What is inequality?

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, how are you, my friend?

Chris Well, cooling off a bit now. It's been really hot for London, a week in London, but there's a bit of a bit of thunder, a thundershower happening at the moment.

Scott So I'm enjoying that. And you all are still figuring out COVID stuff over there, as we talked about last podcast.

Chris We are, we are. I mean, the vaccination rate is climbing. The latest news was that there was going to be, I think the date was the 21st of June for kind of the end of all lockdown measures, basically back to normalcy. And they've pushed that date back a month to, I think, July 19th now. I'm totally destroying the evergreen quality of this episode by giving all of these. So, you know, I mean, you know, things continue much as they have the past 18 months or so on the COVID file. How are you doing?

Scott Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. You're in New York? I'm in New York. It's been pretty fun. I'm having a nice time. New York feels like it's kind of come back to life. It does not feel, it feels just about like it's almost that pre-COVID sort of life. Although, you know, I did have a friend go to a basketball game, the Brooklyn Nets, and he was not vaccinated. And so he had to go across the street and get an instant COVID test.

Chris It's remarkable when you want to do tech development and you're a large institution. How long does it take to get it done? And then you think, or we could just have a piece of paper. Right, right, right. Which we could get, like, we could do that tomorrow. And you start to have these really interesting conversations about, yeah, we could totally do that, but you know what? 80-20 rule? This is going to be, this is actually going to be more useful. then the better solution that would take us a long time to to to kind of get past all of these practical implementation issues and it's really funny you know i i mean this is this is very old news now but if i think back to At the outset of governments like in the United States and in my native Canada and over here offering subsidies for people whose other incomes or businesses were being destroyed by the lockdown, the first time most of them tried, they had These application portals that requested that companies upload all sorts of documentary evidence that these were their expenditures and these were the expenditures that they couldn't defer and here are the contracts that proved it.

And you get tens of thousands of entities submitting each, you know, dozens of documents into this portal. And there are real people behind those portals who somehow have to process them. And it's impossible. Realize it would take us five years to process this data. So you just throw it all out. And then you figure out, like, let's just find some kind of quick and dirty thing. Like, you know, do you know your tax number? Can you tell us how much tax you paid last tax period? And if so, we're just going to put the money in your bank and sort it out later because a few people might abuse the system, but in the big picture, it's going to accomplish more of the objective we want. All I can say is I've got many friends who work inside government bureaucracies, and it's totally fascinating how when you're running a government, you make decisions for very different reasons

that individuals make decisions, and they're still the right decisions. Yeah, so speaking of governments and- Oh, are you going to try to segue from that? Did I give you a segue? I gave you an easy one. Like, I'd master a segue. Here we go.

Scott So, there was a big leak to ProPublica. Basically, the tax information of a bunch of billionaires like Bezos and Elon Musk and Warren Buffett was leaked. And basically, these people are not really paying taxes. So, I mean, I think Jeff Bezos' functional tax rate was 0.98%. Elon Musk's was 3.27%. And Warren Buffett's was 0.1%. So this is, I mean, you know... This is a really kind of bombshell revelation.

Chris Yeah, it's really been all over kind of the headlines and the news and the late-night talk shows over there in your country, hasn't it?

Scott Yeah, yeah, no, it's been talked about a lot. And it's just really arresting in that, you know, you have these companies, you have these individuals that are just basically not paying any taxes. And, you know, it's funny because Mitch McConnell went on the Hugh Hewitt radio show and was saying, it's very important to remember that in this country we don't tax wealth. which is right by and large right like you know like like we like capital gains right like you have to you have to cash out your stuff to get taxed on it right so if you keep it if you have a bunch of capital investment and you keep it in the stocks or whatever and um you know it's increasing in value you don't get taxed on it right unless you cash out on it and you actually make cash gains and then you

so it's just pretty interesting that that there's just two different sorts of tax systems There's tax systems for people that are workers that draw salaries and things like that. And this is why it was really interesting when Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama and they released their tax returns. Mitt Romney, even though he's much wealthier than Obama, paid a lower tax rate.

Chris Because of the source of his money.

Scott Yes, his money is all through investments. And Obama's, you know, just gets a normal kind of paycheck and stuff. So it raises an interesting question, like, what's the nature of inequality, right?

