Teaching Social Inequality (Elgar Guides to Teaching) 1803928212, 9781803928210

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Teaching Social Inequality

ELGAR GUIDES TO TEACHING The Elgar Guides to Teaching series provides a variety of resources for instructors looking for new ways to engage students. Each volume provides a unique set of materials and insights that will help both new and seasoned teachers expand their toolbox in order to teach more effectively. Titles include selections of methods, exercises, games and teaching philosophies suitable for the particular subject featured. Each volume is authored or edited by a seasoned professor. Edited volumes comprise contributions from both established instructors and newer faculty who offer fresh takes on their fields of study. For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series, visit our website at www​.e​-elgar​.com.

Teaching Social Inequality Garth Massey Emeritus Professor of International Studies, University of Wyoming, USA

ELGAR GUIDES TO TEACHING

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Garth Massey 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945124 This book is available electronically in the Sociology, Social Policy and Education subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781803928227

ISBN 978 1 80392 821 0 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80392 822 7 (eBook)

EEP BoX

To my granddaughters, Ava Rose, Flinn Dara, Brenna Margaret and Inkeri Lyra

Contents 1

Introduction to Teaching Social Inequality1 About Teaching Social Inequality2 The importance of open classroom discussion 4 Choices for social inequality courses 5 Locating social inequality in the curriculum 6 Student preparation, or not 7 The idea behind Teaching Social Inequality9 Why social inequality matters 10 Key take-aways/key points 12

2

From inequality to stratification From different to unequal The false promise of biological essentialism, phrenology, and eugenics What non-humans tell us about social inequality The psychology of inequality Prejudice, contact, and diversity Opportunity and diversity through affirmative action From prejudice to structural inequality Key take-aways/key points

13 13

3

Typical challenges in teaching social inequality Making connections, recognizing a stratification system The social reality of race Talking about race and inequality Key take-aways/key points

24 25 27 28 30

4

Getting started with big questions What is fair? What is liberty?

31 32 33

vii

14 16 18 20 21 22 23

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Teaching social inequality

What are equity and equality? Key take-aways/key points

34 36

5

Ideas about inequality Sorting through students’ ideas Confronting good and bad ideas Key take-aways/key points

38 39 40 49

6

Theories of inequality: functionalism to power-conflict Theory in the social sciences Introducing students to social theory On the functionality of social inequality Social origins of power-conflict theory Theories’ concepts and social inequality Key take-aways/key points

50 50 52 54 59 65 66

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Inequality as power Seeing power in social structure Guiding students into and through the labyrinth of power Status, class, and power The power of status privilege and cultural appropriation Dissecting political power Patriarchal power Power of social movements Key take-aways/key points

67 67 68 69 71 74 77 80 82

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Stratification and mobility Social mobility, personal and societal Mobility in the stratification system Conveying a picture of social mobility Structural mobility The rise of the precariat Downward mobility and its backlash Social stratification and social class Social class and class culture Cultural contradictions of capitalism: Daniel Bell revisited Key take-aways/key points

84 85 86 89 91 92 94 95 96 98 100

Contents

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Wealth and poverty Wealth – learning Jay Gould’s lesson A path to wealth or a revolving door? Not poor, but not doing so well Poverty in an affluent society Wealth, poverty, and social change Key take-aways/key points

10 Global inequality What is global inequality? The growth of global wealth and income inequality Inequality between nations Inequality within nations Making sense of global poverty Globalization and global inequality Developing a global perspective Key take-aways/key points

ix

102 104 106 108 110 112 113 115 116 118 120 123 128 129 131 133

11 Consequences of inequality: spillover or by design? 134 Social inequality: telling stories 135 Migration135 Globalization’s toll 137 Socialization, early childhood, and the folks next door 138 Paying for inequality 140 141 Global inequality matters Policy matters 142 Key take-aways/key points 144 12 Current trends in inequality: forces at play The political economy of social inequality Power in the law Technological change and digital technology Health care and health care delivery Forces at play across the curriculum Key take-aways/key points

