Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. He is coauthor of The Inequality Puzzle (2010) and coeditor of The Great Recession (2011) and The Inequality Reader (2011). Tamar Kricheli-Katz is Assistant Professor in the Buchman Faculty of Law and in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

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THE NEW GILDED AGE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction: Poverty and Inequality in a New World David B. Grusky and Tamar Kricheli-Katz.....................1Rich and Poor in the World Community Peter Singer...............................................................19Global Needs and Special Relationships Richard W. Miller........................................................39(Some) Inequality Is Good for You Richard B. Freeman............................................................63Inequality and Economic Growth in Comparative Perspective Jonas Pontusson.......................................88Rising Inequality and American Politics John Ferejohn...........................................................115Unequal Democracy in America: The Long View Jeff Manza..........................................................131A Human Capital Account of the Gender Pay Gap Solomon Polachek..................................................161The Sources of the Gender Pay Gap Francine D. Blau..............................................................189A Dream Deferred: Toward the U.S. Racial Future Howard Winant...................................................211Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Public Policy Mary C. Waters....................................................230Notes............................................................................................................247Index............................................................................................................287

Chapter One

Peter Singer

SAVING A LIFE

Bob is close to retirement. His proudest possession is a very rare vintage car, a Bugatti, worth two hundred thousand dollars. Its rising market value means that he will be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. It also is something that he puts a lot of time into maintaining, polishing, and taking out for drives in the country. Unfortunately, it is so expensive that no one will insure it for him. He takes a risk every time he drives it, but he thinks it's worth doing; he doesn't like the idea of the car just being a museum piece. One afternoon Bob takes the Bugatti out and drives it to a place where he often likes to park. It is a good spot for going for a walk, along a disused railway siding. He parks his Bugatti, and walks up the siding, normally a pleasant, quiet stroll. But today, as he comes to the point where the disused siding meets a major line, he looks up and he notices, to his surprise, that there is a train coming down the line. He is surprised because no trains are due at this time. When he looks more closely he sees that, in fact, this is a runaway train; there is no one in it. And he looks further down the main line, and there he sees, to his horror, a small girl playing just inside the tunnel that the train is heading towards. The child is too far away to warn of the danger. It seems very likely that she is going to be killed by the runaway train. What can Bob do? He looks down and sees a switch near him. If he throws it (though it's a little rusty, he can throw it with some effort), it will divert the train down the disused siding, thus saving the child's life. But, if the train goes down the disused siding, given the speed at which it's traveling, it will almost certainly crash through the rotten old barrier at the end of the siding. And what will it do? It will pile straight into his precious, uninsured Bugatti and, undoubtedly, destroy it.

Peter Unger tells this story in his book Living High and Letting Die. He forces us to face the question: What should Bob do? Should Bob throw the switch, saving the child's life and destroying his Bugatti? Or, should he not throw the switch, almost certainly condemning the child to death, but saving his Bugatti?

When I tell this story and ask this question, almost everyone immediately responds that Bob should throw the switch and save the child's life. If it comes to a choice between the almost certain loss of a child's life and the loss of your most precious possession (something worth two hundred thousand dollars and a significant part of your net assets), almost everyone thinks you should choose to save the child's life. And I think that's right. The question I want to explore is, what does that say about what we ought to do in other situations where we can save children's lives?

Unger's story of Bob's Bugatti is a modified version of a story that I told many years ago in an article, "Famine, Affluence and Morality," first published in 1972. My story involved noticing that a small child had fallen into a shallow pond and was in danger of drowning. You realize that you could walk into the pond and save the child's life. No one else seems to be around to save the child. The cost to you, since the pond is a shallow one, is simply that you are going to ruin your shoes and the nice two-hundred-dollar suit that you are wearing and be late for a meeting. In this Drowning Child case, as in the case of Bob's Bugatti, almost everyone says, "Obviously you should save the child's life." In both of these cases the child was close enough to us for us to be able to see her and save her. In terms of closeness, the drowning child in the shallow pond is somewhat closer, because you actually wade in and fetch out the child with your bare hands. But note that Bob's greater distance does not lessen his duty to rescue the child from the train. In general, greater distance as such would be an arbitrary basis for denying that a child whose life is in danger ought to be rescued.