Chris Because clearly... Right, and that is kind of, there's been like a billion headlines discussing and kind of gawking at, you know, the private financial data of the richest people in the world. And so there is this kind of gawker effect, I think, of the information. But I think you're right, as we kind of looked at... Behind that specific thing that everyone's talking about, but also just the broader question of this word, inequality, which is a giant word in politics and society today and probably needs to be explored a lot more.

Scott Yeah, yeah, I think it's interesting because I think we all just assume we're for equality, right? Everybody's for... Inequality must be a bad thing. Right, but you know, it's interesting, you look at, you know... Both Plato and Aristotle in their visions of human society. I mean, they both, they had radically different kind of views on how society should be organized. But the one thing they could agree on is that inequality is inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing, right? I mean, neither of them, when they're thinking about their political visions, think about equality. And, you know, it's... So, aspirationally, it's not always been something that has been esteemed.

Chris There is something quite, and you might know this specific piece of political history more than me, but I feel like there is something in kind of the French and American political revolutions that That's where we really started to marry freedom with equality. You know, you think of the French Revolution as like, yeah, liberté, égalité, fraternité. Like, égalité, that was like part of the deal and part of the legitimacy of the overthrow of... The Royal Authority was this notion that in some kind of more natural state, we ought to be equal.

Scott Which is interesting, because you think about nature is not a very equal state, right? Although you could argue, I mean, you could argue this either way, though, because I guess you could say, on one level, right, Darwinian evolution is pretty, you know, the strong are the winners, right? You know, it doesn't favor equality amongst... Although, if you're in a hunter-gatherer society, you are actually probably in much more of an egalitarian state, because everybody's kind of doing all the same things. You have this shared kind of labor. And not that you don't have some kind of clan or tribal leadership structure, but in that kind of society, it's not stratified. Most people have to learn. You've got the hunters and the gatherers, and you're all working together, and you're doing mostly the same sort of stuff. So I guess you could argue that there is, in certain states of nature... I think why this is great to be talking about this now is because the ProPublica story and kind of the backdrop of the conversation you're having in the US about

Chris Thank you very much. David Pérez- Maybe the kind of the classic starting point, you know, if we were in some kind of theory class, the classic starting point is going to be the political theorist John Rawls, who, you know, wrote this classic of political theory called Justice as Fairness. And his, you know, his kind of thought experiment, which There must have been so many undergraduate, like, poli sci essays written on John Rawls and his theory of justice. But his basic argument was that inequality is fair if it leads to the least well-off being better off. So kind of his argument that inequality makes sense if by incentivizing people to really strive and achieve by letting them have fruits of that striving, if that incentive environment helps the whole of society to improve, including the least well-off, then that's got to be fair. That makes sense that there is that kind of inequality in an economic situation. Because actually, to level it would make everybody worse off, and that can't be better.

Scott And also, he kind of came up right with the concept of the veil of ignorance, where when you're making societal policies, you should make it with this veil of ignorance, meaning that you're behind the veil and you don't know if you're... Right. Am I one of the poor people or one of the rich people? Right. Right. So you should make a policy not knowing how you'd be affected by it, which is obviously the opposite of the way most modern democracies work with lobbyists and things like that. What you do, especially, and this is the thing about economic inequality, the more money you have... The more you can get beyond the veil of ignorance and shape things for your interests, right? So, I mean, that's one of the challenging things, I think, about the way we're making societal arrangements is that, you know, it's no surprise. And it's just interesting, too, because you see this trend in the United States, thinking about this taxation thing. You know, when Eisenhower was president, the top tax rate was like 89%. Kennedy took it to like low 60s or something, and people thought that was crazy. People thought Kennedy was radical. Then Reagan took it to, like, 38. And ever since the 38, you can just see, like, if you look at charts, I've seen lots of charts that just chart from when Reagan does this on how just the people whose incomes grow are the wealthiest, and everyone else's income for adjusted dollars is stagnant or going down. You know, then Bush took it down to 34%.

And when Obama was president, and they wanted to let the Bush tax cuts expire, and let the top tax bracket go back up to like 38%, people were saying Obama was a socialist. I'm like, basically, he just wanted to let the top 1% bracket go back to where it was under Reagan, which, again, you could argue, I mean, Reagan was a pretty significant game-changer for American society, American politics, but that's one of the biggest game-changers, the way we treated wealth. And it was bipartisan. I mean, like, Eisenhower was a Republican. It had an 89%. I mean, this was kind of a bipartisan thing where we just, we taxed The super-rich, pretty highly. And it created a pretty vibrant middle class. Which is a pretty rare thing in world history, to have a vibrant middle class. But we've kind of had it in this country. And I think... I mean, that's to me the challenge is when you look at these stories of these tax rates, right? Or what does it mean when we say, you know, American corporate tax rates are the highest in the world or whatever, but with all these loopholes, like I think GE a couple years ago paid nothing in taxes. You know, basically they got money back.

