I was back in London on Monday for a day-long symposium at the LSE on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century—this time, with Piketty in attendance. At least, he was there after his late Eurostar train got in from Paris. He missed the economics panel, but was there for the panels “Gender and everyday life” and “Accumulation and Timespaces of Class”—as well as a closing session in which Piketty and Mike Savage discussed Tony Atkinson’s work. Atkinson is one of the “godfathers,” I believe Piketty said, of inequality studies; he has a new book out—Inequality — What can be done?— with a more robust set of policy recommendations than Piketty’s.
I’ll focus on the Gender and Everyday Life panel. Stephanie Seguino raised the question, “how do we distribute the bad news of capitalism in hard times?” Answering this question brings out the relationships between economic inequality, gender inequality, and racial inequality. The first might be getting worse, but the second seems to be getting better; meanwhile, racial inequality in the US is increasingly a phenomenon not of exploitation but of exclusion. Some of women’s advancing equality, however, has come thanks to men’s worsening employment prospects—i.e. some of the fact that the gender gap is (very slowly) narrowing in wages is because of “levelling down”. And it’s possible that capitalism just trades off one inequality for another: when a country is culturally homogenous, gender inequality is higher; when a country is diverse, gender inequality lower. Suggested implication, with bitter irony: if racialized people are available to bear the brunt of “the bad news of capitalism,” women are freed from precarity and can get ahead.
Naila Kabeer followed up on the global dimension, and emphasized a pattern seen over and over again in the data from gender and development studies: it’s not about how racialized or marginalized groups (such as the Dalits in the Indian caste system) do in hard times versus how women do: the real suffering is reserved for people at the intersections—Dalit women, for example. Kabeer emphasized a set of problems of particular interest to feminist bioethics: the choice of establishing social programs as universal or as means-tested, safety-net programs is a substantial choice. While it seems sensible to put money where needs are greatest, a number of problems result. Others have observed that such programs are vulnerable at the ballot box and that they tend to be of lower quality than universal programs. Kabeer focused on they way they re-enact the power relations of society in the relationship between agency and client. Who wants to access services when the organization of those services treats you as in moralizing terms? (Nancy Fraser writes about some similar dynamics in the social state from the perspective of critical theory, in “What’s critical about critical theory?” referencing the work of Carol Brown in “Mothers, Fathers, and Children: From Private to Public Patriarchy.”) Kabeer highlighted the tension between universality in programs, and tailoring programs to need, as one of several crucial challenges in addressing inequality.
