Advocates for economic equality face the inconvenient political fact that, as a metric, inequality serves as a poor proxy for actual need or injustice. Americans, for example, generally support some version of the welfare state not because they want to bring down the rich, but rather out of concern for the needs of poorer folk who face hunger, homelessness, and truncated life prospects. Americans do not generally object to the relative inequalities that result, say, when someone becomes rich by inventing a new consumer good that the rest of us want to buy. Americans don’t even object to inequality that results from luck. While John Rawls may have fretted about inequalities from winners and losers in “life’s lottery,” simply consider that 45 U.S. states made policy decisions to hold actual lotteries (as do almost all Western nations) through which lucky winners get rich despite not meriting their new wealth relative to any of the other players. Americans don’t resent lucky winners, they envy them.
In his new book, The Return of Inequality, sociologist Mike Savage wants to change the West’s agnostic toleration of inequality into manifest opposition. The problem with inequality—and Savage is explicit about this—is not the challenges faced by poorer people. Rather, for Savage, the mere fact that some people are much richer than the rest of us is itself an offense—an offense that requires rich people be knocked off their pedestals. He argues for the need to “turn the telescope” away from poverty and to focus on wealth itself “as a social problem.”
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