Inequalities’ Inequality: The Triple Rule of Economic Psychology

Abstract

Twenty-two years ago, at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, I delivered a paper about the economic psychology of equality and inequality.¹ I had studied the world of the second modernization for a good amount of time and by my lecture, I meant to provoke the learned audience to discuss a basic dilemma of modernization: that such modernization would be impossible without a high degree of economic inequality because only such a relationship will interest those who benefit from that development—but that it would be impossible with a high degree of economic inequality because it would create antagonists of those who suffer in this relationship. Thus, with logical necessity, it would follow that modernization is simply not possible because inequality either is or is not of a high degree. However, notwithstanding this argument, I argued that modernization did occur in some societies.