So what do these things even mean? I appreciate the Rawlsian question you raised, because how is it that we tend to societal arrangements in a way that would be the rising tide that would lift all boats? And it seems like concentrating the wealth in the hands of the wealthy doesn't seem to do it.

Chris So that's right. I think that that's where, you know, I think even a lot of economists have arrived at that point. So back up a step. If the campfire we're sitting around is what is inequality? At the moment, we're talking about economic inequality and income inequality. And there are definitely a few other pathways leading off this campfire that I also want to explore, because I think that I think that that's part of the blind spot, in a sense, is that when we talk about inequality, as you say, one, we kind of assume it's a negative, which I think, you know, and probably we live in a moment where that is true. But it's also intellectually interesting to kind of keep room for the positive, creative powers of me being taller than you. I mean, there's all sorts of reasons why the world is structured the way it is, Scott. But also that there are many other dimensions to life than just wealth and income that in some ways maybe have a more profound effect upon our relative well-being. So I want to get into some of those things too, but just staying on kind of income inequality for a moment. I think that there's a lot of kind of very mainstream like economic thinking now that says like, yes, you know, the basic intuition that incentives help society and everybody. And so you you don't want to. You know, sort of take away everybody's earning power and then distribute everybody a food ration so that everyone has exactly the same consumption possibilities. I mean, we've tried that. What tends to happen, if I take the China example, Thank you very much.

David Plylar So it's hard to build a complex ecosystem of exchange without allowing all sorts of variety of outcomes. Having said that, yeah, it seems that a lot of mainstream economists are of the view that at a certain level, when there's too much, particularly like wealth inequality, It actually is a drag on the economy. And one of the reasons is that when you've got so much money that you don't have anything else to spend it on, so you save it. And so it just kind of stagnates and it pools. It doesn't circulate as much. But if you took that same money and gave it to people who don't even have a home, then they would buy a home, right? Don't yet have... The kind of the capture of political institutions that happen when there are extreme wealth differences, right? If I'm Jeff Bezos and I can go around and I can hand out pretty big favors that governments come to me and they want to get, like, where am I going to put my next headquarters?

And so I have a capacity to sort of tilt this playing field In ways that benefit me but maybe wouldn't be the same choices that all of the voters who democratically elected these people would like them to make. So there are all of these destabilizing or kind of corrupting influences of extreme wealth differences. And I think that that is something we can point to and quite clearly say that, yeah, that is inequality, and probably inequality in a negative sense, because it's holding us all back some ways.

Scott Yeah, and there's a certain kind of inequality, I think, that almost becomes seemingly intractable, where, you know, if you look at the U.S., for example, it just costs so much money to run for office, right, to run for political office, to get elected and to get reelected. So you just, I mean, and with the creation of things like super PACs where people can just give basically unlimited amounts of money to these political action committees, these things are just stack the deck. I mean, they just, it's funny because it's not rocket science, but... But you don't hear people complain about it that much. You don't hear outrage that the super rich have so much more access to the levers of power than the middle class or working class or poor people. Not that you don't hear criticism of it at all, but it's surprising how accommodated we've become to it.

But that's the thing that is interesting, is the degree to which we become accommodated to certain forms of inequality that become problematic. And I don't know if that's also, in America, because everyone thinks they're going to be the next millionaire.

Chris Right, and so let's take that as a, I think that's a great phrase to kind of bring back to the central fire and then explore some of the other dimensions of it. Because I'm interested in kind of taking the opportunity of America having a giant convulsing moment about inequality economically to talk about all sorts of other dimensions of it. But this point that you landed on, I think that you can look at... I think we can take that in many other directions to explore and kind of shine a light on. On the other work that the kind of inequality has upon shaping our world, I was reading just the other day, it's a very short book by Mary Beard, who has done, like here in the UK, is maybe the preeminent scholar on ancient Greece and ancient Rome. And she also wrote a book on women in power and took like this deep cultural look at kind of the structure of the concept of gender in Western society. And I underlined this one sentence. The thought really summarized it for me. So my basic premise is that our mental cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. And she was talking about how from the times of ancient Rome and before, if you thought of a person in power, probably the picture in your head was of a man, just as if you think of a college professor. Chances are, still today, the picture in your head is going to be And so this is...

