We’re living in unequal societies, but what makes the inequality noxious, and very inflammable socially, is that we’re also living in very unfair societies. That’s to say — and this is true of the less developed as well as the developed world — societies in which it is widely felt that many rewards and fortunes have not been accrued in a proportional relationship to effort, enterprise, hard work and the contribution to the societies of which these men and women are part. People’s rewards have often come about because they have got lucky, rigged a market or manipulated things, like a mafia gangster or oligarch, sometimes illegitimately, to get themselves into the position in which they are in. It is this interrelationship between inequality and unfairness — which are two discrete analytic categories — that I think is the hallmark of our times. And it raises big questions about the legitimacy of contemporary capitalism.
January 23rd, 2012
