Explaining Wealth Inequality

Property, Possession and Policy Reform

Benedict Atkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032037363
• eBook ISBN: 9781000470765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Conditions
• Index: Economics

This book discusses the origins of wealth inequality and explains how societies can reform to avoid the catastrophe of inequality-induced social breakdown. It develops a theoretical and practical understanding of the principles behind the concept of ownership and property, complete with historical examples.

It proposes a new research perspective focusing on how the problem of wealth concentration is ameliorated by cooperative and collaborative initiatives to enhance the public sphere, without derogating from the private. The book is based on research data compiled from taxation and household data to explore the theme that wealth inequality is made inevitable by possessive behaviour expressed in possessive language. It shows that while inequality is inescapable, we can adopt policies where resources are more efficiently and broadly distributed for public benefit. Such policies are directed towards encouraging voluntary, as opposed to compulsory, wealth transfer to achieve public good.

The primary market for the book consists of academics and students from the fields of economics, including growth and developmental economics, law, sociology, history, business and international trade. It also provides a practical resource for government policy analysts wanting to develop a more detailed understanding of the role played by wealth inequality in a range of social problems.

Part I

Possession and property

1 Language and possession

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188766-1

Language predisposes humans to a possessive mentality. Settled peoples make sense of surrounding phenomena by acts of notional and then physical annexation. Their innate grammar ensures that they cannot do otherwise. Possessive language leads to possessive thought which leads to possessive action. Possessiveness causes division, because a thing is owned exclusively, with the result that the owner excludes the trespasser from the thing. From exclusion comes social inequality.

Possessiveness is pre-determined by language

In 1957, Noam Chomsky, then at the beginning of his career in linguistics, published a book called Syntactic Structures, a ‘theory of linguistic structure’ which introduced the idea that knowledge of grammar is inborn. The book transformed the study of language structure and acquisition. Few academic fields are as contested as that of linguistics, and Chomsky’s language theories are rejected by many linguists. However, many acknowledge Chomsky’s profound effect on language theory.¹ His theory of innate grammar provides us with many clues as to why humans think possessively and, wherever they gather in settled societies, create property systems.

Chomsky argues that the speed and facility with which children acquire complex grammar disproves the claim that language is acquired from the linguistic cues of parents and others. In a short period of time, a child’s linguistic competence vastly outstrips whatever language adults could teach the child in that time (Berwick and Chomsky, 2016).

To demonstrate his argument, Chomsky referred to recursiveness in language. Our grammar is recursive, or generative, meaning that we are linguistically capable of constructing an infinity of sentences. Our linguistic super-capacity is a property of our brain. Grammar, a system of categories and rules that make meaningful communication possible, is the product of a code written into a computer, the brain. Stimuli activate the code.

Chomsky’s theory of innate grammar, or what he used to call universal grammar – because language capacity is common to all people – helps to explain how our grammar directs the choices we make to create property, and, more specifically, to seek control by appropriation. Applying the theory of innate or universal grammar, we can say that humans acquire language in the same way, and communicate using similar grammars. Grammars are not identical. All, however, categorise reality in the same way. That is, their modes of classifying phenomena, and explaining human interaction with those phenomena, are the same.

If we examine the possessive case in language, we can identify a common human attitude to the act of possession, which is the condition precedent for creating property. As our grammar shows, humans cannot make sense of the world without asserting possession in myriad ways – I possess my coat, declaring my right to control the custody of the coat, when I say, ‘It’s my coat’; similarly, I propose that another person possesses a dog when I say, ‘You have a friendly dog.’

The possessive case, involving conceptual appropriation, is part of the languages of settled (as opposed to nomadic) peoples. The purpose of the possessive case is to allocate control. Its existence in language tells us that for millennia human forebears recognised that social efficacy requires humans to exercise control – over themselves, over others and over things. The existence of possessive grammar also foretells conflict. If two people say of the same thing, ‘It’s mine’, then antithesis is created, and if dispute follows, an ultimate consequence of dispute may be warfare.

