How do you know it’s inequality when you see it?
This is a good question, and now there’s a much bigger conversation happening about the way inequality has been politicised in the Global North and South, and the difference between the two. We’ve got the data, but I think it’s still misleading because it only deals with on dimension: the money metric. It’s about Gini coefficients, and ignores a whole set of social inequalities. It also presumes that equality is about who has more than someone else. I’m not convinced by that.
I think the most damaging forms of inequality can’t be seen like that, for example, how much we consume, our education opportunities, or health outcomes. I actually agree with Charles Tilly, and a range of feminist scholars, who say that inequality is a relational phenomenon: relations between people and their wider institutional, or structural context. You might be really annoyed that I have an iPad, when you don’t, but you’d be really annoyed if I had got it through means where I abused my status. Or imagine that my children get jobs because I work in a particular organisation that gives them internships, when your children can’t. So it’s misuse of power and status that generate unequal relations, an uneven playing field.
So we know inequality when we see it, but the data only shows part of it. We need better theoretical methods of understanding how those inequalities relate to power and status.