145 146 148 149 152 153 154

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13 Learning with quantitative material Trusting the numbers Assessing sources of information Data and statistics Too many numbers? What’s behind the statistics? What’s the point? Key take-aways/key points

156 157 158 161 163 164 167

14 Responding to inequality: social movements Giving voice to all students The modern Civil Rights Movement as a template Recognizing the centrality of social inequality in social movements Student activism in social movements Key take-aways/key points

168 168 171 173 181 183

15 Student research on inequality 184 Existing sources and unobtrusive measures 185 Computing with existing data 187 Interviewing188 Ethnographic and field research 190 Mixed research methods: social movements 192 Experiential learning as a research project 194 Study abroad? 195 Learning about efforts to lessen inequality far from home 196 198 Can the course afford independent research? Key take-aways/key points 199 References201 Appendix: a sample syllabus 

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Index218

1. Introduction to Teaching Social Inequality With even a cursory look at a news story having to do with some problematic aspect of daily life one will notice how often social inequality is mentioned as part of the problem. It is either a cause or an undesirable consequence, or both. Implicit in the reference is some concern, not for inequality per se, but for the degree of inequality, suggesting it is great or greater than it should be or than it needs to be, and that it is greater than norms of fairness or efficiency should accept. It links inequality to something requiring the reader’s attention: poor health or reduced life expectancy, low educational attainment or the burden of college loans, police apprehension and incarceration, the siting of plants and landfills that discharge toxic waste, proposals for urban transit routes, political contributions and access to those in power, a crime committed by a mentally ill or addicted unhoused person. It may suggest that wealth or power is ill gotten but rarely that the distributive system is completely haywire. Far from embracing a utopian image, few people and no well-regarded organization espouse a society without inequality. Barely an issue worth polling, it is universally accepted that some people have more than others, that a well-functioning society not only accepts but also endorses a degree of inequality that both spurs ambition and rewards effort. Most of the uber-rich have benefited from inheritance, but this does not diminish the universal sense that people should be able to pass along their cultural capital and material advantage to their offspring. Progressive taxation is widely endorsed, tax evasion is condemned, but taxes should not be confiscatory. When the dust settles, most voters prefer a candidate who promises to lower taxes, or at least their taxes. Rich crooks should be taken down, but rich hedge fund managers are just part of the system most people believe in. Poor people should be helped, but a guaranteed income for everyone would not only reward idleness, it would break the bank and destroy innovation. The conveyor belt from wealthy households to prestigious schools to lucrative careers – solidifying for the few the advantages of meritocracy – has enough unoccupied spaces for others to hop on. No one wants to throw the brake handle. Teaching social inequality begins by facing the fact that it is apparent everywhere, and most people think it is okay. 1

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In the past half-century, the study of social inequality has made giant strides. Case studies and qualitative research have opened eyes to the complex, often destructive and compromised lives of unhoused individuals, the empty promises foisted on a growing precariat, the struggles of the working poor and those in the low-wage economy who make do with stagnating wages, and people who in an earlier generation might well have been solid members of the middle class. Less scholarly attention has been given to the successfully striving upper-middle class and the affluent, but the very wealthy and powerful remain, as they have been for centuries, a curiosity and topic of great interest. At the same time, computers and digital technology have made possible the analysis of enormous data sets from longitudinal and panel surveys, public polling, and existing, often government-collected data. Multivariate analysis and other sophisticated statistical techniques have explored the importance of both achievement and inheritance for social mobility. Quantitative data assess public policies, map the crystallization and fluidity of social classes, put numbers on the intersectionality of ascriptive status, such as race, gender, and age, and offer translations of wealth into power and power into wealth. This can almost feel like information overload, but it reflects both the significance of social inequality and the importance of understanding it. Because it is so central to our knowledge of today’s society and its operations, inequality is a phenomenon too urgent to be left out of any serious conversation. And it makes the teaching of social inequality a fundamental part of education in a democratic society. Because there is little consensus about its causes, what it actually looks like, and how (and how much) it contributes to both desirable and undesirable outcomes, social inequality is one of the most challenging topics in the social science portfolio.

