Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Has rising inequality really immiserated the majority of citizens? Economic inequality undoubtedly has increased in most Western countries since its low point around 1980, particularly in the United States and other English-speaking countries, and especially in the contrast between the very richest and everyone else.³ Economic inequality is usually measured by the Gini coefficient, a number that can vary between 0, when everyone has the same as everyone else, and 1, when one person has everything and everyone else has nothing. (Gini values generally range from .25 for the most egalitarian income distributions, such as in Scandinavia after taxes and benefits, to .7 for a highly unequal distribution such as the one in South Africa.) In the United States, the Gini index for market income (before taxes and benefits) rose from .44 in 1984 to .51 in 2012. Inequality can also be measured by the proportion of total income that is earned by a given fraction (quantile) of the population. In the United States, the share of income going to the richest one percent grew from 8 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015, while the share going to the richest tenth of one percent grew from 2 percent to 8 percent.⁴

There’s no question that some of the phenomena falling under the inequality rubric (there are many) are serious and must be addressed, if only to defuse the destructive agendas they have incited, such as abandoning market economies, technological progress, and foreign trade. Inequality is devilishly complicated to analyze (in a population of one million, there are 999,999 ways in which they can be unequal), and the subject has filled many books. I need a chapter on the topic because so many people have been swept up in the dystopian rhetoric and see inequality as a sign that modernity has failed to improve the human condition. As we will see, this is wrong, and for many reasons.

The starting point for understanding inequality in the context of human progress is to recognize that income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being. It is not like health, prosperity, knowledge, safety, peace, and the other areas of progress I examine in these chapters. The reason is captured in an old joke from the Soviet Union. Igor and Boris are dirt-poor peasants, barely scratching enough crops from their small plots of land to feed their families. The only difference between them is that Boris owns a scrawny goat. One day a fairy appears to Igor and grants him a wish. Igor says, “I wish that Boris’s goat should die.”

The point of the joke, of course, is that the two peasants have become more equal but that neither is better off, aside from Igor’s indulging his spiteful envy. The point is made with greater nuance by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his 2015 book On Inequality.⁵ Frankfurt argues that inequality itself is not morally objectionable; what is objectionable is poverty. If a person lives a long, healthy, pleasurable, and stimulating life, then how much money the Joneses earn, how big their house is, and how many cars they drive are morally irrelevant. Frankfurt writes, “From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.”⁶ Indeed, a narrow focus on economic inequality can be destructive if it distracts us into killing Boris’s goat instead of figuring out how Igor can get one.

The confusion of inequality with poverty comes straight out of the lump fallacy—the mindset in which wealth is a finite resource, like an antelope carcass, which has to be divvied up in zero-sum fashion, so that if some people end up with more, others must have less. As we just saw, wealth is not like that: since the Industrial Revolution, it has expanded exponentially.⁷ That means that when the rich get richer, the poor can get richer, too. Even experts repeat the lump fallacy, presumably out of rhetorical zeal rather than conceptual confusion. Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a talisman in the uproar over inequality, wrote, “The poorer half of the population are as poor today as they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.”⁸ But total wealth today is vastly greater than it was in 1910, so if the poorer half own the same proportion, they are far richer, not “as poor.”