How do you know its inequality when you see it?
I think what is happening in social science --very broadly speaking--is that there’s a conceptual shift with this mainstreaming of the idea of inequality. We used to talk about poverty and unemployment before we had this radical popularisation of the concept of inequality with the work of Piketty and others. So what is the difference? I think inequality is different in that it includes the idea of a relation. So the notion of inequality is suggesting that there’s a kind of predatory relationship between people and social groups.
I think this concept of inequality contains three important presumptions. The first is that inequality is not some kind of original or natural condition. Inequality, as it’s seen and understood right now, is the outcome of a process. So, by contrast, poverty could be considered as sort of natural or default human condition in the absence of development.
Secondly the idea that inequality contains the presumption that there’s something morally suspect about this. So it’s a normative problem, and I think that’s because our political discourse about development and in the developed countries has somehow normatively valorised the idea of inequality. By using inequality in this way, we’re saying that there’s something wrong with it.
