Should perceived social inequalities be taken into account?

The rate of income poverty and income inequal­ity has fallen in France since Les Trente Glorieuses (“The Glor­i­ous Thirty” a thirty-year peri­od of eco­nom­ic growth in France between 1945 and 1975). But is so-called object­ive data enough to under­stand the social hier­archy? Wouldn’t people’s per­cep­tions provide the key to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the cur­rent situ­ation? This is Nic­olas Duvoux’s thes­is, in which he argues for sub­jectiv­ity to be taken into account in the social sciences.

The book was born out of an obser­va­tion that there is a gap, sci­en­tific­ally but also socially and polit­ic­ally, between the so-called object­ive apprais­al of social phe­nom­ena and the sub­ject­ive apprais­al that the people con­cerned have of them. Inequal­it­ies, for example, are tra­di­tion­ally con­sidered on the basis of income or socio-pro­fes­sion­al cat­egor­ies. From this so-called object­ive point of view, the situ­ation in France is less unfa­vour­able than in pre­vi­ous peri­ods or in oth­er European coun­tries. But this approach is not enough to assess the cur­rent situation.

A sub­ject­ive ana­lys­is, tak­ing account for example of social unrest, the crisis of con­fid­ence in insti­tu­tions or the gen­er­al level of sat­is­fac­tion of the French people, gives a much more neg­at­ive pic­ture of the state of soci­ety. How can this dis­crep­ancy be resolved? The first way would be to dis­miss the sub­ject­ive view, by con­sid­er­ing that the French people are mis­taken in their assess­ment. The oth­er approach, which I defend and put into prac­tice in the book, is to con­sider that, on the con­trary, sub­jectiv­ity can be a factor that leads to a bet­ter assess­ment of the situ­ation. The thes­is of this book can be summed up as fol­lows: let’s take sub­ject­ive rep­res­ent­a­tions very ser­i­ously, let’s eval­u­ate them as sci­entif­ic prob­lems, and let’s try to ana­lyse soci­ety afresh on the basis of tak­ing them into account.

The sub­ject­ive approach has demon­strated its rel­ev­ance in vari­ous fields. Let me give you two examples. The first is the per­ceived tem­per­at­ure, a stat­ist­ic­al con­ven­tion that incor­por­ates wind and humid­ity in addi­tion to ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure in an attempt to identi­fy physiolo­gic­al reac­tions. This tem­per­at­ure gives us an idea that is closer to what might be con­sidered the truth from an epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al point of view – and so in this sense it is more “object­ive” than ambi­ent tem­per­at­ure alone. It is clear that there is no such thing as real­ity on the one hand and the sub­ject­ive on the oth­er: the sub­ject­ive is also a set of stat­ist­ic­al con­ven­tions, and it gives us a closer view of the phenomenon.

I found the second example in epi­demi­ology. Numer­ous stud­ies, most not­ably led by the Brit­ish epi­demi­olo­gist Michael Mar­mot, have shown that the way in which patients per­ceive their social status is more pre­dict­ive of future deteri­or­a­tion in their state of health than their object­ive social status. Here again, incor­por­at­ing sub­jectiv­ity gives access to a wealth of inform­a­tion that is not access­ible to so-called object­ive assessment.

It’s clear that the sub­ject­ive abil­ity to see a pos­it­ive future for one­self is a highly rel­ev­ant way of inter­pret­ing soci­ety: not only does it allow us to describe the social hier­archy, but it also explains the unequal rela­tion­ships that devel­op with­in it and how they are repro­duced. On the first point, it is some­times said that the polit­ic­al and social crises we are exper­i­en­cing are due to an increase in inequal­ity since Les Trente Glorieuses. This state­ment needs to be con­firmed. It’s true that the wealth­i­est people are get­ting rich­er, and that more and more of their wealth is being inher­ited. But what we are wit­ness­ing is not so much an explo­sion in inequal­ity as a reversal of the feel­ing of secur­ity into a feel­ing of insec­ur­ity. Dur­ing Les Trente Glorieuses, life may have been hard, but there was a wide­spread pro­spect of pro­gress, of improve­ment in the indi­vidu­al and col­lect­ive situ­ation. That has now dis­ap­peared for a whole sec­tion of the population.

