EXPLORATIONS IN SOCIAL INEQUALITY
An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.
--Plutarch
A 1979 Carnegie study ("Small Futures: Children, Inequality, and the Limits of Liberal Reform", Richard de Lone principal investigator) found that a child's future to be largely determined by social status, not brains. Consider Bobby and Jimmy, two second-graders, who both pay attention in the classroom, do well, and have nearly identical I.Q.s. Yet Bobby is the son of a successful lawyer; Jimmy's works infrequently as custodial assistant. Despite their similarities, the difference in the circumstances to which they were born makes it 27 times more likely that Bobby will get a job that by time he is in late 40s will pay him an income in the top tenth of all incomes in this country. Jimmy had about one chance in eight of earning even a median income.
Now, more than two and one-half decades later, the projected inequality of fates of Bobby and Jimmy's second grade successors is even greater. For a variety of reasons to be here explored, inequality in the United States has increased to the extent that the gap between the rich and poor is larger now than at any point in the past 75 years--greater than that of any industrialized nation (see Edward N. Wolff's 1995 Top Heavy: A Study of Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America, Twentieth Century Fund, and his "The Rich Get Richer: And Why the Poor Don't"). Federal Reserve figures for 1989 found the wealthiest 1 percent of American households (with net worth of at least $2.3 million each) owning nearly 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and the top 20 percent of American households (worth $180,000 or more) own more than 80 percent. According to Michael Hout and Samuel R. Lucas's Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (Princeton University Press), in 1974, when income inequality was at its lowest point, the top 10 percent of U.S. households had incomes 31 times that of the poorest 10 percent and four times greater than median-income households. Twenty years later, these numbers had inflated to 55 times the poorest and six times the median.
Such statistics (see Injustice Studies, a refereed electronic journal out of Illinois State, for more) raise many questions, including:
Is inequality inevitable?
Is inequality desirable or undesirable for social progress in improving the quality of life for the vast majority of people?
What determines the variability of inequality across the nations of the world?
Are there thresholds in the disparities between the haves and have-nots that lead to social revolution? Is inequality, at least in terms of income and wealth, really a social problem?
Can there be economic inequality and yet political equality? Can, for instance, capitalism coexist with democracy?
In capitalist economies, who should provide the safety nets for those unable to compete, such as because of age or physical or mental disabilities?
First, what do you know about social inequality? Take the interactive quiz from Cornell's Center for the Study of Social Inequality to ascertain your "IQ" (Inequality Quotient).
How do individuals feel about such unequal access to the American Dream and the growing gap between the haves and have-nots? Or do they not even know? See Demos's "Public Opinion on Poverty, Income Inequality and Public Policy 1996-2001." Are there limits to the degree of inequality before the social contract is voided? Listen to Robert Reich's video "How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap?"
THEORY AND MEASUREMENT
Of interest here are the ways in which inequality is institutionalized, in other words, the ways by which socially-defined categories of persons (ignoring differences in individuals' talents and abilities) are unevenly rewarded for their social contributions. These are the criteria by which the social worthiness of individuals are judged and discriminations made, such as the classifications of gender, ethnicity, race, religion, age and generation. These vary, in part, on the basis of a society's stratification order (i.e., caste, class, or mixed) and its cultural history (i.e., the legacy of slavery on race relations in the United States). And the "rewards" come in a number of forms: power, wealth, social power, prestige in the eyes of others, self-esteem and sense of personal efficacy, the number and welfare of one's progeny, and one's satisfaction and happiness with life.
For data and analyses about the contemporary inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth check out:
Albert Benschop's Sociosite index of stratification resources
Russell Sage Foundation's Social Inequality Working Papers
Goetz Kluge and An-Ly Yao-Kluge's Entropy and Inequality Measures
Income Statistics from the Census Bureau
See Chapter 5 of the 1998 Report of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, "Inequality and Economic Rewards" (pdf format).
Isaac Shapiro & Robert Greenstein's "The Widening Income Gulf" (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Sept. 4, 1999)
Articles from the Federal Reserve Bulletin, such as "Recent Changes in U.S. Family Finances: Results from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances" (released Jan. 2000)
University of Texas Inequality Project
Inequality & Social Policy: A JFK/Harvard Multidisciplinary Program
SocioRealm's Stratification and Society page
Tax statistics from the Internal Revenue Service
The American Prospect: Articles on Inequality in America
Department of Health and Human Services' "Poverty Guidelines and Measurement"
Barry Bluestone's "The Polarization of American Society"
Rebecca Blank's "Is there a Trade-off between Unemployment and Inequality?"