Now suppose that the child in danger is in some remote part of the world in a developing country. Every day, according to UNICEF, about 21,000 children die from poverty-related causes. Among these causes of child death are starvation and malnutrition (getting enough in terms of calories, but not a balanced healthy diet). Not eating enough, or not eating the right food, might contribute to being at higher risk of having certain diseases, which a healthy child could resist. The risk is further magnified by an unsafe water supply, which can convey diseases again and again. While growing up in these conditions, many millions of children lack even the most minimal health care. They cannot even obtain oral rehydration therapy, which essentially consists of some salts that you give to a child suffering from diarrhea so that the child can better survive. Other children die from measles, because they were not immunized against that disease, or from malaria, because they did not have bed nets to sleep under. These are just some of the causes that lead to those thousands of deaths daily of children from poverty-related causes. Just as much as the pool and the train in my earlier stories, they are threats to children's lives.

I focus on children, but this is just a way to simplify the argument. If I were to talk about adults, people would say such things as "Why couldn't they have gotten a job?" In fact, often that's not a realistic solution, but talking about children eliminates that argument. Clearly, children are not responsible for the poverty that they are in.

How much does it really cost to save a child's life in the third world? It's very hard to put a figure on this. In oral rehydration therapy, for example, the actual ingredients cost less than a dollar, but that's not the true cost of getting adequately trained people to bring the medicine to the children who need them. In my book The Life You Can Save, I cite several estimates, ranging from $300 to $1,000. If you were to donate that amount to an NGO that is working to save lives and reduce poverty in the third world, you could expect to save the life of one of the thousands of children who are dying every day. (You can find suggested organizations in the book I just mentioned or on the website www.thelifeyoucansave.com.) If that's so, and if you thought that Bob ought to sacrifice his Bugatti to save a child's life, shouldn't you give what is needed to save the life of a child endangered in the third world?

What is the morally relevant difference between those situations? I want to argue that there is none, or, in any case, none that is remotely strong enough to justify those who can comfortably afford it in not giving five hundred or a thousand dollars to Oxfam America, Partners in Health, or one of the other NGOs that are out there helping to relieve poverty in the poor nations. After all, the sacrifice made by that donation is not remotely as great as the sacrifice that, as almost everyone thinks, Bob should make of his Bugatti—not remotely as great in terms of impact on lifestyle, nor in terms of loss of a cherished possession.

What are some of the differences that people might think exist between the two situations? In response to the pond example, someone might say, "You are certainly saving a child who is going to drown. But if you give to an aid agency, you can't really know for sure that you are going to save a child." That is one of the advantages of the Bob and Bugatti example over my pond case. You don't know for sure that the train is going to kill the child. Maybe the child will look up and see the train hurtling toward her and just in the nick of time dash out of the tunnel and escape. Or, miraculously, she may find room between the side of the tunnel and the train. That's why I said the child would "very likely," but not certainly, be killed. Equally, it is very likely, but not certain, that if you give a substantial donation to one of the more effective NGOs working to save children in developing countries, your donation will save at least one life.

At this point, people may say, "Don't I have a special duty to those who in some way are part of my community?" Let's assume that the child in the pond and the child in the railroad tunnel are in some sense part of my community. We might even assume that I know that the child is a compatriot, say, a fellow American. We may have some obligations to people who are closer to us. Parents have special obligations to their children. Maybe we can expand that into obligations to other close relatives and friends, and then to those with whom we are in some sort of reciprocal relationship where we owe favors or owe a debt of gratitude. All of those things make some difference. But how big a difference should they make? Maybe, if you can save your compatriot or someone who is not a compatriot, but not both, there is some sort of obligation to save the one to whom you are more closely related. But if we are not saving anyone at all—if we are comfortably enjoying our relatively luxurious lives without giving substantial sums to people in the third world to save their lives—I don't see the relevance of the special obligation to our compatriots.

ETHICS AND IMPARTIALITY

How can we decide whether we have special obligations to "our own kind," and if so, who is "our own kind" in the relevant sense? The twentieth-century Oxford philosopher R. M. Hare argued that for judgments to count as moral judgments they must be universalizable, that is, the speaker must be prepared to prescribe that they be carried out in all real and hypothetical situations, not only those in which she benefits from them but also those in which she is among those who lose. Consistently with Hare's approach, one way of deciding whether there are special duties to "our own kind" is to ask whether accepting the idea of having these special duties can itself be justified from an impartial perspective.

