comment by ira katznelson · cy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scienti½c rationality, and...

In the immediate aftermath of theevents of September 11, 2001, it was hardto know what to say. We seemed bereftof “a terminology,” as Madame de Staëlobserved after the Jacobin Terror, in asituation “beyond the common meas-ure.” In the days that followed, my ownthoughts turned to Hannah Arendt, andthe works she had written in an effort tograpple with another situation beyondthe common measure. “The problem ofevil,” Arendt forecast in 1945, “will bethe fundamental question of postwarintellectual life in Europe–as deathbecame the fundamental problem afterthe last war.”

‘Evil’ is a word one heard with somefrequency in the aftermath of the attackson the World Trade Center and the Pen-tagon, though rarely deployed withArendt’s precision. Within some intel-lectual circles, a denunciation of theseacts as evil has been accompanied by afar too simple justi½cation of liberalismand the Enlightenment as decency incar-nate. Evil, in this view, implies morethan doing harm or inflicting pain on

innocents. Behavior is evil when itattacks valued goods proffered by West-ern modernity.

Disputing the integrity and worth ofthese goods, critics in other intellectualcircles have focused instead on the evilsof postcolonialism and the exploitativerelationships characteristic of globalcapitalism. It is these iniquities thatshould command our attention, not theacts of terror they consider in a cooler,sometimes icy, register.

I ½nd the impulses at play in bothresponses unsettling. Each group is bet-ter at assuming a posture than develop-ing ways of acting and living decently ina world riven by heterogeneous, inter-connected, and sometimes conflictingcultures. A rote defense of Western lib-eralism could very well authorize a newbrand of colonialism, once again makingmany non-Western peoples ineligible forits core values of rights, toleration, par-ticipation, and consent. A wholesalerejection of enlightened liberalism as amere ½gment of Western imperialismcould very well license an irresponsibleand foundationless antimodernism,reinforcing a mirror-image view of ‘us’against ‘them.’ Intransigently advanced,each perspective evades asking how wecan shade the sensibilities, deepen thecapacities, and address the limitations ofthe liberal tradition in full awarenessthat credulous notions of human per-fectibility have been mocked by theglobal diffusion of human superfluous-ness, the central hallmark of modern

Comment by Ira Katznelson

Evil & politics

Dædalus Winter 2002 7

Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Sci-ence and History at Columbia University, is theauthor of numerous books and articles on Ameri-can politics, political theory, and social history,including “Liberalism’s Crooked Circle: Letters toAdam Michnik” (1996). A Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy since 2000, he is completing a newbook on the New Deal, the South, and the originsof postwar American liberalism.

Commentby IraKatznelson

8 Dædalus Winter 2002

“radical evil,” as Hannah Arendt arguedin The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Writing in the aftermath of total warand the Shoah, Arendt sought both toapprehend the appearance of “radicalevil, previously unknown to us,” and totransform the eschatology of evil into asystematic tool with which to name andexplain the terrible cost Nazism andStalinism had exacted. By ‘radical evil,’she understood the project of erasing themoral and the juridical person as a prel-ude to physical annihilation. Justi½ed bymillenarian ideologies and advanced bywhat Arendt called manufactured unre-alities, radical evil literally erased humanplurality by stripping large populationsof their rights as citizens, including theright to a name, as a prelude to masskilling. Turning innocents into nonpeo-ple, both the Nazis and the Soviets thuselided the liberal tradition’s central puz-zle of how to make it possible for incom-mensurable values and identities tocoexist, perhaps even flourish, in a cli-mate of toleration.

Although today’s constellation ofMuslim fervency, fascist-style mobiliza-tion, and Internet-friendly coordinationmay be new in some respects, it is mani-festly as capable of producing radical evilas the barbarous offshoots of Westerncivilization Arendt addressed, even ifthankfully it has yet to equal them. Fa-miliar, too, are the challenges that Islam-ic zealotry can pose to the tradition ofEnlightenment and to the possibilities ofa decent liberal politics.

Given these hazards, we need toexplore whether the Western liberal tra-dition can effectively contest radical evilwithout sacri½cing its own best features.I think it can, though not on its own andonly if liberals can ½nd a terminologyand institutional practices to engagewith nonliberal beliefs and cultureswithout dismissing them too hastily asirremediably antiliberal.

Any meaningful effort to re½ne thelanguage and institutions that a robustliberalism requires must move beyond athin and often misleading claim to uni-versality; it also can gain con½dencefrom a fresh appreciation for the En-lightenment’s rich, though often neg-lected, lineage of realism and a recogni-tion of liberalism’s history of inventionand transformation. Kant, for example,worried about the demagogic uses ofreason and the possibility that a new setof ostensibly enlightened “prejudices[can] serve, like the old, as the leadingstrings of the thoughtless masses.” Healso well knew that demonic violencehas long characterized human affairs.Such realism is quite distinct from therosy optimism of those eighteenth-cen-tury philosophes who supposed that sys-tematic understanding would trump tor-ture and barbarism, as if to realize thetitle of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s paintingof 1798: Darkness Dissipates as Wisdom andTruth Descend to Earth. Rather thanPrud’hon’s canvas, it is Goya’s etchingsof Los desastres de la guerra after the Span-ish insurrection of 1808 and the Peninsu-lar War with Napoleon that might betterbe adopted as chastening emblems of ahumane realism.

Today’s terror forces, or should force,an engagement not just with this year’sinstance of evil but with a proper role forrealistic reason and institutional innova-tion in the face of a persistent humancapacity for desolation, now enhancedby the legacy and diffusion of twentieth-century models of radical evil. Times ofturmoil and fear urgently pose two ques-tions: whether liberalism can thrive inthe face of determined adversaries andwhat kind of liberalism we should wishto have. Answers to ‘what kind’ affectthe possibilities for ‘whether’ by offeringchoices not only about doctrines but alsoabout institutions and public policies.

The ideals of the liberal tradition,

Evil &politics


properly appreciated, represent an opensensibility rather than a ½xed set ofarrangements or ideas. The most impor-tant moments of innovation and changein the modern West’s liberal politicaltradition have come in circumstancesgoverned by anxiety and alarm. Considernot only Locke’s institutional formulafor toleration in conditions of religiouswarfare between Catholics and Protes-tants, but his speci½cations for politicalconsent and representation in the con-text of a century of civil war in England.Consider, too, the constitutional innova-tions of Benjamin Constant in Francewhen faced with a global war and thecollapse of legitimate kingship. Consid-er, ½nally, the development of the twen-tieth-century liberal welfare state inresponse to depression, class conflict,and the rise of Bolshevism, Fascism, andNazism.

Especially at moments of danger andinnovation, the liberal tradition has beenneither self-contained nor homoge-neous. There have been liberal demo-crats, liberal socialists, liberal republi-cans, liberal monarchists–and also lib-eral Christians, liberal Jews, liberal Mus-lims. In each instance, the absence of apartnership with political liberalism hasproved an invitation to oppression.Without a commitment to such a cardi-nal liberal value as toleration, even adeclared democrat may be tempted bydespotism. The liberal tradition is thusnecessary to an effectively decent poli-tics. But it is not suf½cient. An abstractcommitment to universal human rightsby itself, without depth, passion, andhistorical particularity, cannot possiblycontend with radical evil. An effectiveliberalism modi½es but does not replaceother commitments.

The more global our world, as DipeshChakrabarty reminds us, the more im-perative it is to register that the prove-

nance of an idea may affect its status butnot its value or capacity. Even if liberalpolitical thought is inescapably Westernin origin, it no longer belongs only to theWest. “Concepts such as citizenship, thestate, civil society, public sphere, humanrights, equality before the law, the indi-vidual, distinctions between public andprivate, the idea of the subject, democra-cy, popular sovereignty, social justice,scienti½c rationality, and so on,” heobserves, “all bear the burden of Euro-pean thought and history.” These secularand universal categories and conceptswere preached “at the colonized and atthe same time denied . . . in practice. Butthe vision,” writes Chakrabarty, “hasbeen powerful in its effects. It has histor-ically provided a strong foundation onwhich to erect–both in Europe and out-side–critiques of socially unjust prac-tices. . . . This heritage is now global.”Even when contradicted by such deepinjustices as slavery and Jim Crow, Euro-pean imperialism, and today’s spectacu-lar global inequalities, struggles based onthese orientations ensue “because thereis no easy way of dispensing with theseuniversals in the condition of politicalmodernity.” Or at least, one might say,no attractive struggles are possible whol-ly outside their frame.

Both liberalism and the Enlightenmentwithin which it nestles advance a philo-sophical anthropology of rational actorsand rational action, insisting that humanagents develop the capacity to deliberate,choose, and achieve sensible goals. Intheir effort to cultivate such rational citi-zens, liberal regimes in the past have alltoo often imposed various limits, draw-ing boundaries that stunt the capacitiesof individuals based on their religion,race, gender, literacy, criminality, or col-onized status. But after centuries ofstruggle about the dimensions of free-dom, enlightened political liberalism

today acknowledges no legitimate barri-ers to reason, hence no legitimate ascrip-tive barriers to liberal inclusion and lib-eral citizenship.

The result is a deep paradox. The glob-al appeal of an enlightened liberalismcannot help but jeopardize the localattachments, the historical particulari-ties–the human plurality–that consti-tute its most important rationale.

Here, then, lies liberalism’s most basiccurrent conundrum: how to broaden itsendowments in order to protect andnourish heterogeneity while coping withits perils.

As our version of this challenge beck-ons, it is not a war on terrorism that willde½ne the early twenty-½rst century, buta series of battles for the soul–that is,for the content, rules, and respectfulinclusiveness–of a properly robust, andrealistic, liberalism. This endeavor,rather than a stylized conflict about themerits of Enlightenment, had better bethe struggle we make our ½rst priority.

Commentby IraKatznelson


One of the hardy perennials of politi-cal theory asks how, if at all, one mightjustify the inequality of wealth andopportunity that is so manifest in socie-ty. The issue has been with us from theearliest times, but it seems to havegained renewed urgency in the pastdecade or so as economic inequality inthe United States, if not in the rest of theworld, seems to have become moreextreme with the rise of technology.

In his essay “Beyond Compassion,”Orlando Patterson captures somethingof the current anger over inequalitywhen he laments the perverse distribu-tion of wealth that allows the ceo of alarge corporation to pull down wagesand stock options that exceed the wagesand bene½ts of a thousand line employ-

ees. He condemns the society that offersnothing but small handouts to motherswho raise small children but awards for-tunes to go-go dancers.

It is easy to recite statistics to showthat an ever-greater percentage ofwealth is concentrated in–take yourpick–the top 1, 5, or 10 percent of theincome distribution in the United States.Public discomfort with the current situa-tion is only magni½ed because this eco-nomic divide between rich and pooroften tracks profound and enduringracial cleavages.

In our multiracial society, it is an over-simpli½cation to treat the inequality ofincome and wealth as a racial problem.But, that said, there is ample evidence tosupport the proposition that whites as agroup are blessed with both greaterwealth and higher income than theirblack counterparts. In many quarters,the combination of these two dominantfeatures raises twin concerns aboutpolitical stability and racial and econom-ic justice.

In light of this sorry state of affairs, itis perhaps too easy for Patterson to con-clude that the market is a “moral non-starter.” But denunciation is not quitethe same as argumentation. The currentdistribution of wealth in America is notjust the product of the market. It is also


Richard A. Epstein

Against redress

Richard A. Epstein, James Parker Hall Distin-guished Service Professor of Law at the Universityof Chicago Law School and Peter and KirstenBedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution,has been a Fellow of the American Academy since1985. He has written extensively in many legalareas and played an especially prominent role inthe ½eld of law and economics. His most recentbooks include “Principles for a Free Society: Rec-onciling Individual Liberty with the CommonGood” (1998) and “Mortal Peril: Our Inalien-able Right to Health Care?” (1997).

the product of the crazy-quilt pattern ofregulation and taxation that seeps intoevery area of life. It is therefore neces-sary to disentangle the consequencesthat flow from regulation from thosethat flow from the market, which inreturn requires some theory of what asociety based on the market looks like.

Frederich von Hayek’s claim that localknowledge in a decentralized system willoutperform the handiwork of state min-isters (many of whom control literallytens of thousands of times the wealth ofordinary peasants) remains unrefuted byhistory, so much so that virtually all sys-tems of regulation, wise or foolish, treatthe market almost by default as the start-ing place for analysis. Labor statutes donot prohibit negotiations between man-agement and labor to set wages andworking conditions. They just institute asystem of collective bargaining. Antidis-crimination laws do not shut down pri-vate employment markets. They onlyspecify certain grounds on which em-ployers are not allowed to base their hir-ing decisions. One can attack or defendthese institutions for the consequencesthat follow in their wake, but the simpleand inescapable truth today is that whenit comes to the provision of goods andservices, nothing beats the market.

Like it or not–and “moral” or not–with the demise of central planning, themarket is our starting point.

It hardly follows, however, that themarket is both the starting and the end-ing point of the analysis. Questions ofboth social and economic inequalityremain with us still. Today’s sorry stateof affairs, which ½nds prosperity tem-pered with poverty, surely invites somewholesale reform. Obviously, as a politi-cal matter, it is hazardous to argue that,even if we keep our market institutions,the redress of inequalities within the

United States does not, and should not,rank high on the list of legislative priori-ties for the social and economic reformsof the next generation.

It is nevertheless this hazardous posi-tion that I wish to defend.

In order to show why the redress ofinequalities should not rank on our listof legislative priorities, I shall ½rst try tooutline a sensible theory that helpsexplain both the uses and the limitationsof the market. The theory here is rightlydescribed as libertarian in its orienta-tion, but it makes no pretense that themarket can discharge all social functionsor indeed operate on its own resourceswithout the assistance of the state.Rather, it argues that state interventionis needed to supply all individuals withprotection against force, fraud, andmonopoly.

Once this benchmark is established, Ishall then sketch out in general termstwo separate lines of argument used tojustify government intervention toredress economic and social inequality,and then indicate why both of these fallshort of their intended goal. These arearguments about restitution and redis-tribution, respectively.

Finally, I shall indicate briefly a gener-al strategy for social reform that could,and should, be adopted to achieve amore just society, without the costly andunneeded by-products of governmentintervention. Rather than add more lay-ers of taxation and regulation, the besttonic for a healthy society is to free upentry into a host of markets by removingthe plethora of taxes and regulationsalready in place. The emphasis should beon self-suf½ciency, not transfer; itshould be on making the economic piegreater, not trying ½tfully to use govern-ment action to put more goods in thehands of those who need them themost.


Richard A.Epstein oninequality

The question of economic and racialinequalities plays itself out on a vast can-vas. But as with so many large problems,it is best attacked by breaking it downinto smaller problems that may proveamenable to legal solutions that satisfyour best moral and political instincts.Before attempting to understand the roleof state power in dealing with claimsbetween groups, it is far easier to askwhen the state should back a claim forcompensation or support brought byone individual against another.

The ½rst place to turn is the theory ofcorrective justice that has dominated our view of human interactions sinceAristotle. It takes little imagination toaward compensation to the person whois either physically attacked or duped byanother.

As an initial matter, it is hard to denythe proposition that the (indiscriminate)use of force or fraud seriously diminish-es the overall welfare of society. Theindividual who takes from anotheralways gains, but that gain pales intoinsigni½cance beside the loss inflictedon the other person. This reduction inoverall wealth and utility (for in thiscontext the two go hand-in-hand) more-over has adverse consequences on thirdparties, who perceive themselves as atrisk when force and fraud are allowedunabated.

At the same time, Aristotelian,Kantian, and utilitarian moral theoriesare all hard-pressed to condemn anyform of vigorous economic competitionthat involves neither force nor fraud.The routine business transactions ofeveryday life produce a common good–economic gains for all parties to thetransactions. That increased wealth inturn creates still greater opportunities toproduce more goods for trade throughthird parties. Insofar as this is true, wedo not need to know whether one party

to the transaction is rich and the otherpoor, because the voluntary transactionwill improve the position of both,regardless of their initial endowments ofwealth.

This is why a market analysis is,emphatically, a moral starter for socialtheory.

The standard libertarian theory there-fore has ample grounds to draw a sharpline between aggression and deceit,which it condemns, and competition,which it praises. Competition expandsthe size of the pie, and of each of itsslices; coercion reduces the size of theoverall pie, and forces some individualsto bear a disproportionate share of theloss.

Many Marxist or left-wing theoristsdispute this result by insisting that ordi-nary market transactions are contami-nated by exploitation, which is, when allis said and done, a form of theft.

The term “exploitation” requires, ofcourse, some explication. Clearly, no oneis particularly upset when it is said that askillful halfback exploited an opening inthe defense in order to run for a touch-down. Taking advantage of opportuni-ties made available within the context ofthe rules is often a good, not a bad,thing. And the ½rm that exploits anopening in the market to introduce anew widget that displaces its creakierrival deserves our thanks, not our con-demnation.

To the determined Marxist or hismodern sympathizers, however, exploi-tation often carries the more cynicalconnotation that one side of the transac-tion is left worse off than he would havebeen if he had never entered it at all.

But this view of exploitation offers noexplanation as to why someone down onhis luck would choose to make a con-tract that left him poorer than before.Many contracts are performed on a


Againstredress

repetitive basis: the ordinary worker canquit at any time and yet frequently willreturn to work day after day. He obvious-ly does so because he thinks that thisopportunity is better than any of hisalternatives, and it would be an oddform of assistance to ban him from thatline of work altogether.

In some cases, the charges of exploita-tion are re½ned so that they concede thepoint of mutual gain by contract, butinsist that the worker is exploitedbecause the ½rm has obtained a dispro-portionate share of the joint pro½t fromthe transaction. Why they presume theasymmetrical division of this unob-served gain remains something of a mys-tery. Their intuition is that minimumwage laws, for example, can boost theleast fortunate worker’s share of the gainto a larger, and more just, proportion.

But the imposition of any such rule ofdivision does more than alter sharesenjoyed by current players. It alsochanges the entire landscape. The higherminimum wage will induce someemployers to reduce their workforces,others to change nonwage terms of thecontract. It will narrow the gap betweenlower- and higher-skilled employees andthus reduce worker incentives to investin their own human capital.

Yet, ironically, the one effect that is notlikely is a reduction in the employer’sshare of the surplus, for the higher theminimum wage, the more likely thatsome ½rms will exit from the market.

Hence, the one con½dent predictionwe can make is this: any effort to tilt bylegislation the contractual wage balancein competitive markets will block volun-tary transactions, leaving both sidesworse off than before. The Marxist con-ception of exploitation is in the endundermined by the unjust consequencesthat its application in practice will pro-duce.

