“With the help of
well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral
judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good
and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”
-- Paul Bloom, “The
Moral Life of Babies,” New York Times
(9 May 2010)
This week, Annie Lowrey of the New York Times wrote a terrific,
front-page story
on how the poor in America have much greater access to material goods than in
generations past, yet feel as if they are falling farther and farther beyond
the middle class. As James Ziliak, director of the University of Kentucky’s Center for
Poverty Research, stated, “Without a doubt, the poor are far better off than
they were at the dawn of the War on Poverty. But they have also drifted further
away.”
If people are better off,
why does it matter if they’ve “drifted away” from the middle and upper classes
on a relative scale? If the rising tide lifts all ships, what difference does
it make if some seas rise faster and taller than others?
As it turns out, it makes every
difference in the world—and not just in America, but also across most societies
in every corner of the globe. Why? Because rising inequality, no matter how
improved the objective standard of living is for individuals across the board,
offends something deep within us—an innate
sense of fairness, justice, and opportunity.
As Paul Bloom wrote in 2010, “You won’t find a society
where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on
loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent
mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice.”
As a result, it should come
as no surprise that people are frustrated—even enraged—by how an emphasis on conspicuous consumption has replaced a
more fulfilling vision of the American Dream with a vacuous conception of
liberty and success.
For far too long, American
policymakers have focused on “expanding the pie”, as if GDP growth was gospel
sent down from on high—the embodiment of our collective pursuit of happiness. As
we’ve explored in this space,
however, achieving happiness is a much
more complicated task than economic growth. It requires a deep
understanding of human nature; a critical examination of the true material needs (as opposed to wants) of
individuals, and a commitment to investing in the foundational elements of true prosperity—the infrastructure
of opportunity.
That infrastructure is physical—inter-city high-speed rail, urban mass transit, affordable
housing, reliable water/gas delivery, clean power—and human—education from K-graduate school, social institutions,
mobility (where health
care attaches to you as a human rather
than an employee), and substantive
and procedural justice.
Erecting this infrastructure is a mission
statement that acknowledges that government’s primary role is to lay the
groundwork (including a robust social safety net) for people to life the lives they’ve
imagined, but that the State must also take aggressive steps, as necessary, to
allay levels of inequality that threaten to create a “gilded class” (if Thomas
Piketty is right that, over time, the rate of return on capital is greater than the growth
rate of the economy, then individuals who start with capital are very likely to
accumulate more) and undermine
the citizenry’s belief in the very idea of Republican government.
While the incredible reduction in extreme
poverty worldwide has brought billions
of people the bare necessities of life, there remain 1.2 billion
people living on less than $1.25 per day. These individuals remain in desperate
need of economic growth and actions to address inequality. As
the Economist noted
last year, “Growth alone does not
guarantee less poverty. Income distribution matters, too.” Indeed, while two
thirds of the fall in extreme poverty was the result of economic growth; one-third
came from greater equality.
As the cartoon above implies, the world has enough—enough to feed the hungry and
shelter the homeless, enough to treat the sick and heal the injured. However,
that bounty means little unless extreme poverty is eradicated in the developing
world (an achievable goal by 2030) and unless the developed world creates an
infrastructure of opportunity commensurate with our innate belief that all
people deserve an equal chance to succeed.
