ONE GREAT MIND

THREE GREAT QUESTIONS

The Enigma of Inequality

Göran Therborn

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This book is published for educational purposes. As it is a
work protected by copyright law, it cannot be copied,
reproduced, transmitted, distributed, or used in any other
form without the author's permission. Unauthorized use may
result in legal action being taken.
 Contents

Prologue

Introducing Our Lecturer | Göran Therborn 5

The Outset | The Enigma of Inequality 7

Key Concepts 9
Three Great Questions 11
- How does existential inequality manifest itself in our society?
- What is the background of the era of equality
being countered by capitalism?
- In what ways did the pandemic contribute to creating an equal world?

More GREAT MINDS 17

 Prologue

The world’s greatest sociologist argues that

“inequality begins in the womb.”

The inequality of the 21st century as seen by

an international authority on the topic.
How unequal is our world today and why?
 Introducing Our Lecturer

Career Highlights
- Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge, UK
- Affiliated professor of sociology at Linnaeus University, Sweden
- 2019 Swedish Lenin Prize,
as a writer in a “critical and rebellious left tradition”
- 2018 Honorary Prize of the Equality Fund (Sweden)

Writing Highlights
- 1978 What Does the Ruling Class do When it Rules?
- 1980 The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology
- 2006 Inequalities of the World
- 2011 The World. A Beginner’s Guide
- 2013 The Killing Fields of Inequality

Göran Therborn
 Göran Therborn

Göran Therborn is a professor emeritus of sociology

at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and an
affiliated professor of sociology at Linnaeus University, Sweden.
He began to make a name for himself by writing for Zenit,
a Swedish Syndicalist magazine when he was twenty. Making
an impression as a rebel in the field of sociology through his
criticism of established academia, Therborn went on to publish
controversial papers in the European progressive journal New
Left Review.
He is the author of 40 books, including What Does the
Ruling Class do When it Rules? (1978), The Ideology of Power
and the Power of Ideology (1980), Inequalities of the World
(2006), From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (2008), and The Killing
Fields of Inequality (2013). He is the most cited academic in
sociology, with his works having been translated and published
in 24 languages.
Therborn retired from teaching in 2010 but continues
to study family, gender, gender relations, inequality, modern
radical social ideology, cities and power, and the formation
of the middle class from various perspectives.

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 The Outset

The Enigma of Inequality

Last November, “poverty and social inequality” occupied the top spot as the
leading concern with 33% on the monthly What Worries the World survey,
through which Ipsos tracks public opinion across 28 countries, with Corona
virus ceding its number one position for the first time in 18 months. A year
has passed since, but inequality is still the second greatest worry worldwide
after inflation.
Göran Therborn devoted his academic life to globalization and inequality.
Therborn says that inequality begins even before birth in the mother’s
womb, with the mother’s health and economic circumstances affecting
the fetus’s health. Children born to rich parents inherit not only wealth
but various privileges. They are also able to receive much higher-quality
education than children lower in the hierarchy. People with university
degrees have a higher life expectancy than those without, and civil servants
who are higher up live longer than those at the bottom, like janitors
or administrative assistants.

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 Inequality exists between countries as well. Damages caused by climate
change are more likely to affect the poor people of developing countries
than developed ones. COVID-19 mortality is higher in people of color
like blacks or Hispanics than whites. Is there any way to address
inequality and the polarization it leads to?
On Great Minds, Göran Therborn presents his keen insight into
inequality as well as ways to solve it.

* Videos of the lectures are available at www.thegreatminds.com

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Key Concepts

1 Equal World
A world where everyone can choose, pursue, and prosper
on the career path they desire. Göran Therborn explains
that equality is a relative concept, not one in which
everything is exactly the same. So the equal world he's
talking about is a more equal and less unequal place to
live.

Existential inequality
2
To ignore, despise, ban, and socially exclude certain
people, and this can occur in all relationships and groups,
from families to countries. Göran Therborn explains that the
opposite concept, 'existential equality', can continue and
develop alongside the secularization of the world because
it does not belong in the capital-labor relationship.

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Neoliberalism
3
A political ideology that aims to minimize the role of
government and maximize the freedom of capitalists based
on the globalization of capital. Göran Therborn explains
that neoliberalism is an ideology rife with huge inequality
that has been around since 1980, and he argues that the
pandemic has contributed to bringing neoliberalism to an
end.

