Relative deprivation

Based on Wikipedia: Relative deprivation

Here's a puzzle that has vexed social scientists for decades: revolutions rarely come from the most oppressed people. The poorest of the poor, the truly desperate, seldom rise up. Instead, uprisings tend to emerge from groups whose conditions have been improving—and then stop improving.

This counterintuitive finding points to one of the most powerful forces shaping human behavior: relative deprivation. It's not what you lack that drives you to action. It's what you lack compared to what you think you should have.

The Discovery in the Army

The concept emerged from an unlikely source: a massive study of American soldiers during World War II. Researchers were trying to understand morale, and they stumbled onto something strange.

Military Police units reported higher satisfaction with promotions than the Army Air Corps, even though Air Corps soldiers were promoted far more frequently. How could this be? The soldiers being promoted more often were somehow less happy about it.

The answer lay in expectations. In the Air Corps, promotions were so common that soldiers expected them. When a colleague got promoted, you felt you deserved one too. The Military Police had lower expectations—promotions were rare for everyone, so missing out didn't sting as much.

This was the birth of relative deprivation theory. What matters isn't your objective situation. It's the gap between what you have and what you believe you're entitled to.

The Four Conditions

The sociologist Walter Runciman later formalized this into four preconditions. For someone to experience relative deprivation about something—let's call it X—four things must be true:

• You don't have X
• You know other people who do have X
• You want X
• You believe getting X is actually possible for you

That last condition is crucial. It explains why extreme poverty often doesn't spark rebellion. If you've never seen anyone like you achieve something better, if improvement seems genuinely impossible, you won't feel deprived. You'll feel resigned.

But give people a taste of progress, let them see others like them succeeding, and then slam the door shut? That's when the trouble starts.

Personal Versus Group Deprivation

Runciman identified two distinct flavors of relative deprivation, and the distinction matters enormously for understanding social movements.

The first he called egoistic deprivation. This is personal. You compare yourself to other members of your own group and come up short. Perhaps you're a worker who watches colleagues get promoted while you're passed over. This kind of deprivation might push you to work harder, or to seek a new job, or to become bitter and disengaged. But it rarely changes society.

The second type—fraternalistic deprivation—is explosive. This happens when your entire group compares itself to another group and feels disadvantaged. Now you're not just personally frustrated. You're part of a collective grievance.

The American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s offers a textbook example. Black Americans weren't comparing themselves to other Black Americans. They were comparing their group's treatment to white Americans' treatment. They had the same citizenship, fought in the same wars, paid the same taxes—yet faced systematic exclusion from public life, from voting booths to lunch counters.

This collective comparison created the energy for mass mobilization. Individual grievances lead to individual actions. Group grievances lead to movements.

The Television Problem

There's a particularly modern form of fraternalistic deprivation that deserves attention: the gap between media portrayals and reality.

Consider how television depicts "middle class" or "normal" life. Characters in sitcoms and dramas live in spacious apartments in Manhattan or sprawling suburban homes. Teenagers drive new cars. Families take elaborate vacations. The problems depicted are relationship drama or career setbacks—never whether the rent check will clear.

Young people watching these shows internalize them as the baseline. This is normal. This is what I should expect. When their actual lives fail to match this standard—when they can't afford the apartment, can't take the vacation, can't buy the car—they experience genuine deprivation. Not because they lack necessities, but because they lack what they've been taught to expect.

This helps explain generational frustration that puzzles older observers. "You have smartphones and streaming services and opportunities we never had!" they say. True. But the reference point isn't the past. It's the aspirational present beamed through every screen.

The Moving Target

Here's where relative deprivation gets philosophically interesting: it can never be eliminated. Not as long as inequality exists.

Absolute poverty—not having enough food, shelter, or basic necessities—can theoretically be solved. If we produce enough and distribute it fairly, everyone's basic needs could be met. Economists and development experts have sophisticated ideas about how to achieve this.

But relative deprivation persists regardless of overall wealth. In 1905, not owning a car meant nothing about your social standing. Cars were curiosities for the rich. By 2010, lacking a car in most of America meant something profound about your place in society. It meant difficulty getting to work, to the grocery store, to the doctor. It meant social exclusion.

Mobile phones tell the same story. Fifty years ago, no one felt deprived for lacking one because they didn't exist. Today, try navigating modern life without a smartphone. Try applying for jobs, staying in touch with family, accessing your bank account, verifying your identity through two-factor authentication. What was once unimaginable has become practically mandatory.

This is the treadmill of relative deprivation. Society advances, expectations advance with it, and those left behind feel the gap even as their absolute conditions might improve.

When Progress Breeds Revolt

Some of the most dangerous moments for political stability come not from stagnation but from progress followed by reversal. Scholars call this "temporal relative deprivation" or "unfulfilled rising expectations."

The pattern appears throughout history. Conditions improve. People's expectations rise to match and then exceed those improvements. Then progress stalls or reverses—due to economic crisis, political change, or simply hitting natural limits. The gap between expectation and reality suddenly yawns wide.