This does not mean, however, thatexploitation is an empty concept. Itreceives its best de½nition from classicaleconomic theory, which condemns (assome hard-core libertarians do not)monopoly, even if it grows out of volun-tary combination and not government(or private) coercion.

For the purposes of this essay, I shallaccept the standard ef½ciency-basedeconomic theory that in general seeks toregulate or outlaw monopoly for theresource losses that it imposes on societyas a whole. Hence it may in principlemake sense to regulate the rates chargedby natural monopolies (i.e., traditionalwater, power, and light companies) thatcannot be divided without fatal losses inef½ciency. And it may in principle bepossible to prevent the formation of vol-untary cartels that seek to divide mar-kets or to rig prices.

But if this theory allows the use of gov-ernment force to break up or limitmonopoly power, by the same token ittakes a very grim view of any state barri-ers to entry into various economic orsocial markets. The state that imposes aprotective tariff may bene½t some localindustry, but that interference with tradeplaces a far greater burden on thoseother individuals who are blocked fromchoosing their trading partners.

Within this general framework, thestate also commits a wrong against itsown citizens when it imposes restric-tions against their entering into sometrade or business, unless that restrictionis clearly calibrated, as most occupation-al restrictions are not, to prevent thepractice of fraud on hapless customers.

We are now in a position to outlinethe relationship between this generaltheory of individual rights and the largerissues of economic and racial inequality.One way to frame the issue is to ask



whether poor people generally, or blackpeople speci½cally, have a claim for resti-tution from society at large.

To state the question in this wayrequires us to observe at least twoimportant caveats. The ½rst is that wecannot predicate sound theories of resti-tution on bad theories of social justice.The case here cannot rest therefore onundifferentiated charges of exploitationbut must be tied to a demonstration thatthese individuals have been the groupvictims of force and fraud, including theimposition of barriers to entry, by othermembers of society.

The second caveat is that in principlethe question of restitution is notrestricted solely to the position ofAfrican Americans, but could in fact beasked in connection with AmericanIndian tribes, with Chinese and Japaneseimmigrants, or indeed with any groupthat claims to have suffered injustice atthe hands of others. But for these pur-poses at least, I shall concentrate on theblack experience precisely because theanswer to the question of whether resti-tution should be provided may seem tobe self-evidently in the af½rmative.

After all, there is little question thatthe institution of slavery as practiced inthe United States before the Civil Warand the racial restrictions that lay at theheart of Jim Crow and the black codeswere wholly indefensible when meas-ured against a basic theory of libertarianrights. Excluding blacks from participa-tion in the political and social life of thattime constitutes one of the great stainson our history, made still worse by thecountless acts of private violence andintimidation to which the state turned ablind eye.

Yet it is one thing to recognize thecommission of these past seriouswrongs, and quite another to concludethat they support claims for restitution

today to the descendants of the victimsof state and private violence.

Critical problems arise on both sidesof the line. Who should receive restitu-tion? And who should be made to payfor it? Let us take these two elements inorder.

First, who counts as a victim? Thatquestion was easy to answer in 1865when huge portions of the AfricanAmerican population in the UnitedStates had just been released from thebonds of slavery. But it is far harder toafford victim status, over 135 years later,to their descendants. No one alive todaysuffered the cruelties of past regimes.

The point here is especially true whenclaims for restitution are pressed on alimited basis. For over twenty years, forexample, black parents in Kansas City,Missouri, have pressed claims for resti-tution by claiming that black children inthe city had been victims of the vestigesof segregation that survived after the1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v.Board of Education. But no remedy herecan ½t the ostensible wrong, for today’sschoolchildren in the district bear norelationship to the black children in thatdistrict whom segregation might haveshortchanged two generations ago.Quite simply, the program forces vastamounts of state tax revenue into lavishexpenditures in one school district,while the educational needs of otherchildren, black and white alike, sufferfrom comparative neglect.

The dif½culties are, if anything,greater in considering who should paythese claims for restitution. Here thenub of the dif½culty is that the state isnot just some disembodied entity with aheart and mind of its own. Even morethan the private corporation, it is a com-posite of huge numbers of individualswho bring to this sprawling nation theirown distinctive pasts. Any program of


Againstredress

restitution, however, contemplates theuse of tax dollars to bene½t some sub-class of the population at the expense ofeveryone else. In all cases, this approachnecessarily results in risks of overinclu-sion.

For example, the claim for restitutionbrought against the German state afterWorld War II necessarily fell with equalweight on resistance ½ghters and themost ardent Nazis. Even so, the state ranthe risk of overinclusion because of theimmediacy and enormity of the wrong;it adopted a two-pronged approach thatcompensated survivors of the Holocaustand their descendants, and then, gener-ally, the state of Israel.

It is hard to see how one could deviseany similar program of restitution forthe descendants of former slaves inAmerica. Too much time has passed tohave any con½dence that the brunt ofthese payments will be borne by individ-uals who had any connection, direct orindirect, with the wrongs of a previousgeneration. Many Americans todaydescend from those individuals whogave their lives during the Civil War tofree the slaves. Millions of people havemigrated to our shores from just aboutevery point on the globe, often to escapethe physical danger and economicoppression of their own lands. By whatright do we ask these immigrants andtheir children to compensate blackswhose ancestors have been injured byothers when they have done nothingwrong themselves?

We could, of course, bite the bulletand conclude that some substantialtransfer payment should be made fromgeneral resources nonetheless. But evenhere, we have to consider the complica-tions that remain.

Claims for restitution today do notoccur in a vacuum. The same countrythat saw Jim Crow was able to redirect

its moral compass and provide extensiveprograms that were designed to remedysome of the past conditions of slavery.We have had extensive af½rmative-action programs; we have had programsthat targeted the educational shortfallson inner-city youth, predominantlyblack; we have extensive welfare pro-grams that bene½t disproportionatenumbers of African Americans.

As a matter of social cohesion, Ibelieve that we would do far better keep-ing some general programs in place thathelp those at the bottom than trying to½nd ways to pay restitution to blacksrich and poor alike. Owing to the com-plexities involved, my great fear is thatany program of restitution will emergeas a twisted jumble of preferences thatheaps a second set of injustices on the½rst.

Having examined the claims for resti-tution made by African Americanstoday, I shall next briefly address thequestion of the best social response toinequalities of wealth.

Much of the wind would be takenfrom the sails of the current restitutionmovement if the average income ofblack citizens were equal to that ofwhites. But while claims of economicinequality only lurk behind restitutionclaims, they become the centerpiece ofany claim for the redistribution ofincome and wealth.

This claim of course runs smack intothe libertarian prohibitions on the use offorce and fraud, for it honors claims forredistribution even when the poor per-son concedes that he has no correctivejustice claim to the wealth of the richperson. The question is whether theseinequalities of wealth justify someaction for redress when the wealth isacquired, and accumulated, throughindustry, thrift, and invention.



Perhaps the easiest way to make thecase for some redistributive action is toappeal to the diminishing marginal utili-ty of wealth. The point here is that thevalue of the additional dollar drops themore dollars that a given person has. Aperfect system of wealth transferbetween persons could presumablyimprove aggregate social utility by tak-ing dollars from the persons who needthem the least, giving them to the per-sons who need them most. The totalnumber of dollars could, in some idealworld, remain constant after the trans-fer. Does greater satisfaction from these(redistributed) dollars justify the coer-cive transfer?

One conceptual obstacle to this argu-ment is that it is fanciful at best and mis-chievous at worst to purport to makethese interpersonal comparisons ofwealth. Clearly no social ruler (punintended) lets us know with certaintythat wealth is worth more in the handsof a poor person than in the hands of arich person, so the determined econo-mist can shipwreck the case for wealthtransfers from the start by denying thepossibilities of interpersonal compar-isons of utility. I can assert that wealth isworth more to the poor person than tothe rich person; you can deny thatproposition. The rich person might usethe next dollar to complete work on aninvention that will improve the lives ofothers. The poor person might squanderit on a drinking binge. We have no wayof knowing if wealth is more useful to apoor than a rich person.

Still, this hard-edged argument hasbite only insofar as it cautions us againstthe easy assumption that the marginaldollar is always worth more in the handsof the poor person than in the hands ofthe rich person. But it does not in myview show that in general these compar-isons are ill conceived. Homeless people

on the edge of starvation do on averageneed that next dollar more than thefashionable elites choosing between vin-tage wines. The entire enterprise ofcharitable activities, through churches,hospitals, and schools, would be largelyunintelligible if in fact the marginal dol-lar of wealth were, and were perceivedto be, worth as much in the hands of therich as in the hands of the poor. Whowould choose to fund soup kitchens,childhood vaccinations, and scholar-ships under those circumstances?

So one conceptual objection to redis-tribution fails to deliver a knockoutblow. How then does one continue todislodge demands for state-mandatedredistributions of wealth?

A more promising line of argumentseeks to demystify the state by treating itmerely as the agent for those individualswho in any given situation bene½t fromits actions. Hence the question ofwhether the state can take wealth from A and give it to B can be reposed: can Bdemand some part of A’s wealth, solelybecause B needs it more?

At this point, the hard-core libertarianwill dismiss B’s claim as mere theft–acoercive seizure of private property. Thestate, therefore, is no better than theRobin Hood who takes from A and givesto B.

This argument looks too glib to bewholly convincing. There are markeddifferences between an organized sys-tem of state redistribution and the iso-lated actions of a brigand. State actioncan proceed through the ordinary chan-nels of taxation and thus does not pres-ent the same threat to peace and socialorder as the actions of the ordinarythief. In addition, the social levies inquestion are not concentrated againstone person on a whim, but are part of acomprehensive social plan that asks allof the more fortunate among us to con-


Againstredress

tribute something to the support ofthose who are least fortunate. This webof institutional constraint surely makesstate action less of a threat than thatindividual action.

Or does it? In reply, one could argue that it would

be odd to sanction individual thefts onthe grounds that the thief took onlysome predetermined amounts of wealthfrom those individuals who were in aposition to pay for it. The interpositionof political majorities does not necessar-ily insulate the state’s decision from allcriticism. As James Madison reminds us,political factions often act and vote inways that allow them to line their ownpockets. It hardly counts as a tribute tothe democratic process if a minority ofwealthy persons is consistently outvotedand outmuscled by those who enjoy theadvantage of greater numbers, namely,the poor.

The objection of theft may not be ashowstopper, but it can hardly be dis-missed on the grounds that the processesof deliberative democracy insulate all ofits decisions from substantive attack.The owners of private property are enti-tled to nothing more than the protec-tions that deliberative democracy wishesto confer upon them. Outright con½sca-tion is not cleansed simply because it isauthorized by a majority, or even super-majority, vote. Progressive taxation isnot cut from the same cloth as thoseforms of collective action that raise thestandards of wealth and happiness forall, which is what the state tries to do bysupplying certain standard publicgoods–military defense, a judicial sys-tem, police protection, public infrastruc-ture–to all its citizens.

This last observation is forti½ed whenone looks more closely at the unhappi-ness created by individual acts of theft.Here a proponent of redistribution

might argue that whenever the thief hasmore use for the stolen goods than theirowner does, the theft helps to advancehappiness. But that shortsighted calcula-tion ignores the broader dynamics oftheft.

If the state were to legalize individualtheft, the scope of these activities wouldsharply increase, as many individualswould forsake productive activities forwhat once passed as a life of crime. Inresponse, property holders would beforced to hire more armed guards to pro-tect their possessions. Worse, they mightavoid theft by prematurely consuminggoods that they would otherwise save,thereby depleting the social store ofwealth over time. And if consumption isnot possible, a property holder canalways choose to invest resources inbricks and mortar, which are harder tosteal than money.

Theft is therefore a losing propositionon both sides of the ledger. The propersocial response is to make it illegal–both for individuals and for the state.

The hard social question is how manyresources should be devoted to its elimi-nation. Here the idealist might be tempt-ed to hold that the state simply has amoral and social duty to eradicate allforms of theft, including taxation. Forour purposes, the critical point is thatthe destructive cycle wrought by individ-ual theft may be mirrored when the stateuses coercive means to redistributewealth.

Thus the wise citizens of Hong Kong,fearful of expropriation after the Chi-nese takeover in 1997, invested largesums of free cash into their new localairport, where it was relatively insulatedfrom expropriation. Allowing the stateto steal from the wealthy alters the fullrange of productive and consumptiveactivities–generally for the worse.

Here again, a note of caution is need-



ed. I have no doubt that the strong sensethat motivates private charitable trans-fers affords some political margin oferror against certain state-mandatedtransfers designed to help those in direneed. Most people who are taxed wouldbe prepared to devote for religious ormoral reasons some fraction of theirwealth to the alleviation of poverty andmisery. Once the state undertakes thatrole, private citizens can reduce theiramount of private giving to offset thestate exaction. Hence the public systemof support displaces the ordinary systemof private charity, but meets with rela-tively little resistance so long as thereductions in private giving are avail-able.

Yet the margin for error in this sce-nario is not in½nite. Raise the level oftransfer payments for public services toohigh, and the private adaptive responsewill be less charity–such that it will nolonger be able to offset the increasedburden of public taxation. Matters onlyget worse if the transfer payments inquestion have, as is so often the case, lit-tle to do with the alleviation of povertyand hardship in our midst.

At this point, Madison’s warningabout factions becomes pertinent. Howtaxes are spent generally depends on thekind of bare-knuckled political strugglethat makes Washington politics so uglytoday. Losers from proposed legislationcan lobby furiously against it. But lobby-ing is always a two-way street thatallows well-organized bene½ciaries tomount a political campaign in response.

Once the government halls are openfor business, anyone can apply forgrants. Farmers can obtain their specialsubsidies; small-business men can optfor theirs; corporate welfare can enrichwell-heeled stockholders; senior citi-zens can cash in on a rich set of retire-ment and medical bene½ts denied to

their younger and poorer brethren. Pub-lic cynicism can mount, as it has mount-ed, in response to the transparent effortsto make it appear as though every give-away on the map should be extolled inthe name of the public good.

Why believe that the total sum of stateand federal redistributive activities pro-vides any net bene½t to the poor, whopay through the nose for every majorsubsidy only to receive relatively paltrywelfare bene½ts in exchange?

In the struggle between differentpolitical factions over transfer pay-ments, as with individual theft, twosides are engaged in either blocking orsecuring wealth transfers. Their com-bined activities result in a net diminu-tion of wealth across the board, whetherpeanut farmers or tobacco farmers wintheir vaunted subsidies.

The parallel to individual theft goesone step further. Once wealth redistrib-ution is fair game, people will alter theirpatterns of consumption and invest-ment. They will leave less to the nextgeneration out of fear that the estate taxwill gobble up their bequests. And theywill hire the ½nest lawyers and plannersto navigate their private fortunes safelythrough the arcane niceties of the taxcode.

My conclusion is simple: any effort tosecure redistribution necessarily reducesthe total stock of wealth. And it is notlikely to result in transferring wealth tothe poor.

If, as I believe, restitution and redistrib-ution are more often than not misguid-ed, even dangerous, strategies for socialreform, what alternatives exist?

I can think of two underappreciatedlines of inquiry. The ½rst of these is theuse of charitable contributions to assistthe poor, even through faith-based ini-tiatives without direct government sup-


Againstredress

port. Smaller amounts of state-sponsoredredistribution could give familiesstronger incentives to take care of theirwayward members. In addition, anycharitable dollar is likely to do moregood than a government dollar becausevoluntary contributors have at leastsome incentive to monitor how theirfunds are spent. Finally, reducing gov-ernment transfers is likely to increaseoverall wealth, which in turn reduces thedemands on the welfare system. Evaluat-ed by its systematic returns, increasedcharitable spending is no panacea, but ithas none of the drawbacks of coercivegovernment programs.

The second line of action comes froma different quarter. The statute books arelittered with laws that impose indefensi-ble barriers to entry into product andlabor markets. It is easy to ½nd all sortsof regulations that exclude individualsfrom driving jitneys, braiding hair, orpracticing law and medicine. Why is itthat Sears, Roebuck can sell lawn mow-ers but not legal services if it is preparedto stand behind both?

The political forces behind the statusquo are formidable. It may well be thecase that entrenched interests will blockany quick and sudden shift in politicalfortunes that would block the operationof competitive markets. But however

vexed these transitional issues, the intel-lectual program is clear: remove barriersto entry in the trades and professions.Removing these obstacles costs the gov-ernment nothing in direct expenditures.Indeed, it reduces administrative bloatand, through it, tax burdens. In addition,it increases the total level of productionin society. In the midst of all the clamorfor redistribution, we should not forgetour initial point of departure: that ordi-nary contracts produce gains from tradethat are shared by all parties. The lowerthe level of transactions costs, the higherthe velocity of exchanges that moveresources from lower- to higher-valueduses. Open entry and freedom of con-tract expand the opportunity set acrossthe board, and are prey to none of thedestructive consequences that markresort to faction or theft. The nineteenth-century program of trade and labor lib-eralization makes as much sense intoday’s Internet age as it did in an eradominated by iron and steel.

John F. Kennedy had it right when hesaid that a rising tide lifts all boats. Andthat tide will only rise when we put asideour preoccupation with redress andredistribution–and agree instead tounleash the productive capacities of allour citizens.



The economic gap between rich andpoor has grown dramatically in the Unit-ed States over the past generation and isnow considerably wider than in anyother affluent nation. This increase ineconomic inequality has no recentprecedent, at least in America. The dis-tribution of family income was remark-ably stable from 1947 to 1980. We do nothave good data on family incomes before1947, but the wage gap between skilledand unskilled workers narrowed dramat-ically between 1910 and 1947, whichprobably means that family incomes alsobecame more equal. The last protractedincrease in economic inequality occur-red between 1870 and 1910.

The gap between the rich and the restof America has widened steadily since1979. The Census Bureau, which isAmerica’s principal source of data on

household incomes, does not collectgood data from the rich, but the Con-gressional Budget Of½ce (cbo) hasrecently combined census data with taxrecords to track income trends near thetop of the distribution. Figure 1 showsthat the share of after-tax income goingto the top 1 percent of American house-holds almost doubled between 1979 and1997. The top 1 percent included allhouseholds with after-tax incomesabove $246,000 in 1997. The estimatedpurchasing power of the top 1 percentrose by 157 percent between 1979 and1997, while the median household’s pur-chasing power rose only 10 percent.1 The


Christopher Jencks

Does inequality matter?

Christopher Jencks, Malcolm Wiener Professor ofSocial Policy at the Kennedy School at HarvardUniversity, has been a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1992. The author of several classicworks, including “Inequality: A Reassessment ofthe Effect of Family and Schooling in America”(1972), Jencks is currently completing a new studyof inequality in America under the auspices of theRussell Sage Foundation.