One of the profound dimensions of inequality is just the cultural coding of roles and identities in society. Now we are becoming woke to a lot of this cultural code, but I would hypothesize that still most of it is latent. We're not looking at it. And what do you do with With ways of looking at the world that are just deeply coded to see differences.

Scott Sometimes it's situational. Like in this country, I was actually surprised at how the George Floyd, you know, the police brutality and murder of George Floyd actually didn't just spark anger and protest, but there were systemic questions raised. And widely. I mean, like... The Black Lives Matter movement has had a pretty wide impact in the cultural conversation this past year, which is interesting and helpful. And I think it's caused people to take seriously. You know, I've talked with a lot of white people who started asking serious questions about the way policing is done, right? And reflecting on their own experiences with police power and things like that, and taking a lot more seriously the testimony and experience of African Americans. So, I mean, but yeah, I mean, but I think you're right. Like, oftentimes this stuff does go relatively unchallenged. Or it's just, you know, you kind of accept it, right? You just kind of accommodate and accept it.

Which I think, you know, again, if you compare the average level of outrage at racial inequality right now with economic inequality, I think it doesn't feel to me to be even comparable. I think the outrage and interrogating of the racial inequality right now in the United States and throughout the world. I mean, the George Floyd stuff did spark some international questions about race and power and authority, but it's not as widespread on economic inequality and power, right?

Chris But does that surprise you? I mean, because, you know, one of the things about economic inequality is, and maybe we've got this entirely wrong, but we live in this culture and understand, and we just did it too the past 20 minutes, that some degree of it is okay, and it's just that there's this kind of slippery slope, and nobody's quite sure where that slope is, but at a certain point, now it's a problem. And... And where that point is, is a kind of a live debate. And you can kind of debate it from many dimensions. But racial inequality or gender inequality, this is clear-cut. The presence of it is a wrong. And that's how it's framed. So it doesn't surprise me at all that the... The cultural conversation is both much clearer and in some ways the battle lines are much more clearly drawn on these non-economic dimensions of inequality where right and wrong, good and evil are much more black and white.

Scott Yeah, you don't hear people making rousing moral defenses of gender inequality or racial inequality, but you do hear people make, and across the political spectrum, make, as you're saying, even someone like Rawls. There are arguments. Thank you very much.

Chris An economic and political freedom, which, to eliminate the economic inequality, you would have to deny people. It's definitely interesting that we use this one word, inequality, and we often list the different forms of inequality, income inequality, racial inequality, gender inequality, but when you look at them... There are some very big differences in how we evaluate each form of it.

Scott And maybe that's because... So I think on one level, right, the grounds and conditions for inequality are rooted in particularity. If there was no particularity, there probably wouldn't be much inequality, right? If we were all... Thank you very much. Inequality stems from, it's just particularity, right? And particularity in itself is not a problem, right? In fact, I don't think we'd want to live in a world without particularity. But the question is, at what point does sort of the ground level inequality that exists as a necessary condition of particularity become problematic and maybe immoral or maybe oppressive?

Chris I didn't understand that. But what it, or at least what I heard, and what for me is a clearer statement of what you were saying, and sorry, this is just in my own words, is that it seems to me that there's a difference actually between, if we confine the inequality debate to a material debate, We're going to meter that with laws, sovereignty, civil rights, market access. But as long as we're thinking about inequality in material terms, we're always going to be in this world of like there's there's mine and there's thine right there's some stuff that's mine there's some stuff and that's yours and we're always going to be creating these distinctions and and and status and and divides from one another that's the material plane of inequality but you know the kind of There's a plane of dignity or a plane of emotion, of personhood, where it seems like an equality is achievable, or at least we can imagine it morally. That kind of involves, on that plane, I don't feel superior to you, I don't feel inferior to you. We can actually meet on the same status plane, and we can all coexist there.

And maybe that's another way to state it. I'll stop and then let you react to it, is that when we talk about material inequality, we're never actually willing to talk about material equality. But when we talk about racial inequality or gender inequality or all sorts of the immaterial forms of inequality, then the goal is equality. We have a story around that. So what do you make of that?

