We are the pioneers of our own histories,

drawn to the horizon as if it waited just for us

the way the young are drawn to the future,

the old to the past.

“Driving West”

– Linda Pastan

The news and political campaigns these days are filled with chatter about inequality. Most of the concern is focused on inequality of outcomes, expressing after-the-fact dissatisfaction with the results of economic activity. Income and wealth are distributed unequally – and it’s getting worse.

It’s popping up in other spheres too. Unequal access to and use of the Internet is creating a digital divide that increasingly separates those who are connected from those who aren’t.

Other concerns address inequality of opportunity: not after-the-fact results, but before-the-fact barriers. The most important of these barriers today is geography – the accident of birth location. Thousands die every day trying to overcome geographic inequality by crossing borders, from Syria to Turkey to Greece, from North Africa to Italy, from Latin America to the U.S. and Canada. Another such barrier is racism – the accident of birth color and culture that puts some in a position of cultural privilege and others in a position of cultural subservience. In both cases, the inequality lies not in the outcomes of economic activities but in the barriers to engaging in them at all.

All of these forms of inequality are important and deserve our attention, but the one to which I think Maine needs to pay special attention is the subtle inequality of attitude that derives from demographic imbalance. It is often said that white people can’t understand the concept of “white privilege” because – like fish trying to understand the concept of breathing air – they’ve just never experienced life outside what for them is “normal.”

Similarly, as “normal” in Maine comes increasingly to be the life experience of aging baby boomers, this now-dominant culture naturally thinks of being 20-something or 30-something (to the extent that it pays any attention to that topic at all) as it remembers those times rather than as they actually exist today.

This difference in generational attitude, particularly as it applies to defining what constitutes a “problem” that calls for a public-policy response, constitutes an important and growing barrier to economic opportunity. We misallocate and waste enormous amounts of economic and political capital arguing about, inventing and evading artificial rules to “correct” nickels in unequal income distribution (think minimum wage debates) while paying far less time figuring out how to improve the billions we spend each year on our human capital investment that determines what capabilities new entrants bring the labor market in the first place (think K-12 education).

It is precisely these subtle psychic presumptions – rather than differences in income, wealth, location, culture or age – that makes inequality so dangerous. Inequality is natural, a part of life. To seek to eliminate it is both foolish and the stuff of a ghastly, Orwellian nightmare. Since the big bang, the nature of this universe consists of change and difference. Our choice is: “Do we greet it with fear and hostility or curiosity and wonder?” The most important question inequality poses for Maine today is: “Does the horizon to which we allow ourselves to be drawn emerge primarily from the past?”

Will the future of Millinocket be built exclusively on dreams of the emergence of a major manufacturing facility? Will the Portland of tomorrow be a publicly gated community where no change unacceptable to even one person happily blessed with a current official residence will be allowed? Will the future of our state legislative process be an endless loop of the iconic Miller Lite commercial with one group shouting, “Lower taxes!” and another responding, “Higher wages?”

If these lazy-minded, fear-based and hostility-driven visions do indeed become the horizon Maine seeks, we will be not pioneers but lemmings headed to our own demise.

Charles Lawton is chief economist for Planning Decisions Inc. He can be contacted at:

clawton@planningdecisions.com