Economic Inequality
Economic inequality refers to the unequal distribution of wealth, income, and resources within a society or between countries. It is often measured using indicators such as the Gini coefficient, which quantifies the extent of inequality within a population. Economic inequality can have wide-ranging social and economic implications, influencing factors such as social mobility, political stability, and overall economic growth.
7 Key excerpts on "Economic Inequality"
eBook - ePubRethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice
The radical potential of human rights
- Radhika Balakrishnan, James Heintz, Diane Elson(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...But equally important, expanding inequalities raise important questions of what is fair and just. The human rights framework, as one approach to evaluating economic and social outcomes with regard to social justice, must engage with the question of inequality—how much, if any, inequality is acceptable, and what limits does growing inequality place on the fulfillment of basic rights? Approaches to understanding inequality When people speak of inequality, they often have in mind an unequal distribution of income or wealth. However, people experience inequalities across a number of dimensions. There are inequalities in educational attainment, in health, and in the distribution of power. The free time men and women have is unequally distributed, once all demands for work, both paid work on the job and unpaid work at home, are taken into account. Inequalities in income and wealth are associated with other disparities. For instance, low-income households have worse health outcomes on average (Subramanian and Kawachi 2004). Furthermore, inequalities can be measured with respect to different units of society—between individuals, between households, between social groups (e.g. race, gender, and ethnicity), and between countries. The emphasis in this chapter is on inequalities in income and wealth between individuals, households, social groups, and countries—and the relationship of these inequalities to human rights. Inequality can be defined in various ways and the generic term “inequality” actually reflects a range of distinct inequalities. One important distinction is between “horizontal inequality” and “vertical inequality.” Horizontal inequality is defined as inequality between culturally defined or socially constructed groups. Inequalities with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, religion, caste, and sexuality are all examples of horizontal inequalities. Vertical inequality refers to inequality between individuals or between households...
eBook - ePubEconomy/Society
Markets, Meanings, and Social Structure
- Bruce G. Carruthers, Sarah Louise Babb(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...This argument is frequently cited as a reason for abolishing affirmative action policies. In this chapter, we document the patterns and magnitude of different kinds of Economic Inequality in market economies, particularly that of the United States. We also examine the connection between economic differences and other social distinctions, primarily race and gender. We present evidence that markets lead to inequality and take issue with the idea that the inequality generated by markets necessarily leads to the most efficient economic outcomes. At the same time, we examine how the inequalities generated by markets are not always based on merit. Markets are always and everywhere embedded in nonmarket social relations. As a consequence of these underlying systems of embeddedness, markets do not necessarily eliminate discrimination against women, minorities, or individuals from lower-class backgrounds. Rather, markets can often reproduce patterns of discrimination. Inequality in Perspective One of the fundamental topics of sociological and economic research is Economic Inequality, or differences between individuals in a given society in terms of their economic circumstances. Two of the related topics most discussed by social scientists are monetary income and wealth. Income is a flow of resources that a person receives over a period of time, such as a weekly paycheck from a job, monthly interest earned on a savings account, or an annual pension received after retirement. Wealth, on the other hand, consists of the resources an individual already possesses rather than a flow received over a time period. Examples of wealth include household items such as cars and DVD players but also more substantial resources such as real estate, savings accounts, stocks, and bonds...
eBook - ePub- Nan de Graaf, Dingeman Wiertz(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In general, liberals will be most tolerant of Economic Inequality and socialists the least. The former firmly believe in the value of the market as allocator of resources and distributor of wealth, while the latter often regard market outcomes as unsatisfactory. They therefore call on the state to step in and redistribute resources in order to achieve a more equal distribution. Conservatives will usually side with the liberals on economic issues, yet may deviate from this if it helps to maintain order and stability within society, since the latter are their ultimate priorities. Nonetheless, whatever one’s ideological stance on this issue, from a pragmatic point of view, high levels of Economic Inequality will generally provide cause for concern. If economic resources are too much concentrated in the hands of only a few, this may harm longer-term economic growth and prosperity. Metaphorically speaking, inequality may not only pertain to how the pie is distributed, but also to how much pie there is to distribute in the first place. Needless to say, lower growth and economic prosperity, in turn, have spillover effects for a wide range of other societal issues; for example by threatening the welfare state, stimulating crime, and making people less willing to invest in the environment. Aside from its potential impact on economic growth and prosperity, there is also evidence that Economic Inequality can lead to worse health outcomes, reduced social mobility, and greater inequality in the political sphere. Moreover, an unequal distribution of resources can erode the social fabric that keeps together society, increasing tensions between social groups and undermining norms of trust, reciprocity and solidarity that are key to cooperation, collective action and the production of public goods...
