The Games
Unequal People Play

A review of
Rigging the Game: How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life.
Michael Schwalbe. Oxford University Press, 295 pages..

December 3, 2007

Inequality, Michael Schwalbe believes, may be our society’s “most consequential feature.” After all, this North Carolina State sociologist notes at the outset of his intriguing new book, inequality impacts “every aspect of our individual lives.”

“An unequal distribution of resources,” he explains, “produces an unequal distribution of experiences — of health and illness, of pain and pleasure, of security and insecurity, of opportunity and despair.”

We have, in our world today, an abundance of articles, studies, and books about just how unequally distributed our resources have become. Given our astoundingly high levels of contemporary inequality, that abundance shouldn’t surprise us.

Most of this work zeroes in on the “how much” of inequality. That’s important, to be sure. We need to know how much more some have than others. But we need to know more. We need to know the “how,” not just how did we become unequal, but how do we stay that way. How is inequality, as sociologists put it, “reproduced.”

That’s the question that sociologist Michael Schwalbe takes on, in distinctly unorthodox scholarly fashion. Schwalbe doesn’t throw numbers at us, not a single correlation coefficient. Nor does he overwhelm us with sociological jargon.

Yet Schwalbe respects the insights the sociological tradition has to offer. He shares those insights with us, in a conversational style that communicates, above all, through metaphor.

Analysts, to make sense of society, use metaphors all the time. These days, more often than not, they make the “market” their metaphor of choice — and explain daily life “as a series of transactions” for everything from money to approval.

Life certainly does sometimes take on the character of a market, but Schwalbe chooses a different metaphor: the game. In the game of life, people “compete with each other for money, status, and power” in contests guided by rules and people “whose jobs are to make, interpret, and enforce the rules.”

Games can be fair. Games can be unfair. We have the latter. We play today by rules rigged to reinforce inequality, and Schwalbe helps us see how these rules operate. But he also delves into deeper questions. Why do people so often resign themselves to continue playing games rigged against them? And what makes people demand, as we know they sometimes do, new rules?

Schwalbe’s answers point us toward a more equal society, to a “culture of solidarity” where “people support each other in raising questions, discovering how the world works, and thinking about how to create a new world.”

Can we reach that new world? Schwalbe exudes a reasonable optimism. We already understand, he notes, that power corrupts. That’s why we seek to limit “the political power than any individual or group can acquire.” And most of us also understand “that as wealth concentrates, power tends to concentrate along with it.”

Perhaps someday, speculates Schwalbe, we’ll go on to recognize “that preserving what's good about society requires limiting wealth for the same reasons that we limit political power.”

.— Sam Pizzigati

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the weekly online newsletter on excess and inequality. For updates on inequality-related stats, trends, and books, just check here for a free weekly Too Much subscription.