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 1
How does existential inequality
manifest itself in our society?

Göran Therborn
“Existential inequality is produced by a series of processes stemming from the
family to the state. It's created by providing recognition or respect to some
and dismissal, contempt, or prohibitions, and social exclusions to others. And
the most common effect of existential inequality, I think, is the crushing of
your self-confidence, which is very much a thing which happens among oppressed
or dominated classes or ethnic groups, and a scaling down of ambition, a profound
amount of self-doubt, sometimes even self-hatred. What I here call existential
inequality is better known under other names. It's most common variants are
racism for instance, and xenophobia, the exclusion of others, the trampling on
other people, because of the color of their skin or their religion, or their ethnic
origin or what have you. And there is patriarchy, and sexism, which was geared,
the whole patriarchal system was geared to tell girls from very early on, that
you are not worth as much as a boy. And this was then reproduced later on
in their lives one day as adults and so on. This is existential inequality. And
then we have two others which are also still with us, Caste and class. Caste
in the classical Hindu system was perhaps the most cruel of existential inequalities,
the so called untouchables, were real social outcasts. Really incredible humiliation
which has been, which has now been reduced, I mean, thanks to the policies

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of Independent India, but its Caste is still there in India, structuring life opportunities.
And there is of course class, and class is not only economic exploitation and
domination, it's also class contempt, and separation and segregation. And its
class contempt is very deeply felt by all those who are exposed to it, it's a
very cruel form of class rule.”

Write down your thoughts.

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 2
What is the background of
the era of equality being countered
by capitalism?

Göran Therborn
“There was a backlash from the remarkable equalization which took place
in the period between 1945 and 1975. What were the reasons for all
this? Well, the underlying structural reason was a profound change in the
power relations between capital and labor. And this was in one crucial
aspect, due to the beginning of deindustrialization. There were also some
crucial crisis events, which accelerated the process of social change, and a
process of decline of labor, and increase in the power of capital. There
was in the 1970s, the so-called oil crisis, which created a very new
situation in the world market. So this sent the energy costs rising
enormously throughout the world. And there was also another crisis in the
1970s, which was the crisis in the world market with the reentry of
world competitors, particularly Japan and Germany, both of whom had for
long been kept down by their defeat in World War II. But now, West
German, and Japanese enterprises were sort of entering the world market,
and so too were Korean and Taiwanese firms as well. And this meant in

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 Europe and in North America, a profit squeeze for the American and
European enterprises. And together this created a big, big crisis of
simultaneous inflation and unemployment, which meant that the post-war
economic policies didn't work any longer, and also stimulated an aggressive
capital response in order to restore profits. So, in this situation, the
capital went on a counter offensive after the equalization process in the
previous decades. And this kind of counteroffensive took several forms.
One of them economic, several of them economic, including outsourcing of
manufacturing to low wage locations, primarily in Asia, and later in other
parts of the world. There was a shift within capitalism from industrial
manufacturing, to financial speculation on the stock market, or the real
estate, housing market, etc.”

Write down your thoughts.

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 3
In what ways did the pandemic
contribute to creating an equal world?

Göran Therborn
“The pandemic had itself direct distributive effects of a very negative
kind. It was actually causing an explosion of inequality. And the
mortality of COVID-19 was very racially configured. And the whites and
Asians, white and Asian Americans were afflicted the least by death from
COVID, whereas African Americans and Hispanics were hit very hard. So
there were many direct inegalitarian effects of the pandemic. Between
them on the one hand, I mean, the essential workers who had to work
through the pandemic, and on the other hand, they protected upper
middle classes who could work safely from home. But, in the longer run,
and indirectly, one could say that the pandemic did have an egalitarian
effect in the sense that it meant the termination of neoliberalism, which
was the ideology of the great un-equalization from 1980 and onwards.
Now, under the pandemic, the government was no longer a problem, as
President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher were arguing, and the days
of big government were not over as Bill Clinton said in the 1990s, now
a big government was a solution, with great public interventions. And
well, the United States was already in the vanguard of this change,

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 ending the pandemic, ending the neoliberal conception of small
governments.”

Write down your thoughts.

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