When we talk about inequality, the first things that come to mind are macroscopic, abstract. Here are some facts you might be familiar with: The richest 0.1% take in 196 times as much as the bottom 90% in income (Saez, 2020). Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett held combined fortunes worth more than the total wealth of the poorest half of Americans (Collins, 2021). Even there, inequality is revealed within the top echelons: women make up only 11.5% of the world’s billionaires (Piketty, Saez, and Zucman, 2017). People of color face higher unemployment rates (BLS, 2020). The very richest live 10–15 years longer than the poorest (Chetty et al., 2014).
Income, wealth, gender, race, health. This list is by no means exhaustive. Not only is inequality pervasive, it exists on a multitude of dimensions. However, these numbers only tell a part of the story — namely, the ending, the outcomes. We can measure the current condition by a variety of methods, but this does not necessarily tell us how these outcomes came to be. There are attempts at making narratives that explain this, with regards to their respective dimensions — income and wealth inequality due to “capitalism”, gender inequality from the “patriarchy”, racial inequality from the “ethnostate”, and so on. However, not only are these stories tied to the contexts of their dimensions, they also rely on the presumption of some already-existing structure that supports the exertion of certain oppressive forces that benefit some to the detriment of others.
With this essay I attempt to introduce a framework for understanding how inequality is generated at its most basic level — and how these events accumulate and eventually coalesce into the chasms of injustice that we commonly see. I argue that the beginnings of inequality are more easily observed, more intuitive, and more tractable than the abstract, collectivized, and symbolic stories we are used to. The main argument is this: at its most basic level, social inequality arises from asymmetric information. I have mentioned this phenomenon in a previous essay on inequality in general as the “mechanism of inequality”; in this essay we will explore this more deeply on a micro level, i.e. the level of person-to-person interaction.
Learning to play the game
Growing up, I was used to moving around to different countries due to my parents’ work. I lived in Singapore for three years where I went through kindergarten and a few years of primary school, moved back to Indonesia for two years, then spent the rest of my primary school years in Japan. As you would expect, I was used to not fitting in. It’s hard enough adapting to one’s early stage of interacting with peers as a shy and socially awkward young lad — having to face a new round of culture shock and readjust to (in some respects completely opposite) social norms certainly did not make things easier. I was bullied quite a bit, exacerbating the problem, turning me into a rather unsociable and disagreeable young man.
The experience taught me — or rather, forced me to learn — social interaction in an unorthodox way. Socialization, using the term in the formal sense used in sociology, as the process of internalizing social norms, is a process that happens tacitly, through the subconscious. We are explicitly taught some rules: be polite and considerate, do not say things that might hurt people’s feelings, and the infamous Golden Rule — “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, or “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 7:12 ESV). You would think that following all these rules would allow anyone to seamlessly integrate and be accepted into their respective social environments. Alas, this is not the case. The majority of social norms are implicit — they are things people are aware of, but often only subconsciously, due to the fact the teaching and learning of these rules are also done subconsciously. At some point, I decided that I had to take it upon myself to spell these rules out explicitly, if only to myself, in order to properly learn them and integrate them into my behavior. I was convinced that I was doing many things wrong — otherwise, why was I not accepted by my peers?
And so, I started observing, and even writing down the rules that I thought were being followed. I did this with (if I may be so bold) a scientific mindset, jotting down hypotheses and testing them by conducting myself as if they were true to see what would happen. One of the key insights that remain crucial to the way I view the world today, is that sometimes people say one thing, but mean something else. Spelling it out this way would seem obvious to most, I am sure, but for me, spelling it out was necessary for me to see it. This practice, while being a strange way to learn socializing, did allow me to see some things that are not obvious to many. By turning the tacit into the explicit, various aspects of social dynamics became clearer to me than it might be for someone who learned it “naturally”.
Here’s a common example: a self-deprecating comment (e.g. “ugh, I’m so fat”) is never to be taken literally as intended to merely convey the speaker’s opinion about their weight, but rather a signal highlighting their insecurities with regards to their weight as it stands in relation to cultural stigma about overweight people — that is, being overweight is commonly seen as lower in status (e.g. less physically attractive) than being of average or healthy weight. Further, it can also indicate a request by the speaker who, trusting their peers enough not to mock or belittle them on this point, hopes to have their sentiment rejected in favor of them (“what are you talking about, you’re not fat!”) or to be validated in some other respect, assuring her self-esteem and status with relation to that particular social group.
Here, I want to note two things. Firstly, that spelling out the implicit in an explicit way like this can be uncomfortable, which you may have felt reading the previous paragraph. These social dynamics happen below the conscious, thinking mind, and bringing them to the surface can trigger an emotional reaction due to a social rule that exists which roughly goes: insecurities are not to be talked about explicitly to preserve the comfortable illusion that we are without insecurities in normal, daily interaction. I posit nonetheless that talking about these things are necessary, particularly with respect to our intention to dissect and find what ultimately arises as massive chasms or social inequality that comes from not talking about these things.