In proposing that special duties need justification from an impartial perspective, I am reviving a debate that goes back two hundred years to William Godwin, whose book Political Justice shocked British society at the time of the French Revolution. In the book's most famous passage, Godwin imagined a situation in which a palace is on fire, and two people are trapped inside. One of them is a great benefactor of humanity—Godwin chose as his example a celebrated and edifying writer of his day, Archbishop Fénelon, "at the moment when he was conceiving the project of his immortal Telemachus." The other person trapped is the Archbishop's chambermaid. The choice of Fénelon seems odd today, since his "immortal" work is now unread except by scholars, but let's suppose we share Godwin's high opinion of the good Archbishop. Whom should we save? Godwin answers that we should save Fénelon, because by doing so, we would be helping thousands, those who have been cured of "error, vice and consequent unhappiness" by reading Telemachus. Then he goes on to make his most controversial claim:

Supposing I had been myself the chambermaid, I ought to have chosen to die rather than that Fénelon should have died. The life of Fénelon was really preferable to that of the chambermaid. But understanding is the faculty that perceives the truth of this and similar propositions; and justice is the principle that regulates my conduct accordingly. It would have been just in the chambermaid to have preferred the archbishop to herself. To have done otherwise would have been a breach of justice. Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. That would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fénelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice—pure, unadulterated justice—would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expense of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun "my" to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? My wife or my mother may be a fool or a prostitute, malicious, lying or dishonest. If they be, of what consequence is it that they are mine?

In Godwin's time and in ours, most readers have found his impartiality excessive. Samuel Parr, a well-known liberal clergyman of the time, preached and subsequently published a sermon that was a sustained critique of Godwin's "universal philanthropy." As the text for his sermon, Parr takes an injunction from Paul's epistle to the Galatians, in which Paul offers yet another variant on who is of our own kind: "As we have, therefore, opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith." In Paul's words, Parr finds a Christian text that rejects equal concern for all, instead urging greater concern for those to whom we have a special connection. Parr defends Paul by arguing that to urge us to show impartial concern for all is to demand something that human beings cannot, in general and most of the time, give. "The moral obligations of men," he writes, "cannot be stretched beyond their physical powers." Our real desires, our lasting and strongest passions, are not for the good of our species as a whole, but, at best, for the good of those who are close to us.

Modern critics of impartialism argue that an advocate of an impartial ethic would make a poor parent, lover, spouse, or friend, because the very idea of such personal relationships involves being partial toward the other person with whom one is in the relationship. This means giving more consideration to the interests of your child, lover, spouse, or friend than you give to a stranger, and from the standpoint of an impartial ethic this seems wrong. Feminist philosophers, in particular, tend to stress the importance of personal relationships, which they accuse male moral philosophers of neglecting. Nel Noddings, author of a book called Caring, limits our obligation to care to those with whom we can be in some kind of relationship. Hence, she states, we are "not obliged to care for starving children in Africa."

Those who favor an impartial ethic have responded to these objections by denying that they are required to hold that we should be impartial in every aspect of our lives. Godwin himself wrote (in a memoir of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft after her death following the birth of their first child):

A sound morality requires that nothing human should be regarded by us as indifferent; but it is impossible we should not feel the strongest interest for those persons whom we know most intimately, and whose welfare and sympathies are united to our own. True wisdom will recommend to us individual attachments; for with them our minds are more thoroughly maintained in activity and life than they can be under the privation of them, and it is better that man should be a living being, than a stock or a stone. True virtue will sanction this recommendation; since it is the object of virtue to produce happiness; and since the man who lives in the midst of domestic relations will have many opportunities of conferring pleasure, minute in the detail, yet not trivial in the amount, without interfering with the purposes of general benevolence. Nay, by kindling his sensibility, and harmonizing his soul, they may be expected, if he is endowed with a liberal and manly spirit, to render him more prompt in the service of strangers and the public.

In the wake of his own grief for his beloved wife from whom he had been so tragically parted, Godwin found an impartial justification for partial affections. In our own times, Hare's two-level version of utilitarianism leads to the same conclusion. Hare argues that in everyday life it will often be too difficult to work out the consequences of every decision we make, and if we were to try to do so, we would risk getting it wrong because of our personal involvement and the pressures of the situation. To guide our everyday conduct we need a set of principles of which we are aware without a lot of reflection. These principles form the intuitive, or everyday, level of morality. In a calmer or more philosophical moment, on the other hand, we can reflect on the nature of our moral intuitions, and ask whether we have developed the right ones, that is, the ones that will lead to the greatest good, impartially considered. When we engage in this reflection, we are moving to the critical level of morality that informs our thinking about what principles we should follow at the everyday level. Thus the critical level serves as a testing ground for moral intuitions.

(Continues...)

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