Inequality of What?

The last two lessons assumed we know what should be equal. We do not, and the question turns out to be the deepest one in the field.

In 1979 Amartya Sen gave a lecture with a title that reframed the argument: "Equality of What?" His observation was disarming. Almost every serious political position is egalitarian about something — the libertarian about rights, the utilitarian about the weight given to each person's welfare, the socialist about resources. They are not arguing about whether to be equal. They are arguing about what to equalise, and choosing one space means accepting inequality in the others.

And the answer determines what a society would actually have to do, which is why this apparently philosophical lesson has more practical consequence than either of the two before it.

Four people, one city, identical monthly income.

Each of the four receives exactly the same amount of money each month. What each of them is able to be and to do differs enormously.

Ravi is thirty, healthy, lives ten minutes' walk from his work, and shares a flat with a friend. He eats what he likes, sees people in the evenings, saves a little.

Devi uses a wheelchair. The same income buys her substantially less, and not because of anything about her preferences. Her costs are higher — accessible housing is scarcer and dearer, some journeys require a taxi where Ravi walks, and equipment must be replaced. And some of what Ravi has is not purchasable by her at any price: the office she was offered has no lift, and the local social club meets upstairs. On any income measure, she and Ravi are equal. On any account of what they can actually do, they are not.

Farida is married and the income arrives in her husband's account. She does not control it. She can ask, and mostly receives, and there are things she does not ask for. Her measured household income per head is identical to Ravi's (see 8.1.2 on the pooling assumption). What she can do without asking is a different quantity entirely.

Kiran lives in a district where the water supply fails three days a week, the nearest clinic is an hour away, the streets are unlit, and the school has ninety children to a class. Ravi's income buys him a life; Kiran's identical income buys much less, because most of what makes a life liveable there is not purchased individually at all.

Four people. One income. Four different lives.

Now the question that organises the rest of this lesson. If we equalised their incomes — which we have, by construction — have we equalised anything that matters?

And there is a fifth person who makes it harder. Meena has lived in circumstances like Farida's since childhood, and when a researcher asks whether she is satisfied with her situation, she says yes. She reports being content. Any measure based on how people say they feel will record her as doing well.

The four spaces

One — welfare. And Meena's problem.

The utilitarian answer: what matters is how well people's lives go for them, so equality should be about welfare, satisfaction or preference-fulfilment.

Its appeal is that it goes straight to what we care about. Money is only ever instrumental.

And it fails on adaptive preferences, which is the most sociologically important objection in this lesson.

People adjust their expectations to their circumstances. Someone who has never had a real option does not experience its absence as a loss. Someone raised to expect little reports satisfaction with little. Sen's examples are deliberately uncomfortable — the contented labourer, the tamed housewife — and his empirical illustration is more striking than the argument.

In Indian health data, self-reported illness was systematically higher in Kerala — the state with the highest literacy, the best health services and the longest life expectancy — than in states with far worse objective health outcomes and much shorter lives. People who have seen a doctor, who know what a treatable condition is, and who expect to be well, report more illness. People who have never had care report less.

Read the implication carefully. A policy ranked by self-reported wellbeing would have rewarded the states doing worst. Subjective measures record what people have learned to expect, and expectation is produced by exactly the conditions being measured.

Two further problems. Expensive tastes: if welfare is the metric, the person who can only be satisfied by rare wine has a claim on more resources than the person content with tea, which most people find perverse. And interpersonal comparison: there is no agreed way to compare units of satisfaction between people.

None of this means subjective measures are useless. They are indispensable for some questions. It means they cannot be the sole space of equality, because they are systematically deformed by the inequality they are supposed to measure.

Two — resources. And Devi's problem.

The resourcist answer: equalise what people have, and let them decide what to do with it. This respects the fact that people want different things, and it does not require anyone to judge whose satisfactions count.

Rawls's primary goods — rights and liberties, opportunities, income and wealth, the social bases of self-respect — are the best-known version: things any rational person would want whatever else they want. Dworkin's equality of resources is the most developed, using a hypothetical auction with equal purchasing power, plus a hypothetical insurance market to handle bad luck.

And the objection is Devi. The same resources convert into different real freedom for different people. She needs more income to reach the same place, and for some things no amount of income will do it, because the barrier is a staircase and a hiring practice rather than a price.

Rawls addressed this partially through the fair value of liberties and his account of the worst-off position. The general point stands: a resource is a means, and the rate at which people convert means into ends varies systematically — by health, by body, by age, by where they live, by how they are treated.

Three — capabilities. Sen's answer, and the one this course finds most useful.

Two terms, and they are worth learning precisely.

Functionings are the beings and doings a person actually achieves: being adequately nourished, being healthy, being educated, moving about, taking part in the life of the community, appearing in public without shame, having a say.

A capability is the real freedom to achieve combinations of functionings — the set of lives genuinely available to you.

