Inequality. It’s the cause du jour and a topic on which there is little dissent. Everyone knows it’s wrong, it is just that obvious. Type the word into Amazon and you’ll see from the start of this decade a staggering amount of books written on the topic. It seems to me (rather ironically) that if you want to make a lot of money nowadays with ease, write a book on the evil that is wealth and income inequality. In fact, studies show that by the time you finish reading this sentence another thousand books will have been released on the subject.
However, being a much talked-about issue doesn’t necessarily mean that any productive ink has been spilled or words typed. In fact, as I hope in this short piece to prove, inequality is the biggest non-issue of a generation.
So what does inequality mean? It means a difference in balance or degree, a variation within some group, or really it just a measure of disparity. Understanding this simple and uncontroversial definition leads you to one simple conclusion. Inequality is a morally neutral concept. It is neither good nor bad; it doesn’t tell you the moral status of any idea or any society. It only says that there exists in a group some sort of gap between two subsets; I will reiterate, it makes no moral claims whatsoever.
So what is the problem I am describing here? It’s mainly a lexical one I admit. However it is still important. The problem in how we speak of this nowadays, is that it is assumed that a disparity must be important as inequalities are morally wrong. But, you’ll never get a moral conclusion by finding difference somewhere between groups; you need to look much much deeper.
What is the solution?
It’s simple to describe, it is a lack of income and wealth; it is poverty which is the problem, not inequality. We speak as if poverty and inequality are synonymous. They are not. To further demonstrate that these are by no means the same thing imagine this. I am sat in a room with Bill Gates. Well, within that room there exists massive wealth and income inequality.
But is this a problem – no. He hasn’t hurt me or caused me harm. There is no problem, in that I’m not in a bad situation, even though there is serious inequality. Where the problem comes in is looking at Bill Gates in a room with someone who is homeless. You also have massive inequality in that room but the problem in this room is one of homelessness not inequality as you had that in a large scale in both scenarios.
To give a simple example, lets say that a nuclear bombs go off around the world and when we emerge from our bomb shelters we see that practically everything we see has gone. All our possessions are destroyed, all the supermarkets, cinemas and banks have turned to ash. Well, in this scenario this is a large amount of equality so this must surely mean we are in a good situation if greater equality is a good thing? Clearly not. We all equally have nothing.
To sum up I’d say this. Inequality per se just doesn’t matter and we are not thinking clearly when we call it a problem and one that we need to solve.
Poverty is a problem, poverty is a moral issue, but wealth and income gaps are not.
Stuff everyone else is wrong about. 