Scott Yeah, no, I think that's right, and I think, you know, it's interesting, because in the Christian tradition, the term for this is the Imago Dei, the image of God, and so there's this idea that... Oh, that's so cool. Wait, wait, wait, what's this term? We've got to put that in the show notes.

Chris I'm slowly learning my Latin from you.

Scott Yeah, no, in Genesis 1, you know, at the end of the creation story, God says, let us make humankind in our own image, like in the divine image. And so there's this idea that, look, not everybody... Some people are going to be smarter than other people. Some people are going to be stronger than other people. Some people are going to be more entrepreneurial or less entrepreneurial. But I think what you're saying is this kind of Imago Dei concept. Everybody deserves the same level of dignity. Everybody deserves a certain kind of equal regard, despite their differences. And that's across the board. So we have that kind of concept. The question becomes, is there such a thing? Is there kind of an economic situation That actually functionally undergirds that kind of dignity. Where there's a power structure that's so different and so unilaterally unbalanced that that sort of common dignity is functionally eroded.

Chris Right, it's lip service.

Scott Right, because some people are just more of a person than other people.

Chris So you're saying there has to be a connection between those planes of existence?

Scott Yeah, I think so.

Chris If we believe in racial equality... And there is a clear statistical racial divide in our wealth. And the racial divide explains a lot of it. Then we haven't achieved that racial equality, the racial dignity. And so what you're saying is that...

Scott Yeah, because I think what you were able to do just now, and I think what we all do, is we kind of set out these planes and make them distinct, right? And we can do that conceptually, but are they really ever distinct, right? Do power relations and stuff really compromise the ability of somebody to really have that kind of ideal equal dignity we're thinking about? And is that the case also with...

Chris It seems to me that the conversations about wealth inequality tend to remain kind of economic arguments versus saying that if there is that extreme wealth inequality, it must be... That there are other deeper inequalities in society that we are not owning up about. That the wealth inequality is kind of like a proxy or an indicator or a kind of litmus test of a moral inequality in society at a certain point. That's interesting. I mean, so the interesting, one interesting dimension to take that is we've been talking a lot about sort of, you know, Case of the, just the difference in outcomes among, you know, the wealthy, the poor, the resilient, the precarious. Do you know, I was looking at a study just a couple of days ago, and it was looking at extreme poverty globally. And if you look at like 2018, 2019, the projection was that extreme poverty globally was going to fall from about 500 million people to about 300 million people.

Over the past couple of years. And we don't really notice it, you and me. I mean, I guess that, I don't know, when you get corn tortillas, they're fractionally more expensive. But, you know, when you're living off of staples, it can be the difference between sort of being fed and starvation. And that's just one example. I mean, the... Before we were talking about the COVID pandemic, development economists were talking about the AIDS pandemic, which doesn't even really make headlines anymore in the United States or here in the UK. But three quarters of global AIDS cases are in Africa today. So there are these There are all of these dimensions of inequality. Once we start to evaluate our moral progress in inequality terms, it gets really bad for us.

Scott Yeah, but that is a deeply moral question, right? If we've got systems that are not eroding poverty but drastically increasing it, right? Is that an acceptable form of inequality like Rawls is talking about? Or is this, again, a kind of systemic inequality that gets worse and worse, right? Where the more you have an entrenched class or group, the more their interests are served, which, again, it's, you know, a feedback loop, right? Where you just get more and more influential and powerful.

Chris And it's kind of, you know, this feedback loop... So you're familiar with fractals, right? These kind of patterns that, you know, the micropattern repeats at the macro level. So, I mean, you can see fractals in... This dynamic of income, wealth, and inequalities are many other inequalities, too. I'm flipping through my book.

Scott Quote you to yourself.

Chris This isn't a very exciting quote. It's just quoting statistics that I quoted. You know, in Paris, people who live northeast of the river, the Seine, bi-sextasy, people who live northeast are only half as likely to have a university degree as those who live to the southwest. In Australia, mature adults earning less than $20,000 per year are more than twice as likely to suffer from chronic illness as those earning more than $50,000. I mean, yeah, deep inequalities in health, education, and opportunity remain, and in many cases have worsened

Scott And from the Rawlsian kind of perspective, as you were saying earlier, or not even inevitable, maybe we could argue, have some positive societal function. And what kinds are really just, ought we be, ought we find, ought we be indignant about, or ought we really find problematic?

