The Inequality Reader

Contemporary and Foundational Readings in Race, Class, and Gender

David Grusky

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974090
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Sociologie

Oriented toward the introductory student, The Inequality Reader is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more alive, more accessible, and more relevant. Now more than ever, The Inequality Reader is the one-stop compendium of all the must-read pieces, simply the best available introduction to the stratifi cation canon.

PART I

Introduction

1

The Stories About Inequality That We Love to Tell

DAVID B. GRUSKY

There is a growing consensus among academics, policy makers, and even politicians that poverty and inequality should no longer be treated as soft social issues that can safely be subordinated to more fundamental interests in maximizing total economic output. The most important sources of this newfound concern with poverty and inequality are (1) the spectacular increase in economic inequality and other forms of disadvantage in many late-industrial countries (the takeoff account); (2) the striking persistence of many noneconomic forms of inequality despite decades of quite aggressive egalitarian reform (the persistence account); (3) an emerging concern that poverty and inequality may have negative macrolevel effects on terrorism, total economic production, and ethnic unrest (the macrolevel externalities account); (4) a growing awareness of the negative individual-level effects of poverty on health, political participation, and a host of other life conditions (the microlevel externalities account); (5) the rise of a global village in which regional disparities in the standard of living have become more widely visible and hence increasingly difficult to ignore (the visibility account); (6) the ongoing tendency to expose and delegitimate new types of inequalities (based on sexual orientation, disability, or citizenship) that, not so long ago, were taken for granted, rarely discussed, and barely seen (the new inequalities account); (7) a confluence of recent events (e.g., Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession, and high pay for poorly performing CEOs) that have brought poverty and inequality into especially sharp relief (the idiographic account); and (8) a growing commitment to a conception of human entitlements that include, at minimum, the right to seek or secure employment and thereby be spared extreme deprivation (the social inclusion account).

The foregoing list is remarkable in two ways. First, only three of the eight reasons for this newfound interest are about the brute empirics of inequality (i.e., its growth or intransigence), while all others are about changes in how we have come to view, study, and evaluate those empirics. When scholars now argue, for example, that inequality has multifarious effects (i.e., an externalities account), they presumably don’t mean to suggest that such effects suddenly multiplied in the contemporary period. Rather, we are to understand that inequality was always rife with externalities, however inadequately we may have appreciated them in the past. Although changes in empirics hardly exhaust, then, the sources of our growing concern with inequality, this is not to gainsay the equally important point that such changes, especially the takeoff in income inequality and the Great Recession, are likely very important in explaining why inequality has come to be understood as a fundamental social problem of our time.

The above list is no less remarkable for the relatively minor role that normative concerns play. To be sure, there appears to be a growing sentiment that, at minimum, contemporary social systems should guarantee an opportunity for all citizens to participate in economic life and hence avoid the most extreme forms of social and economic exclusion (i.e., the social inclusion account). It would nonetheless be a mistake to understand the rising interest in poverty and inequality as principally fueled by some sudden realization that social inclusion is a fundamental social good. Indeed, far from treating inequality as a moral problem in itself, the contemporary tendency is to emphasize its profound consequences and threats for the world community as a whole (i.e., the macrolevel externalities account). The rhetoric of sustainability, although more frequently featured in discussions of environmental problems, is increasingly taken as relevant to discussions of inequality as well. In adopting this rhetoric, the claim is that extreme inequality is counterproductive not just because it reduces total economic output but also because other very legitimate objectives, such as reducing mortality rates, might also be compromised. By this logic, social policy must simultaneously be oriented toward increasing economic output and restraining the rise of debilitating and counterproductive forms of inequality, a rather more complicated maximization problem than conventionally taken on in economics (see Ch. 3, Fischer et al.; and Ch. 4, Krueger).

The Role of Benign Narratives in Past Scholarship

The foregoing orientation toward poverty and inequality should be understood as a sea change relative to the sensibilities that prevailed after World War II and even into the 1960s and 1970s. To be sure, the standardissue sociologist of the past also embraced the view that inequality was an important social problem, but overlaid on this sensibility was an appreciation of various logics of history that operated in the main to reduce inequality, if only gradually and fitfully. The problem of inequality was understood, then, as a tractable moral problem, an unfortunate side circumstance of capitalism (and even socialism) that would become yet more manageable with the transition into the increasingly affluent forms of advanced industrialism. This orientation toward inequality, which we characterize as “benign,” is expressed in the standard postwar narratives about three types of outcomes: (1) the distribution of income, power, and other valued resources; (2) the distribution of opportunities for securing income, power, and other valued resources; and (3) the formation of social classes and other institutionalized groups (e.g., racial groups and gender groups). We review each of these three types of benign narratives below.