Secondly, I am not saying that it is bad that we have implicit sentiments underlying our social interactions, or that we should in fact be more explicit in saying what we mean. On the contrary, I would suggest that such subtlety is not only good but necessary, insofar as it facilitates high-signal communication of information that is not easily articulable. It cannot be denied that some people, notably certain groups within the neurodivergent, have trouble deciphering social signals, and this is to their detriment; some social changes may be useful to help everyone interact fluently. However, as I will note later in this essay, it should be possible to enact these social changes while preserving the utility of (what one might call) high social aptitude.
The colosseum of youth
Hopping from culture to culture allowed me to see the contrast in rules between one place and another. The way I conceptualized it was that in many different contexts, people play the same games, but with slightly different rules. Referring to games in the context of game theory and social interaction framed as such, it occurred to me that many social games were very clearly zero-sum in nature, that is, there are winners and losers, or in the case of games with many players, outcomes took the form of a hierarchy consisting of winners at the top, losers at the bottom, and varying degrees in between. These hierarchies tend to be very illegible, in the sense that they are commonly not written down explicitly and whose existence and properties may not be easily extracted from players. In the context of a school environment, a legible hierarchy would be student rankings based on grades; a more illegible hierarchy would be one of popularity — the “cool kids’’ vs. the “nerds”, a common spectrum which takes on various names along which students in a class might be distributed. Despite being illegible (popularity rankings are seldom formalized), they nonetheless exert a considerable influence on social dynamics, and in the “real world”, a great deal on material outcomes between groups. Various cultural developments have pushed awareness of some of these hierarchies into mainstream discourse, and have become hot-button topics (e.g. gender politics, race politics, etc.). In this essay I would like to direct attention toward a slightly different kind of hierarchy, which ranks not discrete social groups, but operates on the level of individuals. In any case, similar dynamics exist, such as the tendency for outcomes to take the form of power law, or “winner-takes-all” distributions.
There is a considerable amount of literature on the subject of “popularity”, particularly as it pertains to social hierarchies in schoolchildren. On this point it should be noted that “popularity” is commonly treated as a distinct construct from “attractiveness”: in one survey of 153 classrooms of students, the average correlation between these attributes was only r=0.44, a substantial proportion (21.5%) were found to be popular whilst only moderately attractive, and only 9% were considered high in both attributes (Babad, 2001). Research in this field commonly take the form of surveys wherein participants are asked to nominate peers in the reference group (classroom or grade) who they consider “popular”, proxying to the actual hierarchy presumed to exist underneath (Coie et al., 1982). Social standing with regards to this hierarchy is evidently important to many students, with indications that social “games” are being played outside of the explicit rules (be kind to others, etc.) referenced before. For instance, a 2011 study on 3,722 eighth- to tenth-grade students finds that popular students — but not the most popular — are more likely to be aggressive and torment their peers, wherein the students estimated to be on the top 2% of popularity are considered the least aggressive relative to the sample, while simultaneously increases in social status (for both males and females) are accompanied by subsequent increases in aggression (until the student approaches the top of the social hierarchy) (Faris and Felmlee, 2011). Aggression and tormenting (incidentally, phenomena I am personally familiar with from my younger days) would certainly not be in accordance with the Golden Rule; yet, it would seem that there is status to be gained from it. I am not necessarily saying that being a bully is always beneficial for raising social status in all groups (on the contrary, this seems to be more the case for schoolchildren rather than adults), but the point is that games are governed by implicit rules as much as (if not more) than explicit rules.
Strategy games: the theory
Looking at inequalities on this micro level may be more intuitive than popular discourse on the issue with regards to “big causes” such as capitalism or the patriarchy, simply because they are closer to our daily lives, and are more universally applicable. As we will soon see, the same patterns show up inl oppressive force that may be attributed to capitalism or the patriarchy — in fact, this is the core mechanism by which such structures exert this force.
For a more tractable framework to analyze this, now we may look at several influential works that have set the theoretical basis of academic discussion of these implicit social dynamics. In Strategic Interaction (1969), Erving Goffman describes the mechanism of gamelike events in which an individual’s situation is dependent on the moves of other players, the awareness of which determines whether or not they will make the optimal (winning) move.
“Just as it can be assumed that it is in the interests of the observer to acquire information from a subject, so it is in the interests of the subject to appreciate that this is occurring and to control and manage the information the observer obtains; for in this way the subject can influence in his own favor responses to a situation which includes himself. Further, it can be assumed that the subject can achieve this end by means of a special capacity- the capacity to inhibit and fabricate expression.”
Goffman describes what he defines as “expression games”, which consist of moves designed to control and manage information flow between players, as it is these flows of information that will determine winners and losers. For players, any form of interaction will be perceived as a “move”, even if they do not realize that a game is being played (this he calls an “unwitting move”). In social interactions, we give out signals of our intentions in every action, and in many cases, the purpose of the move is concealed for strategic purposes. As in the “ugh I’m so fat” example, the intention (gaining or reaffirming status through a request for validation) is concealed by what seems to be a simple assertion of opinion. Goffman does a comprehensive analysis of these dynamics in the two essay which make up Strategic Interaction which we will not discuss in-depth, but it is important to note that skilled players of social games deploy control moves (which are premeditated with specific intentions, conscious or otherwise) as opposed to unwitting moves. “Social aptitude” or social competence may be partly defined by the ability to extract implicit information from social environments, and to play the “correct” moves which optimize for social standing (possibly at the expense of another player).