Chris Problematic and, and I guess another one would be kind of like, just dysfunctional. Yeah, you know, it's been a long time since I've read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. I don't know if I would recommend that book. I mean, you got to be... We'll put it in the show notes for those who haven't read it. It does feel like, you know, here's somebody who really liked to think hard about profound moral questions, which is great. But, I mean, he could have done with a really good copy editor. I mean... Or just go out to more comedy clubs or something. There are a lot of ways to say things, and some of them are more interesting than others. And he didn't always find those ways. But I do think that if some... And I'm sure it's happening. I have to reach out to some people and ask, who's doing this now? But like a contemporary complexity scientist or just an evolutionary biologist, anybody who's thinking about ecosystems and how healthy ecosystems work, I think if they read John Rawls' The Theory of Justice, they would say what's missing here is a kind of organic dimension.

I mean, the whole argument is purely rational, that any inequality is fine as long as it actually is a positive incentive that helps even the worst off to do more. But there's a kind of missing social dimension to that, which is just what happens to the organic body of the community as inequality increases? You know, I think of kind of the concrete experience that I think a lot of us had over the past year. At the outset of the pandemic, everybody is stuck at home and we kind of, we saw anew this class of labor that had always been there called essential workers. And there's something, I think, quite insightful about how divided the lives of people in our neighborhoods had become by income, by education, by age. That when we went into lockdown, it was remarkable to meet these people. Like, wow, we live in

the same neighborhood. I never knew that. Which to me suggests, is that part of the corrosive aspect of inequality? That the rational calculus of what's fair just misses entirely. That the farther apart we are,

Scott But really what they're doing is they've just taken a late modern Western take and put it on a train. And the resource is a little more concentrated and scarce. And so it's really the inequality that exists on this train is just a pronounced form of what existed in Western culture before they got on the train. So when you're looking at it, it seems pretty harsh, but it's like, well, no, this is just like taking the society we live in, in the kind of late modern capitalist West. And concentrating it into one small social context. And so it looks like a lot more unequal. And that's funny because to the essential workers, they're like in the second class. There's like first, second, third class, and then the enders. They're on the very back of the train. So these essential workers are somewhere between second and third class, right?

It's so interesting how all these things are reified in this post-apocalyptic drama. But you look at it and it's like, yeah, it's post-apocalyptic and sci-fi, but really it's just concentrating what exists all around us all the time and putting it in a reified fictional context. So it looks worse, but I don't know that it is any different than the world we live in. It's just because it's more diffuse, you don't notice it.

Chris And what do you take from it? Is it a happy experiment?

Scott I mean, it's dark. I mean, the show is dark. The show is dark. The show is dark. It's pretty... And it does wind up in revolution. I mean, there is... They do wind up in a revolt against the system.

Chris So that's what's interesting, and I feel like that's... You've put your finger on, I suppose, maybe the hardest question to answer about inequality is whether it's good or bad, the benefits outweigh the costs or whatever, just how much will people put up with? I mean, when you identify it, then it's kind of real, and then it's a thing that's there that divides us, and it becomes a powerful and clear evidence to me, on the wrong side of that inequality, that the world isn't working for me. The way the world is set up, it's not working for me. That maybe I have a chance of being in a better world if we bust this one up.

Scott But, you know, it's interesting. And this is, to me, the biggest... I don't know if it's a failure of Marxism, but I think it's a place where he just seems to have gotten it wrong. And that Marx would have imagined... Right, this is like the dialectical, you know, idea that, like, you know, there's these material struggles and stuff. And he thought, basically, that the Marxist, the Communist Revolution... What happened in a place like England, or a developed United States kind of context, or something like that, where you have these inequalities, but you also have these economic resources, and there's so much wealth, and so much... He would never have thought it's going to happen in Russia, in a kind of peasant-farmer kind of context, or even in China. I don't think Marx would have even thought... He would have thought you would have had to go through these very advanced capitalist stages first.

Which then would get people so frustrated because of so much abundance that's so unequal. And that really... Where I think Marx's theory seems to be failing right now is societies like that don't tend to revolt. The abundance does not make people revolutionary.

Chris Well, I mean, so that's an interesting... I mean, you're the country that just had an insurrection a few months ago around your presidential election. But I guess you can argue that that was quite an isolated thing, and it never really threatened the... Right. Well, so a couple of interesting things there. I think, yeah, you're right. I mean, where Marx was really interesting was, you know, kind of in the way that, you know, like there are people who put like a big frame on what's going on in the world and a big explanatory theory for it. And his whole argument that human history is driven by this dialectic, this kind of back and forth. Michael Garfield, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson. Michael Garfield, Slavoj Žižek, Jordan Peterson You know, in the 1940s, he published this book called The Great Transformation, which in that book, the question that he basically asked was, like, how did they ever come to this?

