In 1820 the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in his magnificently crafted Philosophy of Right,
had written with some despair of the moral squalor and of the ravages
that poverty brings in its wake. The state of poverty, he argued, is not
an aberration, it is a product of industrial society, of the
overproduction and underconsumption which marks this social order. But
it is precisely society that banishes its victims to the twilight zone
of collective life. Here, removed from the advantages of solidarity that
civil society offers, the poor are reduced to a heap of fragmented
atoms, rabble, poebel. When the standard of living of a large
mass of people falls below a certain subsistence level, he wrote, we see
a loss of the sense of right and wrong, of honesty and of self-respect.
“Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is
established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one
class by another.”
Hegel suggests that poverty is a social
phenomenon. One, society is complicit in the creation and recreation of
poverty. Destitution, that is, is the outcome of a skewed economy. Two,
poverty breeds unfortunate consequences, such as suffering, which
seriously demoralises human beings. Three, the existence of large
numbers of the poor pose a direct threat to the social order, simply
because the poor are (justly) resentful of their exclusion from the
benefits of society.
We should be seriously reflecting on Hegel’s
criticism of a society that refuses to correct the wrongs it has heaped
on its own people, in the light of the research findings of the
economist Thomas Piketty and his colleague Lucas Chancel.
Inequality in India
In
a paper aptly titled ‘Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British
Raj to Billionaire Raj?’, they conclude that income inequality in India
is at the highest level since 1922, when the country’s income tax law
was conceived, and that the top 1% earners corner 22% of income. These
research findings should send a powerful warning signal to power elites,
leaders who prefer to concentrate on the politics of beef, brutal
repression of dissent, and curtailment of basic human freedoms, even as
the lives of thousands of Indians are mired in mind-numbing poverty.
There
is more to the proposition that some persons are poor beyond belief,
and others are rich beyond belief in India. P is poor, we can say, when
she does not possess access to the basic resources which enable q, or s,
or m to consume nutritious food, avoid ill health, attend school, take
up a job, and own a home, let alone go on holiday or possess a car. This
implies that p is not just poor, she is unequal to q, s, or m, since
the latter three, unlike p, have access to certain advantages that p
does not. Poverty is the effect of inequality as well as the prime
signifier of inequality. And inequality is demeaning.
Implications for society
Arguably,
inequality is not only a matter of statistics. It is a shattering
reflection on the kind of society we live in. Logically, if the economic
ordering of society is responsible for ill-being, it is obliged to
remedy the wrongs that it has visited upon the heads of the poor. This
constitutes a basic code of justice. People who have been wronged are
entitled to ask for justice. If justice is not delivered, inequalities
are reinforced and compounded over time.
Resultantly,
people fated to occupy the lowliest rungs of the social ladder are not
only denied access to basic material requirements that enable them to
live a decent life, they are likely to be socially overlooked,
politically irrelevant except in times of elections when their votes
bring parties into power, disdained, and subjected to disrespect in and
through the practices of everyday life. To be unequal is to be denied
the opportunity to participate in social, economic, and cultural
transactions from a plane of equality.
Starkly put, the presence
of massive inequality reflects sharply and pejoratively on the kind of
social relations that we find in India. Because these social
relationships are indisputably unequal, they cannot but be entrenched in
massive discrimination and exploitation. Can we reflect on inequality
without taking on exploitation and discrimination? And unless we
confront these background inequalities directly, will not inequality
continue to be produced and reproduced along with the production and
reproduction of a lopsided social order, indeed as an integral part of
this order?
Morality of mutual respect
Let us not
understate the implications of inequality, it violates a basic
democratic norm: the equal standing of citizens. Persons have equal
standing because each human being has certain capacities in common with
other human beings, for instance, the capacity to make her own history
in concert with other human beings. Of course the histories that persons
make might not be the histories they chose to make, but this is not the
issue at hand. What is important is that each person realises this
ability.
The
principle of equal standing generates at least two robust principles of
democratic morality. For one, equality is a relation that obtains
between persons in respect of some fundamental characteristic that they
share in common. Equality is, morally speaking, a default principle.
Therefore, and this is the second postulate, persons should not be
discriminated against on grounds such as race, caste, gender, ethnicity,
sexual preferences, disability, or class. These features of the human
condition are morally irrelevant.
These two postulates of
political morality yield the following implications. To treat persons
equally because they possess equal standing is to treat them with
respect. The idea that one should treat persons with respect not only
because some of these persons possess some special skill or talent, for
example skilled cricketers, gifted musicians, or literary giants, but
because persons are human beings, is by now part of common sense
morality. If someone were to ask, ‘equality for what’, we can answer
that equality assures equal standing and respect, and respect is an
essential prerequisite for the making of human beings who can
participate in the multiple transactions of society from a position of
confidence and self-respect. If they cannot do so, the government is
simply not taking the well-being of its citizens seriously.
