At a recent meeting, we discussed people who should be encouraged to join the effort we were working on. We quickly listed demographic categories that we should pay attention to: race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, age, class, ideology, partisanship, and religion.

I think these categories are important for outreach and recruitment–but importantly different.

Race, gender, and sexual orientation

Race, gender, and sexual orientation matter because we live in a society that is deeply unequal on those dimensions. Unless you seriously strive for equal representation, you are likely to end up with a panel or committee full of straight white men–and the more influential and prestigious the group is, the more that will be the outcome. Failing to address it preserves inequality.

A demographically homogeneous group may also lose the wisdom that comes from a wider range of perspectives and experiences, but to me, that is not an essential argument. Sometimes, adding racial or sexual/gender diversity won’t actually add relevantly different perspectives on the issue under discussion, but inclusion is still important for addressing inequality in the society as a whole. There is often also a pragmatic imperative for improving racial and gender representation. Without such diversity, a group looks illegitimate and can’t win the support it needs to move forward.

I would equate religion with race/ethnicity insofar as it’s an identity that provokes discrimination by others. As a set of beliefs about the world, a religion is more like an ideology, which I will address below.

Social class

Our society is also unequal by class, but this is different. Class is a name for social inequality. It doesn’t make sense to imagine a society with different classes that are equal to each other. If you have equality, you don’t have classes at all. However, it is not clear that a classless society can be accomplished. State communist societies produced the nomenklatura, a powerful new class or (as Trotsky thought) a caste composed of party officials and their families. According to Robert Michels, social democratic parties and unions quickly created “oligarchies” of professional organizers, notwithstanding their sincere commitments to equality. By virtue of being a union official instead of a unionized line worker, you are now part of a different class.

If you organize a meeting of people who hold a certain range of positions in society–a meeting of union leaders, or teachers, or leaders of nonprofit organizations, or college students, or miners–it will have a class “bias.” Yet surely there is value in such meetings. It wouldn’t be reasonable to argue, for example, that teachers should never organize except along with students, parents, and others. But if teachers organize, that is a middle class movement.

Therefore, it is a bit disingenuous to imagine that you can be “inclusive and diverse” with respect to class. But you can strive (1) to be inclusive of people who have various class origins and cultural markers of class, such as accents; and (2) to organize meetings and movements that engage grassroots participants, not merely leaders and experts. But (2) is hard. After, who will organize, pay for, and advertise the big meeting that is open to the public as a whole? Surely some kind of specialized subgroup will be responsible. Michels thought oligarchy was an “iron law,” and even if it’s less rigid than that, there is still a powerful tendency for people who hold certain social positions to run things. That’s what it means to have those positions.

Age

Age is different, too. We should be concerned about including younger people because we should be worried about future leadership and must create opportunities to learn and to develop power. But age equality is not like racial or gender equality. There are actual differences among people of different ages. For instance, senior managerial positions cannot be equally distributed between the young and old. It takes time to develop the experience, expertise, and connections that institutions need.

The House Democrats who will lead important committees if the party wins in November  will include Elijah Cummings, age 67, Bennie Thompson, 70, Maxine Waters, 80, Nita Lowey, 81, and Eddie Bernice Johnson, 82. These are women or men of color who have waited a long time for gavels. To be sure, the party caucus could replace them with younger leaders who were also diverse, but these people’s claims to leadership rest on seniority, and that deserves consideration. I wouldn’t oppose replacing them with younger chairs, but I would insist that age is different from, say, race. It can be legitimate to consider seniority or experience.

Ideology, partisanship, and theology

It’s worth bearing in mind that our goal is to develop the right views so that we can do what is right. The right views are not equally consistent with all ideologies, party platforms, or applications of theology.

In pursuing the right views, we must be humble. It is very likely that each of us is wrong and that others are more right. So we must be open and interested in alternative views.

I am typically a mainstream liberal, center-left. I especially benefit from being an outlier in meetings that are dominated by libertarians/neoliberals or by radical proponents of identity politics. I don’t fully align with either position but always learn from them–usually more than I learn from hanging around other people with whom I easily agree.

Learning provides a rationale for philosophical diversity–but with important caveats. First, some alternative views are more worthy than others. I seek out libertarians but not Trump-supporters to learn from. That is a judgment, and it could be wrong, but it’s my best judgment at this moment. I don’t believe that I have anything whatsoever to learn from Donald Trump himself, yet more than 60 million Americans really like him. Demographic representativeness would argue for including Trump-supporters, but my judgment about how to learn does not.

Furthermore, the value of ideological diversity depends on the purpose of a meeting or event. If I am trying to advance an agenda, I want a majority of participants to share my considered views of the topic. I may value some minority views to keep us sharp, but I’d like the majority to agree with me. I can achieve that goal either by recruiting like-minded participants or by persuading other attendees to agree. I would never treat racial or gender/sexual diversity in a similar way, trying to stack the room with people who were like me. On the other hand, if my goal is to learn, I may prefer to be one of a few participants in a meeting dominated by people who oppose my views, so that I can get a full dose of their perspective.

Conclusion

In sum, race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality make powerful claims for equal representation. Class and age are more complicated; it can be disingenuous to imagine that a meeting can be egalitarian on those dimensions. And ideological diversity is not a good in itself, but intellectual humility and striving to learn are genuine goods that sometimes provide reasons to be ideologically inclusive.