1 Estimates of the absolute change in purchas-ing power should be treated with extreme cau-tion. The Consumer Price Index suggests, forexample, that the purchasing power of the bot-tom quintile did not change between 1979 and1997, yet data on food expenditures suggest thatthe poorest quintile felt it had more discre-tionary income (see Bruce Hamilton, “UsingEngel’s Law to Estimate cpi Bias,” AmericanEconomic Review 91 [June 2001]: 619–630) anddirect measures of housing conditions andother amenities suggest that the poorest quin-tile’s material standard of living rose (see SusanMayer and Christopher Jencks, “Do Of½cialPoverty Rates Provide Useful Informationabout Trends in Children’s Economic Wel-fare?” Levy Institute, Bard College, June 2001,available at <http://www.jcpr.org>). © 2002 by Christopher Jencks

gap between the poorest ½fth of Ameri-can households and the median house-hold also widened between 1979 and1997, but the trend was far less dramatic.

To liberals who feel that economicinequality is unjust or socially destruc-tive, its growth is evidence that Americahas been headed in the wrong direction.To conservatives who feel either thatriches are the best way of rewardingthose who contribute the most to pros-perity or that a generous welfare stateencourages idleness and folly among thepoor, the growth of inequality seemseither innocuous or desirable. Thedebate over inequality involves bothmoral and empirical claims, but becausethe empirical claims are hard to assess,both sides tend to emphasize moralarguments. But treating inequality as amoral issue does not make the empiricalquestions go away, because the mostcommon moral arguments for andagainst inequality rest on claims aboutits consequences. If these claims cannotbe supported with evidence, skepticswill ½nd the moral arguments uncon-vincing. If the claims about conse-quences are actually wrong, the moralarguments are also wrong.

The connection between moral obliga-tions and empirical evidence is mostobvious in the case of utilitarian morali-ty, which requires everyone to followrules consistent with the greatest goodof the greatest number. Utilitarianmorality tells us, for example, that weshould not litter even when there is nochance of being punished, because thecost to others usually exceeds the bene½tto ourselves. But a moral obligation tofollow rules that promote the greatestgood of the greatest number does not tellus which speci½c rules for distributinggoods and services produce that result.

If humanity lived entirely on mannathat dropped from heaven, and if eachadditional pound of manna yielded aprogressively smaller increase in therecipient’s well-being, rulemakers com-mitted to the greatest good of the great-est number would seek to distributemanna equally, at least when recipientshad equal needs. But economic goodsand services do not drop from heaven.People have to produce these goods andservices in order to sell them to oneanother. How much people producedepends partly on how generously theirefforts are rewarded. Rulemakers there-fore have to make tradeoffs between theneeds of consumers, which are relatively


ChristopherJencks oninequality

Percent of Household Income Going to the Richest One Percent

Year

6

9

12

15

97959391898785838179

Perc

ent

7.58.1

9.610.5

10.1 10.0 10.1 10.3

13.6

11.4

Figure 1Changes in the percent ofhousehold income going tothe richest 1 percent ofAmerican households,1979–1997.

Source: Congressional BudgetOffice, Historical Effective TaxRates, 1979–1997, September2001, Table G-1c.

equal, and the motives of producers,who usually produce more when extraeffort leads to higher rewards.

The most widely discussed alternativeto the utilitarian theory of justice is thetheory proposed by John Rawls.2 Rawlsclaimed that when uncertainty is greatand downside risks are high, peopleare–or should be–absolutely riskaverse. This assumption led Rawls tobelieve that if people did not know whatposition they would occupy in a societythey would want to organize the societyso as to maximize the well-being of thesociety’s least advantaged members. Ifthis claim is correct, utilitarian logic alsoimplies that society should maximize thewell-being of the least advantaged. Evenif most people are not as risk averse asRawls claimed, they may be suf½cientlyrisk averse to feel that maximizing theposition of the least advantaged shouldbe given very high priority in a just soci-ety.

But most thoughtful liberals, includingRawls, also recognize that rewardingpeople for producing more goods andservices will often improve the absolutewell-being of the least advantaged. Iden-tifying the best strategy for improvingthe position of the least advantagedtherefore requires complex empiricalcalculations that turn out to be rathersimilar to the calculations required toachieve the greatest good of the greatestnumber. The rest of this article assessesvarious empirical claims about how eco-nomic inequality affects both the meanlevel of well-being and the position ofthe least advantaged.

Some of the potential costs and bene-½ts of inequality emerge when we con-trast the United States with other rich

democracies. One simple way todescribe income inequality in differentcountries is to compute what is calledthe “90/10 ratio.” To calculate this ratiowe rank households from richest topoorest. Then we divide the income ofthe household at the ninetieth percentileby the income of the household at thetenth percentile. (Comparing the nineti-eth percentile to the tenth percentile isbetter than, say, comparing the ninety-ninth percentile to the ½rst percentile,because few countries collect reliabledata on the incomes of either the veryrich or the very poor.)

The Luxembourg Income Study (lis),which is the best current source of dataon economic inequality in differentcountries, has calculated 90/10 ratios forfourteen rich democracies in the mid-1990s. Table 1 shows the results.3 Tokeep differences between these fourteencountries in perspective I have alsoincluded data on two poorer and lessdemocratic countries, Mexico and Rus-sia. If we set aside Mexico and Russia,the big English-speaking democraciesare the most unequal, the Scandinaviandemocracies are the most equal, andWestern European democracies fall inthe middle. (Italy looks more unequalthan the other continental democracies,but the Italian data is somewhat sus-pect.) Within the English-speakingworld the United States is the most un-


Doesinequalitymatter?

2 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

3 lis adjusts household incomes for size-relat-ed differences in households’ economic needsusing a scale in which, for example, a house-hold of four needs twice as much as a house-hold of one, and a household of nine needsthree times as much as a household of one.This scale probably underestimates the addi-tional income needed to maintain a constantlevel of material well-being and probably over-estimates the additional income needed tomaintain a constant level of subjective well-being when household size rises.

Table 1Income inequality and economic output invarious countries during the 1990s

Scandinaviad 2.8 75 77.2Sweden (1995) 2.6 68 78.9Finland (1995) 2.7 68 76.6Norway (1995) 2.8 85 77.8Denmark (1992) 2.9 79 75.4

Western Europe 3.6 73 77.5Nether. (1994) 3.2 75 77.5Germany (1994) 3.2 71 76.6Belgium (1996) 3.2 74 76.4France (1994) 3.5 66 78.4Switz. (1992) 3.6 84 78.5Italy (1995) 4.8 67 77.6

Brit. Com. 4.3 73 77.7Canada (1994) 4.0 78 78.2Australia (1994) 4.3 75 78.0U.K. (1995) 4.6 67 77.0

e

U.S. (1997) 5.6 100 75.7

Middle-income LIS nationsRussia (1995) 9.4 21 (?) 65.0Mexico (1998) 11.6 25 na

a From <http://lisweb.ceps.lu/key/½gures/ineqtable.htm> (8/13/01).

b From U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Ab-stract of the United States, 2000, GovernmentPrinting Of½ce, Table 1365. GDP is converted to$U.S. using purchasing power parity.

c National Center for Health Statistics, Health,United States, 2000, Government Printing Of½ce,2000, Table 27.

d All area averages are unweighted arithmeticmeans.

e England and Wales.

equal of all. The 90/10 ratio in the Unit-ed States is twice that in Scandinavia.But even the United States is nothinglike as unequal as Russia, Mexico, or

many other Latin American countries.America’s unusually high level of

inequality is not attributable to itsunusually diverse labor force. Years ofschooling are more equally distributedin the United States than in the Euro-pean countries for which we have com-parable data (Sweden, the Netherlands,and Germany). Adult test scores aremore unequally distributed in the Unit-ed States than Europe, partly becauseAmerican immigrants score so poorly ontests given in English. But disparities incognitive skills turn out to play a tinyrole in explaining cross-national differ-ences in the distribution of earnings. Ifone compares American workers withthe same test scores and the sameamount of schooling, the Americans’wages vary more than the wages of allSwedish, Dutch, or German workers.4

Almost everyone who studies the caus-es of economic inequality agrees that byfar the most important reason for thedifferences between rich democracies isthat their governments adopt differenteconomic policies. There is no agree-ment about which policies are crucial, butthere is a fairly standard list of suspects.A number of rich countries have central-ized wage bargaining, which almostalways compresses the distribution ofearnings. Many rich democracies alsomake unionization easy, which alsotends to compress the wage distribution.Some rich democracies transfer a lot ofmoney to people who are retired, unem-ployed, sick, or permanently disabled,



4 Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, “Do Cog-nitive Test Scores Explain Higher U.S. WageInequality?” Cambridge: National Bureau ofEconomic Research, April 2001; and DanDevroye and Richard Freeman, “Does Inequali-ty in Skills Explain Inequality in EarningsAcross Advanced Countries?” Cambridge:National Bureau of Economic Research, Febru-ary 2001.

Country (and year of the ninetieth tothe tenth percentile)

Ratio ofholdhold income atthe 90th to10th per-centile a

GDP

per capita as a percent ofu.s. level in 1998 b

Life expec-tancy atbirth(1995est.) c

while others are far less generous. TheUnited States is unusually unequal part-ly because it makes little effort to limitwage inequality: the minimum wage islow, and American law makes unioniza-tion relatively dif½cult. In addition, theUnited States transfers less money tothose who are not working than mostother rich democracies.

The fact that the American govern-ment makes so little effort to reduceeconomic inequality may seem surpris-ing in a country where social equality isso important. American politicians pres-ent themselves to the public as beingjust like everyone else, and once theystep outside their of½ces, Americans allwear jeans. The way Americans talk andthe music they listen to are also affectedby egalitarian impulses. But while thetenor of American culture may be demo-cratic, Americans are also far more hos-tile to government than the citizens ofother rich democracies. Since egalitari-an economic policies require govern-mental action, they win far less supportin the United States than in most otherrich democracies.

Conservatives have argued for cen-turies that trying to limit economicinequality inevitably reduces both theincentive to work and the ef½ciencywith which work is organized. As aresult, they think egalitarian societieshave fewer goods and services to distrib-ute than societies that allow the marketto determine household incomes. Onesimple way to test the claim is to askwhether countries that tolerate a highlevel of inequality really do enjoy a high-er standard of living.

Measuring a country’s standard of liv-ing is not easy. The most widely usedmeasure is probably per capita GrossDomestic Product (gdp), converted toAmerican dollars using what is knownas “purchasing power parity”–a system

designed to measure what different cur-rencies actually buy in the countrieswhere they are used. Column 2 of Table 1shows gdp per capita for the fourteenrich democracies on which lis providesdistributional data. At ½rst glance thedata seem to support the conservativecase, because the most unequal country,the United States, also has the highestgdp per capita. That fact makes a strongimpression on most Americans. But ifyou compare the other thirteen richdemocracies in Table 1 you will ½nd nosystematic relationship between in-equality and per capita gdp. Britain andItaly, for example, rank just below theUnited States in terms of inequality, buttheir gdp per capita is lower than anyother country but France. The fact thategalitarian economic policies have noobvious correlation with per capita gdpwithin Europe or the Commonwealthmakes a strong impression on egalitari-ans in those countries. It also suggeststhat America’s high output per capitamay be traceable to something otherthan our tolerance for economic in-equality.

Notice, too, that no rich democracy isas unequal as Mexico or Russia. Somethink this is because the combination ofaffluence and democracy always leadscountries to adopt somewhat egalitarianeconomic policies. Others think thecausal arrow runs the other way, andthat extreme inequality retards econom-ic growth. This debate is unlikely to besettled soon, because it requires histori-cal evidence that is hard to ½nd in poorcountries.

If inequality does not account forAmerica’s high gdp per capita, whatdoes? A ½rst step toward answering thisquestion is to decompose economic out-put into two components: the numberof hours worked in different countries(“effort”) and the value of the goods and



services that workers produce per hour(“ef½ciency”). Table 2 shows such statis-tics for the United States and six otherrich democracies. Americans are morelikely to have paid jobs than people inthe other six countries, but except in thecase of France the difference is fairlysmall. American workers also seem toput in more hours per year than workerselsewhere, although data on hoursworked is not collected in the same wayin all countries, so the numbers must betreated gingerly. Still, the estimates ofoutput per hour suggest that while theUnited States is considerably more ef½-cient than Canada, Australia, GreatBritain, and Sweden, it is slightly lessef½cient than France and Germany.

One obvious objection to this compar-ison is that unemployment is higher inFrance and Germany than in the UnitedStates. One way to correct for this wasteof human resources is to divide econom-ic output by what Table 2 labels “avail-

able” hours–the number of hours actu-ally worked plus the estimated numberof hours that those looking for jobs in agiven week wanted to work. The last rowof Table 2 shows the results of this calcu-lation. After this adjustment is made, theUnited States, France, and Germanylook about equally ef½cient. If we set theUnited States to one side, moreover,there is again no obvious correlationbetween inequality and ef½ciency in theother six countries.

Another objection to the calculationsin Table 2 is that they take no account ofcross-national differences in the stock ofphysical and human capital. This is true,but since one major rationale for tolerat-ing a high level of inequality is that thissupposedly encourages capital accumu-lation and investment, holding Ameri-ca’s advantages in these domains con-stant would bias the results in favor ofequality. The calculations in Table 2 alsoignore national differences in natural



Table 2Estimates of economic inequality, output, effort, & ef½ciency in seven rich democracies for 1998

U.S. U.K. Australia Canada France Germany Sweden

Inequality (1994–1997)line 1: 90/10 ratio 5.6 4.6 4.3 4.0 3.5 3.2 2.6

Output (1998)line 2: GDP per capita $32,184 $21,673 $24,192 $25,179 $21,132 $23,010 $21,799

Effort (1998)line 3: % of pop. employed 48.6 45.9 45.8 46.6 38.1 43.5 45.1line 4: Hrs per worker per yr. 1864 1731 1860 1779 1567 1510 1629

Ef½ciency (1998)line 5: GDP per worker $60,106 $44,280 $47,558 $49,007 $55,714 $50,616 $44,000line 6: GDP per hr. $32.25 $25.58 $25.57 $27.55 $35.55 $33.52 $27.01line 7: GDP per “available” hr. $30.81 $23.95 $23.51 $25.26 $31.38 $30.38 $24.77

Source by line: Lines 1 and 2: see Table 1. Line 3: see Statistical Abstract 2000, Table 1376. Line 4: see Organiza-tion for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Employment Outlook, Statistical Annex, 2001, 225.Line 5 = line 3/line 4. Line 6 = line 5/line 4. Line 7 = line 6 adjusted to include hours available from those notworking but seeking work, assuming that they wanted to work the same number of hours as those actuallyemployed.

resources, but such an adjustmentwould almost surely make America lookworse, not better. Perhaps the most fun-damental objection of all is that statis-tics on gdp take little account of differ-ences in the quality of the services indifferent countries, since these differ-ences are almost impossible to measure.If America’s service sector producesmore satis½ed customers than the serv-ice sector in France or Germany, Table 2may understate the bene½ts of inequali-ty.

If American managers had organizedthe economy in an unusually ef½cientway, so that American workers wereproducing signi½cantly more (or better)goods and services per hour than theircounterparts in other rich democracies,it would be fairly easy to argue that theydeserved their fabulous salaries. Table 2is obviously not the last word on thisissue, but it does not suggest that Ameri-can workers are producing signi½cantlymore per hour than their counterparts inother rich countries. Comparisons thatadjust for the stock of physical andhuman capital show the same thing.5America’s high standard of living seemsto depend as much on long hours asclever management or clever workers.

The fact that Americans spend somuch time working is rather surprisingfor an affluent nation with a reputationfor hedonism. Workers in Germany,France, Japan, and Britain have cut theirhours substantially since 1980. Ameri-cans cut their hours earlier in the twen-tieth century but have not done so since1980. Americans tell pollsters that theywould like to work fewer hours, butwhen they have a choice between short-

er hours and more consumer goods,they mostly seem to opt for consumergoods rather than family time or leisure.This is a legitimate choice, but it hasnothing to do with economic ef½ciency.

Until fairly recently the United Stateswas so much richer than other countriesthat even the poor lived better in Ameri-ca than elsewhere, leading conservativesto argue that laissez-faire policies bene-½ted everyone in the long run. Today,however, the American poor are nolonger the world’s most affluent. TimSmeeding, who directs the lis, and LeeRainwater, a Harvard sociologist, havecompared the purchasing power ofhouseholds at the tenth percentile of theincome distribution in thirteen richdemocracies covered by the lis. Thesecomparisons provide a pretty good indi-cation of how the poor fare in differentcountries. Table 3, which is based ontheir work, shows that the Americanpoor are better off than the poor inBritain or Australia but marginallyworse off than the poor in Sweden,Canada, and Finland, and substantiallyworse off than the poor in WesternEurope.

Conservatives often blame Americanpoverty on the existence of an “under-class” that rejects mainstream socialnorms, does little paid work, and haschildren whom neither parent can sup-port. It is certainly true that poor Ameri-can households include fewer workingadults than affluent American house-holds. This is true in every rich countryfor which we have data. But when LarsOsberg, an economist at Dalhousie Uni-versity, compared poor households inthe United States, Canada, Britain, Swe-den, France, and Germany, he foundthat the poor American householdsworked far more hours per year thantheir counterparts in the other ½ve



5 Robert Hall and Charles Jones, “Why DoSome Countries Produce So Much More Out-put per Worker than Others,” Quarterly Journalof Economics 114 (1999): 83–116.

Table 3Purchasing power of households at the 10thand 90th percentiles of each nation’s distribu-tion relative to households at the same per-centile in the United States in the same year,1992–1997

Country Purchasing power as a percent of(and year) the U.S. level in the same year

1oth 90th Averagepercentile percentile of all

percentiles

Scandinavia 112 57 77Sweden (1995) 103 49 67Finland (1995) 105 53 73Norway (1995) 128 68 88Denmark (1995) 110 59 80

Western Europe 119 73 88Neth. (1994) 110 64 76Germany (1994) 113 67 82Belgium (1996) 121 73 80France (1994) 110 71 84Switz. (1992) 141 89 116

Commonwealth 94 73 80Canada (1994) 105 80 92U.K. (1995) 85 68 72Australia (1994) 87 71 76

U.S. (1997) 100 100 100

Source: Columns 1 and 2 are from Timothy Smeedingand Lee Rainwater, “Comparing Living StandardsAcross Countries: Real Incomes at the Top, the Bot-tom, and the Middle” (paper prepared for a confer-ence on “What Has Happened to the Quality of Lifein America and Other Advanced Industrial Nations?”Levy Institute, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson,N.Y., June 2001). Local currencies were converted todollars using their estimated purchasing power pari-ty. Area averages are unweighted arithmetic means.Column 3 is calculated from the national means ofthe logarithms of after-tax household income, usingdata provided by Rainwater.

countries.6 This ½nding suggests thatwhat distinguishes the United Statesfrom the other rich democracies is notthe idleness of the American poor butthe anger that idleness inspires in moreaffluent Americans, which helps explainthe stinginess of the American welfarestate.