There
is urgent need, in the face of government inaction and insensitivity
towards people trapped in inequality as a social relation to invoke the
collective conscience of Indian citizens. If the right to equality is
violated, citizens should be exercised or agitated about this violation.
But for this to occur, for society to feel deeply about the right on
offer, we have to incorporate the right to equality into political
thinking, into our values, and into political vocabularies. The project
requires the harnessing of creative imagination and courage on the one
hand, and careful reasoning, persuasion, and dialogue on the other. The
task also demands the investment of rather high degrees of energy and
time. But this is essential because a political consensus on what
constitutes, or should constitute the basic rules of society, is central
to our collective lives. The political is not a given, it has to be
constructed, as Karl Marx had told us long ago, through determined and
sustained political intervention.
source: The Hindu; Link: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/equality-for-what/article19677980.ece
Income inequality is the greatest irony of a Welfare State
Income inequality is the unequal
distribution of household or individual income across the various
participants in an economy. Income inequality is often presented as the
percentage of income to a percentage of population.
Income
inequality is often associated with the idea of income “fairness.” Most
people consider it “unfair” if the rich have a disproportionally larger
portion of a country’s income compared to the general population. The
causes of income inequality can vary significantly by region, gender,
education and social status.
First
and foremost cause of undermining equality in India is growth factor.
With economic growth taking place at a higher rate than before,
different people in the country continue to earn differently. In
particular, the incomes of Indians in upper and middle quartiles are
rising faster as compared to those for the poor do. This is a common
phenomenon when an economy is in its growing stage. The main explanation
for this disparity is the shift from an agricultural economy to an
industrial economy.
Implications of income inequality:
- High
and sustained levels of inequality, especially inequality of income and
opportunity can entail large social costs. Entrenched inequality of
outcomes can significantly undermine individuals’ educational and
occupational choices.
- Inequality
of income does not generate the “right” incentives if it rests on
rents. In that event, individuals have an incentive to divert their
efforts toward securing favored treatment and protection, resulting in
resource misallocation, corruption, and nepotism, with attendant adverse
social and economic consequences.
- Income
inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient, which is 0 when
everybody has the same income and 1 when one person has all the income)
negatively affects growth and its sustainability.
- Higher
inequality in income lowers growth by depriving the ability of
lower-income households to stay healthy and accumulate physical and
human capital.
- Income inequality dampens investment, and hence growth, by fueling economic, financial, and political instability.
Ways to tackle inequality in India:
- Despite
being important to the electorate, inequality of income is absent from
major political campaigns. There is need to make inequality as a
political agenda.
- Government
should work towards reducing asset inequality through redistributive
land reforms but also through rationalising taxes, preventing monopoly
of control over water, forests and mineral resources and reducing
financial concentration.
- There
is need to tackle bias against caste and gender first of all by
recognising the value and dignity of all work (including unpaid work)
and all workers (including those in the most difficult arduous and
degraded occupations).
- Inequality
can be reduced by providing greater voice to traditionally oppressed
and suppressed groups, including by enabling unions and association, and
making public and corporate private activity more transparent and
accountable to the people generally.
- The
media in India plays a role in sustaining inequality. This is becoming
an urgent problem. We must take measures to reduce corporate takeover
and manipulation of mass media.
- Policymakers
should not forget that technology has helped in reducing some of the
access barriers in India, particularly in relation to access to
information. Policymakers should focus on making technology cheaper and
deepening its penetration.
- As
far as India is concerned, most of the public places are inaccessible
to people with disabilities. As per the 2011 census, India has about 2.7
million people with disabilities, and only a handful of those enjoy
education and/or employment.
- The
gender inequality can be reduced by woman empowerment in genuine manner
with a right based approach, rather that treating woman as a
beneficiary of public schemes.
Measure of Income inequality: Gini coefficient
In
economics, the Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion
intended to represent the income or wealth distribution of a nation’s
residents, and is the most commonly used measure of inequality. It was
developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
The
Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency
distribution (for example, levels of income). A Gini coefficient of zero
expresses perfect equality, where all values are the same (for example,
where everyone has the same income). A Gini coefficient of 1 (or 100%)
expresses maximal inequality among values.
The
Gini coefficient is usually defined mathematically based on the Lorenz
curve, which plots the proportion of the total income of the population
(y axis) that is cumulatively earned by the bottom x% of the population
(see diagram). The line at 45 degrees thus represents perfect equality
of incomes. The Gini coefficient can then be thought of as the ratio of
the area that lies between the line of equality and the Lorenz curve
(marked A in the diagram) over the total area under the line of equality
source: http://www.insightsonindia.com/2017/09/18/secure-synopsis-14-september-2017/