You know, the 19th century was pretty peaceful in Europe, and now here I am in, like, it's not even the midway point of the 20th century, and we've had two world wars. Like, how did that happen? And he argued that it was these forces of industrialization that had just... So dismantled society. I mean, this fabulously successful technology of production. I was reading a kind of a retrospective on Polanyi's life and he was talking about how, you know, someone born in 1875 had more in common in terms of their material life, had more in common with a soldier in ancient Rome. Then with their own great-grandchildren. Like that's how radical the transition was. And so Polanyi's argument was kind of very much in the tradition of Marx is that society reacted. And one reaction was to try to, like, protect the national body. You know, we are being, you know, our national identity, our people is being dismantled by these atomizing industrial forces. And that was fascism. And then the other reaction was, you know, the worker, like much as Marx had predicted, is being atomized, is being alienated by the industrial forces, and that was communism. And so for him, it was quite, I guess, a warning signal to the future that this dialectic theory does seem to do some pretty good explanatory work.

So we need to think pretty carefully about the relationship. And the ebb and flow between economy and society in order to prevent the worst reactions to that difference. There was definitely, as an aside, there was a whole bunch of... Thank you very much. Now I'm off in the woods. I don't know how I got here. Lead me back to our campfire.

Scott No, yeah, no, I think that's, and I think that Polanyi stuff is helpful, because I think we're, you know, we talk often on this podcast about it's a different, it's a new world, and we need new maps, and that's, and Polanyi's a mapmaker, and I think, you know, these are the kind of questions that I hope we'll continue to ask on this podcast, because again, like some of the things, you know, it's, as you mentioned earlier, I think, it might have been before we started recording, You know, the whole idea that it's not seeing something that no one's seen, it's thinking differently about something that everyone's seeing, right? Like, you know, about thinking, and that's the challenge, right? Because discovery of something new often is serendipitous, but the hard thing is to look at reality on the ground and actually reimagine, you know, the parts in play and to actually think of it, you know, I think I've probably said this before, but there's a guy here in the States, his name's Paul Tripp, and he's a... Kind of a guy who taught at a seminary, he taught counseling, and this great line from one of his books, he said, in my experience as a counselor, most people don't need information, they need imagination.

And I think that's, I mean, that's part of the key, and I mean, I think that's, this has been a great discussion, which I've appreciated, because I think it's how to think imaginatively about these realities, so that we can see the thing that's there differently. The thing that we all take for granted as shared differently, that to me is sort of the most challenging and ultimately probably more valuable long-term work than just mere discovery of something new.

Chris Yeah, I think I agree. And looking back on this conversation, why this conversation was important for me is You know, so there were these headlines, and there was definitely a moment in your country this week, and, I mean, it made headlines here, too. Again, it's fascinating, gawking reading to read about the taxes of, like, the most wealthy people in the world. But it does feel like the exploration of... What do we mean by inequality? And what is it? And what role does it play? And why is it that we can imagine equality of some things, but we can't imagine equality of other things? I think that this is a great time to be It is this notion of inequality that provides the motive energy for radical societal upheaval. And we do have, like in your country, we do have a kind of orderly social technologies to... Thank you very much.

And I feel like we didn't, this is probably unfair, but I would invite myself, this is what I take away from this conversation and all of our listeners, to really come away from this week where inequality was in the news, to really think about the urgency to work on equality in many dimensions as kind of one of the healthiest and most stabilizing things that we can do.

Scott Well, and also, I just want to say, as your friend and as your colleague, I do appreciate so much of the work you do around these kinds of questions, that you set up societies and convene groups of people to ask questions. And that's what we try to do on this podcast. And so I appreciate the partnership, and I'm thrilled to partner with you in that kind of work, because I think we need more of it. We need more of those kinds of organic

Chris Where your explorations this week have been going on the nature of inequality in society and our relationship to it. And if you're on Clubhost, join us on Clubhost on Mondays. Maybe we'll meet you there and pick up conversations.

Scott Yeah, because we'd love to engage you. Yeah, we'd love to do that. Thanks, my friend. This was great. It was great, Scott. Thanks a lot.