If Rawls is right, disinterested rulemak-ers in all societies should be trying tomaximize the well-being of the leastadvantaged. If you accept that claim,Table 3 suggests that Western Europeancountries are doing a better job than theUnited States and that Western Euro-pean countries are more just. But if youare a utilitarian whose goal is to maxi-mize the average level of well-being, thesituation is not so clear. If you want tocompare the average level of well-beingin countries with different distributionsof income, you need some way of com-paring the value people at differentpoints in the income distribution assignto additional after-tax income. Table 3suggests, for example, that poor Canadi-ans have 5 percent more purchasingpower than their American counter-parts, while affluent Americans have 25percent more purchasing power thanaffluent Canadians. If your goal is toachieve “the greatest good of the great-est number,” you need some way ofdeciding whether the 25 percent advan-tage of affluent Americans over affluentCanadians should count for more or lessthan the 5 percent advantage of poorCanadians over poor Americans.

When employers want to reward allmembers of a hierarchical work groupequally, they usually raise every mem-ber’s wage by the same percentage.



6 Lars Osberg, “Labour Supply and InequalityTrends in the U.S.A. and Elsewhere,” availableat <http://is.dal.ca/~osberg/home.html>.

When social scientists measure econom-ic inequality, they too assume thatinequality has not changed if everyone’sincome has risen by the same percent-age. Such practices suggest that manypeople think a 1 percent increase inincome is equally valuable to the richand the poor, even though a 1 percentincrease represents a much largerabsolute increase for the rich. In whatfollows I will refer to the assumptionthat a 1 percent gain is equally valuableat all income levels as the “One PercentIs Always The Same” rule, or the opiatsrule for short.

The opiats rule implies that if myincome is $100,000 and I give $20,000of it to the poor, my well-being falls by a½fth. If I divide my $20,000 equallybetween ten people with incomes of$10,000, ten people’s well-being will riseby a ½fth. The gains from this gift willthus exceed the losses by a factor of ten.The utilitarian case for governmentalredistribution almost always reflects thislogic: taxing the rich won’t do themmuch harm, and helping the poor willdo them a lot of good. If you look at theactual relationship between income andoutcomes like health and happiness, theopiats rule seldom describes the rela-tionship perfectly, but it comes far closerthan a “One Dollar Is Always The Same”rule, which is the only rule under whichincome inequality does not affect healthor happiness.

If we apply the opiats rule to thetenth and ninetieth percentiles in Table3, the percentage gains accruing to thoseat the ninetieth percentile from living inthe United States almost always exceedthe percentage gains accruing to those atthe tenth percentile from living in West-ern Europe or Canada. Switzerland is anotable exception. Americans near thebottom of the distribution would havegained far more from living in Switzer-

land in 1992 than Americans near thetop would have lost. Column 3 of Table 3generalizes this logic by comparinghouseholds at every point in each coun-try’s income distribution to those at thesame point in other countries and aver-aging the percentage differences.7 Aver-aging across the entire income distribu-tion, Switzerland again does substantial-ly better than the United States in 1992,but all the other rich democracies inTable 3 do somewhat worse than theUnited States.

Up to this point I have been focusingexclusively on what people can afford tobuy. While economic goods and servicesare obviously important, many peoplebelieve that inequality also affectshuman welfare in ways that are inde-pendent of any given household’s pur-chasing power. Even if my family in-come remains constant, the distributionof income in my neighborhood or mynation may influence my children’s edu-cational opportunities, my life expectan-cy, my chance of being robbed, the prob-ability that I will vote, and perhaps evenmy overall happiness. The remainder ofthis article tries to summarize what weknow about such effects.

Educational opportunities: Increases ineconomic inequality have raised thevalue of a college degree in the UnitedStates. If all else had remained equal,making a college degree more valuableshould increase both teenagers’ interestin attending college and their parents’willingness to pay for college. But thegrowth of economic inequality in Amer-ica has been accompanied by a change in



7 Column 3 is calculated from the differencesbetween national means for the logarithm ofafter-tax household income adjusted for house-hold size. Comparing medians in differentcountries yields almost the same results.

the way we ½nance public higher educa-tion. Tax subsidies play a smaller rolethan they once did, and tuition plays alarger role. Since 1979 tuition at Ameri-ca’s public colleges and universities hasrisen faster than most parents’ income.

If American high-school graduateswere as well informed and farsighted aseconomic theory assumes, they wouldhave realized that the monetary value ofa college degree was rising even fasterthan tuition. College attendance wouldhave risen both among children whoseparents offered to pay the bills andamong children who cover their owncosts, who would either have borrowedmore or worked longer hours to earn adegree.

But while some students clearlyrespond to changes in the long-termpayoff of a college degree, many do not.Indeed, the reason affluent parents offerto pay their children’s college expensesrather than just giving their childrencash is that parents fear that if the chil-dren got the cash they might spend it onsomething with more short-term payoff,like a flashy car or a trip around theworld. If affluent parents are right inthinking that their seventeen-year-oldshave short time horizons, the same isprobably true for less affluent high-school graduates whose parents cannotpay their college expenses. Such studentsare likely to be far more sensitive tochanges in tuition than to a change inthe hypothetical lifetime value of a BA.Tuition is easily observed and has to bepaid now. The lifetime value of a BA isalways uncertain and cannot be realizedfor a long time. Among students whopay their own bills, higher tuition couldeasily reduce college attendance evenwhen the long-run returns of a collegedegree are rising.

Table 4 is taken from work by twoeconomists, David Ellwood at Harvard

Table 4Percent of high-school graduates enrolling in a4-year college or some other form of postsec-ondary education within 20 months of gradua-tion, by income quartile: 1980–1982 and 1992

Income Entered a Entered some otherquartile 4-year form of post-

college secondary education

1980 1992 Change 1980 1992 Change–82 –82

Lowest 29 28 –1 28 32 4

Second 33 38 5 30 32 2

Third 39 48 9 33 32 –1

Highest 55 66 11 26 24 –2

All 39 45 6 29 30 1

Source: David Ellwood and Thomas Kane, “Who IsGetting a College Education? Family Background andthe Growing Gaps in Enrollment,” in SheldonDanziger and Jane Waldfogel, eds., Securing the Future(New York: Russell Sage, 2000).

and Thomas Kane at ucla. It showschanges between 1980–1982 and 1992 inthe fraction of high-school graduatesfrom different economic backgroundsentering four-year colleges. Among stu-dents from the most affluent families,the proportion entering a four-year col-lege rose substantially. Among studentsfrom middle-income families, whosefamilies often help with children’s col-lege expenses but seldom pay the wholebill, attendance rose more modestly. Stu-dents from the poorest quartile were nomore likely to attend a four-year collegein 1992 than in 1980–1982. This pattern,in which enrollment rises more at thetop than at the bottom, is just what wewould expect if parents respond tochanges in the long-term bene½ts of col-lege while students respond to changesin short-term costs. It is important toemphasize, however, that the poorestquartile’s chances of attending college



did not fall appreciably; they just failedto rise. The poorest quartile was worseoff only insofar as higher education con-stitutes a “positional” good, whose valuedepends not just on how much you havebut how much others have. That re-mains a contested issue.

If rising economic inequality ex-plained the trends in Table 4, the corre-lation between parental income and col-lege attendance should have grownfastest in those states where economicinequality grew fastest. Susan Mayer, asociologist at the University of Chicago,has shown that that is exactly what hap-pened during the 1970s and 1980s.8Overall, growing economic inequality ina state raised college attendance, partlybecause it was accompanied by in-creased spending on all levels of publiceducation. The positive effects of grow-ing inequality on college attendance per-sisted even when Mayer took account ofchanges in the payoff of schooling in thestudent’s home state. But in the stateswhere inequality grew the most, theeffect of parental income on educationalattainment also grew.

Mayer has also shown that theincrease in economic inequality between1970 and 1990 led to greater economicsegregation between neighborhoods.9When the rich got richer they evidentlymoved to affluent suburbs where otherrich people were also moving. Incomedisparities within neighborhoods hardlychanged. Economic segregation is likely

to be important, because a school’s abili-ty to attract effective teachers turns outto depend largely on its socioeconomicmix. Even when districts with a lot ofpoor children pay better than nearbydistricts, as they sometimes do, they sel-dom attract teachers who are good atraising children’s test scores. Increasingeconomic segregation is therefore likelyto reduce the chances that low-incomestudents will get good teachers.

Life expectancy: People live longer inrich countries than in poor countries,but the relationship flattens out as na-tional income rises. Indeed, the statisticsin Table 1 show that life expectancy andgdp per capita are not strongly relatedin rich democracies. In particular, lifeexpectancy is lower in the United Statesthan in almost any other rich democra-cy.

Within any given country people withhigher incomes also live longer. This re-lationship flattens out near the top ofthe income distribution, but the gap be-tween richer and poorer families doesnot seem to narrow when everyone’sstandard of living rises. Despite both ris-ing incomes and the introduction of Me-dicare and Medicaid, for example, theeffects of both income and education onmortality increased in the United Statesbetween 1960 and 1986.10 Class differ-ences in mortality also widened in Eng-land between 1930 and 1960, eventhough the overall standard of livingrose and the National Health Service



10 See Harriet Orcutt Duleep, “MeasuringSocioeconomic Mortality Differentials overTime,” Demography 26 (May 1989): 345–351,and G. Pappas, S. Queen, W. Hadden, and G.Fisher, “The Increasing Disparity in Mortalitybetween Socioeconomic Groups in the UnitedStates, 1960 and 1986,” New England Journal ofMedicine 329 (1993): 103–109.

8 Susan E. Mayer, “How Did the Increase inEconomic Inequality between 1970 and 1990Affect Children’s Educational Attainment?”American Journal of Sociology, forthcoming.

9 Susan Mayer, “How the Growth in IncomeInequality Increased Economic Segregation,”Irving Harris Graduate School of Public PolicyStudies, University of Chicago, 2001, availableat <http://www.jcpr.org>.

equalized access to medical care.11 Suchfacts suggest that the linkage betweenincome and health involves more thanmaterial deprivation. Otherwise, dou-bling everyone’s purchasing powerwould narrow the gap between the topand the bottom.

One reason for the persistent correla-tion between income and health is thatpoor health lowers people’s earningpower. In addition, big medical bills candeplete a family’s savings, lowering itsunearned income in later years. Butwhile poor health clearly affects income,studies that follow the same individualsover time suggest that income, occupa-tional position, and education also affectpeople’s health. One reason is that mem-bers of affluent households are morelikely to follow the medical profession’sadvice. Affluent Americans now smokefar less than poor Americans, for exam-ple. Affluent Americans also get a bitmore exercise than the poor and are lesslikely to be overweight. But even whenwe take these differences into account,much of the correlation between in-come and life expectancy remains unex-plained. Experimental studies that mani-pulate a monkey’s rank in the hierarchyof its troop suggest that rank affectshealth, and the same is pretty clearlytrue for humans. But we do not knowhow much of the association betweenincome and health can be explained inthis way.

In 1992 Richard Wilkinson wrote aninfluential article arguing that a moreequal distribution of income improvedlife expectancy in rich countries.12 Sub-

sequent work showed that mortality wasalso lower in American states and metro-politan areas where incomes were moreequal. One explanation for this phenom-enon is the opiats rule. A 1 percentincrease in income lowers the odds ofdying before the age of sixty-½ve byroughly the same amount, regardless ofwhat your initial income is. This meansthat adding $1,000 to the income of amillion poor families while subtracting$1,000 from the incomes of a million ri-cher families should lower overall mor-tality. It follows that countries, states,or cities with the same mean incomeshould have lower death rates when thisincome is more equally distributed. Butif this were the only way in which in-come inequality affected life expectancy,the difference between the United Statesand Sweden would be quite small.

Wilkinson and his followers believethat inequality also lowers life expectan-cy independent of its effect on any givenhousehold’s income, because it changesthe social context in which people live.According to Wilkinson, inequalityerodes the social bonds that make peo-ple care about one another and accentu-ates feelings of relative deprivation (thesocial-science term for what people usedto call envy). Other epidemiologists takewhat they call a “materialist” position,arguing that inequality kills because itaffects public policy, altering the distri-bution of education, health care, envi-ronmental protection, and other materi-al resources. Either way, if we comparepeople with the same income–say$50,000 a year–those who live in placeswhere incomes are more unequal shoulddie younger.

Recent research has raised seriousdoubts about such claims. As data onmore countries and more time periodshave become available, the cross-nation-al correlation between economic in-



11 See Elsie Pamuk, “Social Class Inequality inMortality from 1921 to 1972 in England andWales,” Population Studies 39 (1985): 17–31.

12 Wilkinson summarized his thinking on thisissue in Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions ofInequality (London: Routledge, 1996).

equality and life expectancy has fallenperilously close to zero. If you look atTable 1 and simply contrast Americawith other rich democracies, the ideathat inequality kills seems to makesense. But if you compare the other richdemocracies with one another, you ½ndno consistent association between in-equality and life expectancy. Incomesare far more unequal in Canada, Aus-tralia, and Great Britain than in Scandi-navia, for example, but life expectancy isabout the same in these two groups ofcountries.

Recent work has also raised doubtsabout the causal link between inequalityand life expectancy in American statesand cities. In America, both economicinequality and life expectancy are corre-lated with the percentage of AfricanAmericans in a state or city. Blacks dieyounger than whites no matter wherethey live, so states with large black pop-ulations have above-average mortalityrates no matter how their residents’income is distributed. American whitesalso die younger when they live in a stateor a metropolitan area with a large Afri-can American population. Once onetakes the effects of race into account, thecorrelation between economic inequali-ty and mortality tends to disappear.13

If we want to know whether egalitari-an policies would improve people’shealth, however, we need to ask whetherchanges in economic inequality at thenational, state, or local level are associ-ated with changes in life expectancy. Theanswer to this question is “sometimes.”When Andrew Clarkwest and I analyzedchanges in economic inequality withinAmerican states during the 1980s, wefound that white mortality rates fellleast in the states where inequality in-

creased fastest. That ½nding was consis-tent with the Wilkinson hypothesis,although the effect could have been dueto chance. But when we extended ouranalysis back to 1970, the relationshipwas reversed. That relationship couldalso have been due to chance.

When Clarkwest and I looked atchanges in economic inequality withinthe rich democracies that participate inthe Luxembourg Income Study (lis), wefound that life expectancy had riseneverywhere, but it has risen less rapidlyin those countries where economic in-equality was rising fastest.14 This wasconsistent with the Wilkinson hypothe-sis, and in this case the relationship wastoo large to blame on chance, at leastusing conventional statistical standards.Nonetheless, the relationship was weak.Economic inequality in the UnitedStates rose by about a sixth between1979 and 1997.15 Life expectancy in theUnited States rose by three years duringthis period. Had inequality not in-creased, the lis data implied that lifeexpectancy in the United States wouldhave risen by an additional 0.3 years. Tokeep this number in perspective, it helpsto remember that Americans in the top 5percent of the income distribution canexpect to live about nine years longerthan those in the bottom 10 percent.16



13 See also Angus Deaton and Darren Lubot-sky, “Mortality, Inequality, and Race in Ameri-can Cities and States,” Cambridge: NationalBureau of Economic Research, June 2000.

14 See Andrew Clarkwest, “Notes on Cross-National Analysis of the Relationship betweenMortality and Income Inequality,” MalcolmWiener Center for Social Policy, Harvard Uni-versity, 2000, available at <http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/socpol/MWCstdntresearch.htm>.

15 This estimate assumes that the apparentincrease in inequality between 1992 and 1993was a methodological artifact caused largely bychanges in the Census Bureau’s data collectionand coding procedures.

16 This calculation is based on an analysis ofthe National Longitudinal Mortality Survey by

The apparent effect of even a fairly largechange in a nation’s income distributionpales by comparison.

We also need to bear in mind that thecross-national correlation betweenchanges in economic inequality andchanges in life expectancy may not becausal. Countries that restrained thegrowth of economic inequality after1980 were dominated by political partiesthat felt either politically or morallyobligated to protect the interests of theirless affluent citizens. Such countries mayhave done all sorts of other things thatmade people live longer, like reducingthe work week or ensuring that morepeople got the health care they needed.

Happiness: The relationship betweenincome and happiness is much like therelationship between income and health,except that it is easier to tell whethersomeone has died than whether they areunhappy. Almost every year since 1972the General Social Survey (gss) hasasked national samples of Americanadults the following question:

Taken all together, how would you saythings are these days? Would you say thatyou are very happy, pretty happy, or nottoo happy?

Those with higher incomes tend to saythey are happier than those with lowerincomes. This relationship flattens outnear the top of the distribution, but notenough to suggest that making theAmerican distribution of income like

Sweden’s would have a big effect on hap-piness. Just as with health, equalizingthe distribution of income is only likelyto have large effects on happiness if itchanges the social context in which peo-ple live. If equality strengthens socialties or reduces envy, for example, thatcould reduce unhappiness signi½cantly.

Empirical evidence for a correlationbetween equality and happiness remainsthin. Michael Hagerty, a social psycholo-gist at the University of California, Da-vis, has shown that Americans are lesslikely to say they are happy when theylive in cities where incomes are moreunequal, but his analysis does not takeaccount of the correlation between eco-nomic inequality and racial mix. A teamof economists at Harvard and the Lon-don School of Economics has shownthat Europeans become less satis½edwith their lot when their country’s in-come distribution becomes more un-equal, but this effect is con½ned torespondents who identify with the polit-ical Left.17 All this evidence is sugges-tive, but hardly de½nitive.

Crime: Several studies have found thatviolent crime is higher in American met-ropolitan areas where the distribution ofincome is more unequal. But these stud-ies have not looked at whether increasesin inequality are associated with increasesin crime. For the United States as awhole, trends in economic inequality donot match trends in violent crime at allclosely. Inequality hardly changed dur-ing the 1960s, when violent crime rose



17 See Michael Hagerty, “Social Comparisonsof Income in One’s Community: Evidencefrom National Surveys of Income and Happi-ness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology78 (2000): 764–771, and Alberto Alesina,Rafael Di Tella, and Robert MacCulloch,“Inequality and Happiness: Are Europeans andAmericans Different?” Cambridge: NationalBureau of Economic Research, April 2001.

