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London Inequality Studies II. Seminar Report.London Inequality Studies II met on 26thFebruary 2019, under the rubric of Disciplining Inequality, to examine the different ways in which inequality is treated across the disciplines.?In his opening comments, Simon Reid-Henry referenced Larry Bartels’?Unequal Democracy?as he set out the two parallel trajectories LIS II was set about trying to trace:The change in actual levels of inequality over time (specifically the long 20th?century).The shifting intellectual efforts to grasp that.As Bartels book makes clear, the one influences the other. Inequality, we might therefore say, is?epistemic?as much as tangible. How we think and frame inequality matters for what “it” is. This is most apparent in the disjuncture between the current (distinctly white, male liberal) preoccupation with income and wealth inequality and the relative silence within the literature on inequalities of gender and race. This matters at the level of political agency; but it matters too in terms of the formalised structures of knowledge through which inequality is rendered legible. Again, this is most apparent in the distinct frames offered by economics vis-à-vis other social and human sciences.For this reason, LIS II operated according to a very particular heuristic: participants were tasked with pairing a “classic” economic text on inequality, drawn from across the twentieth century canon, with a work authored at around the same time from within one of the other disciplines to have concerned itself with inequality. Thus, the arc of our baseline economics texts stretches from Pigou’s work on?The Economics of Welfare?in 1920 to Thomas Piketty’s recent?Capital in the 21stCentury?almost a century later.Our first pairing pitted?economics against history. Pigou (our economist) was a lecturer at Cambridge in the first decade of the 20thcentury. His work, best captured in?The Economics of Welfare?(1920), transformed the intellectual foundations of economics: from its being a science of wealth, crudely speaking, to its becoming a science of welfare (though prosperity, note, lingers across the two: see recent comments on that by Branko Milanovic?here). In other words, Pigou helped effect a change in economic science from volume to distribution: and he did this primarily by introducing the idea of?externalities(costs imposed on others) and the corresponding need for policies (such as taxes) to correct for this. There was a politics to this work – full economic freedom may not produce the optimal outcome – for all that he insisted economics should be a value-neutral science. Pigou was paired here with RH Tawney’s (1920)?The Acquisitive Society. Here Tawney argues against individualism as the root evil of capitalism. He calls for more solidaristic principles and their institutional embedding. Above all he calls attention to the basic good that is fairness (a fair price for a fair day’s work) and accountability (both industrial and governmental). At the heart of Tawney’s analysis is the idea that private rights and public welfare are at tension in modern capitalist society. Given recent work by geographers such as Brett Christophers work on?The New Enclosures, this is as relevant today as ever before. Tawney compares French universality to the British class system (today we might compare Scandinavian social democracy). But Tawney also considers the effects of unequal remuneration of labour and its degradation of society. Unlike Pigou he thus positions himself more overtly as a moral economist. He is no less adamant that inequality is ultimately inefficient: but he wants a non-utilitarian account of this.Our second pairing was of?economics with sociology. On the economic side we examined Simon Kuznets’ (1955) “Economic Growth and Income Inequality”. In this piece, Kuznets is interested in “the character and causes of long-term changes in the personal distribution of income,” and this at a moment inthe mid-1950s, when the Global North was still the “free world”, good statistics were less readily available and less robust than today, especially regarding the poorer countries. Yet Kuznets’ work represents a key moment in the history of inequality studies – the moment, in some senses, that they “go global”. Even after factoring out (for robustness) the effects of colonial inheritance and what today we might call ‘horizontal’ inequalities within mixed-ethnic societies, he identifies what will become a critical factor in the decades to come: the lack of a poor-country middle class. The consequence of this, as Kuznets already intuits, is that inequality will be experienced as “sharper” in those countries (there will be neither the social norms, the institutions, nor the legal means to reduce its effects). Kuznets is unsure of the longer-term prospects for these countries: will inequality thereafter rise, but be compensated by overall growth? If not “can the political framework of the underdeveloped societies withstand the strain”?With hindsight we might say that most of Kuznets’ fears for what might happen within the “underdeveloped world” (capital flight etc) did indeed come true. And one wonders, with the levels of tax evasion and profit shifting we see today, whether Kuznets’ question is not again a rather pertinent one. If so then that also makes his call for economics to turn to the social and political sciences equally relevant still: and to which end, the sociological side of our pairing. In his (1950)?Citizenship and Social Class?TH Marshall addresses the root causes of Kuznets’ observations in more finely grained depth.?Citizenship and Social Classis a sociological classic that homes in on the persistent problem of class and its relationship (as a social and cultural construct) to the underlying economic realities of uneven distributions of economic wealth and political power. Alfred Marshall once quipped that he studied the works of the socialists with great hopes and even