I WON'T be modest. I am gratified to discover, via my colleague's interesting post on inequality, that a paper I penned on the subject nearly five years ago made its way into Matt Miller's Washington Post column last week. Mr Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, asks why rising inequality has not provoked America's least-favoured classes to agitate for a remedy. By way of an answer, he agrees with my verdict: that access to better goods among the least well-off has ensured that material inequality is not as profound as income inequality. Basically, most people can afford a decent microwave, even if some have far more bells and whistles than others. Affordable modern conveniences have taken some of the sting out of a relatively small income. This in turn has curbed the drive to seek causes of and cures for poverty's discomfort. So the gap between rich and poor is sometimes less conspicuous, even if it is great and growing. From time to time we do feel envious of those who have more, but we don't typically experience our relative level of income in this way. Day-to-day experience is mostly a matter of our material circumstances, and if those are decent enough, a widening gap in income, consumption or wealth is unlikely to come often to our attention. Even if the abstract fact of rising inequality does come across our radar, it may offend our sense of justice only if we've become convinced that inequality itself is unjust, or if we face related tribulations.

When I wrote the paper that Mr Miller cites, official measures of income inequality had increased a good deal over the past few decades while consumption inequality seemed to have remained flat. My colleague responds to Mr Miller by noting that new research suggests that consumption inequality has been increasing with income inequality all along. This may be true, but it seems to me irrelevant to the question of why America's poor aren't storming the barricades. The consumption data concerns how much we spend, not how we experience what we buy, and that's the real issue. Even if we could agree that inequality in real standards of living—in the subjective experience of our material circumstance—is rising, this is not something we actually experience unless we are hungry, too hot or cold, breaking our backs just to scrape by, or dissatisfied with the entertainments of our leisure.

My colleague goes on to say that, in any event, "The trouble with inequality isn’t primarily about consumables", and then quotes Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, in the context of a response to a different but related piece I wrote about inequality. Ms Anderson's point was that the less the rich depend on publicly provided services, like public education, the less likely they are to agitate for the adequate public provision of those services for those who really need them. This is an interesting hypothesis, though I doubt it's true, and neither Ms Anderson nor my colleague offer any evidence to that effect. The argument is notable in that it locates the injustice not in inequality per se, but in the failure to ensure that everyone has access to the basic services and institutions necessary to enjoy fully the value of their liberties. Inequality leads to injustice, this argument has it, by causing the under-provision of certain public goods necessary for fair opportunity. And this knock-on effect of inequality is the reason, my colleague seems to suggest, that America's poor aren't raising Cain over rising inequality. They've been so hobbled by degraded public goods that they can't now manage to mount effective political resistance. And the rich are too siloed in privilege to hear or care.

Colour me unconvinced. The package of goods Ms Anderson and my colleague mentions—low-crime neighbourhoods, safe public parks, good roads and sidewalks, decent schools—has not evidently become more rare over the decades during which inequality has been on the rise. On the contrary, I would hazard that most, if not all, of these things were much worse for the poor 30 years ago in places such as New York City and Washington, DC, when income inequality was much lower there. If this mechanism were at work, one would expect economic mobility to decrease when inequality rises, the deteriorating conditions for the poor increasingly trapping them in poverty. However, according to an important new study, mobility has not changed in the last two decades. No doubt the situation varies from region to region (and Americans are still less economically mobile than people in Canada and much of Western Europe), but this does not seem to me a promising hypothesis about the problem of economic inequality. Indeed, it illustrates the danger of locating the problem of inequality in its putative effects. If inequality isn't problematic in itself, but is of concern primarily due to certain dire consequences thought to follow from it, then one had better be sure there is solid evidence that those consequences have come to pass before sounding the alarm about the dangers of rising inequality.

If the absolute quality of private consumables and public goods has improved for the poor even as inequality has gone up and up, some of the mystery of why those at the bottom of the income ladder haven't taken to the streets is dissolved. Yet rising absolute standards of living are not, in my opinion, the main reason Americans aren't taking to the streets over inequality. The real reason is that Americans aren't egalitarian enough, though there is some indication that this is changing. Americans won't successfully rally against inequality unless they really care about inequality, and they're not going to care until they become more egalitarian philosophically. But that won't happen until egalitarians start making persuasive arguments.