ABOUT TEACHING SOCIAL INEQUALITY Teaching Social Inequality is intended to be a useful guide, a source of ideas and possibilities for college and university faculty and graduate students who have never or seldom taught social inequality or want to teach it more effectively in a related course. It is written, as well, for those who want to teach differently, either in the material they are using or the way they are teaching. Importantly, it emphasizes learning and teaching, addressing how students learn as much as how and what one might want or feel obliged to teach. It is not a reference manual of effective teaching methods based on current pedagogic research, nor is it a sourcebook of tried-and-true tactics and strategies. It sparingly includes references (e.g., books, articles, videos) and, overall, it does not offer a catalog of teaching material. Statistics are terribly important in any course where students are learning about social inequality, but with the

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exception of Chapters 9 and 10, there aren’t many cited in Teaching Social Inequality. Where numbers are included in the discussion, they are date-specific, referenced somewhat generally, and may seem a bit outdated. For instance, the number of children in poverty households in the US (cited in Chapter 9) varied greatly in the past decade, depending on the directives the presidential administration gave executive agencies, a shifting labor market, and the federal government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Contemporary data are readily available and rapidly changing. I trust the instructor to find and select the best data relevant to the design of their course. The book is organized topically, a menu of sorts that can be read cover-to-cover or selectively. Because the reader may pick a particular chapter to read rather than the book in its entirety, there is some repetition of topics that might otherwise have been avoided. For instance, the topic of Chapter 10, global inequality, includes a discussion of globalization. The discussion of power in Chapter 7 includes the power of social movements, discussed more fully in Chapter 14. Globalization appears again in Chapter 11 and both topics are included in Chapter 14, which is entirely devoted to social movements, including the anti-globalization movement. Because instructors are terribly busy, this book will probably be read in snatches. It will be consulted when needed. As such, it has been written to be read easily, much of it in conversational language. If an instructor is looking for ideas, the ideas should be obvious and unlabored. Providing this is the intent of Teaching Social Inequality. Instructors don’t need to be told how to teach. They may need suggestions and ways to get the point across. Some topics, for example, global inequality (Chapter 10), the consequences of inequality (Chapter 11), and the social forces lessening and increasing inequality (Chapter 12), offer less pedagogical guidance than ways of seeing and understanding the system of stratification that help students appreciate its importance. The author has avoided personal anecdotes and recounting personal experiences in the classroom. The first-person singular will not be found here. Instead, Teaching Social Inequality offers illustrations and choices an instructor can adopt as they see fit. This is not a discussion full of tips and clever tricks, though it inevitably draws on more than three decades of teaching about social inequality at the undergraduate and graduate levels in courses devoted solely to stratification and mobility and courses where inequality is a central theme, such as race and ethnic relations, labor in society, economic sociology, and social change. Chapters proceed from somewhat more general to specific topics, but this order is not intended to reflect the chronology of an instructor’s syllabus. The chapters do not provide an outline for a course in social inequality; the

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Appendix offers one possibility. The chapters may have some logical sequencing, but they are topical and address the questions, content possibilities, student concerns, and ways of approaching the topic that an instructor might appreciate in their efforts to help students learn about social inequality. There is far more material discussed in this book than could ever be taught in a single social inequality course. The attention to social inequality in another course, say race and ethnic relations, could incorporate only a small fraction of the suggestions and possibilities described here. There are many lists in the narratives of Teaching Social Inequality. Some of these are incomplete; others may be redundant chapter to chapter. These listings are intended as offerings, suggesting to instructors a wide range of choices. An emphasis here is on the reasons for raising questions and inviting discussion with the class. Would reading and talking about the unequal arrest, conviction, incarceration, and sentencing terms of men of color help students not only to know about this but also to see the structural basis for social inequality? Would the struggle and rapid success of efforts to eradicate discrimination against persons who do not identify with the sex on their birth certificate spark the attention needed to learn how and why discrimination operates more generally?