The distinction between the two matters. A person fasting and a person starving have the same functioning — undernourishment — and completely different capabilities. One has an option the other does not, and the difference is the whole of what a decent society owes.

The bridge between resources and capabilities is the conversion factor, and this is where the approach becomes sociological rather than philosophical.

Personal conversion factors — health, physical condition, literacy, skill. Social conversion factors — discrimination, norms, hierarchies, whether people like you are hired, believed, served, or safe. Environmental conversion factors — infrastructure, climate, water, transport, public safety, the physical arrangement of buildings.

A bicycle is worth a great deal on a flat road and nothing on a mountainside. An education is worth a great deal where qualifications are hired on and less where they are not. An income is worth a great deal where the clinic is free.

Which is why the capability approach makes public provision and social structure central rather than residual. On an income view, a hospital is a cost. On a capability view, the hospital is part of what makes a given income into a life — and Kiran's problem is not that he is poor relative to Ravi but that his money cannot buy what Ravi gets for nothing.

And the argument within the approach is worth knowing. Martha Nussbaum proposes a definite list of ten central capabilities — life; bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; relation to other species; play; and control over one's political and material environment — arguing that without a list the approach cannot guide policy or ground constitutional entitlements. Sen declines to specify one, arguing that which capabilities matter should be settled by public reasoning in each society rather than fixed by a theorist.

Both have a point, and the disagreement is exactly 6.8.1's. A universal list risks imposing one tradition's account of a good life; a refusal to list risks a framework that cannot be acted on, and leaves the specification to whoever holds power locally — which is not obviously an improvement.

Four — opportunity, and the three incompatible things it means.

"Equality of opportunity" commands near-universal assent because it means at least three different things, and the people agreeing are not agreeing.

Formal equality of opportunity. Careers open to talents: no legal barriers, no discrimination in selection, positions allocated on relevant qualifications. This is the minimal version, it is what most anti-discrimination law implements, and it is satisfied by a society in which who has the qualifications is entirely determined by birth.

Fair (substantive) equality of opportunity. Rawls's version: people with the same talent and the same willingness to use it should have the same prospects, regardless of the social class they were born into. This is far more demanding. It requires that family background not determine the development of talent — which means acting on schooling, health, housing, early childhood and the transmission of advantage. Every society falls a long way short of it (see 8.3).

Radical or luck-egalitarian equality of opportunity. Neutralise all unchosen advantage — including natural talent, which nobody earned either. The most demanding, and it raises the question of what remains to hold anyone responsible for.

The technical version worth knowing distinguishes circumstances (things beyond the person's control: parents, birthplace, sex, ethnicity, inherited endowments) from effort (what they are responsible for), and equalises outcomes across circumstances while permitting inequality due to effort — comparing people at the same rank of effort within their circumstance group.

And now the sociological objection, which is the most important paragraph in this lesson.

Effort is itself patterned by circumstance. Aspiration, expectation, the belief that trying will pay, the ability to defer gratification, the knowledge of what to try for, the confidence to persist after a setback — all of these are socially produced, and they are produced by exactly the circumstances the framework wants to correct for. Parts 2 and 5 of this course have already established the mechanism: socialisation, reference groups, habitus, the looking-glass self (see 2.3.2, 5.8.1).

So the responsibility cut cannot be made cleanly. Everything the framework wants to place on the "effort" side of the line turns out, on inspection, to have circumstance on both sides of it.

This is not a refutation — the framework can respond by defining effort relative to one's own circumstance group, which is what the technical version does. But it is a genuine and permanent difficulty, and it explains why "equality of opportunity, not outcome" is a much less coherent position than it sounds when said quickly.

Where this lands in practice.

The capability approach has been operationalised, which is unusual for a philosophical framework, and you have already met one of its instruments.

The Human Development Index — combining health, education and income — was built explicitly to displace income per head as the measure of a country's development.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index counts deprivations across health, education and living standards rather than money (see 7.2.2), and produces a different list of the poor than an income line does.

And the broader "beyond GDP" programme — including the international commission on measuring economic performance and social progress — argued for a suite of indicators covering material conditions, health, education, activities, political voice, social connections, environment and security, on the explicit ground that what we measure shapes what we pursue (see 7.2.2 on Goodhart).

And one further distinction that frames the rest of Part 8: redistribution and recognition.

Nancy Fraser's argument is that injustice has more than one dimension. Maldistribution — economic disadvantage — is remedied by redistribution. Misrecognition — being denied standing as a full participant, through cultural hierarchies of value — is remedied by recognition. She later added a third, misrepresentation: being denied voice in the arenas where the rules are made. Her claim is that these are distinct and that neither reduces to the other, so a politics that pursues only one leaves the other in place.

Axel Honneth argues the opposite: that recognition is the more fundamental category, and that economic distribution is itself governed by socially institutionalised judgements about whose contribution deserves what — so distribution is a form of recognition rather than a separate axis.

