Why achieving Equality is an Impossible Dream
And why the quest for Equality will cause far more harm than good.
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For over 200 years one of the main goals of the political Left has been achieving some sort of equality. I am going to write more on the concept of equality in other articles, but the concept is really quite complex, and people who use the term often fail to define what type of equality they are referring to.
Equality is simply too vague of a concept to have any true meaning. Equality of what? Equality of height? Equality of athletic ability? Equality of intelligence? Equality of vision acuity? Equality of cell phones?
Obviously, I am joking above, but it illustrates a very important point. I know that few people are trying to achieve those types of equality, so I will mention just a few that are commonly sought types of equality:
Equality of Outcome (typically on income, wealth, or material goods)
Equality of Opportunity (government policy and corporate hiring applying the same rules to all citizens)
Political equality (all adults having one vote, the same constitutional rights, and the judicial system treating all persons the same)
Moral equality (all persons are equal in the eyes of God)
Social equality (treating all persons with the same courtesy and respect, regardless of their social status)
In this article, I will focus on Equality of Outcome as measured by inequality of income and wealth. Much of the material from this article comes from Walter Scheidel’s “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century”
Walter Scheidel is one of the leading historians in the field of Ancient History, so he is not affiliated with the political Left or Right. Scheidel uses the latest quantitative data to measure inequality across the last 10,000 years.
Scheidel then looks at:
General trends in inequality of income and wealth across time.
Interruptions in the general trend that either leads to greater equality or greater inequality than the trend.
Events or government policies that may explain the interruptions (for better or worse)
See more articles on Upward Mobility:
Why achieving Equality is an Impossible Dream (this article)
Why Progress and Upward Mobility should be the goal, not Equality
Note: I will also publish a large number of excerpts on Substack from my forthcoming book: Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Poor and Working Class. These excerpts are only available to paid subscribers.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
Quick summary of Scheidel’s book
If you are interested in the topic, I would recommend reading a summary of this book in my library of online book summaries. Below I will summarize his main points:
Ever since the invention of agriculture, human societies have been very unequal.
The typical pre-Industrial society had a:
tiny, but extremely wealthy, elite
larger group of relatively prosperous government, church, and military officials
huge mass of peasants living at subsistence levels.
Modern societies have much higher standards-of-living, but similar levels of inequality.
Periods of relative stability inherently lead to increasing inequality.
The only periods with declining inequality have been marked by what Scheidel calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”:
Total wars, such as World War I and II
Revolutionary violence, particularly from Communist regimes
Complete collapse of the state, such as the collapse of the Western Roman empire and numerous collapses of Chinese imperial dynasties.
Lethal pandemics, such as the Black Death
Even most wars, civil wars, and peasant revolts have had no real impact on inequality. It is only the most extreme that did so.
Peaceful attempts to lessen equality have had little long-term impact, including:
Land reform
Democracy
Public Education and skills building
Redistributive taxation
Social spending
So what do we make of this?
My interpretation of Walter Scheidel’s book is:
Inequality is here to stay. Everything that reduces inequality substantially is worse than inequality. Government policies that attempt to reduce inequality have very little long-term effect, though they are sometimes very popular.
So let’s just move on from trying to create Equality of Outcome and try to do something else.
Our two options
Assuming Walter Scheidel is correct, and I think that he is, we have two choices:
Option #1: High levels of inequality that gradually increase over time.
Option #2: Deliberately provoking one or more of the following:
World War III, which would likely lead to the death of tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people. Let’s call this the National Socialist solution to inequality.
A violent revolution to establish a Soviet-like Totalitarian state that rules by terror and genocide. Let’s call this the Communist solution to inequality.
Deliberately collapsing governments, which likely leads to civil war which kills millions, and then eventually leads to the establishment of a different government. Let’s call this the Anarchist solution to inequality.
Lethal pandemics, which we “tried” recently, but I guess that it did not kill enough people to establish greater equality. Let’s call this the Bio-medical solution to inequality.
All four “solutions” within Option #2 are pretty horrifying. I have zero doubt that a small minority of people would still choose Option #2. The history of the 20th Century is full of examples.
I think any reasonable person would choose Option #1, however reluctantly. The only difference is between:
Those who openly acknowledge that Option #1 is better than Equality of Outcome, and
Those who keep pretending that they can achieve Equality of Outcome by peaceful means.
