"technical" equality

Today in class, my Journalism professor, Dr. Jensen, had our class of about 130 students sit in only the front and middle sections of the lecture hall.

Jensen began the lecture by insisting that the politics and economics of today are undeniably interrelated, and how important it is to understand economics when dealing with the government of our country and those around the world. As the topic of our class has been Democracy and the people's participation in government, he began discussing the differences in the economic statuses of people in the U.S. One statistic he showed us claimed that the top 10% of the nation (in terms of wealth) contains over 70% of the nation's wealth. The remaining nine-tenths of the population shares the rest.

He drove the point home by randomly choosing 13 students sitting in the front section of the lecture hall and ordering the rest of the front section to get up and move to the middle section. So, these 13 people had an area of probably 80 seats all to themselves, and the rest of the class crammed into the middle. Many people were without seats and stood in the back of the big auditorium. Some sat in the aisles (and were laughingly yelled at by Jensen to "stop being stupid and get in their places"). But he then spoke about how all of our educational experiences were "technically" equal-- we could all listen to the same lecture, take the same test, write the same paper. However, no one in the back of the room could agree that they had the same learning opportunity as the 13 sitting in the front.

As Jensen released everyone back to their original seats, he connected the dots: each of us in the U.S. gets one vote in elections, each of us has freedom of expression, each of us is free to form our own political alliances as we choose. The questions he posed to us were: Do you have the same potential for political influence as does Bill Gates? Do you have the money to fund a multi-million dollar campaign? Can you pay hundreds of lobbyists to flood Congress and persuade politicians to pass the bills you want to be passed? Of course not. Few people in this country have such abilities, and several of our policies reflect that fact. Wealth inequality equals political inequality.

He concluded that the only way to overcome the effects of concentrated wealth is with concentrated people.