Inequalities

1. As social scientists, why do we study the poor and not the rich?  What do we mean by affluence? 

In our concern for the poor, we tend to study those populations in deficit but do not make connections between them and the affluent who often create poverty by engineering scarcity to secure profits.   So they are intimately connected to poverty – extracting value from the economy (the renter capitalists) and impoverishing those that create wealth (the productive capitalists).  In this era of financialization, wealth is redistributed among the rich, rather than created through production.    By ignoring the affluent, are we implying that poverty is the ‘fault’ of the poor?  Do the affluent disappear from our calculations?  Surely, they need to be more central.

2. What are we doing when we describe inequalities through categories?  does this effort add to inequality as it strips out the moral and social context?  Are cross sectional snapshots sufficient? 

Does the effort of splitting the population into smaller and smaller groups fragment society and make it more difficult to tackle inequalities, by emphasizing difference rather than common cause?  Cross sectional snapshots inevitably iron out the moral, social and historical context.  In doing that, do we ignore important arguments for the redistribution of wealth, stolen from earlier generations, such as reparations for slavery? In our research, do we need to explore the opportunities for common cause? 

3. What is the role of history or accumulations of wealth in our considerations of inequality?  

Savage (2021) argues, quite persuasively, I think, that the inherited accumulation of wealth has a deadening effect on our society, as those at the bottom of the pile understand that the playing field is not level and they have no hope of ‘winning’.  They decide not to compete as they will always lose.  Accumulated wealth acts to make society more prone to entropy, where new voices with different perspectives and ideas cannot enter the field.  The Conservative Party leadership race is a really good illustration of this.  The constant harking back to Thatcher and ignoring evidence of the harmful effects of some of her policies, not least the de-regulation of the banking sector, shows a political class fresh out of ideas. 

Savage, M (2021) ‘The Return of Inequality: Social change and the weight of the past’ Harvard University Press. London, England.