The Long-Term Trend in Inequality

The dominant inequality narrative of the postwar period featured the emergence of egalitarian ideologies and the consequent delegitimation of the extreme forms of inequality found in agrarian systems (e.g., Bell 1973; Kerr et al. 1964; and Parsons 1970). The Enlightenment was understood as fostering a critical rhetoric of equality that unleashed one of the most profound revolutions in human history. The resulting decline in inequality can be seen, for example, in (1) the European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against the privileges of rank (honorific equality); (2) the gradual elimination of inequalities in the rights to vote, own property, and speak and assemble (civil equality); (3) the abolition of slavery and the establishment of the radically egalitarian principle of self-ownership (equality of human assets); and (4) the equalization of economic assets via the rise of socialism, welfare capitalism, and their many institutions (economic equality).¹

As is well known, the latter commitment to equalizing economic assets was rather weaker than the commitment to other forms of equalization, with the result that economic inequalities remained extreme in all market economies. There was nonetheless a decline in economic inequality throughout the postwar period in the United States. According to the classic Kuznets curve (1955), the initial stages of capitalist development bring about an increase in income inequality as capital is increasingly concentrated among a small number of investors, whereas more advanced forms of capitalism entail a growth in the size of the middle class and a consequent reversal of the upward trend. The causal dynamics behind the resulting inverted-U pattern remain unclear (see Acemoglu and Robinson 2002), but most sociologists attribute the late-industrial decline in inequality to the increasingly crucial role that the skilled working class played in production, the associated growth in working-class productivity, and the leverage that this growth in skills and productivity conferred on skilled workers.

The careful reader might inquire as to the mechanisms by which cultural egalitarianism of this sort diffuses and takes hold. The conventional view in this regard is that a series of crucial historical events after the Enlightenment (e.g., the defeat of Nazism) served to define equality as one of our core cultural commitments. Absent some revolutionary event that changes this cultural trajectory, the course of human history then becomes the working out of this commitment, a task that involves shedding subsidiary values that sometimes come into conflict with our deeper commitment to egalitarianism. The core mechanism that drives this cultural diffusion may therefore be understood as the gradual reconciling of competing values to a new value, that of equality, that has been elevated by one or more historical events to a position of prominence.

The Long-Term Trend in Inequality of Opportunity

The second narrative of interest rests on a sharp distinction between the distribution of social rewards (e.g., income) and the distribution of opportunities for securing these rewards. In liberal welfare regimes, extreme inequalities in rewards may be tolerated, but only insofar as opportunities for attaining these rewards are understood to be equally distributed. It is inequalities of opportunity that are regarded, then, as especially illegitimate in the context of liberal welfare regimes.

The dominant narratives of the postwar period have these inequalities of opportunity gradually weakening. The narratives of this period may be understood as benign because they describe the withering away of precisely those types of inequalities (i.e., inequalities of opportunity) that are regarded as problematic or illegitimate. The trademark of the benign narrative is this simple correspondence between what we want and what we think will likely happen. We describe below four benign subnarratives that characterize some of the processes by which inequalities of opportunity come to be weakened.

The most famous such subnarrative pertains to the discrimination-reducing effects of competitive market economies. In his original formulation of the “taste for discrimination” model, Becker (1957) argued that discrimination would be eroded by competitive market forces because it requires employers to pay a premium to hire members of the preferred class of labor, such as males, whites, or any other ascriptively defined category. This taste is discriminatory because it rests on exogenous preferences for a certain category of labor that cannot be understood as arising from some larger concern for maximizing profitability or market share. When managers make hiring decisions in accord with such tastes, their firms will not be competitive with nondiscriminating firms because they must pay extra to secure labor from the preferred class (without any compensating increase in productivity). In standard renditions of this account, it is presumed that discriminating firms will gradually be selected out by the market, although it is also possible that some discriminating firms will change their hiring practices to remain competitive.

This economic subnarrative works in tandem with a second organizational one that emphasizes the diffusion of modern personnel practices in the form of universalistic hiring practices (e.g., open hiring and credentialism) and bureaucratized pay scales and promotion procedures (see Ch. 7, Weber; Ch. 44, Charles and Grusky; and Reskin and McBrier 2000). The essence of such bureaucratic personnel practices is a formal commitment to universalism (i.e., treating all workers equally) and to meritocratic hiring and promotion (i.e., hiring and promoting on the basis of credentials). In its ideal-typical form, the spread of bureaucracy becomes an organizational process with its own dynamic, a process of diffusion that rests not on actual efficiencies, as with the economic subnarrative, but simply on the presumption that bureaucratic practices are efficient and that modern firms must therefore adopt them. This subnarrative, like the economic one, implies that firms will gradually come to embrace organizational procedures that reduce inequalities of opportunity.

The third subnarrative of interest is the political one. Whereas the economic and organizational subnarratives treat change in inequality as an unintended by-product of macrolevel forces (i.e., competition and bureaucratization), the political subnarrative is about instrumental action explicitly oriented toward effecting a decline in ...