Why this matters for what follows. Part 8 covers class, race, gender and poverty. The Fraser–Honneth argument is precisely the question of how those relate — whether racial and gender injustice are ultimately economic, ultimately about standing, or genuinely two-dimensional. Hold the question open; the lessons ahead supply evidence bearing on it, and 8.7 returns to it directly.

Because the space you choose determines what a society is obliged to do.

Equalise income and the instrument is transfers. Equalise resources more broadly and it extends to assets, inheritance and endowments. Equalise capabilities and it becomes public provision, infrastructure, health, education, accessibility and anti-discrimination — because those are the conversion factors, and they cannot be delivered by giving anybody money. Equalise formal opportunity and it is anti-discrimination law. Equalise substantive opportunity and it is everything that determines childhood.

Three questions for any claim about equality or fairness.

Equality of what — in which space? Income, wealth, welfare, resources, capability, opportunity. An argument that does not say is not yet an argument.

What conversion factors are being ignored? Who needs more of the resource to reach the same place, and who cannot get there at any price?

And which sense of opportunity is meant — formal, substantive, or radical? Two people agreeing enthusiastically about equality of opportunity are frequently proposing incompatible societies.

And keep Meena in view. She reports being content. Any framework that takes that report at face value will conclude there is nothing to address — and the same framework, applied in Kerala, would have concluded that the state with the best health outcomes had the sickest population. That is the strongest single argument for asking what people are able to do rather than only what they have or how they feel about it.

Sen's question — equality of what? — reframes the argument: almost every position is egalitarian in some space, so the disagreement is about which space, and choosing one accepts inequality in the others.

Four candidate spaces, each failing somewhere specific.

Welfare goes straight to what matters and fails on adaptive preferences — people adjust expectations to circumstances, so those with least report contentment. Sen's Indian health evidence is the decisive illustration: self-reported illness was highest in the state with the best health services and longest lives, and lowest where care was absent. Also expensive tastes, and the impossibility of interpersonal comparison.

Resources respect differing conceptions of the good and fail on conversion: identical resources yield different real freedom depending on health, body, place and treatment.

Capabilities — Sen's answer. Functionings are achieved beings and doings; a capability is the real freedom to achieve combinations of them (fasting and starving share a functioning and differ entirely in capability). Conversion factors are personal, social and environmental, which makes public provision, discrimination and infrastructure central rather than residual. Nussbaum proposes a definite list of ten; Sen declines to specify one — and both positions have a real cost.

Opportunity means three incompatible things: formal (careers open to talents, satisfied by a society where birth determines qualifications), fair or substantive (same prospects for same talent and effort regardless of origin — Rawls's version, which every society falls far short of), and radical (neutralising all unchosen advantage, including talent).

And the sociological objection to the responsibility cut is fundamental: aspiration, expectation, confidence and the belief that effort pays are themselves produced by circumstance. Everything the framework wants on the effort side has circumstance on both sides of it — which is why "opportunity, not outcome" is far less coherent than it sounds.

Operationalisations exist: the Human Development Index, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, and the beyond-GDP indicator programmes.

And Fraser's distinction between maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation — against Honneth's claim that recognition is primary — frames everything in the rest of Part 8.

Space of equality — the dimension in which equality is being sought.

Adaptive preferences — expectations adjusting to circumstances, deforming subjective measures.

Primary goods — Rawls: things any rational person would want whatever else they want.

Equality of resources — Dworkin's account, using a hypothetical auction and insurance.

Functioning — an achieved being or doing. Capability — the real freedom to achieve combinations of functionings.

Conversion factors — personal, social and environmental determinants of what a resource yields.

Central capabilities — Nussbaum's proposed definite list of ten.

Formal / fair / radical equality of opportunity — no barriers to selection; same prospects for same talent and effort regardless of origin; neutralising all unchosen advantage.

Circumstance and effort — what a person is not and is held responsible for; a cut sociology shows cannot be made cleanly.

Human Development Index / Multidimensional Poverty Index — capability-influenced measures.

Maldistribution / misrecognition / misrepresentation — Fraser's dimensions of injustice.

One — pick your space. Write down which of the four you think should be equalised, and then write the objection to it from this lesson. Then write your answer to the objection.

Two — find a conversion factor. Take two people you know with similar incomes and list three things one can do that the other cannot. Then classify each as personal, social or environmental.

Three — split "equal opportunity". Take a political statement endorsing equality of opportunity and work out which of the three senses is meant. Then ask what the speaker would have to support if they meant the second.

Four — test the responsibility cut. Write down three things you have achieved through effort. For each, list one circumstance that made that effort possible or likely. This is uncomfortable and it is the exercise.

Five — apply the Kerala test. Find a ranking based on self-reported satisfaction — job satisfaction, life satisfaction, patient satisfaction. Ask whether the people reporting most contentment might be those with least experience of the alternative.