Angus Deaton, which shows that men in thehighest income group have death rates compa-rable to men twelve years younger in the low-est income group, and that women in the high-est income group have death rates comparableto women six years younger in the lowestincome group. My use of Deaton’s results toinfer overall disparities in life expectancyrequires several assumptions that are unlikelyto be exactly correct.

sharply. Inequality rose in the early1980s, when violent crime fell. Inequali-ty rose more slowly in the late 1980s,when violent crime rose again. Inequali-ty near the top of the distribution rose inthe 1990s, while violent crime fell. Noneof this proves that changes in the distri-bution of income have no effect oncrime, but it does suggest that trends inviolent crime depend largely on otherinfluences.

Political influence: Americans are lesslikely to vote today than in the 1960s.The Left sometimes blames this declinein turnout on the fact that almost all thebene½ts of economic growth have beengoing to a small minority. Parties of theLeft in most other countries have madesure that the bene½ts of growth weremore equally distributed. In America,the Democrats have barely discussed theproblem. As a result, voters are said tohave become convinced that neitherparty cares about their problems.

Nonetheless, growing economicinequality cannot explain the decline inturnout, because this decline occurred inthe early 1970s, well before inequalitybegan to grow. Turnout has hardlychanged since 1980.18 If growing in-equality has affected turnout, it musthave done so by perpetuating a declinethat occurred for other reasons.

The most obvious causal link betweenturnout and equality runs the other way.If everyone votes, the electorate is byde½nition representative of the popula-

tion and politicians need to keep allincome groups happy. When people stopvoting, turnout almost always falls themost among the poorest and least edu-cated. As the income gap between thosewho vote and the population as a wholewidens, politicians have less incentive topush legislation that bene½ts the lowerhalf of the income distribution. RichardFreeman, an economist at Harvard, hasshown that class disparities in presiden-tial turnout increased between 1968 and1972 and that the same thing happenedbetween 1984 and 1988.19 I have not seenany evidence on what has happenedsince 1988.

American political campaigns havealso changed in ways that make it riskierfor politicians to upset the rich. Until the1960s most political candidates reliedlargely on volunteers to staff their cam-paign of½ces and contact voters. Nowthey rely largely on paid staff and televi-sion advertising. This change reflectsthe fact that politicians can raise moremoney today than in the past. Politicalcontributions have probably risen be-cause government affects more aspectsof our lives, so both voters and corpora-tions are willing to spend more moneyto influence government regulations andspending patterns. Whatever the expla-nation, people who can contributemoney now have more political weight,and people who can contribute timehave less. Politicians also know that the



18 About 62 percent of the voting-age popula-tion cast ballots in the three presidential elec-tions conducted during the 1960s. Turnout fellto 55 percent in 1972, 54 percent in 1976, and 53percent in 1980. Since 1980 presidential turn-out has averaged 52 percent, with no cleartrend. Off-year congressional elections havefollowed the same trajectory (U.S. Bureau ofthe Census, Statistical Abstract of the UnitedStates, 2000, Government Printing Of½ce,

2000, Table 479). If one allows for the factthat citizens constitute a declining fraction ofthe voting-age population and the fact thatmore citizens are disenfranchised becausethey are–or have been–in prison, turnoutamong eligible voters may actually haveincreased slightly since 1980.

19 Richard Freeman, “What, Me Vote?”paper presented at the Workshop on Inequali-ty and Social Policy, Kennedy School of Gov-ernment, June 2001.

easiest way to raise the money they needis to court affluent contributors. Whenthe share of income going to the top 1percent rises, politicians have more in-centive to raise money from this group.If politicians had to rely exclusively oncontributions of less than $100, theywould also have to rely more on volun-teers to do a lot of their campaign work.

I began this inquiry by arguing thatAmerica does less than almost any otherrich democracy to limit economicinequality. As a result, the rich can buy alot more in America than in other afflu-ent democracies, while the poor can buya little less. If you evaluate this situationby Rawlsian standards, America’s poli-cies are clearly inferior to those of mostrich European countries. If you evaluatethe same situation using a utilitarian cal-culus, you are likely to conclude thatmost American consumers do betterthan their counterparts in other largedemocracies. Much of this advantage isdue to the fact that Americans spendmore time working than Europeans do,but that may not be the whole story.

I also looked at evidence on whethereconomic inequality affects people’slives independent of its effects on theirmaterial standard of living. At least inthe United States, the growth of inequal-ity appears to have made more peopleattend college but also made educationalopportunities more unequal. Growinginequality may also have lowered lifeexpectancy, but the evidence for such aneffect is weak and the effect, if there wasone, was probably small. There is someevidence that changes in inequality af-fect happiness in Europe, but not muchevidence that this is the case in the Unit-ed States. If inequality affects violentcrime, these effects are swamped byother factors. There is no evidence thatchanges in economic inequality affect

political participation, but decliningpolitical participation among the lessaffluent may help explain why Americanpoliticians remained so passive wheninequality began to grow after 1980.

My bottom line is that the social con-sequences of economic inequality aresometimes negative, sometimes neutral,but seldom–as far as I can discover –positive.20 The case for inequality seemsto rest entirely on the claim that it pro-motes ef½ciency, and the evidence forthat claim is thin. All these judgmentsare very tentative, however, and they arelikely to change as more work is done.Still, it is worthwhile to ask what theywould imply about the wisdom of tryingto limit economic inequality if theywere, in fact, correct.

Readers’ answers to that questionshould, I think, depend on four valuejudgments. First, readers need to decidehow much weight they assign to improv-ing the lot of the least advantaged com-pared with improving the average levelof well-being. Second, they need todecide how much weight they assign toincreasing material well-being comparedwith increasing “family time” or“leisure.” Third, they need to decidehow much weight they assign to equaliz-ing opportunities for the young asagainst maximizing the welfare ofadults. Fourth, they need to decide howmuch value they assign to admittingmore people from poor countries such asMexico to the United States, since thisalmost inevitably makes the distributionof income more unequal.

If you are a hard-core Rawlsian whothinks that society’s sole economic goal



20 Mayer’s ½nding that inequality raises edu-cational attainment among the affluent is apartial exception, since the increase among theaffluent is larger than the decline among thepoor, making the net effect on educationalattainment positive.

should be to improve the position of theleast advantaged, European experiencesuggests that limiting inequality canbene½t the poor. If you are a hard-coreutilitarian, European experience sug-gests–though it certainly does notprove–that limiting inequality lowersconsumption. But European experiencealso suggests that lowering inequalityreduces consumption partly by encour-aging people to work fewer hours, whichmany Europeans see as a good thing. Ifyou care more about equal opportunityfor children than about consumptionamong adults, limiting economicinequality among parents probablyreduces disparities in the opportunitiesopen to their children.

All things considered, the case for lim-iting inequality seems to me strong butnot overwhelming. That is one reason

why most rich societies are deeply divid-ed about the issue. Yet given the central-ity of redistribution in modern politics,it is remarkable how little effort richsocieties have made to assemble thekinds of evidence they would need toassess the costs and bene½ts of limitinginequality. Even societies that redistrib-ute a far larger fraction of their gdpthan the United States spend almostnothing on answering questions of thiskind. Answering such questions wouldrequire collecting better evidence,which costs real money. It would alsorequire politicians to run the risk ofbeing proven wrong. Nonetheless, moralsentiments uninformed by evidencehave done incalculable damage over thepast few centuries, and their maligninfluence shows no sign of abating. Richdemocracies can do better if they try.



In February of 2001, Craig Venter, presi-dent of Celera Genomics, commentingon the near-completion of the humangenome project, said that “we are allessentially identical twins.” A newsheadline at the time made a similarpoint: Are We All One Race? Modern Sci-ence Says So. In the article that followed,the author quoted geneticist KennethKidd: “Race is not biologically de½nable,we are far too similar.”

Venter and Kidd are eminent scien-tists, so these statements must be rea-sonable. Based on an examination of ourdna, any two human beings are 99.9percent identical. The genetic differ-ences between different groups ofhuman beings are similarly minute.

Still, we only have to look around tosee an astonishing variety of individualdifferences in sizes, shapes, and facialfeatures. Equally clear are individual dif-ferences in susceptibility to disease–andin athletic, mathematical, and musicalabilities. Individual differences extend todifferences between group averages.Most of these average differences areinconspicuous, but some–such as skincolor–stand out.

Why this curious discrepancy betweenthe evidence of dna and what we canclearly see? If not dna, what are thecauses of the differences we perceivebetween individuals and between groupsof human beings?

Dna is a very long molecule, com-posed of two strands twisted aroundeach other to produce the famous doublehelix. There are forty-six such dna mol-ecules in a human cell, each (along withsome proteins) forming a chromosome.The dna in a human chromosome, ifstretched out, would be an inch or morein length. How this is compacted into amicroscopic blob some 1/1000 inch longwithout getting hopelessly tangled is anengineering marvel that is still a puzzle.

The “business” part of the dna, thepart that carries genetic information, isthe sequence of nucleotides, or bases, in


James F. Crow

Unequal by nature:a geneticist’s perspectiveon human differences

James F. Crow, a Fellow of the American Acade-my of Arts and Sciences since 1966, is professoremeritus of medical genetics at the University ofWisconsin. Over a career that has spanned morethan ½fty years, he and his collaborators havestudied a variety of traits in Drosophila, dissectedthe genetics of ddt resistance, measured theeffects of minor mutations on the overall ½tness ofpopulations, described the behavior of mutationsthat do not play the game by Mendel’s rules, stud-ied the effects of nonrandom mating, and consid-ered the question “What good is sex?”

the molecule. There are four of these,commonly designated as A, G, T, and C.(I could tell you what these letters standfor, but you wouldn’t understand thisessay any better if I did, so I won’t.)

In the double helix, there are fourkinds of base pairs: AT, GC, TA, and CG.The speci½c pairing rules–Awith T andGwith C–are dictated by the three-dimensional structure of the bases.

In a chromosome, the base pairs are ina precise sequence, and the orderlyprocess of cell division assures the repro-duction of this sequence with remark-ably few errors. Chromosomes occur inpairs, one member of each pair fromeach parent, and the dna sites in thetwo corresponding chromosomes matchup. We have twenty-three pairs of chro-mosomes, or a total of forty-six, as previ-ously mentioned, in each cell. Theseforty-six chromosomes contain aboutsix billion base pairs. If we randomlychoose a pair of bases from correspon-ding sites in two persons, 99.9 percent ofthe time they will be the same. This per-centage depends only slightly onwhether the two people are from thesame or from different continents, fromthe same or from different populationgroups.

In order to make sense of how thedna of human beings can be so similar,despite all the important visible andphysiological differences among individ-uals and groups, it is helpful to recountour evolutionary history.

All mammals, including ourselves, aredescended from an ancestral species thatlived about one hundred million yearsago. In our mammalian ancestry an aver-age base has changed, say from an A to aT, at the almost unbelievably slow rate ofabout one change per billion years. Thismeans that only a small fraction of thebases, one hundred million divided byone billion, or 1/10, have changed during

that time. As a result, we share roughly90 percent of our dna with mice, dogs,cattle, and elephants.

Coming closer to home, the dna ofhuman beings and chimpanzees is 98 to99 percent identical. The differencesbetween us that we (and presumably thechimps) regard as signi½cant depend ononly 1 or 2 percent of our dna.

Much of human dna is very similar toeven more remote ancestors: reptiles, in-vertebrates, and even plants. All livingthings share many functions (e.g., respi-ration) going back to a very distant past.Most of our dna determines that we arehuman, rather than determining how weare different from any other person. So itis not so surprising that the dna of anytwo human beings is 99.9 percent identi-cal.

What produces variability betweenindividual organisms–and makes possi-ble evolutionary change–is errors in thedna copying process. Sometimes,because of this, one base is changed toanother–it mutates. Among the six bil-lion base pairs each of us inherits fromour parents, a substantial number–ahundred or more–are new mutations.

How can we reconcile this large num-ber with the extremely slow rate of evo-lutionary change? The explanation isthat only a tiny fraction of mutationspersist over time. Some mutations sur-vive as a matter of either luck or–if themutation confers a biological advan-tage–natural selection. Even if advanta-geous, an individual mutation has littlechance of surviving a long evolutionarytrip. The slow rate of evolutionarychange explains why we mammals are sosimilar in our dna.

Molecular studies of dna have beenextremely fruitful in working out theevolutionary history of life. Much ofwhat we know about human ancestrycomes from dna studies, supplemented


James F.Crow oninequality

by a rather spotty fossil record. The dnaevidence strongly supports the idea thatthe human species originated in Africa,and that European and Asiatic popula-tions–indeed, all non-Africans–aredescended from a small number ofmigrants from Africa. The strongest evi-dence for this is that Africans are morevariable in their dna than are other pop-ulations.

Analysis of dna allows us to measurewith some precision the genetic distancebetween different populations of humanbeings. By this criterion, Caucasians andAsians are relatively similar, whereasAsians and Africans are somewhat moredifferent. The differences between thegroups are small–but they are real.

dna analysis has provided excitingnew answers to old questions. But its½ndings can also be misleading. Take thecase of men and women and sex chro-mosomes. Females have two X chromo-somes, while males have an X and a Y.The Y chromosome makes up perhaps 1percent of the dna. But there is very lit-tle correspondence between the Y andthe other chromosomes, including the X.In other words, the dna of a humanmale differs as much from that of afemale as either does from a chimpanzeeof the same sex. What does this mean?Simply that dna analysis, which hasgiven us a revolutionary new under-standing of genetics and evolution,doesn’t give sensible answers to somecontemporary questions that society isinterested in.

Most of the differences that we noticeare caused by a very tiny fraction of ourdna. Given six billion base pairs percell, a tiny fraction–1/1000 of six billionbase-pairs–is still six million differentbase pairs per cell. So there is plenty ofroom for genetic differences among us.Although we differ from each other in a

very tiny proportion of our dna, we dif-fer by a large number of dna bases.

Some noteworthy evolutionarychanges in human beings have occurredrelatively rapidly, despite the slow over-all rate of change at the dna level. Thedifference between the skin color ofAfricans and Europeans probablyevolved in less than ½fty thousand years,an adaptation to differences in climate.Still more rapid were changes in genesthat confer resistance to malaria inAfrica and Mediterranean regions; itonly took between four and eight thou-sand years for the new genes to evolve.What genetic analysis reveals is thatsome of the genetic changes that seem sosigni½cant to us depended on a very tinyfraction of our dna.

But, as I said, this tiny fraction is still avery large number of bases. No twohuman beings are alike in the traits theypossess. Some are tall, others are short;some are stocky, others thin; some aregifted musically, others tone deaf; someare athletic, others awkward; some areoutgoing, others introverted; some areintelligent, others stupid; some canwrite great poetry or music, most can-not. And so on.

To understand our differences, weneed to consider not just dna, but itscellular products as well. This area ofstudy is new, but it is progressing rapid-ly. The emphasis is changing from dnasequences to genes. A gene is a stretch ofdna, usually several thousand base pairslong. The function of most genes is toproduce proteins. The genome sequenc-ing project has revealed that we humanshave thirty to forty thousand genes. Butsince a gene often produces more thanone kind of protein, sometimes produc-ing different kinds for different bodyparts, the number of kinds of protein ismore like one hundred thousand.

We share a number of genes with


Unequalby nature

chimpanzees, genes that make us pri-mates rather than elephants or worms.Evolutionary scientists believe thatmany of the differences that we observebetween ourselves and chimpanzeesinvolve changes in the amount ratherthan in the nature of gene products.Human beings and chimpanzees shareproteins that produce body hair andbrains, but in chimpanzees these pro-teins produce more hair and less brains.Why this should be so is still far frombeing fully understood. But this is aresearch area that is advancing very rap-idly, and there are good genetic leads tobe followed up.

Of course, not every human differencehas a genetic cause. Many are environ-mental, or are the result of interactionsbetween genes and environment. Evengenetically identical twins develop intodistinct individuals.

The ability to learn a language is large-ly innate, built into the nervous systemof all normal people, as demonstrated sobeautifully in the effortless way in whichyoung children learn to speak. But theparticular language any individual learnsobviously depends on the social setting.Mozart was a great composer partlybecause of his genes and partly becauseof his training. Ramanujan had a greattalent for mathematics, but without hisbeing exposed to a textbook–not a verygood one, by the way–he could neverhave made his astounding discoveries.Michael Jordan has a talent for basket-ball, but it would never have developedhad he grown up among the Inuits.

Just as there are great differences amongindividuals, there are average differ-ences, usually much smaller, betweengroups. Italians and Swedes differ in haircolor. Sometimes the differences aremore conspicuous, such as the contrast-ing skin color and hair shape of Africans

and Europeans. But, for the most part,group differences are small and largelyovershadowed by individual differences.

Biologists think of races of animals asgroups that started as one, but later splitand became separated, usually by a geo-graphical barrier. As the two groupsevolve independently, they graduallydiverge genetically. The divergences willoccur more quickly if the separate envi-ronments differ, but they will occur inany case since different mutations willinevitably occur in the two populations,and some of them will persist. This ismost apparent in island populations,where each island is separate and there isno migration between them. Each onehas its own characteristic types. In muchof the animal world, however, and alsoin the human species, complete isolationis very rare. The genetic uniformity ofgeographical groups is constantly beingdestroyed by migration between them.In particular, the major geographicalgroups–African, European, andAsian–are mixed, and this is especiallytrue in the United States, which is some-thing of a melting pot.

Because of this mixing, many anthro-pologists argue, quite reasonably, thatthere is no scienti½c justi½cation forapplying the word “race” to populationsof human beings. But the concept itselfis unambiguous, and I believe that theword has a clear meaning to most peo-ple. The dif½culty is not with the con-cept, but with the realization that majorhuman races are not pure races. Unlikethose anthropologists who deny the use-fulness of the term, I believe that theword “race” can be meaningfully appliedto groups that are partially mixed.

Different diseases are demonstrablycharacteristic of different racial and eth-nic groups. Sickle cell anemia, for exam-ple, is far more prevalent among peopleof African descent than among Euro-



peans. Obesity is especially common inPima Indians, the result of the suddenacquisition of a high-calorie diet towhich Europeans have had enough timeto adjust. Tay-Sachs disease is muchmore common in the Jewish population.There are other examples, and new onesare being discovered constantly.