THE IMPORTANCE OF OPEN CLASSROOM DISCUSSION Student learning is an interactive process between instructor and students and among students. While the technologies that absorb students’ attention today seem to isolate them from one another, the learning experience described in Teaching Social Inequality encourages and relies on shared engagement with the material. Even in large classes, discussion and verbal exchanges of disagreements are possible. Time can be given to thinking about and responding to what the instructor is saying and showing, and especially to the instructor’s reference to facts and logic intended to sort out a disagreement. These moments are a very important part of the learning process. Discussions can also take place through writing. When students are not responding, they can be asked to write: a sentence, three points, an idea in a short paragraph. It is sometimes easier for reticent students to participate when asked to read what they have written. Students can exchange slips of paper and read what another person has written. Done in a supportive way, this helps them join the discussion. In this and any number of ways, information revealed in discussion can be used by the instructor to immediately gauge the learning experience. Whether learning is happening, if another approach is needed, or the material to be

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learned bears repeating, now or later, knowing what students are thinking and feeling is crucial, and it is available when there is interaction. Much of what is presented here and many of the suggestions for introducing and handling material assume the possibility of evoking student reactions and responses, open discussion, and a mutual, respectful search for understandings. It does not seek agreement on matters of opinion, ethical values, or first principles. Rather, between what students usually bring to the course and where the instructor would like them to go is a huge space that invites clarity, attention to facts, sound reasoning, and the acquisition of tools needed to make some sense of the world.

CHOICES FOR SOCIAL INEQUALITY COURSES While Teaching Social Inequality recommends historical and comparative approaches and sees them as vital to student learning, faculty may choose to make their social inequality course more or less historically informed. It can focus entirely on the US or another country with little attention to global inequality. It may be more or less intended to spur students to social activism. It might include some fieldwork, independent research of existing material, and quantitative data analysis, or none at all. Teaching Social Inequality offers suggestions for instructors following any and all of these options. The demands of post-secondary teaching, great as they are, compete with many other wants and needs of the organization. Research and writing, providing expertise and time in a service capacity both within and outside the organization, and the day-to-day emotional and time-consuming contact and problem solving with students and colleagues makes it difficult to teach with all the energy one might like. It is a challenge to imagine and follow a curriculum that will take students from blithe ignorance and misguided notions to a place where the social sciences have an impact on their understandings. What to do? Many texts today offer a package of teaching material. These are handy and probably designed with more pizzazz than what the typical faculty member can create. Students learn from them. The texts themselves are usually well written and clear in what the student is expected to know. A text and its peripherals are both a source of information and a manual for absorbing the information. Texts spell out what is to be learned and how this is to happen. Despite the closure and confidence this offers, Teaching Social Inequality also has something that may be of value even to an instructor using a text. There are interstices in texts where additional ideas and topics can be inserted. Instructors may assign a student research project (Chapter 15) or want to focus on social change and social movements (Chapter 14) that are not offered in a text. A text may be light on theories of social inequality (Chapter 6), devote little attention to the history of Western imperialism (Chapter 10), or

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say less about power than an instructor thinks is needed (Chapter 7). Teaching Social Inequality can be useful in such instances. It is very possible that an instructor wants to fashion a course that takes students into areas of a topic where texts have not yet caught up. This could especially be in such areas of gender and queer studies, global social movements, a course on labor that addresses the decline in unionization’s ability to lessen social inequality, or the implications for inequality of a new technology or advances in artificial intelligence. When time permits and a faculty member feels ambitious or dissatisfied with what a text provides, she may in effect start from scratch and build a course of her own. The voices of multiple authors and the varied sources, points of view, perspectives and outlooks offer a diversity that at some point in the course will resonate with every student. By including material from popular sources, students can see the relevance of the topic for a wide audience. It allows for inclusion of the most current statistics, social movements, and legal decisions regarding social inequality. New ideas and a new look at old ideas can be included in ways that may be more likely to engage students in the back-and-forth arguments academics take for granted but are unknown or rarely revealed outside the academy. The Appendix offers one such course, covering many of the facets of a standard social inequality course for undergraduates that follows much of what is discussed in Teaching Social Inequality. It is obvious that an instructor using this or a similar syllabus has not adopted a text. The course has been built “from scratch.” Nor does it rely on a single collection of readings available in one place, though David Grusky and Szonja Szelényi’s The Inequality Reader (2011) contains several assignments. It includes perhaps more quantitative material than some would like, but the articles from Pathways, published by Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, are readily accessible. Some excellent articles in popular magazines articulate the realities of social inequality better than can most instructors and offer much fodder for class discussion. If there is only one thing Teaching Social Inequality can contribute to a course it is this: Discussion is fundamental to all the ways students learn – often despite their resistance or skepticism – about the centrality of social inequality in modern society.

