The Right Way to Argue About Wealth
Progressives are in danger of losing the argument about wealth. Jack Jeffrey, Fairness Foundation, shows how republican political theory might help them win it.
Since the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, there has been an explosion in scholarship on the issue of wealth inequality. Its simple message was that modern capitalism, left unchecked, tends to concentrate wealth, especially when returns on capital are higher than the rate of economic growth, and that western societies were approaching levels of inequality not seen since the Victorian era. This reoriented debate away from unequal pay towards the distribution of assets, inheritance, and the ways in which wealth, unlike income, reproduces economic and political power across generations.
Not through lack of trying, public attitudes have not kept pace with the scale of the problem, or with what we increasingly know about its damaging economic and social impacts. It is often assumed that restating the statistics will be enough to shift the political agenda, and that eventually this will translate into widespread support for policies like progressive wealth taxation. But, as others have pointed out, this lacks a more sophisticated understanding of why people who should support economic change currently acquiesce to the ‘system-justifying beliefs’ that legitimise the status quo.
Going beyond fair shares
The important, necessary work of documenting trends in wealth inequality has had the effect of abstracting away from how people actually experience wealth in their day-to-day lives. Wealth, as well as having a quantitative character, as something that can be measured, counted and compared, also has a qualitative character, shaped by how it is valued. This is far more important in understanding what would lead people to see disparities as a social and political problem. And in so far as there has been research on this, what we know emphatically is that people simply do not experience wealth in purely monetary terms.
It is in this way that, as Mike Savage observes in The Return of Inequality, zero-sum thinking about the economy, where one person’s gain necessarily comes at another person’s expense, does not really resonate with the wider public. Because wealth is not understood in straightforwardly financial terms, its unequal distribution does not automatically appear as a simple case of some having too much. Instead, how wealth is acquired and how it is used is more important to a public that associates wealth less with abstract monetary accumulation than with security, protection, future possibility, and the capacity to provide.
We need to work with these perceptions if we want to raise the salience of wealth inequality. At the very least, this means moving beyond purely distributive critiques centred on who has more and who has less. But this is easier said than done. As Katrina Forrester outlines in her excellent history of the rise of egalitarian distributive justice, the dominant language of academic social science has tended to treat inequality above all as a question of fair shares or just distributions. That framework yielded enormous insight, but it also encouraged a way of thinking that often struggles to connect with what people actually find objectionable about inequality, and especially about wealth inequality.
Wealth as freedom
This is where republican political theory may offer a more useful starting point. To clarify, by ‘republican’ I do not mean anti-monarchy or the US Republican Party, but rather a body of work in contemporary philosophy aimed at developing insights from an older civic tradition that emphasises the importance of what Philip Pettit terms non-domination, meaning not living under the arbitrary power of another person or institution. On this view, what matters when it comes to wealth is not only whether it is unevenly distributed, but whether it creates relationships of dependence.
This offers a more intuitive way of thinking about what wealth does, and why it matters to people. People value wealth because it gives them control. In practice, having wealth means the ability to opt out of a job, challenge a landlord, absorb an unexpected financial shock, care for a relative, or take a risk on something. Someone having too little wealth is therefore not bad simply because someone else has more. It is bad because wealth protects people from being too dependent on the will of others. This also helps explain why extreme wealth is objectionable. Very high levels of wealth confer a kind of social and political power that can be used to influence the political system, compromising democratic politics.
As Stuart White argues in his excellent book The Wealth of Freedom, both republican political theory and liberal distributive egalitarianism point towards many of the same policies. But I would argue that the language of republicanism connects more directly with how people actually experience wealth inequality, and offers a sharper frame for explaining why it matters. This is not to say that republicanism does not have its own limitations. But putting its ideas and concepts back into political debate might help activists and campaigners convince a frustrated, and yet curiously intransigent, public that we desperately need to do something about wealth inequality.
Jack Jeffrey is a Senior Researcher at the Fairness Foundation and co-edits Renewal – A Journal of Social Democracy.
Jack’s recommendations of the week:
The Asset Economy by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings. A short, highly readable book, on why Piketty’s emphasis on capital accumulation misses how inequality is now increasingly organised through asset ownership, especially housing.
The Progressive Work Ethic for Labour. Elizabeth Anderson speaks to Steven Klein about the history of the work ethic, how it has been abused to discipline workers, and how a positive vision of work could inform progressive politics today.
Political Conversions: Switching Sides in the 21st Century on Past Present Future. David Runciman talks to David Klemperer about the left-wing to right-wing pipeline.
For more on republican political theory and wealth inequality, HopeWorks recommends Wealth, Power and Domination, a write-up of a discussion organised by the Fairness Foundation and the UCL Policy Lab. To stay up to date with the Fairness Foundation, follow Fair Comment.