Togeth­er with soci­olo­gist Adrien Papuchon, we have car­ried out a cross-ana­lys­is of the under­stand­ing of poverty, on the one hand based on object­ive meas­ure­ments and on the oth­er hand based on meas­ur­ing people’s feel­ing of poverty. Both approaches res­ult in around 15% of the pop­u­la­tion being clas­si­fied as “poor”. But there is only par­tial over­lap between these two groups, which means that some people who are not con­sidered poor from an object­ive point of view con­sider them­selves to be poor, and vice versa.

The group formed by the sub­ject­ive approach is more het­ero­gen­eous than the “object­ive” group: it includes people who are not in employ­ment (gen­er­ally iden­ti­fied by the object­ive approach) as well as blue-col­lar work­ers, white-col­lar work­ers, full-time employ­ees, retir­ees, small-scale self-employed work­ers, etc., who are not clas­si­fied as “poor” by the object­ive approach. This study has there­fore made it pos­sible to quanti­fy and approach in a stat­ist­ic­ally extremely robust way the diverse social mix that has mobil­ised in the Gilets jaunes (Yel­low Vests)movement.

We have shown that for the most dis­ad­vant­aged men, being in a couple has a strong pro­tect­ive effect. But the key determ­in­ant is wealth. For those who have it, it provides a form of sta­bil­ity and tem­por­al secur­ity. What mat­ters is not so much the con­cen­tra­tion of wealth as the abil­ity to invest it in soci­ety. This open­ness ensures a form of con­trol over one’s own life, that of one’s chil­dren, the trans­mis­sion of wealth, and soci­ety as a whole. 

On the oth­er hand, the fact of not hav­ing any assets exposes people to a form of rampant social insec­ur­ity and a feel­ing of dis­pos­ses­sion. This is very clear for retired people, for example. Few of them are poor in mon­et­ary terms, but more and more of them feel poor. These people are often ten­ants, and don’t see their future as any­thing oth­er than inev­it­ably deteri­or­at­ing as a res­ult of the rising cost of living.

There is a very strong demand for secur­ity, sta­bil­ity and a sense of belong­ing to soci­ety. Pop­u­lists have clearly under­stood this and are build­ing their appeal pre­cisely on the idea of regain­ing con­trol. But if we are to ana­lyse the situ­ation in detail and come up with last­ing solu­tions, I believe we need to listen care­fully and deeply to what this insec­ur­ity is express­ing, and fight against the tempta­tion to dis­miss the sub­ject­ive. It there­fore seems to me cru­cial that pub­lic stat­ist­ics, first and fore­most, take account of sub­ject­ive data in under­stand­ing social pos­i­tions, in addi­tion to so-called object­ive data. In this con­text, the abil­ity to see a future appears to be an indic­at­or – like the per­ceived tem­per­at­ure men­tioned earli­er – that gives very accur­ate access to a person’s social pos­i­tion: when you make a self-assess­ment of your situ­ation, you take into account your resources, your assets, your abil­ity to devel­op pro­fes­sion­ally, etc. It’s not just a ques­tion of being able to pro­ject your­self into the future.

Then, of course, it’s not a mat­ter of the pub­lic author­it­ies dir­ectly trans­pos­ing people’s feel­ings into pub­lic policy, but of rework­ing the demands for secur­ity in a col­lect­ive way. Bourdieu’s work has shown that there is a very close and com­plex rela­tion­ship between these expect­a­tions of secur­ity, these sub­ject­ive pro­jec­tions of vary­ing degrees of anxi­ety, and people’s rela­tion­ship to hous­ing, employ­ment, and so on. For example, own­ing one’s own home has become a fun­da­ment­al value today, provid­ing sta­bil­ity. But the hous­ing mar­ket is under severe pres­sure. A lit­er­al trans­la­tion of the import­ance attached to home own­er­ship might be to extend the max­im­um term of mort­gages. That’s not what I’m advoc­at­ing at all. I recom­mend work­ing on col­lect­ive ways of eas­ing these ten­sions, but with the main aim of giv­ing people sta­bil­ity and the abil­ity to plan ahead. This must be a polit­ic­al pri­or­ity, but it must also guide the sci­entif­ic pro­gramme of human sci­ences such as sociology.

Interview by Anne Orliac

Works and stud­ies cited:

N.Duvoux, L’avenir con­fisqué. Inégal­ités de temps vécu, classes sociales et pat­rimoine, PUF, 2023.

N. Duvoux, A. Papuchon, Qui se sent pauvre en France ? Pauvreté sub­ject­ive et insé­cur­ité sociale, Revue française de soci­olo­gie, 59–4, 2018, pp. 607–647