LOCATING SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN THE CURRICULUM One of the greatest challenges in Teaching Social Inequality is to address the very wide range of courses that can be offered under some version of the social inequality title. It could be a general introduction to sociology or

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a lower-division course similar to what was once taught as “social problems” that emphasizes problematic organizational, institutional, and societal topics related to unequal life chances. It could be part of a race and ethnicity course emphasizing the legacy and persistence of prejudice, discrimination, and systemic racism, possibly addressing class inequality as conjoined to racist societal practices. Other courses where social inequality is an integral part include gender and women’s studies courses, queer studies, courses on immigration and border studies, the sociology of work and economic sociology, political sociology, globalization, aging studies, and disability studies. These and other courses requiring an examination of the stratification system and different life chances for categories and groups of people will rarely find social inequality in their course title. Nonetheless, hopefully there will be something of value offered here in the way of addressing social inequality in these courses. It may be tempting to teach “inequality-lite” when there is so much else to cover in courses not specifically or solely devoted to the topic. Inequality is only one of many descriptors of situations and arrangements in society. Similarly, the preferred level of analysis may be the psychological, interpersonal, or cultural rather than the structural. As will be discussed throughout Teaching Social Inequality, regardless of the course level, learning about social inequality means being exposed to many of the same facts, engaging with the same concepts, exploring the same understandings, and grappling with many of the same issues. It is hoped that faculty, regardless of how much space or attention is given to social inequality in their course, will find useful ideas and approaches in Teaching Social Inequality.

STUDENT PREPARATION, OR NOT Teaching Social Inequality is written not only for four-year college and university faculty teaching undergraduate courses for sociology majors. It is written with any student in mind who has drifted into the course or is fulfilling a general education checklist. It can be useful for community college faculty and possibly those teaching high school Advanced Placement courses. The ideas and observations offered can also be helpful in teaching advanced-degree students in interdisciplinary and applied programs who have not had acquaintance with a social science approach to understanding and analyzing social inequality. The upper-division course that focuses on or includes social inequality may be for interested sociology majors, interdisciplinary majors, or students majoring in other social sciences. Usually titled Social Stratification or Stratification and Mobility, this course will require a stronger grounding in social science

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thinking but may not, unfortunately, have a prerequisite of social statistics and research methods. It is unusual for an academic department to require a course entirely devoted to social inequality as preparation for other courses. In the best of all worlds, the course would be a prerequisite for courses focused on race and ethnicity, globalization, gender or women’s studies, migration and border studies, criminology, urban and rural sociology. This would be rare, however. The evaluation of departments and programs, increasingly based on student hours generated (i.e., tuition paid), means that, even if these courses are at the upper-division level, they will be open to any student. This presents a distinct challenge for student learning, given the centrality of social inequality and the stratification system to all of these topical courses. Fortunately, student motivation for taking a social inequality course may be more than to satisfy a general education requirement which, in many colleges and universities, can be accomplished with only one lower-division social science course. Not often, but sometimes this is the case. Motivated or not, the course is their opportunity to glimpse the sociological imagination and appreciate how this can inform their understandings in the years to come. Given a politicized social media environment that not only offers a plethora of “alternative facts” but is suspicious of or hostile to the social sciences more broadly, the opportunity to help students appreciate the rigor and insights of the social sciences is not to be squandered. Perhaps surprisingly, some students come to the course lacking such basic skills as the ability to read a chart or graph. A table of information may be no more informative than a wallpaper pattern of dots and squiggles. Quantitative information has a way of inducing a “brain freeze” for more than a few of them. Similarly, with no background in research methods, time has to be devoted to explaining how good research can generate good findings. Students can show surprise that many of the things disguised as facts – factoids read and heard on a smartphone – barely qualify. Student disinterest in reading from low-attention-grabbing sources may limit the amount of material assigned to students, but it should not mean avoiding the scholarship in the field, qualitative and quantitative. It is worth taking the time to walk through and encourage discussion about data presented in readings, using this as an opportunity to build the narrative that will help students see the empirical realities of social stratification. This is discussed more fully in Chapter 13. Students may have little knowledge of where information about social inequality comes from, be unable to evaluate its quality or appreciate its limitations, or simply may be bored by or uninterested in the practice of scientific inquiry. The stories social inequality tells, however, and the excursions taken in their pursuit, can be engaging and empowering. It can offer students