Now, of course, this does not mean that all the attempts to create Equality of Outcome via peaceful means are entirely bad. Some of the government programs that I mentioned above bring material benefits to society. Providing education for children benefits society even if it does not make our society substantially more equal. Providing a pension and health care for the elderly also benefits society even if those benefits are overwhelmingly concentrated among persons over the age of 65.
It does mean that we should be honest with ourselves as to how much choosing option #1 can achieve. We should openly acknowledge the following:
We cannot achieve anything like Equality of Outcome, nor is it even clear that government social programs can get us very far in that direction
With each tax dollar spent we are making trade-offs with other important societal goals
The potential negative incentives that government social programs can impose on those who can least afford them.
Other goals might produce far better results (which I will discuss in the next article).
So are we all doomed to immiseration?
So if all peaceful societies are doomed to increasing inequality, does that mean that we as individuals are doomed to immiseration? This is more or less what Karl Marx argued in the mid-19th Century. His theories had an enormous impact on the 20th Century.
Karl Marx believed that the very nature of capitalism made the following inevitable:
The bourgeoisie (factory owners) would gradually concentrate into a very few, very rich factory owners.
The proletariat (factory workers) would expand in numbers and their incomes would decline.
This would create a highly polarized two-class society with:
a very small, but rich, bourgeoisie and
everyone else being members of a huge, but increasingly poor, proletariat
This proletariat would achieve class consciousness. The proletariat would perceive a common unity with all other members of the proletariat in all nations and in opposition to the bourgeoisie in all nations.
The result would be an international revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.
The proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx never defined how this form of government would work in any real detail.
Marx believed, however, that this dictatorship of the proletariat would take control over the means of production (i.e. all factories and businesses) and then run the economy efficiently and scientifically without the need for private ownership or private profit.
As the contradictions within capitalism were overcome by scientific management, the need for government would recede and the dictatorship of the proletariat would gradually wither away.
Note that Karl Marx never strove for Equality of Outcome. He just believed that it was the natural outcome of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a new economy without private ownership or private profit.
But it is very clear that Karl Marx and his supporters believed Equality of Outcome was a very good thing, and that it was impossible under capitalism. Indeed, Karl Marx’s theory is by far the most thought-out means that the Left has developed to establish Equality of Outcome. All other ideologies on the Left seem vague in comparison to Marxism.
The history of Marxism after Marx died is a gradual splitting of the ways between two dominant wings of the Socialist movement:
Social Democrats, who saw that the immiseration of the proletariat did not happen, so it was better to work within Liberal Democratic Capitalism via social reform and trade union activity.
In other words, they chose Option #1, which, as Scheidel shows, failed to achieve the desired level of equality. Over time, Social Democrats completely dropped Marxist ideology and became reformists similar to the American Democratic party.Communists, who also saw that the proletariat was not achieving a revolutionary consciousness and instead increasingly supported Social Democratic trade unions.
Vladimir Lenin decided that the answer to Marx’s incorrect prediction was to form a Vanguard of committed full-time revolutionaries to establish a one-party Totalitarian state ruled by terror. Lenin and the Communists wanted to rule in the name of the proletariat instead of Marx’s rule by the proletariat.
In other words, Lenins and the Communists chose Option #2. The big split came in 1917 when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, and the entire Socialist movement split into two camps in almost every nation.
It is important to note, that while Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other Communists were able to create far greater levels of income and wealth equality, they substituted an inequality based on rank within the Communist party. In practice, one’s rank in the Communist party determined one’s income, power, and social status. Josef Stalin, for example, had as much control over material wealth as the wealthiest capitalist in the 1940s. So realistically, the Communists just substituted one form of inequality for another form of inequality.
Why Equality of Outcome is impossible to achieve
Equality of Outcome is impossible to achieve because of the inherent diversity of humans:
Individual humans are genetically different from each other. This gives individuals differences in both abilities and preferences. These differences will lead a person to make different choices, which will lead to different outcomes in life.
Individual humans have different childhood experiences, which affect their adulthood in a myriad of different ways.
Individual humans are raised in different family structures (married, single parent, adoption, etc), and those differing family structures lead to different life outcomes.
Regardless of genetics or childhood, individual humans still have differing levels of intelligence, desire to work hard, ability to plan for the long-term, and amount of self-discipline. Those all lead to different outcomes in life.
