. People of similar status thus come to believe their status privileges are just and their status deficiencies unjust; they acquire a perceptual map of status differences that guides their dealings with others. Inequality divides us into separate nations or communities; we generally accept the boundaries as simple, obvious, and unchangeable. In social science’s formalization of these experiences, inequality refers to systematic distinctions that we can rank (more or less, higher or lower) and which concern valued qualities (such as wealth, prestige, education, and security). We may perceive inequality among individuals or organizations; among segments of a population, such as ethnicities or those in rural versus urban areas; among positions, such as occupations or locations in a hierarchy; and among nations. Inequalities of positions differ analytically from inequalities of individuals. An organizational chart maps a hierarchy of positions—these remain the same even as different individuals move through them. Other unequal social locations, such as occupations or ranks of wealth, can also be considered positions, although more malleable and less clearly defined. The relationships among positions—the structures of inequality— represent the enduring systems through which people move. Whoever occupies a position gets its status, authority, and privileges, and gives them up upon leaving. The resulting positional inequalities differ from status inequalities that inhere in personal characteristics such as skin color or sex. The degree of status inequality between people reflects the differences in opportunities available to the groups to which they belong. Structures of inequality endure when social mechanisms ensure that each new generation replenishes the full range of positions vacated as older generations die. Mechanisms that