inequality regime

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

An inequality regime is RB3’s Piketty-derived ensemble of narratives, laws and institutions that makes a distribution of advantage intelligible, legitimate and resistant to challenge. It stabilizes selected economic asymmetries across generations. The proposal distinguishes this historical organization from the r > g relation itself and from any claim that an enduring inequality is necessary or ethically justified.

Explanation

Property, inheritance, educational access, taxation and representation help reproduce the conditions under which advantage persists. The regime does not create every asymmetry from nothing: it retains, normalizes and reiterates selected constraints. Explaining that durability requires more than the observation that a rate difference once occurred.

The source assigns different explanatory roles to the schema and the regime. The former identifies directional bias; the latter concerns its maintenance through time. Its comparison with Riedl is structural and does not reduce political institutions to a biological mechanism or treat social hierarchy as naturally ordained.

Regimes can be disrupted or redesigned, with historical reversals attributed to changes in their supports. These are the book’s political-economic interpretations, including acknowledged contestation, not newly certified causal estimates. Durability therefore remains contingent and the definition makes no inference from institutional legitimacy to actual justice.

Scope and attribution

Keep institutionally reproduced legitimacy distinct from ethical justification and contingent endurance distinct from necessity.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 284.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

The developed account belongs to RB3 in the cited local scope, with antecedents and qualifications retained.

Occurrence locators: 112, 113, 114.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Institutional and ideological stabilization is distinguished from r > g alone.