Abstract

As part of the interdisciplinary Colloquium proposed by the magazine Encartes, and based on the text by Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz, this text seeks to complement and expand the debate on social inequality in Latin America. In order to overcome a strictly economic view on the subject, the author proposes, on the one hand, to incorporate social and cultural dimensions into the analysis, and on the other, to assume inequality as a class experience. Hence his concept of social fragmentation. Initially, the article reviews the most current data on the primary and secondary distribution of income in Latin America over the last 15 years. It is clear that these indicators do not necessarily correspond to the experience of the different social classes that live a growing fragmentation and distancing from their life experiences that imposes the need for an ethnographic approach to inequality. This fragmentation can hardly be understood without an analysis of the social mechanisms and processes of social classification, which legitimize hierarchies and gaps between social classes. The disparity in the distribution of income and wealth is key for the author in the genesis of social fragmentation, hence the centrality that he attributes to the role that the State can play.

Keywords: Latin America, social class, inequality, experience of inequality, social fragmentation

Social Inequality in Latin America: Structural Explanations and Everyday Experiences

Abstract: As part of the interdisciplinary colloquium Encartes has proposed — based on a seminal text by Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz — the present study seeks to complement and expand the debate on social inequality in Latin America. Looking to go beyond a strictly economic perspective, the author simultaneously proposes incorporating social and cultural dimensions into analyzes as well as taking up inequality as a class-based experience that leads to his notion of social fragmentation. The article starts with a review of the latest data on primary and secondary income distribution in Latin America over the last fifteen years. It is clear these indicators do not necessarily correspond to the experiences of different social classes now subject to increasing levels of fragmentation and distancing in their life experiences, which implies the need for an ethnographic approach to inequality. Further, it will be hard to understand this fragmentation without an analysis of social classification's mechanisms and processes that legitimize hierarchy and gaps between the classes. Disparities in income and wealth distribution, writes the author, are key to social fragmentation's origins, which leads to the centrality he lends to the role the state can play.

Keywords: Inequality, Latin America, social fragmentation, social class, the experience of inequality.

Introduction

In the course of the last fifteen years, the issue of inequality has acquired great visibility in public opinion, as well as on the agenda of national and international organizations. Even greater has been the centrality and relevance attributed to it in the academic sphere, especially in that of studies on contemporary social issues. Poverty and social exclusion, two themes and concepts that successively dominated this discussion in previous moments, are today re-signified and re-problematized in relation to inequality. Inequality is accentuated and permeates multiple and different spheres of social and subjective life, reconfiguring the foundations of social order and the daily experiences of individuals, for which reason its problematization arouses particular interest.

This process has not been spontaneous or random. It is clear that this is not a new phenomenon. It is also obvious that in the past there have been numerous studies on inequality, mainly associated with social stratification. But the contemporary centrality of social inequality is fundamentally due to its close association with neoliberal globalization. Without going into details on a widely discussed topic, the truth is that a set of structural (of the economy and welfare regimes), technological and cultural transformations that coincided from the last quarter of the last century were gradually giving rise to a deepening of the social and economic gaps between different social sectors, and especially to an irritating concentration (and ostentation) of wealth in a global elite. Inequality was thus configured as an essential feature of neoliberal globalization.

It is in this context that a broad interest in the subject arises: its historical roots, its causes and effects, its measurement and, not least, its conceptualization. The publications in recent years have been numerous and diverse. In the case of our region, the literature is also extremely rich; Two studies stand out that share the same historical perspective and attempt to provide a holistic interpretation of inequality in Latin America. I am referring to the study of Luis Reygadas (2008) Appropriation, already Una historia de la desigualdad en América Latina by Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz (2016), both also strongly influenced by the pioneering work of Charles Tilly (2000).

The article by Pérez Sáinz, around which this discussion forum is organized, is precisely a derivation of the approach that we can find, developed in much more detail, in the aforementioned work. More specifically, this text offers us a synthesis of the approach that the author calls "radical-critical" on inequality, and a reflection on the disempowerment factors of the subaltern classes and their responses in a specific period: that of "the globalized modernization ”, which coincides with the beginning of neoliberal globalization and up to the present day. Taking the article by Pérez Sáinz as a reference and starting point, I propose to reflect here on a set of elements or gray areas that, although the result of a relatively arbitrary selection, allow me to show the multidimensionality of social inequality, and especially the complexity of its expression in contemporary Latin American societies. I am interested in placing emphasis not so much on a prescriptive discourse (political and / or economic), but on the possible contributions of sociology and anthropology to the analysis of the consequences of social inequality in everyday experience and, therefore, to the understanding of the society in which we live.