The French Revolution fits this pattern. The decades before 1789 saw rising living standards and expanding rights for many French people. Then came financial crisis, poor harvests, and political paralysis. The revolutionaries weren't the most oppressed people in France—they were the newly elevated classes who felt their trajectory suddenly blocked.

More recently, some scholars have applied this framework to the Arab Spring of 2011. Countries like Tunisia and Egypt had experienced real economic and educational progress for decades. A new generation grew up with higher expectations than their parents. When those expectations collided with autocratic governments and limited opportunities, the result was explosive.

There's a dark irony here for reformers. The most dangerous thing you can do politically might be to improve people's lives partway—enough to raise expectations, not enough to fulfill them.

The Political Consequences

Relative deprivation doesn't just explain revolutions. It shapes everyday political behavior, including voting patterns.

Research has linked fraternalistic group deprivation to support for far-right political movements. When people feel their group is losing ground relative to others—whether defined by race, religion, region, or education—they become receptive to politicians who validate those grievances and promise restoration.

This explains why economic statistics often fail to predict political outcomes. A politician might say, "The economy is growing! Unemployment is down!" And the numbers might be accurate. But if certain groups feel they're not sharing in that growth, if they see others prospering while they struggle, the aggregate statistics mean nothing to them. Their lived experience is deprivation, regardless of what the charts show.

The Quality of Life Debate

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued something provocative: relative differences in wealth matter more for human wellbeing than absolute levels. Beyond basic subsistence, it's your position in the social hierarchy—not your actual resources—that determines your quality of life.

This has profound implications for policy. One school of thought says we should focus on raising overall wealth. Make the whole pie bigger, and even the smallest slices become adequate. Eventually, rising tides lift all boats.

The opposing view—influenced by relative deprivation theory—says this misses the point. Even if everyone becomes materially richer, those at the bottom will still feel deprived as long as the gap persists. They'll still experience the stress, the status anxiety, the sense of being left behind. If you want to improve human welfare, you need to address inequality directly, not just overall growth.

The debate remains unresolved, but relative deprivation research suggests the second view has merit. There's substantial evidence that inequality itself—independent of absolute poverty—correlates with worse outcomes: higher crime, worse health, lower trust, more social dysfunction.

The Opposite Case

It's worth noting what happens on the other side of the comparison. If relative deprivation comes from unfavorable comparison, what do we call favorable comparison?

Social psychologists have coined the term "relative gratification." This is the satisfaction that comes from perceiving your situation as better than relevant others or better than your own past. It's the warm feeling of upward mobility, of having made it, of being among the fortunate.

Relative gratification can be just as socially significant as deprivation. It explains why some people in objectively modest circumstances report high life satisfaction—they compare themselves to where they came from, or to others who have less. It also explains the resistance of comfortable groups to change: they correctly perceive that flattening hierarchies would eliminate their relative advantage, even if their absolute position remained unchanged.

The Limits of the Theory

For all its explanatory power, relative deprivation theory has real limitations that critics have pointed out.

The biggest problem: many people who feel relatively deprived do nothing about it. They don't join movements. They don't protest. They don't even vote differently. They simply absorb the discontent and carry on with their lives.

Why? Several reasons. Some people are temperamentally conflict-averse. Some are focused on immediate survival and can't afford the risks of activism. Some don't believe collective action will actually improve their situation. Some are simply worn down, too exhausted by daily life to add political struggle on top.

This means relative deprivation is necessary but not sufficient to explain social movements. You need the grievance, yes. But you also need organization, resources, opportunity, and a belief that action can succeed. Deprivation provides the fuel, but other factors must spark the fire.

Measuring the Immeasurable

One final complexity: relative deprivation can be measured objectively or experienced subjectively, and these don't always align.

Objective measures compare your actual resources to some standard—median income, for instance. You can calculate whether someone falls below 20 percent of the median, a common threshold for relative poverty. This gives researchers hard numbers to work with.

But subjective experience is messier. Two people in identical objective circumstances might feel very differently based on their reference groups, their expectations, their personal psychology. One feels grateful; the other feels cheated.

Both perspectives matter. Objective measures help policy makers identify patterns and target interventions. Subjective experience predicts actual behavior—who joins movements, who becomes radicalized, who withdraws from society.

Living With Comparison

Relative deprivation theory ultimately tells us something uncomfortable about human nature: we cannot help but compare. Our sense of satisfaction depends not on what we have but on what others have, on what we expected to have, on what we believe we deserve.

This comparison instinct probably served us well evolutionarily. In small groups competing for limited resources, monitoring your relative position mattered for survival. Those who didn't pay attention to status hierarchies got pushed aside.

But in a connected world where we can compare ourselves to billions of people, where media constantly shows us curated highlights of others' lives, where algorithms feed us content designed to provoke envy and aspiration—the comparison instinct may be maladaptive. We're equipped for a village and living in a global panopticon.

Understanding relative deprivation won't make the feeling disappear. But it might help us recognize it for what it is: not an accurate assessment of our circumstances, but a cognitive reflex shaped by reference points we didn't fully choose. The gap we feel might say less about what we lack than about who we've been taught to compare ourselves to.