The Tales Conservatives Tell About Inequality

In 1972, the neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol defended existing income inequality on the ground that it simply reflected the natural distribution of human ability. “Human talents and abilities, as measured, do tend to distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve, with most people clustered around the middle, and with much smaller percentages at the lower and higher ends ...” he argued. “This explains one of the most extraordinary (and little-noticed) features of 20th-century societies: how relatively invulnerable the distribution of income is to the efforts of politicians and ideologues to manipulate it. In all the Western nations — the United States, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Germany — despite the varieties of social and economic policies of their governments, the distribution of income is strikingly similar.” This was a comforting story for the right. The level of inequality in the United States happened to be a perfectly optimal reflection of the talent of the populace.