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

Still, a narrow focus on income inequality and a nostalgia for the mid-20th-century Great Compression are misplaced. The modern world can continue to improve even if the Gini index or top income shares stay high, as they may well do, because the forces that lifted them are not going away. Americans cannot be forced to buy Pontiacs instead of Priuses. The Harry Potter books will not be kept out of the hands of the world’s children just because they turn J. K. Rowling into a billionaire. It makes little sense to make tens of millions of poor Americans pay more for clothing to save tens of thousands of jobs in the apparel industry.⁶³ Nor does it make sense, in the long term, to have people do boring and dangerous jobs that could be carried out more effectively by machines just to give them remunerable work.⁶⁴

Rather than tilting at inequality per se it may be more constructive to target the specific problems lumped with it.⁶⁵ An obvious priority is to boost the rate of economic growth, since it would increase everyone’s slice of the pie and provide more pie to redistribute.⁶⁶ The trends of the past century, and a survey of the world’s countries, point to governments playing an increasing role in both. They are uniquely suited to invest in education, basic research, and infrastructure, to underwrite health and retirement benefits (relieving American corporations of their enervating mandate to provide social services), and to supplement incomes to a level above their market price, which for millions of people may decline even as overall wealth rises.⁶⁷

The next step in the historic trend toward greater social spending may be a universal basic income (or its close relative, a negative income tax). The idea has been bruited for decades, and its day may be coming.⁶⁸ Despite its socialist aroma, the idea has been championed by economists (such as Milton Friedman), politicians (such as Richard Nixon), and states (such as Alaska) that are associated with the political right, and today analysts across the political spectrum are toying with it. Though implementing a universal basic income is far from easy (the numbers have to add up, and incentives for education, work, and risk-taking have to be maintained), its promise cannot be ignored. It could rationalize the kludgy patchwork of the hidden welfare state, and it could turn the slow-motion disaster of robots replacing workers into a horn of plenty. Many of the jobs that robots will take over are jobs that people don’t particularly enjoy, and the dividend in productivity, safety, and leisure could be a boon to humanity as long as it is widely shared. The specter of anomie and meaninglessness is probably exaggerated (according to studies of regions that have experimented with a guaranteed income), and it could be met with public jobs that markets won’t support and robots can’t do, or with new opportunities in meaningful volunteering and other forms of effective altruism.⁶⁹ The net effect might be to reduce inequality, but that would be a side effect of raising everyone’s standard of living, particularly that of the economically vulnerable.

Income inequality, in sum, is not a counterexample to human progress, and we are not living in a dystopia of falling incomes that has reversed the centuries-long rise in prosperity. Nor does it call for smashing the robots, raising the drawbridge, switching to socialism, or bringing back the 50s. Let me sum up my complicated story on a complicated topic.

Inequality is not the same as poverty, and it is not a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. In comparisons of well-being across countries, it pales in importance next to overall wealth. An increase in inequality is not necessarily bad: as societies escape from universal poverty, they are bound to become more unequal, and the uneven surge may be repeated when a society discovers new sources of wealth. Nor is a decrease in inequality always good: the most effective levelers of economic disparities are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions, and state collapse.

For all that, the long-term trend in history since the Enlightenment is for everyone’s fortunes to rise. In addition to generating massive amounts of wealth, modern societies have devoted an increasing proportion of that wealth to benefiting the less well-off.