In the first place, I will refer to the primary and secondary distribution, or more specifically the functional distribution and the redistribution of income, a key distinction for the radical-critical approach. I consider it important to start with a measurement problem, but also to reflect on its implications in terms of my interest in everyday experience and the societal. Then, I will argue about the relevance of thinking about economic inequality as a manifestation, determinant but one, of social inequality, and from there to suggest the hypothesis of an emerging social fragmentation. In a third section, I am interested in introducing underestimated dimensions in the analysis, but of growing interest, referring to the cultural, the social and the subjective, and which in my opinion are key to understanding social inequality. Finally, the place of the conclusions is occupied by a brief final reflection on the paradoxes of current inequality and its analytical implications.

Rich and poor or capital and labor

The article by Pérez Sáinz that summons us opens with a direct and forceful questioning of a prevailing view of inequality today, which privileges the distribution of income between households and / or individuals as a dimension of analysis and measurement. Indeed, most contemporary studies, as well as the indices used to measure them, are based on income inequality between households or individuals.

Based on these criteria, Latin America, although it continues to be a deeply unequal region, would have experienced a more or less significant decrease in inequality since the beginning of the new century and until about 2015. With the exception of Costa Rica and Honduras, data from the cepal show that between 2002 and 2013 the Gini Index decreased in all other Latin American countries (cepal, 2014). Subsequent calculations show that between 2012 and 2015 this indicator experienced some stagnation (with minimal decreases in some countries and increases in others), with which, in general terms, the decrease in income inequality that began with the new century would have kept.1

This trend temporarily coincides with the resurgence of progressive parties (also called populists in the region) with electoral capacity, and which acceded to the government in several cases. However, the decrease in inequality not only occurred in these countries, but also occurred in others that had explicitly neoliberal governments, such as Colombia or Mexico. Unsurprisingly, this raised many questions.

A first response consists of questioning the sources of the information and not so much the indicator or the conceptualization itself. The issue is that in household surveys there is usually an underreporting or underreporting of the income of the privileged sectors, or even not directly capturing the elites in which income is concentrated. The alternative has been to use fiscal data to compensate for these deficiencies in attracting the richest sectors or their income in the surveys. There are not many exercises of this type in our region, but among the few countries in which they have been carried out, we find studies in Mexico and Brazil that represent, for the period of analysis, precisely contrasting development models: in both cases it turns out that Inequality is much deeper than suggested by data based on household surveys, and it is even doubted whether any decrease has actually occurred (Esquivel, 2015; Salama, 2015).

Other interpretations suggest that the decrease in inequality has to do with a narrowing of wage gaps, and more especially between skilled and unskilled work (Lustig et al., 2013). Pierre Salama (2015) refers to a kind of scissor effect in the labor market between a demand with more qualifications and a supply of less qualified jobs. The issue here is, as Pérez Sáinz (2013) himself says, whether the narrowing of the gap is “Brazilian” (the least qualified approach the most qualified) or “Mexican” (a precariousness of the skilled workers); Obviously, in the latter case, the inequality indicator may decrease, but at the same time the world of work will suffer a worsening of its conditions. In other words, the same indicator could have different meanings in different contexts.

Table 1. Indicators of income distribution and functional distribution in Latin America. Source: Prepared by the authors based on data from ECLAC (2018), tables ia.1.1 and ia.1.2.

A more fundamental question is that this (re) distribution of income is the result of a previous distribution of national income among productive factors, basically between labor and capital (and income), or in other words between wages and profits (Lindenboim , 2008). To put it more simply: much of what is distributed afterwards depends on this first distribution, and as long as it does not change, everything will remain more or less the same. Pérez Sáinz's proposal, in accordance with the most structural analyzes, is to focus on this sphere. In fact, as Atkinson (2009) points out, after a long absence in economics dominated by the neoclassical perspective, in the last decade there has been a renewed interest in the structural analysis of the distribution of the national product between capital and labor.

Echoing this resurgence of the structural approach, the most recent reports from the cepal (2016 and 2018) incorporate a section on the so-called functional income distribution. The first important observation that emerges from these data is that, like what happens with income redistribution, the distribution between capital and labor also places Latin America as a highly unequal region. The indicator used in this case is the share of wages in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP); Of a total of eleven Latin American countries included in a United Nations analysis, seven are in the lowest third of countries with the lowest wage share (with less than 40% of the GDP captured by wages); another three in an intermediate situation (between 40% and 45% of the GDP) and only Costa Rica in the upper third (slightly above 50%). It should be noted, as a point of reference, that Switzerland tops the list in this series with a wage share of 59% of the GDP, followed by the United States with a value close to 55% (data taken from cepal, 2016). It is interesting to note that countries with high inequality in the secondary distribution of income, such as the United States or the United Kingdom, at the same time have a share of the wage bill in the GDP very high in the first case and relatively high in the second (paradox to keep in mind).

