The Return of Inequality by Mike Savage

Author:Mike Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

7.5: Visceral Inequalities and Economic Inequality

In Chapter 1, we examined the far-reaching shift that economists have staged in making inequality concrete through turning the telescope on wealthy elites, away from their long-standing attention to the poor. Whereas historically it has been the bodies of the poor that commanded attention—disreputable, lower class, and racially excluded, as objects of pity and repulsion—it is increasingly the obscene bodies of bloated elites that have been brought into view. Piketty’s deployment of income-share analysis, and its capacity to mine down in highly granular detail into very small percentiles at the top of the distribution captured the zeitgeist perfectly on its publication in 2013. Rather than hiding behind abstractions, such as the Gini coefficient, a top economist had made it scientifically acceptable—indeed cutting-edge—to zoom in minutely to real, excessively wealthy people.

This turns out to have huge implications. By portraying prominent elite figures, marked by their wealth, power, and privilege, people’s relative lack can more readily be turned into anger and resentment. This is why the visceral inequalities experienced by women, racial minorities, and those from disadvantaged classes are not best understood as performative or identity based. They come to the fore when relative inequalities decline, so encouraging the sense that mobility should be possible—but also when the actual concentration of top-level inequalities leads in the other direction. The impossibility of ever winning the game, however hard you play—and even if you obtain a certain measure of success—becomes ever more apparent as the biggest victors forge further ahead. The overarching hold of those at the top who stand above you, judging you, and ultimately finding you wanting, becomes more grating. In this context, we can understand the anger expressed toward statues of Cecil Rhodes or General Lee not as purely symbolic struggles, or just as trying to set the historical record straight, but testify to the resurgent anger toward elites—in the form of powerful white men—who increasingly characterize the “stuff of inequality.”

Visceral inequalities are linked to the changing dynamics of capital accumulation. The rise of relative categories was associated with economic growth based on productivity increases (or in Marx’s terms, the shift from absolute to relative surplus value). As productivity growth in the expanding service sector is increasingly driven by worker’s embodied qualities, where face-to-face and personal interaction plays a key role in making transactions, then physical appearance and deportment come to the fore. There is indeed an arresting feature of much visceral politics, which is that those who feel violated, abused, disrupted, and personally affronted include those who are in relatively—though not supremely—privileged positions. In this vein, McLaughlin, Uggen, and Blackstone’s (2012) summary of research on sexual harassment shows that women in supervisory positions are more likely to report being subject to sexual harassment compared to lower-grade female employees. Rather than supervisory status giving insulation from harassment, it works the other way around. Friedman (2016) shows that it is often highly successful and upwardly mobile people in professional and managerial jobs who feel most personally unsettled

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