The urge to possess, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau pointed out (1755), is the beginning of conflict. Settled society, according to Rousseau, is disastrous to human happiness. The disaster is one of recognition. Humans recognise the surrounding world and the part that they play in that world. If we borrow from Sartre, who wrote two hundred years after Rousseau, we can interpret Rousseau to say that on leaving the state of nature, humans beheld the Other (Sartre, [1943] 2020). Like Adam and Eve cast out from Eden, they perceived their nakedness. Comparison between self and other began. Then, according to Rousseau, occurred the greatest disaster:

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!

(1755: Second Part Para 1)

This vivid statement contains a clue about the origin of social inequality. The clue is the word ‘mine’. Any personal pronoun claiming possession is at the beginning of a chain of causation that ends in inequality. If something is mine, I must possess it. To own something, we must possess the thing. Most people think of possession as physical custody of a thing, or at least the legal right to physical custody of the thing. However, possession is notional, not physical. It is impossible to possess a field, a house or a car physically. One can only possess these things mentally, meaning one apprehends a field, house or car. What is understood or apprehended mentally is defined as a field, house or car and becomes a legal object that can be sold or leased because it is owned.

The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon asked the question, ‘What is property?’ and famously answered that ‘It is theft!’ (1840: 1). Proudhon did not mean to say that owners are thieves. He meant that a property system dispossesses. If we create property, the owner possesses and others are excluded. These others are, in effect, dispossessed, although the act of possession is not necessarily a direct act of dispossession. The social effect of dispossession is radical. It creates the categories of haves and have-nots. Proudhon thus follows the thought of Rousseau, who warned that social division is begun by dispossession, and maintained by the dichotomous actions of dispossession and possession.

Self and possession

It is important to understand why the dichotomy between possession and non-possession (or indeed dispossession) is born and the social fissure increases. Possession is linked to self. Each person understands external phenomena through the agency of self. Unless I am self-conscious, I am language-incapable. I begin to make sense of my environment and communicate in meaningful language when self and grammar correlate, identifying to every human a world of form, substance, agency and motion.

We describe the world to ourselves and others by using both pronouns of self and pronouns connecting-to-self – I, me, my, mine, you, yours, his, hers, hers, its, theirs, ours. Pronouns are the identifiers of self, or objects perceived by the self. I have blue eyes. She is intelligent. His name is Robert. My mother was kind. Our team will win. They are from Spain. Her house is bigger than your house.

The self is unique and its essence incommunicable. We share thoughts and feelings, but a person’s experience of self, a person’s selfhood, is unknowable to another person. Our apartness is the beginning of property, as we can see from observing the way that we deploy possessive pronouns. The possessive pronouns possess. That is my house and not your house. This is our land and not yours. I will drive my car to the office. Our children are playing. If something is mine, it is not yours. An assertion of possession may be uncontroversial. Alternatively, it may be contested. It may elicit inimical emotion.

Possession occurs in many ways. I possess my body and its parts inalienably, but my possession of my car is alienable. My arm is connected to my self. My car is not. I can sell my car. I cannot sell my arm. People claim to possess their children as theirs, though not inalienably, since as well as being ‘our’ children, they are themselves. Two verbs, ‘have’ and ‘belong’, perform a coadjutant function expanding the range of descriptive possessive statements in a way that pronouns and adjectives cannot (‘You may have that coat’; ‘I do not belong here’).

The idea of control expressed in pronouns and adjectives, and the verb representations of possession, distil in the language patterns of every linguistically capable person a dialectic of appropriation (mine) and contest or antithesis (mine/yours). Possessive grammar is the instrument, and proof, of invariable appropriation. Alienably or inalienably, we declare things (called nouns) to be our property: ‘my heart’, ‘my wife’, ‘my house’.