greater disappointment, and TH Marshall recalls that observation here in order to assert the necessity of a vision in which the state enforces the?positive?freedoms that citizens need to partake in society fully and equally(something IsaiahBerlin will shortly provide the language for). In response to Kuznets’ predominantly economistic questioning of what determines for inequality (economic growth or socio-political underdevelopment) Marshall responds that equality is ultimately a civic-political designation. What is needed is the rule of law (civic rights), something like the postwar British welfare state, which was just then getting up and running (social rights) and the power to vote out anyone about to mess with either of these other concerns (political rights) in order to ensure equality.From this triad of civil, political and social rights our discussion then tracked forward to compare?economics with geography: bringing into the picture now as well the environments (urban, infrastructural and environmental) within which socio-economic and political inequalities ultimately bed down over time. This was one of the primary arguments of geographer David Harvey’s landmark (1973)?Social Justice and the City: and it was fashioned with more radical responses to the ongoing lack of those Marshallian rights in countries including the US (civil rights post-MLK had divided into Black Power radicalism and more overtly white, suburban social movements). Harvey’s text can be usefully read alongside Amartya Sen’s?On Economic Inequality, which similarly addresses issues of work, needs and inequality, but which proposes just the sort of liberal framework that Harvey is now rejecting as not fit for purpose (on the basis of his observations of real urban inequality and social struggle). Sen’s aim here is, in a way, to put a bit more humanity into the then emergent Rawlsian account of a ‘just’ liberal society. Harvey, by contrast, goes immediately to the structural issues and the problem of?injustice.Revisiting this conjuncture of arguments today we might say that the entire problem of economic inequality has now both more overtly intersected with political concerns and with the?structural?bases of society: its distributions of housing and work, its infrastructure, its legal systems and its physical environments. Harvey’s book is also one of the first works to explicitly raise the question of the epistemology of inequality studies. “If our concepts are inadequate or inconsistent,” Harvey says, “we cannot hope to identify problems and formulate appropriate policy solutions.” The prioritisation of the “exchange value” of cities (how much rent you can get for a city run-up) over its “use value” (are there decent pools in the parks and other facilities you might want to use) is at the heart of Harvey’s diagnosis. And the implications of all this extend far beyond the city. Yet the differences with Sen can also be overdrawn. After all, both accounts are about managing needs vs. deserts. In Sen, the two are brought together, in fact, as he grasps at a needs-based framework for evaluating what are ultimately the uneven power relations Harvey is diagnosing.Our fourth pairing, of?economics with political science, placed Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez’s “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History” (2009) alongside Larry Bartels (2009)?Unequal Democracy, a work of political science. To some extent both works undertake the same task, as they each demonstrate the longer-run effect of the failure to heed the lessons of the past: be it Marshall’s account of the forms of (good) citizenship required to keep inequality at bay, or the prioritisation of exchange over use value in public policy-making identified by Harvey in the 1970s. Atkinson, Piketty and Saez, in an early publication from the wider set of work that will become so famous after 2014 with Piketty’s?Capital in the 21stCentury, reveal that it was indeed around the early 1970s (seen in the context of the fuller 20thcentury) that income inequality reached its lowest levels in the industrial west. Ever since then, albeit with some variation between nations, it has been creeping back up. The economists point to increased wage incomes among high earners as the root cause of this, but Bartels offers a more full-fledged account of the political changes that also explain?that. Above all Bartels points to what may today be the single greatest structural barrier to the reduction of inequality: the feedback loop, we might say, between economic and political inequality. In other words, what Bartels shows is how the wealthiest have come to have ever more say in how the country is run such that, unsurprisingly, they have also most benefitted over time economically.Once again, then, we are reminded that inequality cannot be discussed outside of the manner in which we also conceive of democracy. Economics will get us part of the way to resolving the problem; but it also requires the insights – as Harvey rightly predicted – of the political and social sciences as well. And indeed, that of the law, with our final pairing matching?economics and the law. Here participants reflected?David Singh Grewel’s review of Piketty’s 2014 magnum opus: which expands upon some of the arguments of Bartels to add how it is that the structures of inequality are written into the land, be it via fiscal spending rules (the EU's Stability and Growth Pact, say) or more overtly, as with the infamous?Citizens United ruling. Ultimately these latter connections are to be taken up more fully in a subsequent meeting. In the meantime, readers might be interested in Katherine Pistor’s new book,?The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Our next meeting focuses a little more on what to do about all this: a task which presupposes, of course, we have some idea of what ‘equality’ itself is, and what we ultimately expect from it. ................
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