How do you know its inequality when you see it?
Well, when one of two conditions are satisfied. The first one involves explicit rules or regulations that deny opportunities to people. So, a good example would be South African Apartheid. One group is denied privileges that are made available to others, and that’s inequality. Inequality is the desired result and it's actually what you observe.
The second condition, somewhat more subtle, is when you observe opportunities that are in principle available to everyone, but some people are taking advantage of them and others are not. That signals that one group does not have the skills, or the organizational capacity to take advantage of the opportunities. Something is missing. An example from the United States illustrates this second condition: private universities accept applications from everyone, but they get disproportionately very few applications from very poor people away from the two coasts – the east and the west coast.
The reason is that guidance counselors available to people that go to schools on the east coast, are not available at schools that people go to in poorer areas. They don’t come from families that have a history of going to college and so on, and therefore they don’t apply in the first place, even if they do somehow apply they don’t know how to write essays that will please the guidance counselors and so on. So, they end up not going to the college, perpetuating inequalities. So these are the two conditions.