The complication is that race and ethnicity, gender, age, religion, ideology and partisanship correlate in the population. Say you want a meeting of influential people who are in a position to allocate resources, but you also demand racial diversity in your meetings. The most influential people are likely to be predominantly white. Or say you’re a libertarian who is genuinely committed to racial equality (as some are). You’re entitled to form a committee of libertarians, but it’s your problem if they all turn out to be white men.

I think these points of conflict among different kinds of diversity generate some of the hardest issues, both ethically and pragmatically.

See also: what is privilege?; the rise of an expert class and its implications for democracy; to what extent can colleges promote upward mobility?; defining equity and equality; two approaches to social capital: Bourdieu vs. the American literature; and a college class on equality; when social advantage persists for millennia.

The phrase “social capital” is used in (at least) two very different senses and discussions.

One is an Anglophone discussion among social scientists who seem generally comfortable with a liberal market order. Important participants include James Coleman, Robert Putnam, Elinor Ostrom and (using the related phrase “collective efficacy”) Robert Sampson and Felton Earls. These social scientists understand social capital as the value that derives from collaborating and solving collective-action problems together. It’s measured by rates of joining, socializing, participating in the institutions of civil society, and trusting one’s peers. It can exist in any group, regardless of wealth and prestige. For instance, Sampson, Earls and their colleagues found that levels of collective efficacy varied greatly among Chicago neighborhoods, independent of race and class.

The central hypothesis in this literature is that higher social capital predicts better outcomes (safety, education, health, employment). This hypothesis is often proven in empirical studies. The deepest explanation is that these desirable outcomes are public goods, subject to problems of collective action, and social capital is the capacity—inherent in a group—to address problems of collective action successfully. For instance, safe streets represent a public good, and when people voluntarily maintain order, the streets are safer.

The other discourse is loosely Marxian and of Continental European origin; the most influential theorist is Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, social capital can only be understood in relation to economic capital and cultural capital. All three forms are the result of past labor, which accumulates or materializes in forms that can then be owned and by–and used to the advantage of–specific individuals or closed groups, such as firms.

Economic capital means ownership, or the ability to own, the means of production (factories, offices, farms, mines). Cultural capital means personal characteristics that you can learn in order to set yourself apart as a member of an advantaged group. For example, if you know how to dress for and behave at a corporate job interview, you have acquired cultural capital. And social capital means membership in any group that has value for those who belong.

Thus a paradigm case of social capital for Bourdieu is being connected to specific aristocrats in a way that puts you within the group known as “the nobility.” You might be a poor and boorish noble: then you would have social capital without much economic or cultural capital. Still, each of the three pays off in ways that are fundamentally economic.

For Coleman et al., the effort required to build social capital is at least partly altruistic. When you try to help others around you, it turns out that you benefit as well from the public resource of social capital. Social capital is non-rivalrous or win/win. If poor people in Chicago build more social capital, that does no harm to Lake Shore millionaires. It might even reduce their tax burdens by boosting graduation rates and cutting crime in the city as a whole.

The Bourdieuian form of social capital is competitive and maybe even zero-sum. If you form a connection to an aristocrat that gives you a leg up in society, I am less advantaged. According to Bourdieu, people build social capital to advance their own interests, strategically targeting others who have various forms of capital to add to their networks:

The existence of a network of connections is not a natural given …  It is the product of an endless effort at institution. … In other words, the network of relationships is the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term. …

The reproduction of social capital presupposes an unceasing effort of sociability, a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed. … This is one of the factors which explain why the profitability of this labor of accumulating and maintaining social capital rises in proportion to the size of the capital. Because the social capital accruing from a relationship is that much greater to the extent that the person who is the object of it is richly endowed with capital (mainly social, but also cultural and even economic capital), the possessors of an inherited social capital, symbolized by a great name, are able to transform all circumstantial relationships into lasting connections. They are sought after for their social capital and, because they are well known, are worthy of being known (‘I know him well’); they do not need to ‘make the acquaintance’ of all their ‘acquaintances’; they are known to more people than they know, and their work of sociability, when it is exerted, is highly productive.

Although these theories are different, they could both apply in a society as a whole. After a discussion with students last week, I am inclined to the following hypotheses:

1. Access to the highest rungs of socioeconomic advantage requires (or at least benefits from) Bourdieu-style social capital. If you want to get a seat on the Supreme Court, it seems almost necessary to attend Harvard’s or Yale’s law school, partly because of who you know as a result. Social capital may also get you into those law schools in the first place. For instance, I can think of someone who attended Law School on his way to federal judicial appointments; his mother had also been a judge, and his grandfather had attended Yale.
2. Well-being in the middle and lower rungs depends on social capital in the Coleman/Putnam sense. If you are trying to get through high school and obtain some post-secondary education, get a job, stay out of jail, and live to the median age, it’s very helpful to be embedded in networks of cooperation and mutual support. Those networks have value even if the other members are not rich and powerful.

See also: David Brooks/Pierre Bourdieu, Bourdieu in the college admissions office, Chua and Rubenfeld, The Triple Package, social capital and economic mobility, “social capital”: political and apolitical and when social advantage persists for millennia.