The evidence indicating that some dis-eases disproportionately afflict speci½cethnic and racial groups does not ordi-narily provoke controversy. Far morecontentious is the evidence that someskills and behavioral properties are dif-ferentially distributed among differentracial groups. There is strong evidencethat such racial differences are partlygenetic, but the evidence is more indi-rect and has not been convincing toeveryone.

To any sports observer it is obviousthat among Olympic jumpers andsprinters, African Americans are farmore numerous than their frequency inthe population would predict. The dis-proportion is enormous. Yet we alsoknow that there are many white peoplewho are better runners and jumpersthan the average black person. How canwe explain this seeming inconsistency?

There is actually a simple explanationthat is well known to geneticists andstatisticians, but not widely understoodby the general public or, for that matter,by political leaders. Consider a quantita-tive trait that is distributed according tothe normal, bell-shaped curve. iq canserve as an example. About one personin 750 has an iq of 148 or higher. In apopulation with an average of about 108rather than 100, hardly a noticeable dif-ference, about 5 times as many will be inthis high range. In a population averag-ing 8 points lower, there will be about 6times fewer. A small difference of 8points in the mean translates to several-fold differences in the extremes.

Asian Americans represent about 12percent of the California population, yetthey represent 45 percent of the studentbody at the University of California atBerkeley. Asians have only slightly high-er average sat scores than Caucasians,but the university’s policy of admittingstudents with the highest sat scores hasyielded a much larger proportion fromthe group with the higher mean.

Two populations may have a largeoverlap and differ only slightly in theirmeans. Still, the most outstanding indi-viduals will tend to come from the popu-lation with the higher mean. The impli-cation, I think, is clear: whenever aninstitution or society singles out individ-uals who are exceptional or outstandingin some way, racial differences willbecome more apparent. That fact maybe uncomfortable, but there is no wayaround it.

The fact that racial differences existdoes not, of course, explain their origin.The cause of the observed differencesmay be genetic. But it may also be envi-ronmental, the result of diet, or familystructure, or schooling, or any numberof other possible biological and socialfactors.

My conclusion, to repeat, is thatwhenever a society singles out individu-als who are outstanding or unusual inany way, the statistical contrast betweenmeans and extremes comes to the fore. Ithink that recognizing this can eventual-ly only help politicians and social policy-makers.

These are times of very rapid change inour understanding of biological process-es. The genome project is but one exam-ple. At the same time, we are gettingmuch closer to a deep understanding ofthe nervous system and of human be-havior. Medical knowledge improves, asdoes data collection and computer


Unequalby nature

analysis. All of these tell us more aboutindividual and group differences. Whatwill be the impact of this new knowledgeon societal issues? What are the politicalimplications of modern biology?

We have seen that the dna sequencesimilarities revealed by the genome proj-ect, valuable as these are for answeringmany interesting and important ques-tions, are misleading in regard to impor-tant human differences. But this situa-tion is rapidly changing. The currentemphasis goes beyond simple dnasequences to identifying the individualgenes, their products, and their complexinteractions. At the same time, not onlythe kinds of gene products (usually pro-teins) but their relative amounts arebeing investigated by much sharper newtools. Genes differ greatly in their pro-ductivity, including differences in activi-ty in different parts of the body.

In the near future, biologists will beable to tell us much more than we nowknow about the genetic and environ-mental causes of human differences. Themost obvious and immediate humanbene½ts will be in medicine. We canforesee the time when many–we canhope most–of our individual suscepti-bilities to disease will be understood, sothat the disease can be predicted inadvance, allowing doctors to anticipateand tailor treatments for the particularperson. Small steps in this direction havealready been made. New treatments areunder development. As a result of ourgenetic understanding, we also now bet-ter understand how to manipulate theenvironment in order to help preventdisease.

At the same time, the study of geneproducts and their regulation is beingextended to normal traits. We can expectthat the molecular biology of the future,perhaps the quite near future, will pro-vide precisely the kind of information

that in the past has depended on obser-vation and statistical analysis of oftenvaguely de½ned traits. We shall be able,as individuals, to know a great dealabout our own genetic makeup.

The magni½cent advances in molecu-lar biology will bring new depths ofunderstanding of human differences,normal and pathological, and the extentto which these are genetic or environ-mental–or, as usually will be the case,both. Whether society will accept thisknowledge willingly and use it wisely Idon’t know. My hope is that gradualprogress, starting with small beginnings,can lead to rational individual behaviorand thoughtful, humanitarian socialpolicies.

It is important for society to do a betterjob than it now does in accepting differ-ences as a fact of life. New forms of sci-enti½c knowledge will point out moreand more ways in which we are diverse. Ihope that differences will be welcomed,rather than accepted grudgingly. Whowants a world of identical people, even ifthey are Mozarts or Jordans?

A good society ought to provide thebest kind of environment for each per-son and each population. We already dothis in part. We give lessons to musicallygifted children. We encourage athletesand give them special training (andsometimes dubious drugs). Studentselect courses according to their abilitiesand interests. We have special classes forthose with disabilities, and such classesare becoming more speci½c as the causesof the disabilities are understood.

We cannot, of course, tailor-make aspecial environment for every individ-ual, but we can continue to move in thisdirection. Finding a genetic basis for atrait doesn’t mean that environment isunimportant. Indeed, more environ-mental influences on the human organ-



ism are constantly being discovered,often through genetic studies.

A test of our democratic institutionswill be the degree to which people canaccept all our differences and ½nd waysto ½t them into a smooth-working, hu-manitarian society. And I argue that weshould strive not only for maximum per-sonal satisfaction but for maximum con-tribution; each of us owes society thefruits of our special gifts. I believestrongly that research into the geneticand environmental causes of human dif-ferences should continue and be sup-ported. The newer procedures broughtabout by molecular advances and com-puters will greatly accelerate discover-ies.

I believe that knowledge, evenunpleasant knowledge, is far preferableto ignorance. I hope that American soci-ety can be less fearful of learning thetruth about biological inequalities andmore courageous in using discoveries inways that are humanitarian and pro-mote human welfare.

The question of equal opportunityversus equal outcomes becomes particu-larly vexing in those occupations andprofessions for which only a small frac-tion of a population can qualify. I havealready mentioned the gross overrepre-sentation of African Americans amongOlympic runners. This is closer to a truemeritocracy than anything else I canthink of: a stopwatch is color-blind. Inthis case, there seems to be no socialpurpose in demanding equal racial rep-resentation.

In some important professions, suchas physics and engineering, Asian Amer-icans are overrepresented and AfricanAmericans underrepresented. We pre-sumably get better research because ofthis. This may or may not outweigh theinequity of unequal group representa-tion. That is a social decision.

What about physicians? There maywell be social considerations, perhapstemporary ones in our society, thatwould make race more important thantest scores in selecting students for med-ical schools.

To achieve political and social equalityit is not necessary to maintain a ½ctionthat important human differences donot exist. The great evolutionist Theo-dosius Dobzhansky said it well: “Peopleneed not be identical twins to be equalbefore God, before the law, and in theirrights to equality of opportunity.”

I have emphasized that people differ,and differ greatly. They differ not only inshapes and sizes, but also in abilities andtalents. They also differ in tastes andpreferences. As Shaw said, “Do not dounto others as you would that theyshould do unto you. Their tastes maynot be the same.” Society’s business, Ithink, is not to minimize individual dif-ferences. We shouldn’t try to ½t peopleinto one mold.

While I expect that science will con-tinue to provide us with further evi-dence of human variability, and while Iwelcome such variability as a source ofsocial enrichment, there are some kindsof human variability that we could welldo without. I refer to serious, painful,debilitating diseases. Many of these arethe result of an unlucky throw of thegenetic dice. Already there are ways ofdiscovering, preventing, and treatingsome of them. More treatments are sureto come. I hope they will be acceptedwillingly and used responsibly. I for onewould be content if the genes for Tay-Sachs disease and Duchenne musculardystrophy were to become extinct, alongwith the malaria parasite and aidsvirus. I hope the great humanitarianbene½ts that could come from geneticresearch will not be held up by fears ofpossible future misuse.


Unequalby nature

Let me leave the last word for JimWatson, co-discoverer of the doublehelix and a major ½gure in the genomeproject:

If the next century witnesses failure, let itbe because our science is not yet up to thejob, not because we don’t have the cour-age to make less random the sometimesmost unfair courses of human evolution.



In every house there is fear.Let’s do away with that fear.Let’s build a women’s organization.

–“Mahila Samiti” (“A Women’s Organi-zation”), song sung all over India inwomen’s groups

Hanuffa Khatoon, a citizen ofBangladesh and also an elected of½cial ofthat nation’s Union Board, arrived atHowrah Station in Calcutta, India, onthe afternoon of February 26, 1998, plan-ning to catch the Jodhpur Express that

night. Because her sleeping-car reserva-tion had not yet been con½rmed, shecontacted the train ticket examiner, whoasked her to wait in the ladies’ waitingroom. At around 5 p.m., two railwayof½cials came to con½rm her sleepingberth; they also offered to show her tothe station’s restaurant, where she couldget dinner before the departure. Ms.Khatoon followed a station-boy to therestaurant and ordered some food, butimmediately began to vomit. Shereturned to the ladies’ waiting room,quite ill. The railway of½cials thenoffered to take her to the of½cial stationhotel managed by the Railways Board.She insisted on checking their creden-tials ½rst, but when the of½cial on dutyat the ladies’ waiting room told her thattheir credentials were in order, sheagreed to go. In the hotel room she wasbrutally gang raped for several hours bya group of four station employees. Final-ly she escaped and returned to the plat-form, bleeding and in a state of shock.There she found another railway of½cialwho pretended to assist her. He said hewould take her to his wife, who wouldtake care of her until she could getanother train in the morning. At thewife’s alleged residence she was brutallygang raped again, and two of the em-ployees tried to suffocate her. Hearing


Martha C. Nussbaum

Sex, laws, and inequality: what India can teach the United States

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distin-guished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at theUniversity of Chicago, is appointed in the philoso-phy department, Law School, and DivinitySchool. She is an associate in the classics depart-ment, an af½liate of the Committee on SouthernAsian Studies, and a member of the board of theCenter for Gender Studies. She has been a Fellowof the American Academy since 1988. Formerpresident of the American Philosophical Associa-tion (Central Division), Nussbaum chaired theassociation’s Committee on the Status of Womenas well as its Committee on International Cooper-ation. Her most recent books are “Women andHuman Development: The CapabilitiesApproach” (2000) and “Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligence of Emotions” (2001).

her cries, the landlord called the police,who ½nally rescued her.1

What is signi½cant–and speci½callyIndian–about this story, however, is notthe sad fact of gang rape, familiarthroughout recorded history in allnations. What is signi½cant is itsdénouement.

Two years later, in an unprecedentedjudgment, Ms. Khatoon won a largedamage award from the Railways Board.It was a landmark case in which theSupreme Court of India declared rape tobe a violation of the fundamental rightto live with human dignity, under boththe Indian Constitution and the Uni-versal Declaration of Human Rights.“Rape,” wrote the Court, “is a crime notonly against the person of a woman, it isa crime against the entire society. Itdestroys the entire psychology of awoman and pushes her into deep emo-tional crisis. Rape is therefore the mosthated crime. It is a crime against basichuman rights and is violative of the vic-tim’s most cherished right, namely, rightto life which includes right to live withhuman dignity. . . .”

It is a mid-April evening in Bihar, innortheastern India. A woman is sittingwith her brother in the backyard of hermud hut in a poor area of this state, oneof the most corrupt and anarchic in thenation. Women have traditionally hadlittle political power in Bihar, where, insome regions, the sex ratio is as low as 75 women to 100 men–a ½gure indica-tive of the differential nutrition andhealth care of girls, sex-selective abor-tion, and, probably, outright infanticide.But Poonam Devi, mother of two girls, isa candidate for election to her panchayat,or local council, and she is arranging the

voting slips, with her number on them,to be given to voters on election day.2 Agentle, soft-spoken woman, PoonamDevi has for two years been president ofa woman’s collective, where she hashelped to arrange loans for all ½fteenmembers of her group.

What is most astonishing aboutPoonam Devi’s campaign, however, isnot the fact of her candidacy–but thefact that she is running against her hus-band, who is af½liated with the bjp(Bharatiya Janata Party, the currentlydominant party nationwide, with aHindu fundamentalist program). Origi-nally it was thought that this constituen-cy would be among those reserved forwomen in the current election, soPoonam Devi’s husband groomed herfor candidacy, assuming that he wouldbe unable to run. But when the electoralplan was announced, the constituencywas not reserved for women, and thehusband could run. But Poonam Devidecided to run anyway, with supportfrom her parents and brothers. Her hus-band asked her to withdraw, but sherefused. He is angry. After all, he says,she is a weak and insigni½cant candidatenext to him. He is educated, he ownssome land, he has been a teacher–and,he points out, he is even unemployed, sohe has lots of time for the council. Areporter from the national news mediaasks Poonam Devi, “Why are you ½ght-ing against your husband?” She ques-tions right back: “Why can’t I ½ght theelections, husband or no husband? Whycan’t a woman and a man be candidatesfrom the same family?” Her platformfocuses on unemployment, the old-agepension, and the insecure economic


Martha C.Nussbaum oninequality

1 Chairman, Railway Board v. Mrs. ChandrimaDas air 2000, SC 988.

2 In Indian elections, voters receive slips withthe symbol of each candidate, and they thendeposit the slip of their choice in the box–aprocedure designed to make voting easy forilliterate voters.

position of single women and widows.3The outcome of Poonam Devi’s candi-

dacy remains unclear. What is clear,however, is that the Seventy-Second andSeventy-Third Amendments to India’sconstitution, which establish a bold pro-gram of af½rmative action for women inthe local panchayats, are bringing largenumbers of women into politics all overIndia, with clear results for the salienceof issues pertaining to the welfare ofwomen and children.

Inequality on the basis of sex is a stag-gering problem worldwide. India ishardly unique in this regard. Women inall nations–including the UnitedStates–still suffer serious inequalities in at least some central areas of humanlife.

Gang rape is hardly a problem indige-nous to Calcutta: it is the regular fare ofu.s. courts. (A recent showing of Lawand Order reruns managed to ½ll anentire evening with programs on thisone theme, most of them based on realstories.) And it is just one especially ter-rible aspect of the general worldwideproblem of violence against women, aproblem that seems to be particularlygrave in the United States. (According toa report recently published in the Journalof the American Medical Association, one-½fth of the Massachusetts high-schoolgirls studied have suffered some type ofviolence from a date, either assault orsexual violence. A recent national studyconcludes that 25 percent of adultwomen have experienced violence froma romantic partner. The Justice Depart-ment estimates that more than 1.5 mil-lion u.s. women experience physical orsexual violence each year from a

boyfriend, husband, or date.4) Nor is lack of political power a distant

dif½culty. Women in the United Stateshold only 13.8 percent of its national leg-islative seats–one of the lowest ½guresamong the developed nations, accordingto the Human Development Report 2001.And in no nation does the ½gure comevery close to equality: Sweden and Den-mark take the lead, with 42.7 percent and37.4 percent, respectively; outside theNordic countries, the highest ½gures arefor the Netherlands at 32.9 percent andGermany at 30.4 percent; highest in thedeveloping world is South Africa at 27.9percent.

But women are also contesting age-oldforms of subordination with increasingsuccess, creating innovative proposalsfor change in both custom and law. Andsometimes nations that are widely per-ceived as lagging behind the “advanceddemocracies” of the United States andEurope can actually take the lead, withbold measures like those that altered thelives of Hanuffa Khatoon and PoonamDevi.

In this essay I shall look at the problemof women’s inequality through the lensof today’s India, a nation with bothenormous gender problems and richpolitical creativity. I shall begin by offer-ing a thumbnail sketch of the situationof women in India and of the Indianconstitutional tradition, which has beenremarkably woman-friendly, and discussconceptions of equality and the role oflaw that offer rich resources for thoseseeking to advance women’s position insociety. I shall then return to the caseswith which I began, showing how a rea-sonable conception of af½rmative actionand a reasonable openness to the norms


Sex, laws,andinequality

3 See Mukul Sharma, “Bihar: Making of a Pan-chayat Election,” Economic and Political Weekly,12 May 2001.

4 Erica Goode, “Study Says 20% of GirlsReported Abuse by a Date,” New York Times, 1August 2000, A10.

of the international community (bothrather lacking in current u.s. politics)have enabled India to progress.

It is extraordinarily dif½cult to sum upsuccinctly the situation of women inIndia, since there is probably no nationin the world with greater internal diver-sity and plurality. In what follows I shallbe mentioning some of those differences(of caste, religion, regional background,wealth and class, and still others). Allgeneralizations cover multiple differ-ences.

India celebrated the ½ftieth anniver-sary of its independence from Britain onAugust 15, 1997. It is the world’s largestdemocracy, with a population of 846.3million. It is a constitutional parliamen-tary democracy, with a written accountof Fundamental Rights containing theabolition of untouchability and an elab-orate set of equality and nondiscrimina-tion provisions. Its legal system is insome respects similar to (and modeledon) that of the United States, combininga basically common-law tradition withthe constraints of a written constitutionincluding the extensive list of Funda-mental Rights. Its Supreme Court, likeours, is the ultimate interpreter of theserights.

India’s Constitution is in some waysvery attuned to issues of sex equality,which were prominently debated whenthe Constitution was adopted in 1950.The framers of the Constitution werevery conscious of deeply entrenchedinequalities, both those based on casteand those based on sex, and they madethe removal of them one of their centralgoals. The text of the Constitution is inmany ways exemplary in its treatment ofissues of gender and sex, particularly inthe section dealing with FundamentalRights.

Article 14 says that the state shall not

deny to any person “equality before thelaw or the equal protection of the laws.”Article 15 prohibits state discrimination“on grounds only of religion, race, caste,sex, place of birth or any of them.” Oth-er rights that are highly relevant to sexequality include Article 13 (invalidatingall laws inconsistent with the Funda-mental Rights); Article 16 (equality ofopportunity in public employment);Article 19 (protecting freedom of speechand expression, freedom of association,freedom of travel, freedom of residence,and freedom to form labor unions);Article 21 (stating that no citizen shall bedeprived of life or liberty “except ac-cording to procedure established bylaw”); Article 23 (prohibition of traf½cin human beings and forced labor); andArticle 25 (freedom of conscience andreligion). (Article 17 abolishes untoucha-bility: “its practice in any form is forbid-den.”)

