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. 

For exam­ple, own­ing one’s own home has become a fun­da­men­tal val­ue today, pro­vid­ing stability. 

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