“Mrs. Clinton pointed at the top category and said the economy required a ‘toppling’ of the wealthiest 1 percent …” – reporter Amy Chozick, New York Times.

In all the talk about US income inequality and the 1% or 0.1% or 00.1% vs. everybody else, some politicians seem to be forgetting we are more than our income percentile rank. It’s important to remember that even as we use these handy short-hand descriptions when discussing various groups. Here is a bit from a recent EconTalk podcast where host Russ Robert chats with James Otteson of Wake Forest University about his new book, “The End of Socialism.”

ROBERTS: So why don’t you close us out and talk about the socialist impulse to think about classes versus the capitalist focus on the individual and why that’s such an important–why do you make that distinction as one of the important ones between the two?

OTTESON: Well, I think that’s really one of the central parts of the moral argument against socialism and in favor of this decentralized notion of capitalism. Once you start thinking about human beings as members of classes–so, even if it’s classes that sound initially plausible or neutral, like the rich and the poor, immediately what you begin to do is to see human beings within those classes as being more or less interchangeable. They’re like marbles or poker chips and one is just as good as another.

But the danger that has actually issued real and horrible consequences in human history–once you begin to see people as being interchangeable, at least among classes, this religion, this nationality, this ethnicity, then you begin to dehumanize them. They don’t seem to you like individual centers of human dignity. And I think, looking at a lot of the horrible episodes of human history, that’s what you see. You see one group of people looking at another group of people as mere members of a group, mere members of a class. But by contrast, when you see instead human beings as being individuals–which, by the way, I think is the correct way to view this, individual centers of human agency, individual centers of human dignity–that completely transforms our relationship to one another. So, I no longer view you as interchangeable, as fungible, as a poker chip. I view you as an irreplaceable and precious asset, precious commodity, precious human being. Someone who brings something to the world that nobody else ever has or nobody in the future ever will. That completely transforms our relationship to one another.

And I think that’s captured by the individualism that you see in capitalism: that what we do is we see people, all people, any person as being unique, having dignity, and being uniquely precious in exactly this way. And when we see it that way–and this is what I call this triumph of human moral agency–that’s really a transformation in how we view other people. That is what will debar us from labeling a whole population of people as a certain kind of group and then devaluing them because they are in the wrong kind of group. We can’t do that. Because each member of that group is unique; each member is different from all of the others; and each one of them is irreplaceable.