The understanding of equality in theConstitution is explicitly aimed at secur-ing substantive equality for previouslysubordinated groups. The framers care-fully distanced their conception fromthe idea, already familiar in those days,that equality requires treating everyonethe same and not using race or sex asgrounds for any type of differential treat-ment–an understanding that has beenused in the United States to subvertaf½rmative action. In India, by contrast,the Constitution’s so-called DirectivePrinciples of State Policy (a nonenforce-able section of the Constitution) devotesa great deal of attention to promotingeconomic equality, and the FundamentalRights are themselves speci½ed in a waythat makes room for af½rmative-actionprograms designed to advance the mate-rial situation of women and the lowercastes.

Thus, Article 15 states that “Nothing inthis article shall prevent the State from



making any special provision for womenand children,” and that “Nothing in thisarticle. . . shall prevent the State frommaking any special provision for theadvancement of any socially and educa-tionally backward classes of citizens orfor the Scheduled Castes and the Sched-uled Tribes.” Similar clauses appear inArticle 16 (equality of opportunity inpublic employment) and in Article 19(various other rights and liberties). Evenbefore independence, quotas and otheraf½rmative-action measures for de-prived groups were an accepted part ofthe Indian scene, and they became evenmore salient at independence. In short,the framers understood the goal ofequality in terms of an end to systematichierarchy and discrimination based onboth caste and sex.

In light of this tradition it is not sur-prising that India has long been a centerof thought and planning about sex equal-ity, or that, when the United NationsDevelopment Programme needed amajor report on gender and governance,it turned the writing of this report overto its New Delhi of½ce.5

There is one great structural differ-ence between the Indian legal systemand the Anglo-American systems towhich it is related: India has no uniformcode of civil law (even within eachregion). Criminal law is uniform for thenation as a whole and is administered bythe state. But with the exception of com-mercial law, which was uniformly codi-½ed for the nation as a whole by theBritish and has remained so, civil lawremains the province of the various reli-gious systems of law–Hindu, Muslim,Parsi, and Christian. These systems are

de½ned by laws passed in Parliament,but they assign to religious bodies con-siderable power in the areas of marriage,divorce, child custody, and property.There are some individual secular lawsof property, marriage, and divorce, butthey do not form a system, and, becauseone is typically classi½ed into a religioussystem at birth, it is not so easy for indi-viduals to disengage themselves, partic-ularly when property is jointly owned infamily consortia (as it often is) fromwhich individuals may not extricatetheir shares. These systems of personallaw have made it uniquely dif½cult toend discrimination based on caste andsex.6 To explore these dif½culties, how-ever, would take us rather far from ourprimary topic.

Unlike the United States, India is anextremely poor nation. It ranks 115th outof the 162 nations of the world on theHuman Development Index of the 2001Human Development Report. The averagelife expectancy at birth is 62.9 (as op-posed to 80.8 in Japan, 76.8 in the UnitedStates, and somewhere between thesetwo numbers in Canada and most ofEurope7), and infant mortality is high,at 70 for 1,000 live births (although thisrepresents a great decline from 165 in1960).

Women do even worse than men inbasic nutrition and health. If equalnutrition and health were present, it is



5 This report will be published shortly; itsauthors include citizens of India, Sri Lanka, andthe United States. (I wrote the introduction andthe discussion of issues of sex equality withinthe family.)

7 Ireland and Denmark are the only nations inWestern Europe to have lower life expectancythan the United States, although most of thenations of Eastern Europe and the former Sovi-et Union also have lower expectancy. Alsoahead of the United States are Australia, NewZealand, Israel, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Singapore,and Malta; Costa Rica and Barbados are close(76.2 and 76.6, respectively).

6 See my discussion in Women and HumanDevelopment: The Capabilities Approach (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2000),chap. 3.

estimated that the sex ratio would beapproximately 103 women to 100 men.India’s sex ratio has not been even 1:1 atany time since measurements began inthe early twentieth century. From a highof 97 women to 100 men in 1901, theratio dropped steadily, reaching a low ofaround 93:100 in 1971; after a slight rise,it declined again even further, reaching92.7:100 in 1991. These are of½cial ½g-ures. Things are probably much worse,at least in some regions. A house-to-house count by a good ngo in ruralBihar arrived at a ratio of 75:100, and asimilar count in a region of Karnatakafound 65:100. Some of these differencesshould be attributed to the differentialnutrition of boys and girls and to un-equal health care, but sex-selective abor-tion and active infanticide are playing anincreasing role. A recent study by theIndian Association of Women’s Studiesestimates that 10,000 female fetuses areaborted every year. Some regions tell avery different story: Kerala, for example,has more women than men. (This situa-tion results from a combination of rela-tively female-friendly traditions andgender-friendly state governance.) Butclearly, on the whole, women face spe-cial obstacles in India.

In education, the male-female gap iseven more striking: the adult literacyrate for women is 44.5 percent, as against67.8 percent for men. (In China, the ½g-ures are 75.5 percent for women and 91.2percent for men.) Such statistics arehard to interpret, since local govern-ments tend to be boastful and since it ishard to establish a clear measure of liter-acy. Yet what is unambiguously clear isthat, despite the fact that education is astate responsibility, India has done verybadly in basic education across theboard, and even worse in basic educa-tion for women. Although all Indianstates have laws making primary educa-

tion compulsory, these laws have littlerelation to reality. Many regions utterlylack schools of any kind, just as they fre-quently lack reliable electricity, medicalservices, water, and decent roads; manylocal functionaries are corrupt, and soteachers in many regions take pay with-out ever even showing up in the regionwhere they are supposed to be teaching.In some rural areas, female literacy is aslow as 5 percent. The national govern-ment, though well-intentioned, has donelittle to ½ll these gaps, although someadult education programs have beenestablished in some of the poorer states,and many nongovernmental organiza-tions run both adult education programsand after-work programs for workinggirls.

Still, this does not seem to be a neces-sary or unbreakable pattern, since someotherwise poor regions have doneextremely well. Kerala has adult literacyof 90 percent and near-universal literacyamong adolescent boys and girls. Thisremarkable record is the outcome ofmore than a hundred years of concertedpublic action. Recently a constitutionalamendment was introduced that wouldmake the right to education a justiciablefundamental right in India.8 It may behoped that the passage of this amend-ment will goad government into actingmore aggressively on its good intentions.

Among the greatest obstacles to fullyequal citizenship that women face, in allnations, is their unequal exposure to sex-based violence.9 In India the problem of



8 Amendment 83, to be inserted in the Funda-mental Rights section of the Constitution asArticle 21a. See the full text of the amendmentin From the Lawyers Collective 13 (April 1998): 10.

9 For data on the United States, and the failureof law to deal adequately with these problems,see chap. 5 of my Sex and Social Justice (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1999).

violence against women is compounded,often, by the low age of marriage and thelack of economic options for a womanwith little or no education. The marriageof girls as young as four or six, althoughlong since illegal, is a common reality,especially in some regions where it istraditional. Laws against it are notenforced, and it shapes a girl’s life frombirth, often discouraging her familyfrom educating her.

Within marriage, at all ages, domesticviolence is so pervasive that three stateshave adopted alcohol prohibition laws inresponse to women’s lobbying in aneffort to reduce such violence. Police donot aggressively investigate domesticabuse, and virtually no women’s shel-ters exist. Rape within marriage is noteven illegal. Thus, women who wish toprotect themselves against marital vio-lence have few options. If they are notequipped for employment outside thehome, they have virtually no exit op-tions; many women endure lives ofabuse because they know that prostitu-tion is their only alternative.

The problem of domestic violence isbeing addressed, above all, through edu-cation, credit, and economic options.Hundreds of nongovernmental organi-zations, from the large Self-EmployedWomen’s Association (sewa), with over½fty thousand members, to the small vil-lage-based women’s collective led byPoonam Devi, have been educating girlsand women outside the formal statestructure, lending them money, andteaching them employment-relatedskills so that they can do something ontheir own if they decide to leave a badmarriage. Education, credit, and thereform of antiquated property laws togive women land rights in their ownnames are probably the three most sig-ni½cant strategies against domestic vio-lence. At the same time, most local

women’s groups also address domesticviolence directly, and politicians such asPoonam Devi ½ght to make life a bit fair-er for widows and single women, twogroups that suffer greatly from discrimi-nation and vulnerability to violence.

Rape, however–in India as in so manyother nations–has been badly dealt withunder the law for many years, and thenumber of rapes appears to be on therise. It is easy to ½nd cases in whichacquittal was secured on the groundsthat the woman was of low caste, or“immodest,” even when there is ampleevidence of forcible rape in the particu-lar instance. Rape is also used as aweapon against women crusading forpolitical change. In 1993 Bhanwari Devi,a member of the state of Rajasthan’sSathin movement for women’s welfare,was campaigning against child marriagewhen she was gang-raped by men from acommunity that supports the practice ofchild marriage. Because the men wereinfluential community leaders, policerefused to register the case until it wastoo late to perform the necessary med-ical examination; a lower court in Jaipuracquitted all the accused. AlthoughBhanwari appealed this judgment andthe Rajasthan High Court agreed in 1996to hear her appeal, arguments in the casehave not yet been heard.

In general, delays in the criminal jus-tice system often create a lapse of tenyears between rape and court date, mak-ing it very dif½cult for women to pursuetheir cases, even when they want to.Often they don’t want to, because awoman’s sexual history is still admittedas evidence, and assumptions about thewoman’s behavior and dress continue toinfluence the resolution of rape trials.Defendants can usually win a continu-ance on the flimsiest of pretexts, andtheir strategy typically is to delay anddelay until the woman gives up the pros-



ecution. A friend of mine who is a pro-fessor of philosophy and women’s stud-ies at University of Lucknow urged a for-mer student to pursue her rape com-plaint and promised to join her in courtwhenever the case surfaced–until, after½ve years, the woman had remarried,and didn’t want to think about her rapeany longer.

One case that spurred awareness ofwomen’s grievances in this area was the1979 case of Mathura, a sixteen-year-oldtribal woman who was raped by twopolicemen within a police compound.The lower court acquitted the policemenon the grounds that Mathura had elopedwith her boyfriend and hence was“habituated to sexual intercourse”; theythus reasoned that she could not be anunconsenting victim–therefore she wasnot, technically, raped. The High Courtoverturned the decision, holding thatmere passive surrender under threat can-not be counted as consent to inter-course. The Supreme Court, however,reinstated the lower court decision.

This judgment triggered widespreadpublic protest and publicity; rape andrape law were discussed widely andopenly for the ½rst time. Four Delhi Uni-versity law professors wrote a petition tothe Supreme Court calling for a rehear-ing of the case. The petition, unfortu-nately, was dismissed. It did, however,energize the women’s movement todemand legal change. More important, alaw commission was set up by the gov-ernment to consider changes in rape law.

One signi½cant result was a shift in theburden of proof in custodial rape cases,as well as a set of mandatory minimumsentences for rape. Other feminist de-mands, such as the demand that awoman’s prior sexual history should notbe deemed relevant evidence, were notincluded in the version of the new legis-lation that was passed in 1982.

Recently, however, the Supreme Court,at least, has shown greater sensitivity tothe issue of sexual violence. HanuffaKhatoon’s case shows a determinationto confront the problem head-on, usingthe resources of the constitutional tradi-tion, which has already held that theright to life guaranteed in Article 21includes a right to life with human digni-ty. (The landmark case was one defend-ing the rights of the homeless.) In anearlier case not centrally dealing withrape, the Court had already opined thatrape is a constitutional issue, and theyquoted from that case at the outset oftheir opinion in Hanuffa Khatoon’s case,declaring that rape is a “crime againstthe entire society” because it “destroysthe entire psychology of a woman.” It istherefore a “crime against basic humanrights” and a violation of the right to lifewith dignity guaranteed under Article 21.This judgment the justices then appliedto Ms. Khatoon’s gang rape by the rail-way employees. The justices argued,moreover, that the fundamental right tolife with dignity belongs not only to citi-zens of India, but to all “persons” (likethe Bangladeshi visitor Ms. Khatoon)within the territory of India.

Then, in a most interesting discussion,the courts pointed out that the Funda-mental Rights are closely modeled onthe list of rights in the un’s UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights. Theymention particularly the declaration’semphasis on equal human dignity (Arti-cle 1); the right to life, liberty, and secu-rity of person (Article 3); the prohibitionof “cruel, inhuman or degrading treat-ment” (Article 5); the guarantee ofnondiscrimination and the equal protec-tion of the laws (Article 7); and the pro-hibition of arbitrary detention (Article9). They argue that the purpose of thesection on Fundamental Rights in theIndian Constitution was to enact the



Universal Declaration and “to safeguardthe basic human rights from the vicissi-tudes of political controversy. . . .” Thisbeing so, the meaning of the word “life”in the Indian Constitution can be fur-ther interpreted with reference to thedeclaration. They note that earlierSupreme Court decisions have alreadygiven “life” a broad construction,including the idea of life with humandignity. Since gang rape is obviouslyinconsistent with human dignity, andthe rape was committed by governmentemployees, the judgment of the CalcuttaHigh Court awarding Ms. Khatoon dam-ages from the Railways Board wasupheld.

This creative judgment shows how alegal tradition can be fruitfully mined togive women redress against violence.Thus far, it has a function similar to thatof the u.s. Violence Against WomenAct, passed by Congress in 1994, whichoffered victims of sex crimes a federalavenue of redress, given the evidentunevenness and unreliability of thecriminal justice system in the states.10

(Of course, our Supreme Court, movingin the opposite direction from its Indiancounterpart, has declared the 1994 Vio-lence Against Women Act unconstitu-tional on the grounds that it allegedlyexceeds the power of Congress.11) Butthe Indian Supreme Court’s judgmentshows something more: it shows that anational legal tradition may deepen andstrengthen its fundamental rightsthrough incorporation of the rightsguaranteed in the international docu-ments it has rati½ed.

This move has been made before in

India. In another signi½cant judgmentconcerning sexual harassment, theSupreme Court ruled that the guidelineson harassment in the Convention on theElimination of All Forms of Discrimina-tion Against Women (cedaw) are bind-ing on the nation through its rati½cationof that treaty.12 In this way the universalhuman rights guaranteed in treaties mayenter a nation without violation of itsdemocratic sovereignty and after duedeliberation by the body that has beenentrusted with the interpretation of fun-damental rights.

In short, when a nation understandsitself to be a member of the world com-munity, committed to taking its treatyobligations seriously, creative legalchange may ensue. Unfortunately, theUnited States is currently reverting toold isolationist habits, giving theimpression that it does not need to con-sult with any other nation and that it ispowerful enough to show disdain for theworld community.

The surprising candidacy of PoonamDevi also is the fruit of creative constitu-tional thinking. At the time of India’sfounding, in keeping with the generallysubstantive understanding of equality inits Constitution, various schemes ofaf½rmative action on behalf of tradi-tionally subordinated groups were con-templated. The Constitution created asystem of representation meant toreflect the proportion of every caste andtribe in the total population of eachstate. The system works by a complexscheme of rotations: in successive elec-tions, only members of certain groupsmay run for of½ce, although all citizens



11 U.S. v. Morrison, 120 S. Ct. 1740 (2000).

10 On this issue see Stephen J. Schulhofer,Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and theFailure of Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1998).

12 Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, AIR 1997, 6 SCC241. Compare the invocation of CEDAW asbinding on the nation in a nationality case inBotswana: Attorney General v. Unity Dow, 1992LRC (Cons) 623 (July 2, 1992).

may vote. Despite controversy and manycomplaints, the system seems to haveworked reasonably well, effectivelyenfranchising a variety of previously dis-advantaged groups and promoting theireconomic and social well-being. There islittle doubt that it would have been dif½-cult to achieve progress against thedeeply entrenched realities of castewithout such af½rmative legal measures.

On the other hand, legitimate objec-tions can be made to the system. First ofall, no reserved seats have ever been cre-ated or even seriously championed forMuslims, arguably as vulnerable aminority as the Scheduled Castes andTribes. Second, the practice of reserva-tion has led over time to a situation inwhich castes at the very bottom of thesocial ladder do considerably better thanthose just above them. Thus, morerecently, as a result of the 1980 report ofthe Mandal Commission, reservationsfor obcs (Other Backward Castes) wereadded to the list. (Estimates of the pro-portion of India’s population thatbelongs to obc groups range from 25percent to 37 percent, and many of thesepeople are economically advantaged.Thus it can now be argued that the sys-tem of reservations no longer protectsthe most vulnerable and otherwiseunrepresented groups.) As a result of thesystem of representation, a politics ofcaste has to some extent displaced a poli-tics of national issues, and recent gov-ernmental instability at both regionaland national levels can be partiallyattributed to the proliferation of caste-based parties. Despite these problems,however, the quota system seems tomost Indians to be a source of moregood than harm, and there is no seriousdemand for its abolition.

Reserved seats for women have beendiscussed since before independence.Early feminists opposed reservations,

arguing that they would compromise thestruggle for women’s full equality. Atindependence, accordingly, reservationsfor women were rejected, although, asnoted above, af½rmative action on thebasis of sex won general support in theConstitution. In 1971, the governmentappointed a Committee on the Status ofWomen in India to study the progressthat had been made by women sinceindependence. In its famous 1974 reportTowards Equality, the committee deliv-ered a scathing critique of the politicalprocess, arguing that the political posi-tion of women in India had, if anything,worsened since 1950, and that womenwere neither able to claim their legalrights nor, in many cases, even aware ofthem. The majority of the committeecontinued to oppose reserved seats as aremedy, but a minority report signed bysome especially prominent feministleaders argued that this remedy was nec-essary for the resumption of social andpolitical progress for women.

A generation later, the representationof women in central and state govern-ment continues to be very low: 6–7 per-cent in the Lok Sabha (the analogue ofthe House of Commons), one of the low-est parliamentary ½gures in the world.Political parties have talked aboutreserving a certain proportion of theirown candidacies for women, but havedone nothing about it. At the same time,women’s voter turnout has signi½cantlyincreased and is now at 55 percent, onlyslightly less than the national average. Inthis situation, it is not surprising that theidea of reserved legislative seats forwomen has attracted new political andconstitutional attention, in connectionwith a push for greater local self-rule.

Arguing, like John Stuart Mill, thatparticipation in local politics teaches cit-izens how to appreciate the commongood, national legislators successfully



amended the Constitution in 1992 to give formal legal status to the system ofpanchayats, or local village councils, anaspect of governance central to Gandhi’svision of India but never fully imple-mented. The Amendments established a 33 percent quota for women in the panchayats and set up a system of rota-tion that is similar to that by which reser-vations for lower castes have alreadybeen implemented at the national level.

