Via John Quigggin‘s post at Crooked Timber, I came across the always-intimidatingly-smart Brad Delong‘s absolutely excellent discussion of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes. While I don’t know enough about economics to adequately express my suspicions about taking what Professor DeLong calls “the balance between productivity and inequality” as a given, I’m interested in the distinction he draws between intrinsic and extrinsic human characteristics. I’m one of those people who suspects that most of “the inequalities that arise out of [intrinsic human characteristics] are legitimate”, but I’d also attempt to expand on DeLong’s points by suggesting that we’re not only talking about individuals here, but also about societal context. In other words, inequalities depend not only on individuals, but also on the way the world works. Certainly, this is obvious, but it’s also important: it’s all too easy to see societal problems as always solvable on an individual basis. Inequalities, I would say, depend in large part upon what many take for granted as the immutable laws of economics. We forget that these laws are a human construct, and not natural or transcendent.
To wit: according to Robert Heilbroner, the world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “was run by economic laws, and economic laws were nothing with which one could or should trifle; they were simply there, and to rail about whatever injustices might be tossed up as an unfortunate consequence of their workings was as foolish as to lament the ebb and flow of the tides. . . Economic laws were like the laws of gravitation and it seemed as nonsensical to challenge one as the other” (122). Such a set of circumstances would seem to contradict J. K. Gibson-Graham’s view of “the shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” (“Economy”, in New Keywords, Blackwell, forthcoming), and suggest that we have long seen the economy as natural and transcendent, beyond human intervention. Supremely extrinsic.
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