A series of data produced by cepal exclusively for Latin America allows us to observe what has happened to the evolution of the functional distribution in the same period that we have been considering, that is, from 2002. If we take the entire period (2002-2016), the behavior of the wage share in the GDP it is not homogeneous: in eight out of fifteen countries considered it is increasing (especially in the Southern Cone); that is, in half the inequality in the functional distribution decreases and in the other half it increases.

Both trends at a general level show a myriad of nuances that make it difficult to draw conclusions from these indicators alone. Especially if we consider different temporary cuts or if we stop to observe what happened in each country. In the latter case, for example, we could find at least one country that represents each of the four possible combinations in the trends of these two measurements, which prevents conclusive statements from being made. But, in addition, the same indicators of cepal in their 2016 and 2018 reports they present significant variations for the same country and year. With all these exceptions, although the functional distribution is fundamental and primary, it does not seem to completely determine the behavior of the distribution of income between households and / or individuals, although it should also be noted that in some countries of the Southern Cone that implemented active policies In the labor market (especially by increasing the minimum wage and intensifying the formalization of employment) there was a decrease in both the inequality in the functional distribution and in the redistribution of income.

From measurements to experiences

There is no doubt that we need to consider both estimates, and that it is important to link the distribution of income at the macroeconomic level and at the household level (Atkinson, 2009). But even so, one or the other measurement or both are far from being an automatic reflection of the experience of inequality. In a recent article, Gabriel Kessler stated that “the conjunction and translation of divergent indicators and trends in qualitative experiences is a pending task when evaluating what has happened to inequality in the region in our disciplines” (2019: 89). Without a doubt, this is a great challenge that I fully share. In my opinion, this does not mean that an experience can have a numerical equivalent, but, above all, the willingness to resignify inequality as experience (collective and subjective).

The problem is that the measurements of inequality, and the conceptualizations that support them, do not always coincide with the way people experience it on a daily basis, nor with the social processes that unfold on the ground, to put it in ethnographic terms. By betting on a figurative analysis in the social sciences, Elías and Scotson (2016) pointed out that statistical importance does not necessarily coincide with sociological importance, which, according to the authors themselves, is attributable to the difference between an analysis of isolated data and another that privileges their insertion into a broader social configuration.

Measuring the functional distribution among productive factors has its own problems. The first, and perhaps the most obvious in the case of Latin America, is that the wage bill does not represent the total of the world of work; in fact, in our region the percentage of informal or non-salary activities is very high, with which the share of salaries underestimates the share of work. But there are still two other more significant questions in terms of our interest in the experience of inequality.

One of them is that the distribution between factors does not necessarily coincide with the distribution between people: the same person can receive income through a salary, a business of which he is a partner, or the rental of properties in which he has invested. The other is that the functional distribution does not allow us to capture the inequalities within each category; For example, the wage inequalities that in our region, it should be remembered, tend to be very high and in some cases extreme; for example, between an employee of a cleaning company subcontracted by a transnational corporation or a government office, and the managers or senior officials who work in them.

If we are interested in examining the inequality between the richest elites, say the richest 1% and the rest of the population, then these subtleties may not be relevant. Surely in that 1% (which concentrates about half of the total wealth on a national and world scale) we will find the best incarnation of capital. But in Latin America, daily inequality is not exclusively related to that 1% (that elite is extremely distant from the rest). It is also between the 15% or 20% that follows and the remaining 80%, with some more and less deep jumps in the gaps.2 In an investigation on Mexico, in which, among other things, we examined the reciprocal views of poverty and wealth, the popular sectors, when consulted about the privileged classes, implied that they were not thinking of Slim when giving their opinions , but in the living conditions of successful professionals, executives of companies and banks, politicians or even well-positioned academics (Saraví, 2015).

Social inequality in Latin America has a determining economic dimension. The key aspect of this dimension, beyond the swings and conjunctural combinations of one or both measurements, is its persistence and depth. But in addition to the economic, income and wealth gaps, these are also translated and reproduced in many other areas of more mundane social life, so to speak, through which the 99% of the population travels. In this context, if there is a feature that defines or marks the daily experience of social inequality, I think it is a growing, and in some cases consolidated, social fragmentation. This intuition or hypothesis is not an isolated occurrence. Just shortly before concluding this text, the prestigious British newspaper The Guardian published a note titled "Tackling Inequality Means Addressing Divisions That Go Way Beyond Income," which began by asking why people are convinced that inequality is increasing while statistics seem to suggest otherwise.3 It is in this field that the social sciences have a great potential for contributions to be made.