eBook - ePubMultidimensional Inequalities
International Perspectives Across Welfare States
- Bent Greve(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
...This ranges from the fact that many of the data used are based upon household surveys with the risk that people do not understand the questions, or deliberately give wrong answers, or else that there is a bias in who answers the questions. There are questions on whether looking into individual or household income, and problems when comparing across countries. There is the problem, as will also be returned to in Chapter 3, that income alone is not a sufficient precise concept to measure the degree of inequality, as well as that income in one year does not inform on the actual options for individual persons in the coming year. There are plentiful suggestions for how to measure Economic Inequality, also including normative preferences on how to value inequality at the bottom, in the middle and top of the income distribution, as well as how the value of a measurement shall change when there is change in the distribution. The chapter has also dismissed trickle-down economics as a way of dealing with inequality, but not delved into other types of arguments related to the causes of and changes in inequality. Still, despite the difficulties we need to try to describe the development and reasons for inequality, but to do it in an open and transparent way. Therefore, this book will use, when looking into Economic Inequality, the Gini coefficient because it gives reasonable information on the development especially when looking over a longer time span. It will further in a number of other areas show the multidimensionality of inequality by looking into how we best can describe and analyse the development both within single issues, but also across a range of issues. This includes, as also briefly touched upon, the use of elements such as educational attainment, life-expectancy, and existing multidimensional indexes in order further to be able to digest the amount of information and different aspects of inequality that are, in fact, available....
- Mikael Stigendal(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These three aspects – the signifier, the signified and the referent – are characteristic of the philosophy of science, which this book builds on and to which I will return many times, called critical realism. There is something that may be referred to as inequality (referent object), but when we call it that, we have to make sure we define the word properly into a concept (reference object). That is what I intend to do in this chapter. Thus, inequality is a relation, comprising at least two poles, like the one mentioned by OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria between the rich and poor. I subscribe to the general definition of inequality suggested by Amartya Sen (Therborn, 2013; Sayer, 2015: 344) as part of his ‘capability approach’. On this basis, inequalities should be seen as differences, which violate the human rights of the disadvantaged (Therborn, 2013: 41). What differences can that be? This chapter answers the question by distinguishing between different types of inequality. 2.1 Income and exchange-value When differences in incomes increase to the extent that they violate the human rights of the disadvantaged, it becomes an inequality. To be poor means that you do not have sufficient resources to participate in society (Therborn, 2013: 21). As Loïc Wacquant puts it in Urban Outcasts (2008: 30), it is a “curse of being poor in the midst of a rich society in which participation in the sphere of consumption has become a sine qua non of social dignity …”. Such a difference can be understood as a particular form of inequality, called resource inequality. It expresses a relation between those who have and those who have not. The latter can for simplistic reasons be called the ‘have-nots’. How many young people are the have-nots in the ten Citispyce countries? What can we know about this? An indicator that measures the percentage of have-nots among young people is the at-risk-of-poverty rate...
- Peter Flora(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Societal Change and Income Inequality: Selected Studies While there are various theories that attempt to explain the unequal distribution of incomes, 62 most are ahistorical and tend to focus on a single cause, such as chance, ability, or education. Only a few incorporate broad social change as a primary determinant. 63 Within this vein, we can distinguish three main approaches: changes in income inequality as a result of capitalist industrialization or general economic growth within a country (Simon Kuznets); 64 changes in income inequality as a result of changes in the distribution of power within a country (Gerhard Lenski); 65 and changes in income inequality as a result of changes in the economic and political relationship of a country to the world economy—an international, rather than national, perspective (the dependency theorists). 66 These approaches are comprised of a variety of factors. While some variables are common to all of these theories, each emphasizes different ones and proposes different structural links. According to Simon Kuznets, early phases of industrialization are characterized by rapid shifts from agricultural to non-agricultural production; by an increasing centralization and concentration of agriculture; and by an increasing supply of industrial labor due to continuous migration from rural to urban areas. All of these processes contribute to an increase in inequality. In later phases when technological advancements are made in all economic sectors, differences in labor productivity decline to make physical capital less important relative to skilled labor in the production process. As a result, income inequality begins to subside...
eBook - ePubAfter Piketty
The Agenda for Economics and Inequality
- Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, Marshall Steinbaum(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...I am convinced that such an analysis of the systems of representations and beliefs about the distribution of income and wealth, however incomplete and preliminary it is within my book, is essential when it comes to understanding the dynamic of inequality. To me this is the central interaction between belief systems and inequality regimes that should be studied more extensively in future research, and which I plan to further study in the years to come. Money and its unequal distribution constitute the supreme social object and cannot be studied from an exclusively economic perspective. In this respect my work is akin to and feeds off the many studies devoted to perceptions of equality and inequality issuing from the fields of political sociology and intellectual history.6In fact, the main conclusion of this work is this: “One should be wary of any economic determinism in regard to inequalities of wealth and income. The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political, and it cannot be reduced to purely economic mechanisms.…The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative powers of those actorsand the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relative actors combined.”7The central role of politics and the changing representations of the economy is particularly evident when studying the evolution of the distribution of income and wealth throughout the twentieth century. The reduction of inequality observed in Western countries between the 1900s–1910s and the 1950s–1960s is largely explained by the wars and revolutions that marked this period, as well as by the new social and institutional compromise that emerged following such upheaval. Similarly, the rise in inequality observed since the 1970s–1980s owes much to the political and institutional reversal of recent decades, notably in fiscal and financial matters...