Initially, advocates for women weresplit about the merits of this system.Many feared that the women who wouldbe selected would simply be tools ofmale interests. But nearly ten years ofexperience with the plan has shown that,on balance, its merits outweigh its draw-backs. Certainly in some cases womendo initially function as proxies for thepowerful men in their families. PoonamDevi was initially groomed for of½ce byher husband, who believed that hewould be unable to run for the seat. Buteven such women learn political skills inthe process. Poonam Devi became sointerested in politics that she is now run-ning for of½ce against the wishes of herhusband. Whether she wins or loses, sheis gaining valuable experience; if sheloses, in due course she will be able torun for a reserved seat.

Moreover, the new system’s extensionof political power to poor and illiteratewomen has been dramatic. Studies showthat a majority of women who serve inthe panchayats are illiterate or barely lit-erate. Moreover, approximately 40 per-cent of female representatives comefrom families with income below thepoverty line. Women report many obsta-cles to their effective participation,including harassment and the threat ofviolence. Nonetheless, a number ofwomen are evidently learning politicalskills and participating in decision-making in a way that would not have

been possible without the Amendments.In addition, the system has increaseddemands for female education: motherscan now urge their daughters to go toschool in order to prepare themselves fora role in politics. They report that thisgives them more power in the family todecide which children shall go toschool.13

More recently, proposals to introducereservations for women at the nationallevel have encountered tremendousopposition–largely from lower-casteparties, who fear that the new quotaswould result in fewer lower-caste legisla-tors, since they believe that educatedwomen will be the most likely to beelected. They propose a subquota in thegeneral women’s quota for lower-castewomen, but so far proponents of theAmendment have rejected this proposal.Certainly such a quota for lower-castewomen would exacerbate some of theproblems already produced by caste-based reserved seats at the nationallevel. A possible outcome of the currentdebate is that parties will agree toreserve a certain proportion of their tick-ets for female candidates (as they do inFrance and quite a few other countries).

It is ironic–and telling–that similarlycreative proposals are non-starters in theUnited States. Even though the UnitedStates has one of the lowest proportionsof women in the national legislaturewithin the developed world, we are notlooking around with genuine curiosity tosee what other nations have done about



13 On all these matters, see Nirmala Buch,From Oppression to Assertion: A Study ofPanchayats and Women in Madhya Pradesh,Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (New Delhi: Centrefor Women’s Development Studies, 1999); I amalso grateful to Zoya Hasan and to Niraja GopalJayal for allowing me to read unpublishedworks on this topic, and for discussion.

this problem. This is not to say that the Indian solu-

tion ½ts the u.s. situation. Very likely it does not. Quotas for women in thepanchayats are a solution well adapted tothe situation of the rural poor in India,where illiteracy and lack of employmentoutside the home pose daunting obsta-cles to women’s political participation.In the United States, by contrast, manymore women already work–and no realequivalent of India’s panchayats exits.

Still, Indian politicians and jurists arethinking–as ours have too often refusedto think–creatively. We should morevigorously confront the problem of vio-lence against women and the problem ofthe underrepresentation of women inpolitics by considering a wide range ofremedies–½rst on the list being cam-paign ½nance reform, which has at leastreceived a hearing. But systems of multi-

ple voting and proportional representa-tion, which have been used successfullyby some municipalities for years toenfranchise underrepresented groups,should also be considered. In general, weshould attend to the issue, debate itwithout phobic reactions (such as theterm “af½rmative action” so oftenevokes), and learn from other nations.

Both of these issues show us one largefact: the world is moving on, with orwithout u.s. participation, to ½nd cre-ative solutions to pressing problems ofhuman inequality. Usually u.s. citizensdon’t know anything much about thesedevelopments, and some of our politi-cians encourage disdain for what is hap-pening elsewhere. We need to learn newhabits of curiosity and respect if we areto be productive members of an increas-ingly interdependent global community.



All too often, we ignore goals, genres, orvalues, or we assume that they are soapparent that we do not bother to high-light them. Yet judgments about whetheran exercise–a paper, a project, an essayresponse on an examination–has beendone intelligently or stupidly are oftendif½cult for students to fathom. Andsince these evaluations are not wellunderstood, few if any lessons can bedrawn from them. Laying out the criteriaby which judgments of quality are mademay not suf½ce in itself to improve qual-ity, but in the absence of such clari½-cation, we have little reason to expectour students to go about their workintelligently.

Twentieth-century physics began around600 b.c. when Pythagoras of Samos pro-claimed an awesome vision.

By studying the notes sounded byplucked strings, Pythagoras discoveredthat the human perception of harmonyis connected to numerical ratios. Heexamined strings made of the samematerial, having the same thickness, andunder the same tension, but of differentlengths. Under these conditions, hefound that the notes sound harmoniousprecisely when the ratio of the lengths ofstring can be expressed in small wholenumbers. For example, the length ratio


Note byFrankWilczek

Frank Wilczek

on the world’snumericalrecipe

Frank Wilczek, Herman Feshbach Professor ofPhysics at MIT, is known, among other things, forthe discovery of asymptotic freedom, the develop-ment of quantum chromodynamics, the inventionof axions, and the discovery and exploitation ofnew forms of quantum statistics (anyons). Whenonly twenty-one years old and a graduate studentat Princeton University, he and David Grossde½ned the properties of gluons, which hold atom-ic nuclei together. He has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 1993.

2:1 sounds a musical octave, 3:2 a musi-cal ½fth, and 4:3 a musical fourth.

The vision inspired by this discoveryis summed up in the maxim “All Thingsare Number.” This became the credo ofthe Pythagorean Brotherhood, a mixed-sex society that combined elements ofan archaic religious cult and a modernscienti½c academy.

The Brotherhood was responsible formany ½ne discoveries, all of which itattributed to Pythagoras. Perhaps themost celebrated and profound is thePythagorean Theorem. This theoremremains a staple of introductory geome-try courses. It is also the point of depar-ture for the Riemann-Einstein theoriesof curved space and gravity.

Unfortunately, this very theoremundermined the Brotherhood’s credo.Using the Pythagorean Theorem, it isnot hard to prove that the ratio of thehypotenuse of an isosceles right triangleto either of its two shorter sides cannotbe expressed in whole numbers. A mem-ber of the Brotherhood who revealedthis dreadful secret drowned shortlyafterwards, in suspicious circumstances.Today, when we say Ö2 is irrational, ourlanguage still reflects these ancient anxi-eties.

Still, the Pythagorean vision, broadlyunderstood–and stripped of cultic, ifnot entirely of mystical, trappings–remained for centuries a touchstone forpioneers of mathematical science. Thoseworking within this tradition did notinsist on whole numbers, but continuedto postulate that the deep structure ofthe physical world could be captured inpurely conceptual constructions. Con-siderations of symmetry and abstractgeometry were allowed to supplementsimple numerics.

In the work of the German astronomerJohannes Kepler (1570–1630), this pro-gram reached a remarkable apotheosis–

only to unravel completely. Students today still learn about

Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion.But before formulating these celebratedlaws, this great speculative thinker hadannounced another law–we can call itKepler’s zeroth law–of which we hearmuch less, for the very good reason thatit is entirely wrong. Yet it was his discov-ery of the zeroth law that ½red Kepler’senthusiasm for planetary astronomy, inparticular for the Copernican system,and launched his extraordinary career.Kepler’s zeroth law concerns the relativesize of the orbits of different planets. Toformulate it, we must imagine that theplanets are carried about on concentricspheres around the Sun. His law statesthat the successive planetary spheres areof such proportions that they can beinscribed within and circumscribedabout the ½ve Platonic solids. These ½veremarkable solids–tetrahedron, cube,octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahe-dron–have faces that are congruentequilateral polygons. The Pythagoreansstudied them, Plato employed them in the speculative cosmology of theTimaeus, and Euclid climaxed his Ele-ments with the ½rst known proof thatonly ½ve such regular polyhedra exist.

Kepler was enraptured by his discov-ery. He imagined that the spheres emit-ted music as they rotated, and he evenspeculated on the tunes. (This is thesource of the phrase “music of thespheres.”) It was a beautiful realizationof the Pythagorean ideal. Purely concep-tual, yet sensually appealing, the zerothlaw seemed a production worthy of amathematically sophisticated Creator.

To his great credit as an honest manand–though the concept is anachronis-tic–as a scientist, Kepler did not wallowin mystic rapture, but actively strove tosee whether his law accurately matchedreality. He discovered that it does not. In


The world’snumericalrecipe

wrestling with the precise observationsof Tycho Brahe, Kepler was forced togive up circular in favor of ellipticalorbits. He couldn’t salvage the ideas that½rst inspired him.

After this, the Pythagorean visionwent into a long, deep eclipse. In New-ton’s classical synthesis of motion andgravitation, there is no sense in whichstructure is governed by numerical orconceptual constructs. All is dynamics.Newton’s laws inform us, given the posi-tions, velocities, and masses of a systemof gravitating bodies at one time, howthey will move in the future. They do not½x a unique size or structure for the solarsystem. Indeed, recent discoveries ofplanetary systems around distant starshave revealed quite different patterns.The great developments of nineteenth-century physics, epitomized in Max-well’s equations of electrodynamics,brought many new phenomena with thescope of physics, but they did not alterthis situation essentially. There is noth-ing in the equations of classical physicsthat can ½x a de½nite scale of size,whether for planetary systems, atoms, or anything else. The world-system ofclassical physics is divided between ini-tial conditions that can be assigned arbi-trarily, and dynamical equations. Inthose equations, neither whole numbersnor any other purely conceptual ele-ments play a distinguished role.

Quantum mechanics changed every-thing.

Emblematic of the new physics, anddecisive historically, was Niels Bohr’satomic model of 1913. Though it appliesin a vastly different domain, Bohr’smodel of the hydrogen atom bears anuncanny resemblance to Kepler’s systemof planetary spheres. The binding forceis electrical rather than gravitational, theplayers are electrons orbiting aroundprotons rather than planets orbiting the

Sun, and the size is a factor 10-22 small-er; but the leitmotif of Bohr’s model isunmistakably “Things are Number.”

Through Bohr’s model, Kepler’s ideathat the orbits that occur in nature areprecisely those that embody a conceptu-al ideal emerged from its embers, rebornlike a phoenix, after three hundredyears’ quiescence. If anything, Bohr’smodel conforms more closely to thePythagorean ideal than Kepler’s, sinceits preferred orbits are de½ned by wholenumbers rather than geometric con-structions. Einstein responded withgreat empathy and enthusiasm, referringto Bohr’s work as “the highest form ofmusicality in the sphere of thought.”

Later work by Heisenberg andSchrödinger, which de½ned modernquantum mechanics, superseded Bohr’smodel. This account of subatomic mat-ter is less tangible than Bohr’s, but ulti-mately much richer. In the Heisenberg-Schrödinger theory, electrons are nolonger particles moving in space, ele-ments of reality that at a given time are“just there and not anywhere else.”Rather, they de½ne oscillatory, space-½lling wave patterns always “here, there,and everywhere.” Electron waves areattracted to a positively charged nucleusand can form localized standing wavepatterns around it. The mathematicsdescribing the vibratory patterns thatde½ne the states of atoms in quantummechanics is identical to that whichdescribes the resonance of musicalinstruments. The stable states of atomscorrespond to pure tones. I think it’s fairto say that the musicality Einsteinpraised in Bohr’s model is, if anything,heightened in its progeny (though Ein-stein himself, notoriously, withheld hisapproval from the new quantummechanics).

The big difference between nature’sinstruments and those of human con-


Note byFrankWilczek

struction is that her designs depend noton craftsmanship re½ned by experience,but rather on the ruthlessly precise ap-plication of simple rules. Now if youbrowse through a textbook on atomicquantum mechanics, or look at atomicvibration patterns using modern visuali-zation tools, “simple” might not be theword that leaps to mind. But it has a pre-cise, objective meaning in this context.A theory is simpler the fewer noncon-ceptual elements, which must be takenfrom observation, enter into its con-struction. In this sense, Kepler’s zerothlaw provided a simpler (as it turns out,too simple) theory of the solar systemthan Newton’s, because in Newton’stheory the relative sizes of planetaryorbits must be taken from observation,whereas in Kepler’s they are determinedconceptually.

From this perspective, modern atomictheory is extraordinarily simple. TheSchrödinger equation, which governselectrons in atoms, contains just twononconceptual quantities. These are themass of the electron and the so-called½ne-structure constant, denoted a, thatspeci½es the overall strength of the elec-tromagnetic interaction. By solving thisone equation, ½nding the vibrations itsupports, we make a concept-world thatreproduces a tremendous wealth of real-world data, notably the accurately meas-ured spectral lines of atoms that encodetheir inner structure. The marveloustheory of electrons and their interac-tions with light is called quantum elec-trodynamics, or qed.

In the initial modeling of atoms, thefocus was on their accessible, outlyingparts, the electron clouds. The nuclei ofatoms, which contain most of their massand all of their positive charge, weretreated as so many tiny (but very heavy!)black boxes, buried in the core. Therewas no theory for the values of nuclear

masses or their other properties; thesewere simply taken from experiment.That pragmatic approach was extremelyfruitful and to this day provides theworking basis for practical applicationsof physics in chemistry, materials sci-ence, and biology. But it failed to pro-vide a theory that was in our sense sim-ple, and so it left the ultimate ambitionsof a Pythagorean physics unful½lled.

Starting in the early 1930s, with elec-trons under control, the frontier of fun-damental physics moved inward, to thenuclei. This is not the occasion to re-count the complex history of the heroicconstructions and ingenious deductionsthat at last, after ½fty years of strenuousinternational effort, fully exposed thesecrets of this inaccessible domain. For-tunately, the answer is easier to describe,and it advances and consummates ourtheme.

The theory that governs atomic nucleiis quantum chromodynamics, or qcd.As its name hints, qcd is ½rmly basedon quantum mechanics. Its mathemati-cal basis is a direct generalization ofqed, incorporating a more intricatestructure supporting enhanced symme-try. Metaphorically, qcd stands to qedas an icosahedron stands to a triangle.The basic players in qcd are quarks andgluons. For constructing an accuratemodel of ordinary matter just two kindsof quarks, called up and down or simplyu and d, need to be considered. (Thereare four other kinds, at least, but theyare highly unstable and not importantfor ordinary matter.) Protons, neutrons,p mesons, and a vast zoo of very short-lived particles called resonances are con-structed from these building blocks. Theparticles and resonances observed in the real word match the resonant wavepatterns of quarks and gluons in theconcept-world of qcd, much as statesof atoms match the resonant wave pat-


The world’snumericalrecipe

terns of electrons. You can predict theirmasses and properties directly by solv-ing the equations.

A peculiar feature of qcd, and a majorreason why it was hard to discover, isthat the quarks and gluons are neverfound in isolation, but always in com-plex associations. qcd actually predictsthis “con½nement” property, but that’snot easy to prove.

Considering how much it accounts for,qcd is an amazingly simple theory, inour objective sense. Its equations con-tain just three nonconceptual ingredi-ents: the masses of the u and d quarksand the strong coupling constant as,analogous to the ½ne structure constantof qed, which speci½es how powerfullyquarks couple to gluons. The gluons areautomatically massless.

Actually even three is an overestimate.The quark-gluon coupling varies withdistance, so we can trade it in for a unitof distance. In other words, mutantqcds with different values of as gener-ate concept-worlds that behave identi-cally, but use different-sized metersticks.Also, the masses of the u and d quarksturn out not to be very important, quan-titatively. Most of the mass of stronglyinteracting particles is due to the pureenergy of the moving quarks and gluonsthey contain, according to the converseof Einstein’s equation, m = E/c2. Themasses of the u and d quarks are muchsmaller than the masses of the protonsand other particles that contain them.

Putting all this together, we arrive at amost remarkable conclusion. To theextent that we are willing to use the pro-ton itself as a meterstick, and ignore thesmall corrections due to the u and dquark masses, qcd becomes a theorywith no nonconceptual elements whatsoever.

Let me summarize. Starting with pre-cisely four numerical ingredients, whichmust be taken from experiment, qed

and qcd cook up a concept-world ofmathematical objects whose behaviormatches, with remarkable accuracy, thebehavior of real-world matter. Theseobjects are vibratory wave patterns. Sta-ble elements of reality–protons, atomicnuclei, atoms–correspond, not justmetaphorically but with mathematicalprecision, to pure tones. Kepler would bepleased.

This tale continues in several direc-tions. Given two more ingredients, New-ton’s constant gn and Fermi’s constantgf, which parametrize the strength ofgravity and of the weak interaction,respectively, we can expand our concept-world beyond ordinary matter to de-scribe virtually all of astrophysics. Thereis a brilliant series of ideas involving uni-½ed ½eld theories and supersymmetrythat might allow us to get by with just½ve ingredients. (Once you’re down toso few, each further reduction marks anepoch.) These ideas will be tested deci-sively in coming years, especially as theLarge Hadron Collider (lhc) at cern,near Geneva, swings into operationaround 2007.

On the other hand, if we attempt to dojustice to the properties of many exotic,short-lived particles discovered at high-energy accelerators, things get muchmore complicated and unsatisfactory.We have to add pinches of many new in-gredients to our recipe, until it may seemthat rather than deriving a wealth ofinsight from a small investment of facts,we are doing just the opposite. That’s thestate of our knowledge of fundamentalphysics today–simultaneously tri-umphant, exciting, and a mess.

The last word I leave to Einstein:

I would like to state a theorem which atpresent can not be based upon anythingmore than upon a faith in the simplicity,i.e., intelligibility, of nature: there are no


Note byFrankWilczek

arbitrary constants . . . that is to say, natureis so constituted that it is possible logical-ly to lay down such strongly determinedlaws that within these laws only rationallycompletely determined constants occur(not constants, therefore, whose numeri-cal value could be changed withoutdestroying the theory).

Biomedical inquiry as it is practiced inAmerica today is an amalgam of threedifferent kinds of research: basicresearch, population research, and clini-cal research. While all three are of criti-cal importance, it is clinical researchthat underpins our national medicalefforts. Only clinical researchers are ableto apply the knowledge of the cell andorgan systems developed by basicresearchers, and the population datagathered by epidemiologists and biosta-tisticians, to patients, making thisknowledge and data relevant to medicalpractice by “translating” it into novel


David G. Nathan

on clinical research& the future ofmedicine

David G. Nathan has been a Fellow of the Ameri-can Academy since 1983. The Robert A. Strana-han Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics at Har-vard Medical School and president emeritus of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, he was alsophysician in chief at the Children’s Hospital inBoston from 1985 to 1995. A recipient of theNational Medal of Science for his research onblood disorders, he is also well known for his men-torship of young physicians during the formativeyears of their research careers.

comment by ira katznelson · cy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scienti½c rationality, and...

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