I recently read an article by David Axelsen and Lasse Nielsen (2024), “The expressive injustice of being rich,” which argues that extreme wealth should be understood not only as a distributive problem, but also as an expressive one. Their central claim is that retaining or spending excess wealth in a context of deprivation carries a social meaning: it expresses disregard for the interests of those who have too little, regardless of the wealthy individual’s intentions.

I found the argument careful and unsettling. It avoids caricatures of greed and explicitly rejects the idea that the moral problem lies in individual motivation. At the same time, as I read, I felt uncertain about something more basic: whether framing inequality primarily in terms of interpersonal “messages” helps us understand how inequality is actually reproduced, and why it proves so resistant to change.

Rather than rejecting the expressive argument, I want to step back and ask a prior question: what if many of the patterns we interpret as moral communication are better understood as environmental effects — as outcomes of structural conditions that shape perception and attention before ethical reasoning even enters the picture?

Structural Inequality as an Environmental Condition

In public debate, inequality is often treated as a matter of outcomes (who has how much) or intentions (who deserves what). A different approach, common in sociology and political economy, treats inequality as a structural condition: a stable configuration of institutions, incentives, and separations that organizes everyday experience in uneven ways.

From this perspective, inequality is not only something people have; it is something people live inside.

Research on residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor markets shows that individuals in unequal societies are exposed to systematically different environments over long periods of time (Massey & Denton, 1993; Chetty et al., 2014). These environments differ not only in resources, but in risk, predictability, and the degree to which consequences are shared or isolated.

This matters because human cognition is not a neutral observer of social reality. A substantial body of work in psychology and behavioral economics suggests that attention, salience, and planning are shaped by repeated exposure to particular conditions. Mullainathan and Shafir (2013), for example, show that conditions of scarcity reliably narrow attentional focus and shorten time horizons, directing cognitive resources toward immediate demands. These effects occur independently of people’s stated values or long-term goals.

Related research in neuroscience and stress physiology indicates that chronic exposure to instability alters cognitive processing and decision-making through well-documented biological mechanisms (McEwen, 2017). These changes are adaptive responses to environment, not reflections of moral character.

I am less certain how far these findings generalize beyond conditions of scarcity. But they raise a question that seems difficult to avoid: if environments characterized by constraint shape perception in predictable ways, what happens in environments characterized by insulation from risk and consequence?

While the literature here is less unified, sociological work on elite insulation suggests that sustained protection from certain forms of vulnerability reduces the likelihood that those vulnerabilities become perceptually salient at all (Khan, 2012; Piketty, 2014). In such contexts, absence of exposure can translate into absence of felt relevance, without requiring denial or hostility.

If this is even partly correct, then some of what appears as indifference may originate not in values, but in environmental filtering.

Adaptation Before Moral Judgment

It would be too strong to say that beliefs do not matter, or that people are simply products of their environments. But a growing body of research suggests that adaptation to conditions often precedes explicit moral reasoning, rather than the other way around.

In sociology, this idea appears in theories of habitus and doxa (Bourdieu, 1977): the notion that certain assumptions become so ingrained through practice that they are not experienced as beliefs at all, but as the natural order of things. In psychology, related ideas appear in work on automaticity and priming, where repeated exposure shapes response patterns below the level of conscious deliberation (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).

Taken together, these strands suggest a more modest claim than the one I initially wanted to make: not that cognition is determined by environment, but that environment structures the field within which moral reasoning operates.

From this angle, both poverty and extreme wealth can be understood as outcomes of adaptation to unequal structural conditions — but under radically different degrees of constraint, reversibility, and exposure to consequence. People adapting under scarcity do so with limited buffers and high stakes; people adapting under abundance do so with protections that reduce the cost of error.

The Limits of Blame

If inequality is reproduced through structural conditions that shape perception and adaptation, then it becomes less clear what role moral blame can realistically play.

Research in political psychology suggests that blame often triggers defensive, identity-protective reasoning, particularly when criticism is perceived as threatening to status or legitimacy (Taber & Lodge, 2006; Kahan, 2017). Under such conditions, individuals become less responsive to evidence, not more.

This does not imply that criticism is always wrong or that power should go unchallenged. It suggests something narrower: that personalizing structural problems often shifts attention away from the mechanisms that sustain them.