Individual humans have different preferences, so even in the exact same environment, they will make different choices. These choices will lead to different outcomes in life.
Individual humans are born into different geographies, each with levels of material progress. This is true for nations, regions, cities, and neighborhoods.
Individual humans are of different ages, and this leads to different abilities and preferences.
Nations have different sub-cultures, which lead to different preferences. Those different preferences will lead to people making different choices. Those choices will lead to different outcomes in life. Culture also affects different outcomes between nations.
Most importantly, all the characteristics that enable some individuals to achieve better life outcomes are beneficial to society. We should want to keep those characteristics and spread them as widely as possible, not destroy them in a quest for Equality.
The Quest for Equality destroys everything
Fundamentally, those who seek Equality of Outcome are at war with human nature and Progress. They do not see that poverty, ignorance, and violence are the natural state of humanity. It is only after hundreds of thousands of years of Cultural Evolution and later Progress that we have been able to exit this state.
Poverty is normal; Progress is not normal.
Progress comes from the daily efforts of societies that have achieved the Five Keys to Progress. Societies that have evolved progress have found mechanisms to channel the most talented in career paths where they can make the most contributions to society. In return, those same mechanisms reward those who contribute the most with a higher level of income and social status.
I disagree with the “Great man” theory of history, but the “Everyone makes equal contributions” theory of history is even worse. Especially talented persons, overwhelmingly white males, have contributed to humanity with their talents. The knowledge, skills, and values of those talented men come from a blend of genetics, upbringing, and cultural inheritance from previous generations.
Egalitarians simply do not know how to create people like that. Nor do egalitarians know how to restructure society to put those men into the best possible position to contribute to society. Nor do governments know how to build a vast, decentralized network of regular, everyday people whom the most talented need to prosper.
Egalitarians only know how to tear people down and punish the successful for making contributions to society. The result is the opposite of what we should be aiming for, but it is the only possible outcome when one makes Equality of Outcome the primary goal for society.
Simply put, it is much, much easier to tear down the rich than it is to build up the poor. So the real choice is not between Equality and Inequality. The real choice is between Inequality with Progress and Inequality with Poverty (unless we can figure out a way to get back to Hunter Gatherer societies and even then genetic inequalities will remain)
The alternatives: Progress and Upward Mobility
In my next article in this series, I will explain why I believe the goals of Progress and Upward Mobility are far superior to Equality of Outcome.
Why achieving Equality is an Impossible Dream (this article)
Why Progress and Upward Mobility should be the goal, not Equality
Note: I will also publish a large number of excerpts on Substack from my forthcoming book: Upward Mobility: A Radical New Agenda to Uplift the Poor and Working Class. These excerpts are only available to paid subscribers.
Other books in my “From Poverty to Progress” book series:
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
I would actually suggest that you have not emphasized the essential importance of inequality enough!
In a complex dynamic system such as human society, the knowledge and problem solving capacity is in great part a factor of specialization and exchange. For this to work reasonably well, there needs to be signals and rewards for the discovery and fulfillment of the actions necessary produce the constant changing stream of solutions necessary for human flourishing. In other words, we depend upon a merit based system where the best and brightest are channeled into the role where they can add the most value (and where they are strongly disincentivized to waste their time). Potential brain surgeons need somehow to be encouraged to spend decades of their lives learning to add their special value, while entrepreneurs are incentivized to experiment with billions of risk to create long shot novel benefits to consumers.
The point is that inequality isn’t something which we should apologize for, it is something which is necessary and should be celebrated as such.
Of course, not all inequality is good inequality, and even good inequality can have negative side effects. Examples of bad inequality are where the system is rigged to benefit the successful at the expense of others. Rent seeking, privilege, cartels, monopolies, elite exploitation, cheating and so forth. Examples of negative externalities include how failure can lead to negative spirals of catastrophic collapse. Bad inequality does need to be minimized, but good inequality needs to be encouraged and rewarded. And there is even bad equality, such as where free riders benefit at the expense of the productive, reducing inequality while lowering total productivity.
I have a lot more I could say, but have already gone on too long. Let me just end by stating that I agree that the focus of a successful society is on prosperity and progress and fairness and not inequality of outcome. Indeed, where I see excessive focus on reducing inequality I usually also see an attempt to undermine the system and replace decentralized complexity with authoritarian control.