Is the Fight Against Inequality or Poverty?

As the Iron Lady did in very quotable fashion, many conservatives today continue to accuse liberals of fetishizing economic equality to the point of willingness to sacrifice the living standards of all, including the poor, to promote it. As Margaret Thatcher put the charge, liberals "would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich".

This accusation made towards liberals is false almost without exception. For just one example, here's Matt Yglesias refusing to trade living standards for equality. In this case, even though economic recessions may reduce income inequality by cutting the incomes of the rich more than those of the poor, Yglesias nevertheless opposes recessions and so declines the living-standards-for-equality trade because absolute living standards for all outweighs income equality.

Yet, many liberals have indeed claimed the struggle against economic inequality as their own. How ought their position be interpreted? While there might be other valid reasons to oppose inequality, the most undeniable reason to do so, and thus the most effective grounds on which to make the case, is that inequality implies inadequate living standards and poverty that are avoidable.  


Liberals have a problem with poverty and inadequate living standards, but of course if those standards were unavoidable and logically necessary (for example, as they have been in most of history before important technological innovations, or as they would be if it were true that there really are not enough resources to provide for everyone at adequate living standards*), then fretting about poverty in the political arena would pointless, like any action aimed at an impossible end. So, necessary to the liberal case that poverty and inadequate living standards are problems that ought to be remedied with political means is that there are enough resources to provide a universal floor of adequate living standards.

So decrying 'economic inequality' is just shorthand for decrying poverty and inadequate living standards and preemptively rebutting the argument that things can get no better because resources are scarce; at least, that's the interpretation of it with the most obvious merit, and liberals would have the most luck in advancing their cause by recognizing that claims against inequality in itself are much more controversial than claims against poverty.

So liberals are innocent of being willing to sacrifice living standards for equality. But might anyone else better merit the accusation of prioritizing their preferences on economic equality over their preferences on living standards? Well, Krugman suggests that the rich do exactly this in this post, as an explanation for their revealed preferences on public policy. He posits that they prefer a bigger slice of a smaller pie rather than a smaller slice of a bigger pie, even if they're losing out in an absolute sense by choosing the former over the latter.

*I use these two examples because conservatives certainly do object to liberal designations of living standards as poor or otherwise inadequate (and so warranting a policy response) by pointing out that such standards have been endured by the vast majority of people throughout history or are currently being endured by most people on earth, and thus cannot possibly be bad enough to justify government action .