In The Strategy of Conflict (1960), Thomas C. Schelling pinpoints the category of games we are discussing, namely strategy games, which are games where the moves of other players determine the optimal move for any single player. This is contrasted with games of skill, e.g. a running competition, or a game of golf; wherein win conditions are determined solely by a player’s performance which do not affect other players, and games of chance, e.g. a lottery, which is determined purely by probabilities that cannot be influenced by the players.
A key aspect of strategy games is information asymmetry. In a perfect-information strategy game, such as a game of chess, all available information regarding the game condition is laid out on the chess board, the information from which is extractable by both players to equal degrees depending on their respective skill levels. Contrast this with popularity ratings between peers in a school environment — the game condition is not obviously available, and each player may have differing (albeit roughly similar) ideas of who the “popular kids” are. Information asymmetry adds a crucial element to strategy games that enables it to become much more complex, as assumed game states are kept independently in the minds of each player. This is where strategic interaction becomes crucial: the control and management of data in the information ecology will disproportionately benefit some players, to the detriment of others.
For a more concrete look at these dynamics, Schelling’s concept of the focal point (also called a Schelling point due to his contributions) is very useful. In game theory, a Schelling point refers to a solution that players tend to choose by default in absence of communication or coordination. Here is a simple example: if you and a friend were placed in random locations inside a shopping mall and asked to find each other, wherein you are both not given information regarding the position of the other, it is highly likely that you would both head for the mall lobby, as it is commonly located in the center of the mall, and might commonly be considered the “default” location to meet up. This is what the Schelling point is in essence — a default context to coordinate around.
Even in this simple example, there are various nuances that lead to the lobby being chosen as a Schelling point for the both of you. Among other things, you would presumably have some experience visiting shopping malls, and meeting people in shopping malls; this experience might have given the both of you some intuitive understanding of architectural layout common to malls that would allow you to navigate to the lobby. A person who has no experience whatsoever in visiting shopping malls may not be able to navigate in this manner, and had you played the game with this person, you would have failed to meet up (i.e. failed to coordinate). The point here is that information from outside the game is necessary for Schelling points to exist and function.
Now consider the above example as an analogy for social interaction. The “outside information” that is necessary for coordination might be referred to colloquially as something like “cultural context”. Again, this might seem like an obvious thing; Of course people with similar cultural backgrounds are able to communicate better! But spelling it out explicitly allows us to further explore how this phenomenon influences social interaction, and therefore outcomes of social games. This will be important as we take a deeper dive into the actual mechanics underlying social games. Cultural context does not necessarily refer to ethnic or national culture, although it includes this; it could be any common experience between players that allows them to presume some commonality of experience that allows them to coordinate and communicate effectively, or “meet up at the lobby” so to speak. These things allow players a great deal of confidence in modelling other players and presuming information about them, which as we have established, is crucial to playing strategic games. This promotes a crucial dynamic: players are encouraged to find other players to coordinate with, which allows them to cooperate in strategically excluding other players for their benefit. The basis for this coordination, of course, is none other than “cultural context”.
This frame enables us to explain what are usually seen as discriminative practices in so-called “meritocratic” game environments, such as the preferences of hiring people of similar gender, ethnic and racial backgrounds as the majority of employees. The same phenomenon also occurs in college environments, in the selection practices of student organizations and committees or kepanitiaan; Universitas Indonesia being located in Jakarta with a majority of students from big cities, the ranks of people selected for these (privileged) positions also tend to be from these same groups. In these cases, Schelling points may include things like: having gone to the same school, being from the same area, and even simply having the same friends. Some call this “nepotism”, which in professional environments is a crime; yet, the very mechanism of the game actively incentivizes it.
Closing thoughts
It must be admitted that political movements based on legible social groups such as gender and race are more easily communicated and advocated for. People can be rallied around clear identities, whereas the kind of inequality discussed here exists on a much smaller scale, and between very complex networks of players each with unique circumstances and “cultural context” to work with. Olufemi O. Taiwo hints at this on an essay critiquing the now-common practice of “diversity and inclusion”:
“Individuals who make it past the various social selection pressures that filter out those social identities associated with these negative outcomes are most likely to be in the room. That is, they are most likely to be in the room precisely because of ways in which they are systematically different from (and thus potentially unrepresentative of) the very people they are then asked to represent in the room.” (Taiwo, 2021)
We are all always playing the Great Social Game all the time, to some extent, and this makes it more difficult to legibly “advocate” against it; yet, I posit, it is a key building block of inequality as a social phenomenon on a macroscopic scale. As Per Molander argues, small inequalities eventually build up to big ones, and while we fight against the big inequalities between groups, they are but ripples, downstream of microscopic inequalities enforced and perpetuated, mostly unnoticed, in our daily lives.
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