At an experiential level, social inequality has become increasingly multidimensional and collective. I am not just referring to the fact that there is more than one variable or axis of inequality, but the most important fact that in the experience of inequality these different dimensions tend to converge and overlap (in the same classes and spaces). We face profound inequalities in the economic living conditions of different social sectors, but also and at the same time marked processes of residential and spatial segregation in cities, the segmentation of the educational system into unequal school circuits, the stratified universalization of health systems with widely differentiated benefits and levels, multiple fractures in the styles and spaces of consumption and entertainment, and even sociodemographic patterns, preventable diseases, and life expectancies that differ substantially between sectors. Classes become more heterogeneous in terms of their composition, but more homogeneous and distant in terms of their daily experiences. These are precisely the spaces that allow us to capture the class as an experience, a conceptualization ex post of the class that can be analytically richer and more experientially closer to the reality of current capitalism.

Income inequality does not necessarily imply fragmentation; This occurs when the different spaces of inequality in the city (school, health, consumption, life expectancy, just to give a few examples) coincide and overlap. Social fragmentation is expressed in the coexistence of spaces of unequal inclusion that are mutually exclusive (Saraví, 2015). Each of these spaces represent socially, culturally and economically homogeneous microcosms, in which individuals are socialized and their subjectivities constructed from earliest childhood. Shared and interclass social experiences are reduced to their minimum expression and the respective sociocultural repertoires are distanced until in some cases they become immeasurable. This is a process that, beyond the ups and downs in the measurements of functional distribution or income redistribution, we have been observing in Latin American societies since the beginning of neoliberal globalization, without substantial changes and rather with a clear accentuation.

This experiential expression of inequality, but which represents a qualitative leap from its classical conceptualization (that is why I prefer to call it fragmentation), requires, on the one hand, to rethink the analytical dimensions and, on the other, to re-evaluate the policies that would allow it to be reversed. The decrease in the Gini index or the increase in the share of wages in the pbi Did it translate into a reduction in educational segmentation, residential segregation, living inequality in terms of Therborn (2015), fragmentation of services or citizen security? To respond we may need to review case by case and, in particular, pay attention to the role played by the State. Some authors consider that fiscal policy may represent a key factor (Barry, 2002), others are skeptical about its scope (Lindenboim, 2008), but beyond the dispute it should be noted that if there is a common element in Latin America, even In these boom years, no country in the region has undertaken a substantial and truly progressive tax reform.4 Which, succinctly stated, has a double effect in terms of equity by reducing the market capacity of the elites (an aspect that is often underestimated) and providing resources for a more universal social citizenship. Perhaps the root of these resistances requires us, as I said before, to look back at other analytical dimensions.

Social and cultural dimensions of inequality

By rethinking the analytical dimensions, I mean complementing or confronting the perspective of the economy, paying attention to the sociocultural dimensions present in the construction and reproduction of inequality. The work of Charles Tilly (2000) has been particularly influential in identifying two key mechanisms of categorical inequality: exploitation and opportunity grabbing. Indeed, there is a broad consensus regarding the centrality of these two mechanisms, the systematization of which is taken up in many other subsequent studies, including that of Pérez Sáinz himself.

Although it is a fundamental contribution that justifies the care received, categorical inequality is sustained by two processes prior to these mechanisms: the assignment of people to different social categories and the institutionalization of practices that allocate resources unequally to those categories. As Douglas Massey (2007) points out, over time these two processes have been the substratum on which people's differential access to material, symbolic and emotional resources is based.

This refocusing of Tilly's contributions enables us to think about a set of little explored but substantive sociocultural analytical dimensions to understand the everyday experience of inequality beyond its economic dimension: the construction and interaction of categories. In simpler terms: how are the categories of inequality constructed? How do we assign different people and groups to each other? What attributes and valuations do we assign to them? How are they expressed in social hierarchies and relations of can? The processes of classification and construction of symbolic limits, of hierarchization and social valuation, differential interactions, or the hegemony of a neoliberal discourse that is translated into practices and thought schemes are some among many other dimensions of this type that allow us an approach more direct to the lived experience of inequality. Many of these dimensions operate in a routine and inadvertent way in the production and reproduction of categorical inequalities, becoming their own even in those most affected by structural disparities (Lamont et al., 2014).

