Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1996) ("Each year millions of children die from easy to beat disease, from malnutrition, and fomo bad drinking water. Among these children, about 3 million die from dehydrating diarrhea. As UNICEF has made clear to millions of us well-off American adults at one time or another, with a packet of oral rehydration salts that costs about 15 cents, a child can be saved form dying soon. [] So, as is reasonable to believe, you can easily mean a big difference for vulnerable children. [] If you'd contributed $100 to one of the UNICEF's most efficient lifesaving programs a couple of months ago, this month there'd be over thirty fewer children who, instead of painfully dying soon, would live reasonably long lives. Nothing here's special to the months just mentioned; similar thoughts hold for most of what's been your adult life, and most of mine, too. And, more important, unless we change our behavior [that is, stop simply tossing the UNICEF letter, unanswered, into the trash], similar thoughts will hold for our future. That moral fact moved me to do the work in moral philosophy filling this volume." Id. at 3-4.).
Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) (Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world's wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don't believe it even exists in this country." Id. at xiii. "The results of Shaefer's analysis were staggering. In early 2011, 1.5 million household with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That's about one out of every twenty-five families with a child in America. What's more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation's landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996--and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half. " "It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn't discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white." Id. at xvii.).
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Inequality (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("The first part of this book is devoted to a critique of economics egalitarianism. Its conclusion is that, from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough. In the second part of the book I will recover one way in which economic equality may indeed be of some moral significant." Id. at xi. It should be noted that Frankfurt does not flesh out the various meanings one might attach to the notion "economic equality" (for example, income equality, wealth equality, wage equality, opportunity equality). It may not matter much for Frankfurt's limited focus, but, then again, it may. That said, I think Frankfurt is pretty much correct though incomplete. Interested readers should take note of the articles and books referenced by Frankfurt. Also see Timothy Shenk, "Shelf Life," The Nation, 12/14/2015).)
Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011) ("This book is organized around three types of inequalities. In the first part, I deal with inequality among individuals within a single community--typically, a nation. . . . In the second part, I deal with inequalities in income among countries or nations. . . . In some countries most people appear poor to us, while in others most people seem very affluent. These 'between-country' inequalities find their expression also immigration when workers from poor countries to the rich world in order to earn more and enjoy a higher standard of living. In the third part, I move to the topic whose relevance and importance are of much more recent vintage: global inequality, or inequality among all citizens of the world. This inequality is the sum of the previous two inequalities: that of individuals within nations and that among nations. But it is a new topic because only with globalization have we become used to contrasting and comparing our fortunes with the fortunes of individual people around the globe. Yet it is probably a type of inequality whose importance will, as the process of globalization unfolds, increase the most." Id. at ix-x.).
Thomas Piketty, The Economics of Inequality, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2015).
George Sher, Equality for Inegalitarians (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2014) ("I have long been attracted to the ideal of equal opportunity, and like many others, I had come to regard the view know as luck egalitarianism-- very roughly, that inequalities are just if and only if they are due to the parties' choices rather than luck--as as attractive elaboration of that ideal. However, at the same time, it seemed to me that luck egalitarianism raised deep analytical and normative problems that has not been recognized, much less resolved, by its proponents. . . . " "Here is the short version of the view at which I arrived. I now believe that the reason people should be allowed to enjoy or suffer the consequences of their choice is not that they are responsible for those outcomes (although they often are), but rather that no one can genuinely live a life of his own unless his decisions have a real impact on his fortunes. I believe, as well, that given our unique relation to our own lives, the non-comparative facts about a person's life are morally more important than whether he fares better or worse than others. For this reason, I take the distributive implications of the moral equality of persons to be considerably more complex than is generally supposed. An,d finally, given what is involved in living a characteristically human life, I view the innumerable contingencies that differentiate each person's situation from those of others not as so may sources of unjust inequality to be neutralized by society, but rather as the backdrop in whose absence we could not live recognizably human lives at all." Id. at vii-viii. "I have argued that a society's primary distributive obligation is to render each of its members sufficiently able to live his own life effectively; and I have suggested . . . that for each person that ability has some upper limits. Like any sufficiency view, one needs to be backed by an explanation of where on the relevant continuum we should set the threshold. However, because the ability to live one's life effectively depends in a number of factors that come in degrees, some internal to the agent and some not, I will not be able to identify or defend the threshold until I have specified which continuum is the relevant one." Id. at 132.).
William Watson, The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty (Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 2015) ("My argument in this book is that this preoccupation with inequality is an error and a trap. It is an error because inequality, unlike poverty, is not the problem it is so widely presumed to be. Inequality can be good, it can be bad, and it can be neither good nor bad but benign. We may wish to have ways of thinking about and perhaps even public policies for each kind of inequality, but we do not need, and it would be a mistake to adopt a single perspective or policy for inequality writ large. Evaluating the different types to inequality require moral judgments that it is would be wrong to try to finesse. A one-size-fits-all perspective or policy would involve us in meaningful and costly injustice, even, in the now ubiquitous but not always illuminating term, social justice." "Inequality is also a trap--not a trap anyone has set for us but one of our making--because concern with it leads us to focus on the top end of the income distribution when our preoccupation should instead be on the bottom, where the bulk of human misery almost certainly resides. Not everyone miserable is poor and not everyone poor is miserable. Some currently poor people are med students, law clerks, and other varieties of the future rich working through their apprenticeship. But other poor people are stuck in poverty for the duration--for their duration, which may be shorter as a result of their poverty--and miss out on many advantages the rest of us take for granted. Their relative or absolute deprivation may not prevent them from leading good lives, nor even the good life that has preoccupied philosophers since philosophy began. But it drastically limits their opportunities and in particular their chance to enjoy the fascinating and alluring gadgets, entertainments, and experiences, notably travel, that define modern affluence." Id. at xi-xii. "[I]f ever poverty is finally eradicated from this earth, it is hard to believe some variant of free, private enterprise will not be involved. Capitalism does generate inequality--that is how it works--but by unrelentingly expanding what is possible in terms of living standards, it also enables people to pull themselves up from poverty. And by reducing the necessary sacrifice, it makes the non-poor more willing to help: the richer I am the less [percentage?] of my income I need give up in order to help you. But it we respond to growing inequality by increasingly fighting capitalism, our false enemy, rather than poverty, our true enemy, we may end up with more of both inequality and poverty and risk at least partly undoing the good accrued during these past, truly remarkable two and a half centuries." Id. at xiii.).
Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("During the past decade, four of the central issues facing our society have been [1] the great divide--the huge inequality that is emerging in the United States and many other advanced countries-- [2] economic mismanagement, [3] globalization, and [4] the role of the state and the market. As this book shows, those four themes are interrelated. The growing inequality has been both cause and consequence of our macroeconomic travails, the 2008 crisis and the long malaise that followed. Globalization, whatever its virtues in spurring growth, has almost surely increased inequality--especially so, given the way we have been mismanaging globalization. The mismanagement of our economy and the mismanagement of globalization are, in turn, related to the role of special interests in our politics--a politics that increasingly represents the interests of the 1 percent. But while politics has been part of the cause of our current troubles, it will only be through politics that we will find solutions: the market by itself won't do it. Unfettered markets will lead to more monopoly power, more abuses of the financial sector, more unbalanced trade relations. It will only be through reform of our democracy--making our government more accountable to all of the people, more reflective of their interests--that we will be able to heal the great divide and restore the country to shared prosperity." Id. at xix. From "Eliminating Extreme Inequality: A Sustainable Development Goal, 2015-2030," with Michael Doyle: "Gaps between the rich and the poor are partly the result of economic forces, but equally, or even more, they are the result of public policy choices, such as taxation, the level of the minimum wage, and the amount invested in health care and education. This is why countries whose economic circumstances are otherwise similar can have markedly different levels of inequality. These inequalities in turn affect policy making because even democratically elected officials respond more attentively to the views of affluent constituents than they do to the views of poor people. The more that wealth is allowed unrestricted roles in funding elections, the more likely it is that economic inequality will get translated into political inequality." "[E]xtreme inequalities undermine not only economic stability but also social and political stability. But there is no simple causal relation between economic inequality and social stability,as measured by crime or civil violence. . . . There are, however, substantial links between violence and 'horizontal inequalities' that combine economic stratification with rice, ethnicity, religion, or region. When the poor are from one race, ethnicity, religion, or region, and the rich are from another, a lethal, destabilizing dynamic often emerges." Id. at 288-289.).
Simon Reid-Henry, The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) ("At the very heart of this book, then, is the claim that we need a new politics to sustain us into the twenty-first century. We need a new strategy of equality to get us there too. Inequality may be felt most strongly within any one national community, but the challenge of inequality is a global one. Meeting it must begin, as the French political historian Pierre Rosanvallon says, with 'rethink[ing] the whole idea of equality itself.' But it must also involve, in the twenty-first century, rethinking the scale at which equality needs to be made. As we shall see, this implies a series of rather more practical concerns. Not least, it serves as a timely reminder for Europe and America, in particular, to practice a little humility, to look outside their own treasured histories for solutions to the problems that they, as much as any other, now face. We rail today at the injustice of paying off the debt incurred by banks that were bailed out during the credit crisis, but this is what the Third World debt burden has always been about--common people paying off debs incurred by corrupt elites. There are plenty more connections too, if we care to look." "The second challenge arises to the extent that we are able to make progress toward the first. It concerns the fact that the more general crisis of the Western welfare state that we have been experiencing of late is not itself unrelated to the ongoing injustice of uneven global development. The runaway increase in wealth today accrues to the richest of this world is what prices something like health care out of reach for even the moderately well-to-do; but these inequalities of wealth that are undermining the Western welfare state are produced through an international economy that itself comes to rest on the backs of the global poor, denying them their due of global public goods as well. The situation, as it confronts us today, is therefore simple: either we push forward with social protection globally, or we will see it continue to fall apart in the global North as much as in the global South. On one level, it might be said that these connections are too indirect, the causality too diffuse. Inequality is natural, we are told time and again. Of course, we should expect to see it everywhere we look. But such claims, which are usually made by those with a vested interest in the status quo, confuse non-equality with inequality. Non-equality is desirable. It means difference, diversity, plurality, variety. Inequality is a product of structural forms of justice. It means marginalization, discrimination, neglect. And a system which serves some more than others." Id. at 9-10.).
NOTE: Few, if any, of the writings above address the notion equality that most interest me. That notion is the one both identified and, then, quietly and quickly breached in the American Declaration of Independence, and completely ignored in the U.S. Constitution. It is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that tall men are created equal . . . ." I short, no man (or woman, or child) is naturally better than any other man (or woman, or child). Equality here does not mean identical, for no two people are identical and, as just, may and do possess different abilities, traits, preferences, etc. Still, no man is naturally better than another man. This I believe. Moreover, I believe that were people to get themselves or their heads around this self-evident truth . . . and act consistently with it, then many of the gross social injustices in society would be eliminated. Yes, there would still be economic inequality, but not of the extent and form we experience it today. Unfortunately, too many people think--and for no good reason--that they as individuals, or they as members of a tribe, race, nation, religion, or whatever, are naturally (and self-evident to themselves) better than others. The result is an undermining of democracy and social injustice, if not genocide.
