Economic Equality

At the simplest level, economic inequality exists in a society whenever there are significant differences in wealth, property or income between individuals or classes. One way of gauging the extent of economic inequality in a society is to measure the relative gap between its richest and its poorest groups. Another way is to estimate the number or proportion of people living below the poverty line.

Absolute equality of wealth or income has probably never existed in any real society. Instead, most democracies today try to make equal opportunity available to people, in the belief that this at least gives those with talent and determination a genuine chance to improve their condition. Under conditions of real equal opportunity, inequalities may well continue to exist between individuals — but there remains a real possibility of improving one's position in society through effort, rather than being permanently fixed in place.

What is far more dangerous for a society is inequality that becomes entrenched — that is, inequality which stays largely untouched across generations. If particular classes of people go on enjoying considerable wealth, and the power that comes with it, generation after generation, society becomes divided between those classes and others who remain poor over the same period. Over time, such deep and lasting class divisions can give rise to resentment and even violence. And because wealthy classes typically hold disproportionate power, it can become genuinely difficult to reform such a society and make it more open and egalitarian — inequality, once entrenched, tends to protect and reproduce itself.

Two influential and opposed ideological positions have shaped how modern thinkers argue we should respond to economic inequality. Marxists, following the nineteenth-century thinker Karl Marx, argue that the root cause of entrenched inequality is the private ownership of important economic resources — land, oil, forests and other forms of property. Such ownership, in this view, does not merely make the class of owners wealthy; it also gives them political power, since that economic power allows them to influence state policies and laws, posing a real threat to democratic government. Because economic inequality, on this view, feeds and sustains other forms of social inequality — differences of rank and privilege — Marxists and socialists argue that tackling inequality seriously requires going beyond equal opportunity, towards public control over essential resources and forms of property. …