International Sociological Association's Committee on Social Stratification and Social Mobility
Working papers from University of Washington's Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, including "The Twentieth Century Record of Inequality and Poverty in the U.S."
Cambridge Social Interaction and Stratification scales
Exploring the concept of "social class". Class is sociologists' major predictor of beliefs, behavior, life-styles and of life itself. When the Titanic sunk in 1912, 60 percent of the first class survived, 40 percent of the second, and only 25 percent of the third.
PBS companion site for Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker's film "People Like Us: Social Class in America"
Archives for Social-Class listserv--will need to register first
the wealthy and the elites
Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
--Barry Switzer
We hear of the tens of billions that Bill Gates is worth. So how much is that really? See David Chandler's graphic conceptualizations in "The L-Curve"
Yahoo's directory of social class and stratification
Val Burris' Who Rules? An Internet Guide to Power Structure Research
Val Burris' "The Myth of Old Money Liberalism: The Politics of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans"
American Heritage's "A Ranking of the Wealthiest Americans of All Time," (Oct. 1998)
The Official Website of the British Monarchy
Keep up with the British bluebloods at the Guardian's monarchy website
Forbes's World's Richest People in 2006
Excerpt of "Social elites and their circulation"
Thorsten Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class
the middle class and its social necessity
In The Middle Class as a Precondition of a Sustainable Society, Nikolai Tilkidjiew observes "...the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered, in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from becoming dominant." For a number of social scientists, its shrinkage in recent decades in the United States is a cause for concern. Fortunately, a sizable percent of the population considers itself "middle class"-- 45.6 percent, according to the 2002 NORC General Social Survey--including more than one quarter of high school dropouts aged 26-41.
the working class
Youngstown State University's Center for Working Class Studies
the lower class
The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
--Anatole France
Charles Booth Online Archive. "Charles Booth was a 19th century Victorian-era Englishman concerned with the rapid increase in poverty and human suffering throughout London that developed during the late 19th century. As such, he embarked on a 30-year quest to document these conditions throughout London by creating detailed poverty maps of the city, engaging in hundreds of detailed interviews with people from all walks of life, and publishing his results in a multi-volume set that was completed in 1903" (SCOUT, Jan. 10, 2003).
Poverty in the United States, 1999 from the U.S. Census Bureau
America's Second Harvest's Hunger in America 2006 "the most comprehensive study of domestic hunger ever undertaken"
More poverty statistics from the Census Bureau
"A Portrait of Poverty in Oregon" (from Oregon State)
PovertyNet Data on poverty from the World Bank
World Health Organization's Commission on Marcroeconomics and Health
University of Michigan's links to poverty-related websites
University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty links to websites
Second Harvest's Hunger 1997: The Faces and Facts
"Poverty Commission Evidence" (British)
Copy of Center for Budget and Policy Priorities finding 3 out of 5 poor renters spending more than half of income on housing
Gender stratification
Race and ethnic stratification: to what extent is race a "skin game" employed to obscure class dynamics?
reflecting on Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
institutionalized discriminations
Thomas Sowell, "Race, Culture, and Equality" (Hoover Essays)
Bruce Western & Becky Pettit. "Black-White Earnings Inequality: Employment Rates, and Incarceration" [.pdf, 287K]
eco-racism (see Toxics Release Inventory case studies at TRI and Environmental Justice and Daniel R. Faber & Eric J. Krieg's Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts)
Why are some groups more successful at assimilating than others?
Age and generational stratification As the proportion of the American population of children under the age of 18 dropped from a peak of 36 percent in 1962 to 26 percent in 2000, what has happened to their status within the various stratification orders? In 2000, of those living with family members, the poverty rate declined 27% since 1993, from 22 percent to 16. And what about the elderly, who now comprise about 13 percent of the population?
childhood: how many of America's children are poor?
Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty estimates between 1979 and 1994 the number of children under six living beneath the poverty line increased from 3.5 to 6.1 million. Will children's condition in society improve or diminish as their relative size declines? According to America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2001, the percentage of Americans under age 18 declined from 36% in the 1960s to 26% in 2000.
And what are community-based organizations in low income areas doing to promote the healthy development of children? See the Center's 2002 report The Role of Community Development Corporations in Promoting the Well-Being of Young Children.
the Annie E. Casey Foundation: "Kids Count" project provides national and state-level poverty estimates and trends of other indicators of child well-being. A rich resource is the foundation's KIDS COUNT 2006 (State-level) Data Book Online.