There is recent research exploring the cognitive roots and uses of categories; this does not mean that they are neutral representation schemes. The (social) construction of these categories is imbued with emotional charges and valuations that constitute the basis of prejudices and social hierarchies. The different spaces in which Latin American societies are fragmented would be unsustainable without symbolic limits that establish borders between groups of people, things and places, and that constitute the basis for the stigmatization and disqualification of some, and the valorization and prestige of others (Bayón, 2016). The foundation of inequality is not the capitals themselves but their valuation (Jodhka et al., 2018). In the educational system, in public spaces, in residential areas or in centers of consumption, inequality in the allocation of material and symbolic resources is based on this power of social classification that establishes hierarchies and social distances that transcend income and coincide with them (Camus, 2019; Bayón and Saraví, 2019b; Márquez, 2003, Carman et al., 2013).

These categories, socially constructed and later constituted as cognitive instruments of individuals, are translated into judgments and emotions such as fear and mistrust, contempt, recognition, overvaluation and even the aestheticization of each other. But also, and partly as a consequence of these feelings, in a set of practices that mark the guidelines for daily interaction and sociability: avoidance or encounter, rejection or empathy, contempt or admiration, to name a few examples. Inequality is thus produced and reproduced, explicitly and inadvertently, by individuals themselves through their social relationships in daily life. Through spontaneous “differential association” practices (Bottero, 2007), the people with whom one is and feels closest tend to be similar in many other dimensions of inequality as well. We live in neighborhoods, attend schools, and consume in markets in which we feel more comfortable and at ease, and we avoid those in which we feel out of place or from which we are excluded (Bayón and Saraví, 2018). It is not about innate preferences or simple lifestyle choices, but rather the result of a decantation process (in which we must deepen) by which inequality gives rise to a sociocultural distancing that reformulates the patterns of coexistence and sociability ( Álvarez Rivadulla, 2019; Bayón and Saraví, 2019a; Segura, 2019).

The inequality that concerns us corresponds to the period of neoliberal globalization. In this sense, it is necessary to consider a characteristic of neoliberalism that permeates and shapes contemporary inequality. It is not only about neoliberalism as an economic order (some of whose aspects are dealt with in Pérez Sáinz's text), but as a process that generates a series of discourses, languages and dispositions with disciplinary capacity. What, following Leal (2016), we could define as a neoliberal common sense that even transcends political projects of one orientation or another, and that has as distinctive features the conceptualization of individuals as autonomous subjects, responsible for themselves and entrepreneurs. (an exaltation of individualization). Under this discourse, “inequality is depoliticized and class seems to be reduced to a question of character and effort” (Bayón, 2019). The poverty of some and the wealth of others are legitimized as a result of personal failures and virtues (even moral), dissociating inequality from its structural roots and material bases. This common sense permeates across society as a whole - not necessarily all, but clearly throughout the entire social stratification - and conditions our daily social and subjective experience of inequality. The forms assumed today by the legitimation and tolerance of inequalities, the sense of right or wrong, feelings of frustration and resentment, moral judgments about deprivation and privilege or social recognition attributed to different actors are unintelligible without the hegemony of a neoliberal discourse.

Perhaps in all these dimensions (and some others such as the accumulation of advantages and disadvantages) we find the explanation for some of the paradoxes posed by contemporary social inequality in Latin America. Its material bases are unquestionable, but so is the participation of these social and cultural dimensions in their production and reproduction, as well as in the daily social and subjective experience of inequality.

Conclution

Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz's text begins with a questioning of the current hegemonic imaginary about inequality, based on income, and offers us a new perspective that moves towards the sphere of factor distribution and the dynamics of disempowerment. With this reflection I have wanted to take the author's challenge one step further, and offer some keys and new approaches to understand the experience of inequality.

Social inequalities go far beyond an income issue. They are expressed on a daily basis in deep divisions in the quality of schools and health centers, in the differences in life expectancy between sectors of the same society, in the formation of enclaves of poverty and exclusive residential areas, as well as in the emergency of new patterns of sociability and social recognition, among others. These processes of social fragmentation for the moment are difficult to measure, and the current indicators of economic inequality considered in isolation cannot account for them.

There are social and cultural dimensions that deserve to be taken into account and explored if we intend to approach the experience of inequality and its transformation. They are also much more persistent and resistant dimensions than changes in income (which may explain the resistance, among others, to progressive tax reforms, for example). This does not mean that they are immovable, but rather that they require our attention. In many cases, there is the substrate of the naturalization of inequality. The re-politicization of inequality requires the social sciences to make it evident in order to enable new policies of solidarity and equity. If inequality is multidimensional, the policies to counteract it should be too; In this sense, by momentarily violating the initial commitment to avoid prescriptions, the State has a fundamental role to play.

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