November/December 2000 | Contents

Q & A: JAMES LARDNER OF INEQUALITY.ORG

James Lardner is the director and founder of Inequality.org, a Web site that focuses on America's economic divide. The site launched two years ago -- starting with a simple bar graph of the Titanic's survival rates by first class, second class, third class, and steerage. Lardner has since collected an impressive cadre of contributors and advisers, and the site now publishes articles on topics like income, health, and the digital divide; offers resources and expert sources for journalists; and provides statistics about wealth and income (i.e.: "34 percent of the homeless people in Silicon Valley hold full-time jobs"). A former New Yorker staff writer, Lardner now works for U.S. News & World Report. A former cop, he is co-author (with Tom Reppetto) of NYPD: The Inside Story of New York's Legendary Police Department, published in July. He is the grandson of the sportswriter and humorist Ring Lardner and son of Ring Lardner, Jr., the screenwriter and member of the "Hollywood Ten" who was blacklisted for refusing to name names for Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt. He was interviewed by CJR's assistant editor, Lauren Janis.

Did the idea to start Inequality.org grow out of what you saw in society? Or out of the fact that the media were not paying attention to it?

It was certainly that the media were not paying attention. I thought of it as a Web site for journalists principally, to begin with. I assumed that other journalists would be interested in this subject and would like to have a place where they could go to get data and analysis. Economic inequality is a difficult subject to write about in the present mood where we celebrate entrepreneurs and wealth. So I wanted not only to provide a resource, but also some encouragement. And to give them ideas of what might be good stories, because it seemed to me there was a lot of interesting research and thinking that wasn't getting in the mainstream press.

And why isn't it getting into the mainstream press?

Now some of it is. But I think that the simple fact that we're living through this economic boom time, or what everyone regards that way, makes people not terribly interested in anything contrary. Besides that, I think we still live very much under the shadow of communism and the received lessons of that historical idea. For a lot of people that shadow has kind of closed the argument on the question of trying to mitigate inequality. It's a topic that just became too highly charged -- you couldn't say anything about it without somehow getting caught up, willingly or unwillingly, in the whole cold war debate. Only now, years since the end of the cold war, is it even beginning to be possible to look at this question dispassionately.

If Inequality.org is successful in its mission, what would you like to see?

I'd like to see it become okay to talk about inequality of income and wealth as a problem and not simply in terms of social justice. People are bumping up against the inequality problem in a whole bunch of fields right now -- in education, health care, campaign-finance reform, the whole digital divide, and the discussion about technology itself. In all these areas, people are trying to micro-mitigate, trying to carve out some little oasis of relative equality in the middle of extreme inequality, and they're discovering that it's very hard. There's not much acknowledgement that in one issue after the other, you're seeing symptoms of extreme, pervasive inequality of income and wealth. There's a broad problem. But it's not kosher to talk about that broad problem.

What are journalists doing wrong?

One thing is that the focus tends to be too much on the simple question of poverty as it's officially defined. A lot of people have questioned the official definition. But aside from that, there is definitely an economic orthodoxy that most of the reporters who write about business or economics conform to. They just laugh at all those people who question globalization and free-floating capital. We're sort of trained just to sneer at anyone who questions that. Starting with the Reagan years, we all got sold to one degree or another, regardless of our party affiliations, on the idea that there's nothing that can be done about the distribution of wealth and income without going down the road of heavy-handed state planning, so-called big government. People are only just beginning to free themselves up from that way of thinking.

Is your hope that Inequality.org will help change the way media look at poverty and wealth?

It's only going to be a really useful thing if it's part of a larger change that I like to imagine is happening and will happen even more. I want it to be part of a process of moving the subject onto the front burner, putting it on the map.