Humans can only understand what is external through the agency of self, and the self can only comprehend existence by relating the components of existence to self. It relates by possession. Thus my car belongs to my self, and our house belongs to my self and a class related to my self, whereas your car belongs to your self because it does not belong to my self. Self is the determiner of possessive grammar. If we accept Chomsky’s theory, we can say that our language faculty causes humans to relate things to self and define things as possessable.

This proposition is not contradicted by the existence of social systems that eschewed or eschew property: collectivism in the 20th century, or the peripatetic kinship systems of nomadic tribes. A principal reason for collectivism’s failure is that it suppressed self-determination, which includes the determination to possess. Among peripatetic peoples, the creation of territory, and kinship relations within the territory, satisfy the self-urge for possession.

Social consequences of possessive grammar

Possessive grammar assigns relational control to a person or thing. The social consequence of our innate tendency to make sense of surrounding matter by mentally defining and possessing that matter is the creation of property systems. People define and appropriate their surroundings, and then distribute control or ownership. Socially, they are perhaps unable to do other than create property systems. Property laws assimilate concepts of possession, occupancy, property and ownership, and cognate ideas of domination, control and wealth.

The act of creating property systems, however, is neither politically nor socially neutral. If people, guided by a mental formulary system that causes them to appropriate external phenomena, assert exclusive rights over land and things, a risk of conflict arises. The history of the world, reduced to its essence, is a contest for land and resources. Possession means dispossession, or more accurately, exclusion. One possesses; the other is excluded. One owns; the other is, potentially, a trespasser.

Possession begins as a mental declaration, and because we possess exclusively, the consequences of our declared possession can destroy the happiness and welfare of individuals and people. The potentially malign consequence of claiming ownership, even metaphorically, can be seen in a passage from Act III Scene II of Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew. Petruchio compares his new wife Kate, the ‘shrew’ of the play’s title, to chattels, house, field and so on, which constitute her dowry:

But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.

Nay, look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;

I will be master of what is mine own.

She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,

My household stuff, my field, my barn,

My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.

And here she stands, touch her whoever dare.

I’ll bring mine action on the proudest he

That stops my way in Padua.

Petruchio’s conflation of Kate and chattels tells us about mental appropriation and the creation of property. For Petruchio, his self is sovereign. From his speech, we might think that he thinks Kate is indivisible from her dowry. By notionally declaring his wife and her property inseparable, and claiming what is hers as his, he claims to own his wife as well as her property.

Petruchio’s liberal use of the personal pronoun betrays his avarice and presumption (although the speech could also be interpreted as a devotional declaration that what is Petruchio’s is Kate’s also, or that Kate is more important to Petruchio than anything he possesses). What is most noteworthy about the speech, however, is that its possessive claims are not much different from those we make in everyday discourse. Men do not today usually explicitly declare that their wives and their wives’ property are their property. But we rarely speak a sentence without making a possessive claim, usually stated by reference to self – I, me, my, mine, our, ours.

Property arrangements are affected by social mores. If Petruchio and Kate married today, Kate would not provide a dowry, and should she inherit property, no law would immediately require her to share that property with Petruchio. However, the principle of property has not altered. Property vests in a person a right of exclusive possession or control, to do with it, within the law, what the owner wishes. We can see that that right, once declared and contested, is a source of perpetual conflict. Our speech invariably and profusely contains possessive assertions that express assumptions about control. If those claims and assumptions are challenged, contest begins and from contest emerges sovereignty.

Contest for sovereignty

Various theories and studies of human behaviour confirm what most people probably regard as self-evident: while humans can join together in society and co-operate with one another to develop and improve their societies, they yet seem innately disposed towards aggression, and will organise to secure the advantage of one group over another. None of these behavioural characteristics tell us much about the origins of social inequality. We can deduce only that people act socially and anti-socially, co-operatively and non-co-operatively.

A possessive mentality is not inescapable. People act co-operatively and create societies that function...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PART I Possession and property
• PART II Inequality and distribution
• References
• Index