Gloom, Doom, and Inequality

mics, policy makers, and even politicians that poverty and inequality should no longer be treated as soft “social issues” that can safely be subordinated to more fundamental interests in maximizing total economic output. The most important sources of this newfound concern with poverty and inequality are (1) the spectacular increase in economic inequality and other forms of disadvantage in many late-industrial countries (the takeoff account); (2) the striking persistence of other forms of inequality (e.g., racially segregated neighborhoods, occupational sex segregation) despite decades of quite aggressive egalitarian reform (the persistence account); (3) an emerging concern that poverty and inequality may have negative macro-level effects on terrorism, total economic production, and ethnic unrest (the macro-level externalities account); (4) a growing awareness of the negative individuallevel effects of poverty on health, political participation, and a host of other life conditions (the micro-level externalities account); (5) the rise of a “global village” in which spatial disparities in the standard of living have become more widely visible and hence increasingly difficult to ignore (the visibility account); (6) the ongoing tendency to expose and delegitimate new types of inequalities (based on sexual orientation, disability, or citizenship) that, not so long ago, were taken for granted, rarely discussed, and barely seen (the new inequalities account); and (7) a growing commitment to a broader conception of human entitlements that encompasses rights to basic social amenities (e.g., housing) as well as rights to basic forms of social participation, such as employment (the social inclusion account). This list is remarkable in two ways. First, only two of the seven reasons for our newfound interest in poverty and inequality are about brute empirics (i.e., the growth or intransigence of inequality), while all others are about changes in how we have come to view, study, and evaluate those empirics. When scholars now argue, for example, that inequality has multifarious unintended effects (i.e., an externalities account), they presumably don’t mean to suggest that such effects suddenly multiplied in the contemporary period (although perhaps they have). Rather, we are to understand that inequality was always rife with externalities, however inadequately we may have appreciated them in the past. While changes in empirics hardly exhaust, then, the sources of our growing concern with inequality, this is not to gainsay the equally important point that such changes, especially the recent takeoff in income inequality, are likely a core reason why inequal2 – Melvin M. Tumin