Low income uninsured children by state from the Census Bureau
From Save the Children: State of the World's Mothers 2006: Saving the Lives of Mothers and Newborns
From ChildStat.gov: America's Children 2005
Child Trends DataBank-"the one-stop-shop for the latest national trends and research on over 90 key indicators of child and youth well-being"
"Poverty Among Nonelderly Americans," from the 1997 Urban Institute's National Survey of America's Families
UNICEF's Progress of Nations reports on the state of the world's children for 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2006
Child Trends--"a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that studies children, youth, and families through research, data collection, and data analysis"
U.S. Dept. of Labor's "By the Sweat and Toil of Children," child labor in 16 developing countries
Jim Zwick's The Campaign to End Child Labor
The History Place's Child Labor in America 1908-1912, Photographs of Lewis W. Hine
The Future of Children
old age
generational inequalities: advantages of founding generations and the inequities in old age support
Demographics of stratification: Regional inequalities and neighborhood segregations
Click here to see
From the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "The Cost of Living and the Geographic Distribution of Poverty" (Sept. 2006)
Mark Fossett's Virtual Laboratory in Racial and Ethnic Stratification & Inequality
David Fasenfest, Jason Booza, & Kurt Metzger "Living Together: A New Look at Racial and Ethnic Integration in Metropolitan Neighborhoods, 1990-2000". Among the findings: the number of predominantly white neighborhoods fell by 30%, 9 of the 10 metropolitan areas studied had an increase in mixed-race neighborhoods, and while whites and blacks became less likely to live in neighborhoods where their group predominated the opposite was the case for Hispanics and Asians.
William H. Frey and Dowell Myers' "Neighborhood Segregation in Single-Race and Multirace America: A Census 2000 Study of Cities and Metropolitan Areas". Data, charts and maps are available at CensusScope.
For measures of city-level income gaps see Angie Rodgers & Ed Lazere's "Income Inequality in the District of Columbia is Wider Than in Any Major U.S. City" (D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, July 2004)
Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research
County-level poverty rates (total) for U.S.
County-level poverty rates for whites
County-level poverty rates for blacks
Kaiser Family Foundation's State Health Facts Online: Demographics and the Economy
Southern Rural Development Center
NAFTA's impacts on three nations
From PBS P.O.V.'s Borders. Explore the geographical and the symbolic borders that affect our opportunities.
From the U.S. Labor Department, Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment, 2000
Poverty Areas from the Census Bureau
Poverty 101: A Primer on Texas’ Poor from the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin
Case study: Microsoft's impact in the Seattle suburbs
The interactions between the stratification orders
The intersection of race, gender, and class
Status consistencies and inconsistencies
Life-cycle differences: the double- and triple- jeopardy hypotheses in gerontology
INEQUALITY AT THE PERSONAL LEVEL
Health
differences in mortality rates. For instance, according to Robert Fogel, in 1875 the life expectancy of the British elite exceeded that of the rest of the population by some 17 years.
CDC's "Health and Selected Socioeconomic Characteristics of the Family: United States, 1988- 90
Identity and Socialization
What are the relationships between social inequality and human motivation?
on exploitation and alienation
Language
Belief systems
Americans' attributions of why the poor are poor
Experiential realms
how perceptions of time & space are shaped by positions in status orders
aesthetic sensitivities: class differences in music preferences
emotions
Activity and lifestyle differences
conspicuous consumption--great project: collecting examples
Status attainment processes: patterns of intergenerational and intragenerational mobility
Isabel V. Sawhill and DanielP. McMurrer "How Much Do Americans Move Up and Down the Economic Ladder?
Homelessness
The U.S. Conference of Mayors A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America's Cities 2000 (pdf, 125 pp)
National Coalition for the Homeless: with fact sheets, legislation and policy
National Resource Center on Homelessness and Mental Illness
Homeless In America
Corporation for Supportive Housing
HomeAid America: 714-553-9510 ~ Homeless Links page
The Austin Chronicle's Hypermedia Gallery: Homeless Teenagers
Margaret Morton's "Fragile Dwelling"--essays, photographs, interviews
homeless--Colorado
FORCES OF CHANGE & MAINTENANCE
OF THE STATUS QUO
Classical statements and theoretical perspectives of how stratification orders are maintained and changed. Take advantage of the University of Chicago's Society for Social Research Page and Carl Cuneo's website for collections of primary and interpretative resources.
functionalism: Social functions and dysfunctions of social inequality
Summary of Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore's (1945) "Some Principles of Stratification
The Marxist tradition
Marx and Engels WWW Library
Medievalist Chris Wickham's Marxist History Writing--with a focus on peasant societies and "how peasants live, remember the past, deal with their neighbours or their lords."
