Middle class inequality is harmful

Opinion: September 15, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Daniel Akst

Newsday

Fifty years ago, Kurt Vonnegut published a short story about a society beset by radical egalitarianism. Titled “Harrison Bergeron” and set in 2081, it features a government official called the Handicapper General who is determined to make everyone equal. This entails attaching bags of lead birdshot to graceful ballerinas, and hiding the faces of the indecently beautiful behind masks. Smart people are required by law to wear devices that emit excruciating noises every few seconds, shattering their concentration.

It’s a radical and heartbreaking piece of fiction. And it raises profound questions — about the extent to which people are entitled to the fruits of their good fortune, about what we owe one another, and about the role government should play in rectifying nature’s unfairness.

Pertinent questions

Those questions are especially pertinent now, half a century later. Inequality has been growing for a generation in this country, and both our economy and political culture are changing in ways likely to exacerbate it. The problem is twofold. First, the global economy has evolved in ways that heap ever greater rewards on the brightest and most self-disciplined people. Blue-collar workers, meanwhile, buffeted by trade and technology, have had their world turned upside down. And second, America does less to ameliorate these trends than most comparable countries. They have universal health insurance, for example.

Higher education is cheaper (if inferior). Taxes are higher on the highest earners. Workers get a greater share of income.

In some ways, we are victims of our own success. By ruthlessly emphasizing merit, we seemed to be moving toward a fairer society. But a funny thing happened on the way to utopia: We didn’t get there. Class mobility seems to have stalled. High-earners marry one another, exacerbating income differences.

The psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who studied the heritability of intelligence, foresaw what was coming back in 1971. “Greater wealth, health, freedom, fairness, and educational opportunity,” he wrote, “are not going to give us the egalitarian society of our philosophical heritage. It will instead give us a society sharply graduated, with ever greater innate separation between the top and the bottom.” Vonnegut’s egalitarian dystopia is an eloquent warning against government abuses in the cause of equality. That was a reasonable worry in the days when communism was very much alive. Maybe it still is.

Cheap overeas labor

But what a difference half a century makes. Our economy may yet evolve in ways that reduce inequality, perhaps by raising the value of plumbing, auto repair and other skills that can’t be delivered from China or superseded by technology. Yet cheap overseas labor and distance-obliterating networks threaten many white-collar jobs, too. So I’m betting on even more inequality ahead.

Daniel Akst, a columnist for Newsday, is the author of “We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess” from Penguin Press. Distributed by MCT Information Services.