In an interview with CUNY’s Folio, Janet Gornick discusses elements of her 2012 commencement speech and why poverty and inequality are growing more important to the current debate.
Excerpt:
Does income inequality affect society differently from poverty and deprivation?
We’re still learning what the implications of inequality are, as distinct from the implications of deprivation. Poverty and inequality are related, but they’re different—especially in the U.S. context.
You can see the distinctive way in which Americans think about inequality when you consider the way that we measure poverty. All countries set a poverty line and consider households with income under that line to be poor. What’s interesting is that, in the U.S., we draw an “absolute” poverty line; that tells us how many households face economic deprivation, meaning that their incomes leave them unable to meet their basic needs. Specifically, in fact, we tie that poverty line to the cost of food. When we consider whether a given household is poor by this standard, the economic well-being of other American households isn’t relevant.
There’s another way to measure poverty, one that’s more common in Europe. That approach also sets a poverty line, and considers households with incomes below that line to be poor. But, instead of setting an “absolute” line, they set a “relative” line, meaning one that’s related to the median income in the country. Most often, if your household’s income is less than 50 percent of your country’s median income, then you’re said to be poor. That type of poverty—“relative poverty”—is, of course, a form of inequality. It defines poverty with respect to the standard of living in each country. In short, households are poor if their resources place them far below the middle.
We know what harm deprivation can do to society, that’s pretty clear, but what about what you call “relative poverty”—what about inequality itself—how does that hurt us?
One of the great debates in social science today—one that has intensified in the U.S. since the Occupy demonstrations last year—concerns the effects of income inequality. The debate addresses the question: Is income inequality harmful to a society, and, if so, how?
Generally speaking, there are two schools of thought about this.
Some focus on what we might call “instrumental” grounds, arguing that inequality is bad because it worsens a range of other outcomes. This argument has been popularized by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level. Wilkinson and Pickett conclude that large income disparities—within countries—worsen a multitude of outcomes, including physical and mental health, infant mortality and life expectancy, crime and incarceration, and educational performance. Today, many scholars are tackling this question, but, so far, I’d say that there’s little consensus about the existence or strength of these effects, or about any underlying causal mechanisms. Still, these claims are so worrisome that many of us concerned with inequality take them seriously, as we wait for future research to clarify the linkages.
Others take a different approach, focusing on what we might call “normative” grounds. They argue that extreme income disparities are incompatible with a fair and inclusive society. In other words, high levels of inequality— especially at U.S. levels—are, simply put, unacceptable. There’s something wrong with a country in which the “haves” have so much more than the “have-nots.” From this vantage point, determining the problematic nature of an unequal income distribution is not an empirical question; it’s a moral question. I find myself sympathetic to this view.
Read the entire interview: Inequality: It Matters, Folio, Winter 2013 (PDF)