Coser's the functions of conflict theory
Excerpt from Ralf Dahrendorf's Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society
Protest.Net--discover where protests are percolating across the U.S. and internationally
T.R. Young's (Red Feather Institute) Marxist Social Theory
SocNet's electronic discussion group on Social Cleavage of Class and Class Politics
Weberian tradition
Coser's review of Max Weber on class, status, and power
Note s on Weber's notions of class, status, and party
Key concepts
legitimation
social mechanisms: structural change, industrialization
social psychological mechanisms: false consciousness, class consciousness
Sources of social inequality
historical legacies
lessons from war: relations between victors and vanquished
recency of immigration
From "collective consciousness" to collective action: Social movements. Given the proper socio-cultural conditions inequalities can spawn collective behavior, which historically have been major agents of social change. Examples in the United States include the labor, civil rights, ethnic, old age, and the women's movements of the past century.
Sergey Mamay's "Theories of Social Movements and their Current Development in Soviet Society"
Evidence from the Haymarket Affair 1886-1887 from the Library of Congress. "This collection showcases more than 3,800 images of original manuscripts, broadsides, photographs, prints and artifacts relating to the Haymarket Affair. The violent confrontation between Chicago police and labor protesters in 1886 proved to be a pivotal setback in the struggle for American workers' rights."
Ed Brown's detailings of social movements around the world, with abstracts of key works
Dan Myers' Links to Activism Sites on the Web
FOCUSING ON THE INSTITUTIONS MAINTAINING & CHALLENGING THE AMERICAN STRATIFICATION ORDER
The changing face of the American class structure
What's been happening to the American middle class?
Americans' beliefs about inequality
Jared Bernstein, Lawrence Mishel, and Chauna Brocht, "Any way you cut it income inequality on the rise regardless of how it’s measured" (Sept. 2000)
The economics of inequality
In The Washington Post, Mark Shields ("Pay the Workers," Aug. 22, 1995:A17) observed how, in 1960, the average pay, after taxes, for chief executives at the largest U.S. corporations was 12 times greater than the average wage of factory workers. By 1974, the CEO's wages and compensation had increased to about 35 times that of the company's average worker. In 1980 the average CEO was making 42 times as much as the average blue collar worker, doubling ten years later to 84 times. Then hyper-inequality kicked in. By the mid-1990s, according to Business Week, the factor was 135 times as much. In 1999, it had reached 400-fold and in 2000 jumped again to 531! Check out the AFL-CIO's Executive Paywatch page for updates on the spiraling pay of America's corporate elite. For an inventory of compensation packages by company, gathered by Mercury Center News, click here.
Perhaps you are interested in the reimbursements made in higher education. From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes Facts & Figures: Pay and Benefits.
focusing on white, blue and pink collar occupations and their stratification along the lines of gender, race and age
Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) Index
Economic Policy Institute, source of State of Working America 2000-01
A.M. Sum, N. Fogg, and R. Taggart, "The Economics of Despair"
Katherine Newman and Chauncy Lennon, "The Job Ghetto"
implications of the shift from the production of manufactured goods to increasing concentration in the service industries. Take advantage of the rich resources available at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some data for discussion:
Charting the U.S. Labor Market in 2005
Employment by major industry division, 1983 and 1994; employment projections
The Impact of Wal-Mart on national and international stratification orders. In 2002, this company posted $245 billion in sales--eight times as much as Microsoft. None of its 1.2 million employees are unionized. Its grocery workers often make less than $9 an hour. Relentlessly pushing suppliers to reduce prices, it has accelerated the exporting of manufacturing jobs to developing nations.
