The Ultimate Dilemma:
Coming to terms with the ethics of inequality
Sadikoen: “We are born into a world where there are already kings and their families, where there is already a government with its priyayi. There are those who are honored, those who have no honor, and there are those who are humiliated, because that is the world. There are men and there are women. There are the high and the low. There is the earth and the sky. There are the poor and the rich. You were taught in school too that for everything there is a plus and minus…”
Minke: “… and that humankind moves from minus to plus and that it is called struggle? Or have you forgotten, Koen? Or has BO (Boedi Oetomo) forgotten? It is not the intention, is it, of the BO to maintain things as they are? So that the poor remains poor, the ignorant remain stupid, and the sick just lie waiting for death to arrive?”
So went a conversation between Minke, an idealistic journalist, and Sadikoen, a doctor and member of the elite Priyayi class of government officials, in Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Jejak Langkah (Footsteps), the third work in his classic Buru Quartet. Even without having read the novel, one can easily grasp the gist of the debate: the conservative arguing for the inevitability of social hierarchies, and the progressive who rejects the status quo and dreams of a better, fairer world. The ideological battle between Minke and Sadikoen has been fought long before Toer’s work. In fact, the same battle is still being fought today.
“The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer” (Shelley, 2011). This old aphorism finds its strength in that there is much truth in it: As of 2018, the richest 1 percent of the global population owned as much as 45 percent of the world’s wealth (Credit Suisse, 2018), and while billionaire fortunes increased by 12 percent last year, the poorest half of humanity saw their wealth decline by 11 percent instead (Oxfam, 2019). In any case, most of us won’t need statistics to show the existence of inequality, as we are regularly faced with it in our day-to-day lives.
Globally, many have clamored for increased measures to reduce inequality as it poses social as well as economic detriments to society (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2011; Stiglitz, 2018). These have been met with equally vehement opposition by more conservative public figures and thinkers on the grounds that measures to reduce inequality will threaten economic freedom (Continetti, 2011). There is an impasse in the public discourse as progressives argue for the good of society as a whole, while conservatives place higher importance on individual liberty.
This is highly problematic: economists may study what policies work best and how they would solve the inequality problem, but it is only through the messy, murky realm of ethics and philosophy that they can be morally justified. I find that there is a crucial, yet rarely-discussed dilemma underlying the ideological deadlock, the answer to which we must collectively decide as a society in order to push the inequality debate forward.
A brief history
“In the beginning, there was surplus…”
-Yanis Varoufakis
To begin with, let us peer through the distant past to view how inequality arose from prehistory. It must be noted that there are still disputes as to reconstructions of pre-historical societies, mainly due to the scarcity of artifacts which shed light on them. In any case, the available archaeological record seems to indicate that hunting and gathering communities, which constituted the dominant socio-economic structure for 95% of human history, were characterized by relative egalitarianism, albeit with a high propensity for violence (Pinker, 2011). The simple reason for this relative equality is that these societies lived in small groups, and were nomadic — they regularly moved from settlement to settlement. Their lifestyle was one of subsistence, wherein food and other resources were collected only to survive, without much accumulation. As such, there was little room for anyone to have more resources than others. As resources were distributed quite evenly, so too was power — hence the frequent violence within and between communities.
However, this does not mean there were no inequalities to speak of: There are indications that even hunter-gatherers had social hierarchies, and this showed in the archaeological record they left behind, such as differences in burial and house sizes. Moreover, the larger burial sites were found to contain more bones, tusks, and other artefacts interpreted as “luxury goods”, indicating the people buried there were of a higher social class (Soffer, 1985).
These hierarchical tendencies increased as mankind went through the transition to the Neolithic age around 12,500 years ago. This period is commonly referred to as the agricultural revolution, as it marked a wide-scale shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies. During this period, man learned to domesticate plants and animals and began living in more permanent settlements (Bocquet-Appel, 2011; Barker, 2009). In tandem with these developments, populations of societies increased, and society grew in complexity as well — this age marked the advent of the division of labor, which resulted in a surplus of resources, which were then stockpiled (Hole, 2984). This was the starting point from which inequality arose — with more surplus resources, so was more of it to be distributed unevenly.
Those who owned land grew to be much more powerful than those who worked the land, and acquired larger shares of the resources produced. With stockpiled resources, landowners would come to afford military power to protect their resources, resulting in a monopoly of organized violence (Boix, 2003). Studies computing Gini indices (which calculates inequality on a scale of 0 to 1, with 0 being perfectly equal distribution and 1 being all resources owned by one person) for pre-historical societies found that early hunter-gatherer societies had Gini indices of 0.2 to 0.5, while societies after the agricultural revolution stood at 0.7 in extreme cases (Shenk, 2010). Inequality continued to rise and fall throughout history, but it would be reasonable to approximate its first dramatic rise here, as the combined result of the division of labor, control of key resources, and monopolies on organized violence.
The mechanism of inequality
American politician Bernie Sanders once called “the issue of wealth and income inequality… the great moral issue of our time” (Judis, 2019). The emphasis on inequality as a moral issue points to what is perceived as the clear injustice in that so few people own so much. To understand how we arrived at this state, we must break down the mechanism which generates inequality.