At the same time, focusing exclusively on elites risks overstating the degree of conscious authorship involved. Political economy research emphasizes that extreme wealth is largely a product of institutional design — including tax policy, inheritance rules, financial regulation, and political influence — rather than individual choice alone (Piketty, 2014; Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012).

Individuals operate within these structures, interpret them, and benefit from them to varying degrees. But treating inequality primarily as a matter of individual virtue or vice may obscure the conditions that make certain outcomes ordinary and others rare.

How Change Has Historically Emerged

If individual blame is a limited tool, the question becomes how structural inequality has actually changed in the past.

Here, historical sociology offers a fairly consistent picture. Large-scale institutional changes rarely begin with moral consensus, clear programs, or widespread confidence. Instead, they often begin when existing explanations lose their ability to make sense of lived experience.

Charles Tilly (1978) and Theda Skocpol (1979) both show that major transformations tend to follow periods in which prevailing arrangements become increasingly difficult to justify, even to those who benefit from them. At these moments, alternatives are often unclear and contested. What changes first is not behavior or power, but interpretation.

This insight connects with Timur Kuran’s (1995) concept of preference falsification: the idea that many people privately doubt dominant arrangements long before they express those doubts publicly. Systems remain stable not because they are widely believed to be just, but because dissent is perceived as costly or isolating.

When that perception shifts — when doubt becomes shareable — change becomes possible, even in the absence of agreement about solutions.

Research on social norms supports this view. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s (1974) “spiral of silence” describes how people gauge the social acceptability of views before expressing them. More recently, experimental work by Centola et al. (2018) shows that when a committed minority — often around 20–25 percent — consistently articulates an alternative framing, social norms can shift rapidly across entire populations.

This does not require control over institutions. It operates through repetition, visibility, and reduced social cost of reconsideration.

Inequality as a Systemic Stressor

At this point, it is important to note that these dynamics are not merely symbolic. A substantial body of comparative research shows that high levels of inequality impose measurable costs on societies as a whole.

Wilkinson and Pickett (2009), analyzing data across affluent democracies, find that more unequal societies exhibit worse outcomes across a wide range of indicators, including physical and mental health, levels of trust, rates of violence, and political stability. These patterns appear across income groups, not only among those at the bottom.

Subsequent research has reinforced these findings, linking inequality to increased anxiety, status competition, and weakened institutional trust (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015). In this sense, inequality functions as a systemic stressor: it degrades the social environment in which all participants operate, including those who benefit materially.

This helps explain why inequality often produces diffuse unease rather than targeted opposition. The harm it generates is distributed, cumulative, and difficult to attribute to single causes — which makes it politically elusive, but no less real.

Agency Without Illusions

Seen from this perspective, agency does not primarily reside in individual control over institutions or resources. It resides in participation in the processes through which societies interpret their own conditions.

Influence operates through shifts in framing, legitimacy, and expectation — through changes in what must be justified, defended, or explained. This form of influence is limited, slow, and uncertain. It offers no guarantees.

But historical evidence suggests that it is one of the few mechanisms through which durable change has occurred without large-scale disruption. Reforms that emerge through gradual norm shifts tend to be more stable than those imposed through crisis, precisely because they alter the environments that shape future behavior.

None of this implies inevitability, nor does it minimize the concentration of power and resources. It suggests only that meaningful change does not usually begin with certainty, moral clarity, or heroic action. It begins when existing explanations weaken, when doubt becomes communicable, and when people remain present to unresolved questions without collapsing them into blame or resignation.

In complex social systems, this is often the point at which movement becomes possible — not because outcomes are known, but because the space of what can be imagined, discussed, and gradually reorganized has expanded.

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References

• Acemoglu, D., & Robinson, J. (2012). Why Nations Fail.
• Axelsen, D., & Nielsen, L. (2024). The expressive injustice of being rich.
• Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being.
• Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality.
• Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice.
• Centola, D. et al. (2018). Tipping points in social convention. Science.
• Chetty, R. et al. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity?
• Kahan, D. (2017). Identity-protective cognition.
• Khan, S. (2012). Privilege.
• Kuran, T. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies.
• Massey, D., & Denton, N. (1993). American Apartheid.
• McEwen, B. (2017). Neurobiological effects of chronic stress.
• Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity.
• Noelle-Neumann, E. (1974). The spiral of silence.
• Pickett, K., & Wilkinson, R. (2015). Income inequality and health.
• Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
• Skocpol, T. (1979). States and Social Revolutions.
• Tilly, C. (1978). From Mobilization to Revolution.