Indexes of hourly compensation costs for production workers in manufacturing in 29 countries, 1975- 97--standardized (U.S.=100) and in U.S. dollars. Having examined these figures (noting, for instance, what happened to Mexico upon implementation of NAFTA) , don't you wonder how they correlate with the investments of multinationals?
the working class and class consciousness
Homepage of the United Auto Workers
Cheryl Cline's checklist: Fiction by American Working Class Authors
poverty and capitalism
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics
relationships between labor and management
Histories of the tensions
Labor History Chronology
A Short History of American Labor
Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington
Berkeley's Guide to Labor-Oriented Internet Resources
SUNY Albany's U.S. Labor and Industrial History WWW Audio Archive
Red Robin's Labor History Pages
An Eclectic List of Events in U.S. Labor History
Professor Richard P. Appelbaum"s "Fighting Sweatshops: Problems of Enforcing Global Labor Standards" Powerpoint slides of his April, 2001 presentation at Trinity University
master resource, featuring rich resource listings, details on the International Association of Labor History Institutions, and much more
Sean Purdy's Collected Bibliography of Comparative Labor History
labor history research tools for British labour history
Cyber Picket Line--extensive online labour resources directory (UK)
Canadian Labour History, 1850-1999
Labor movements and unions
UNITE! Stop Sweatshops Campaign. According to the National Labor Committee (2001), for each $12.99 Gap T-shirt an El Salvador factory worker sews, she receives 11.6 cents.
Human Rights for Workers
Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association
Robert Tyler's Rebels of the Woods: The I.W.W. in the Pacific Northwest
STRIKE PAGE!
LaborNet@IGC Home Page
Women's Labor History from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
LabourStart--"where trade unionists start their day on the net"
Labor Arts
Perspectives and tactics of management
workindex.com--gateway to human resource solutions
the professions
Robert H. Frank's "Talent and the Winner-Take-All Society"
interlocking directorships
Corporate Power, Influence, Money and Interlocking Boards of Directors Page
They Rule--create maps of the interlocking directorates of the top 100 U.S. companies
consumerism and worker alienation: the commodification of all life aspects; commodity fetishism
Nikos Drakos, "Commodity Fetish and the Automobile"
Inequality and family systems
Inequality and the political order
Check out articles on "The New Inequality, and What to Do About It" from the January 1997 issue of the Boston Review. An interesting NPR/Kaiser Foundation/Kennedy School survey conducted in 2001 concerning causes of poverty, perceptions of effectiveness of government poverty programs, sympathy for the poor, etc., can be found here.
the politics of inequality: keeping the poor in their place
Affirmative Action
Affirmative Action Review: Report to the President
Is it the responsibility of government to reduce differences in income of the rich and poor? For a comparison of responses internationally, click here.
History of Federal Individual Income Tax Rates
According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics 1997 report "Police Use of Force: Collection of National Data", 21% of Americans 12 years of age and older had some sort of face-to-face contact with police annually, with blacks and hispanics being 70% more likely than whites to have such experiences.
should the U.S. follow other countries in establishing centralized methods for setting wages?
the welfare state: its structure and its effects
Urban Institute's "Welfare Reform: An Analysis of the Issues"
2000 GREEN BOOK: Overview of Entitlement Programs
Michael Hout's "Inequality at the Margins: The effects of welfare, the minimum wage, and tax credits on low-wage labor markets"
Yahoo's Listing of Corporate Welfare sites
ruling class conspiracy theories
party loyalties and voting patterns. Is there in the United States a declining significance of social class in party loyalties, as some social scientists contend is the case throughout Western democracies? Click to see:
Party identifications of social classes, 1973-94
New York Time's analysis of 1996 Presidential election results broken down by gender, race, income, etc.
Education and stratification
Economic Diversity of Colleges
Great Expectations: How the Public and Parents--White, African American, and Hispanic-- View Higher Education from Public Agenda Online (2002)
Robert Reich, "How Selective Colleges Heighten Inequality," Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 15, 2000)
Religion and inequality: Opiate of the masses?
"Scientific" legitimations of inequality
"History of Race in Science" (project of Evelynn Hammonds, Michelle Murphy, and Stephanie Higgs of MIT)
Inequality and the mass media. Throughout history the elite have maintained their exclusive positions within stratification orders through physical, behavioral, emotive and cognitive controls. According to critical theorists, modern communication technologies are but the latest mechanism of elite manipulation and oppression. Television viewing, for instance, which decreases with social class, supposedly leads individuals to view themselves as being relatively powerless and apolitical, oblivious of the real forces shaping their lives (filled, instead, with extensive trivia and factoids), escapist, and consumers of whatever capitalism has to peddle. Ben Bagdikian, in his fifth edition of Media Monopoly, calculates that only ten corporations now determine what a majority of us hear, read and see--down from fifty corporations in 1983. Even the supposed media watchdogs are reportedly part of the conspiracy. For analyses of the media consumption of American voters and their effects on Americans' political knowledge and beliefs click here.