In the game of life, those who are lucky enough to start with more wealth and opportunities will have a significant advantage compared to those who don’t. This can be viewed in the context of game theory: If two players have identical resources from the start, they will divide new resources evenly, as neither player has leverage to gain more than the other (Thomson, 2010). However, if one player has more resources at the beginning, he will stand a better chance of obtaining a larger share of the payoff. This solution is quite intuitive — the wealthier player is more powerful, and thus can force a more advantageous outcome from the negotiation (Molander, 2017; Fernholz, 2014). In the long run, a series of such negotiations will result in positive feedback amplifying the original degree of inequality, ending in one player holding all the wealth and the other player with nearly nothing.
Further showing the universality of this mechanism, the same phenomenon can even be observed in other species: In short, it has been found in a multitude of species that chance alone will drive 1% or less of the community to dominate 50% of all resources (Scheffer et al, 2017). For instance, one study showed that roughly 1% of trees in the Amazonian rainforest accounted for 50% of the total stored carbon (Ter Steege, 2013).
The illegitimate meritocracy
By accepting the above conclusion, we now face the grave implication that inequality is naturally generated, as the initial conditions for any sort of negotiation will inevitably be disrupted and imbalanced. It will be important to keep in mind this basic nature of inequality, as we delve into its ethical implications.
The perceived unfairness of unbalanced initial conditions is not addressed by the traditional ideological foundation of Western civilization. Enlightenment-era classical-liberal thinkers such as John Locke and Adam Smith placed much confidence in the free market, wherein each individual is free to pursue their self-interest; as such, they were critical of any government intervention which disrupts the free market (Ryan, 1995). This emphasis on economic freedom does nothing to counteract the mechanism of inequality — it was seen not as a problem, but simply a feature of the system.
Essentially, this view asserts legitimacy behind all claims to wealth earned through the market mechanism. This is known in neoclassical economics as the theory of marginal productivity of labor, which maintains that all participants in the production process will earn returns equal to their marginal productivity, wherein it is implied that the rich have fully “earned” their wealth, as it is equal to their contribution to society. Nobel laureate and economist Joseph Stiglitz (2018) argues that this rarely justifies the full extent of the excessive wealth inequality seen today. And no wonder: in a world where the richest 62 persons in the world own as much as the poorer half of the world’s population, this would mean that one person could be 100 million times as productive as another (Molander, 2017).
One study shows that parents’ income is a very good predictor of a person’s future employment and earnings (Chetty et al, 2016). Another shows that people with higher-paying jobs tend to have richer parents (Bui, 2014). Some conservatives have argued that we should strive to improve opportunities for the disprivileged instead of aiming for equality of outcome via wealth redistribution (Feldstein, 1999), but this misses the point: The opportunity of one generation is determined by the outcome of the one preceding it. Thus continues the vicious, self-enforcing cycle of inequality.
We can now safely refute any claim of the free-market system as a meritocracy, where people succeed purely due to ability or hard work. Of course, these factors matter, but it would be impossible to differentiate between rightly earned (legitimate) and lucky (illegitimate income) wealth, as the two factors are deeply intertwined. Any intelligence, skills, or good character to which one would attribute their success is inevitably influenced by whether they went to a good school, or received proper parenting to develop these traits, along with a myriad of other chance factors.
The moral dilemma
We now arrive at an unsettling moral dilemma: if you adhere to conservative classical-liberal values, you must accept that there will always be discrepancies in initial conditions, such that any imbalances can be claimed by the wealthy and privileged. However, a majority of people feel that wealth should be distributed more evenly (AEI, 2015). In that case, the only alternative is to consider the current distribution of wealth as “illegitimate” and not rightly earned, but rather the result of a host of lucky circumstances, over which we have no control. In fact, under this deterministic view, even those personal traits such as skill, character, or ambition can be traced to something which we come to only by chance. If we accept this notion, it becomes much more reasonable to forgo claims to property in favour of a higher authority (i.e. government) to redistribute wealth. This, of course, comes with its own hazards — we are essentially replacing the inevitable inequality enforced by nature with the risk of a tyrannical or incompetent central authority.
There are indications that paradoxically, people support redistribution, but only if it does not make them poorer than others (Xie, 2017). We must face that we cannot have it both ways, and that we cannot support reducing inequality without letting go of what we perceive as our “just desserts”. Before proposing any policy to address inequality, this moral issue is of paramount importance, and we must decide where we stand — we cannot have the cake and eat it too.
Food for thought
“Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.”
- Jawaharlal Nehru
Strangely poetically, this problem echoes the ancient philosophical debate: Do we claim free will by accepting inequality as an inevitable fact of life, and shoulder all the unfairness we go through? Or will we ease up on our claims to individual merit by accepting the mostly-random nature of life, and let go of our hard work as tributes for the greater good of society? It cannot be denied that at some level, we feel in control of our lives and accomplishments. Yet, when we fail, we cannot help but revel in our bad luck. In this way, the answer may very well be somewhere in between.
As we take it upon ourselves to tackle the unresolved question of inequality, we are now forced to answer these questions first. As we do so, we will be laying the foundation for the society of the future. Perhaps, one where we are humble enough to recognize how lucky we are in our success. Perhaps, one where we will nurture a newfound compassion for humanity as a whole. Perhaps, in this brave new world, we will no longer be simply unequal, but each different and equally valuable.
Author: Miftah Rasheed Amir
Editor: Faris Abdurrachman
Illustrator: Rizki Fajar
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