LOOKING AT INTERNATIONAL
STRATIFICATION SYSTEMS
According a 1997 report by the World Bank, because of industrial development (particularly in China, Indonesia, South Korea and Singapore) poverty in East Asian nations has declined by more than half over the past two decades. Nevertheless, 21 percent of their populations remained in poverty in 1995, with evidence of widening gaps between the rich and the poor. And that is the good news. In 1999, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the richest 10 percent of the world's population's income is roughly 117 times higher than the poorest 10 percent, up from 79 times higher in 1980. Take China out of the equation and the 1999 ratio becomes 154:1.
Share of Global Income going to Richest 20% and Poorest 20%
of World 's Population
Year Share of Richest 20% Share of Poorest 20% Ratio of Richest to Poorest
1960 70.2% 2.3% 30 to 1
1970 73.9% 2.3% 32 to 1
1980 76.3% 1.7% 45 to 1
1989 82.7% 1.4% 59 to 1
Source: United Nations, Human Development Report, 1992.
In 2004, according to Worldwatch Institute's "The State of Consumption Today, "the 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent."
The impacts of modernization on social inequalities
Anna Tibaijuka, UN-Habitat Executive Director, warned in 2004 before the release of "The State of the World's Cities," how "Extremism is likely to flourish in the world's rapidly spreading slums if governments do not tackle the poverty that fuels it." In 2030, an estimated 5 billion people will be urban dwellers, 2 billion of whom slum dwellers.
Radhika Sarin, "Rich-Poor Divide Growing" (2003)
"Terra: Brazil's Landless Movement" from the New York Times
International stratification of nations from a Journal of World-Systems Research perspective
the political economy of "brain drains," where core nations import the cognitive laborers of developing nations, thereby retarding their nascent modern industries
Role of multinationals
Policy Research Working Papers from the World Bank
UNICEF's 1996 Progress of Nations
UNICEF's 1997 Progress of Nations
UNICEF's 1998 Progress of Nations
UNICEF's 1999 Progress of Nations
UNICEF's 2000 Progress of Nations
From the United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population Report 2004
The New Internationalist Magazine
Globalism and Social Policy Programme with links to the global establishment
World Trade Organization
International Monetary Fund
Inequality Around the World from the World Bank
Ayelet Shachar's Children of a Lesser State: Sustaining Global Inequality Through Citizenship Laws
Richard Appelbaum "Fighting Sweatshops: Problems of Enforcing Global Labor Standards"--PowerPoint frames from his April 5, 2001 Trinity talk
When perceiving inequalities from a global perspective--such as noting the stratification orders between unions of "core," "semi-periphery," and "periphery" nation-states-- one comes to appreciate how any model of inequality that's worth its salt must address numerous systems of social arrangements which ultimately make people and groups "better off" relative to others. Not only must it identify the separate workings of each of these systems but also how each interacts with the others--how, for instance, Mideast gender orders are shaped by OPEC's power relative to that of Western and Asian cartels, how the social standing of shamans in preindustrial societies are affected by satellite-beamed American television, or the ways core nations import the cognitive laborers or developing countries ("brain drains"). Like the various interlocking gears of a clock, this model must develop:
the psychological orders: the inequalities in the ways individuals think of themselves (i.e., feelings of esteem and worth, sense of control over personal fate), which are, in turn, shaped by (and produce):
the interpersonal orders: how interactants' senses of relative superiority, equality or subordination vis-à-vis each other influence their behaviors, which are, in turn, shaped by (and produce):
the institutional orders: the social dynamics underlying the inequalities among and between entire racial, ethic, occupational (and professional), age (and generational), and religious groups, which are, in turn, shaped by (and produce):
the political-economic orders: the social dynamics underlying the various political and class clusterings of sexual, racial, religious, educational, age, and generational groups which are, in turn, shaped by (and produce):
world-orders: the social clusterings and interactions between the supra-national and supra-regional clusterings of international political economies, multinationals, and cultural orders.
A second train of thought upon reviewing these differences in national rates of inequalities and levels of economic development: Are things better for both self and society---- i.e., high levels of trust and cooperation between a people, and low rates of violence, fear, greed, and moral rot--where inequality and development are relatively low (but where, say, individuals' basic needs are amply met) or where both are high? What are the sociological differences between nations where basically all are poor but equal as opposed to where the poor are well-off relative to the poor of other nations but where there's an all-too-obvious monstrous gap between themselves and society's "special" others? Is there an ideal size of a middle class proportionate to the size (and relative ratio) of less-than-middle and greater-than-middle classes? And from what (or whose) perspective are such judgments to be made: materialism's? religion's? medicine's? national happiness surveys?