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the sense that inquiry is exciting and rewarding both for those who believe strongly that inequality is problematic and those who think it is unfairly criticized and unappreciated.

THE IDEA BEHIND TEACHING SOCIAL INEQUALITY Students live in a world that celebrates privilege. They are only at the beginning of an awareness of the wielding of power that operates massive organizations, fuels competing agendas in cities, divides rural from urban, pits countries against one another, and directs the collective might of a nation. And, they literally have no idea of great wealth. “When you fly over the land at 36,000 feet, do you ask yourself: Who owns all of that?” When they are told that only a few thousand people own most of it in a world of 8 billion people, students may scribble in their notes or tap their computer keys, but it really doesn’t compute. Instead, pass out tangerines on the basis of annual household income, each worth the equivalent of $10,000, to 20 students (each person representing 5 percent of the nation’s population). This results, of course, in a few people needing bags to hold their fruit. Then shift the distribution to wealth. It will require several more bags for the wealthiest and will leave nearly half the students empty-handed. Switching from the US to another country or shifting to the income or wealth a decade or a century ago is also instructive for obvious reasons. Whether enacting an illustration or writing a response to their instructor’s provocation, students must be engaged. Otherwise, as Phillips Cutright used to say, “statistics will just bounce off their foreheads.” Talk of faraway places – within their own city or in a distant continent – will fly past them like bats in the night. They’ll be checking their phones or in no time be rifling through their backpacks. Teaching about social inequality is not a rhetorical exercise. No professional social scientist endorses propaganda in the classroom. The more neutral notion of ideology that Karl Mannheim (1936) described has mutated into a plague that can’t be justified in the curriculum. Does this mean that faculty must confine themselves to (quoting a voice from the past, police detective Joe Friday, who interrupted the complaint of an aggrieved woman by telling her) “Just the facts, Ma’am”? When the sociologist Howard Becker (1967) asked in the tumultuous ’60s, “Whose Side Are We On?,” he sought to encourage engagement and responsibility by those few of us who have the privilege to teach and do whatever research moves us. Teaching Social Inequality recommends the same. First and foremost, however, it recognizes that social inequality is an emotion-charged topic, the facts of which are neither obvious nor are they par-

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ticularly attractive features of a democratic society. It offers ways of engaging students and helping them make informed choices about the most important dimension of society and its connections to its most serious problems. It offers a clearer view of possibilities for themselves and their world, based on the best available information and modes of understanding. Regardless of their personal values and aspirations, it encourages them to ask about social inequality and its place in whatever they find inexplicable, opaque, confusing, troubling, and in need of change.

WHY SOCIAL INEQUALITY MATTERS The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to make clear that the current situation, nationally and internationally, was failing to address vital social issues and the many crises of the Anthropocene associated with the natural environmental. Apparent was the importance of a large but vulnerable and poorly remunerated portion of the national and global workforces. From the Costco in Cleveland to the Nike-contracted workshop in Thailand, the pandemic exposed the gap between those who could comfortably sustain themselves or even enhance their labor and lifestyle within the requirements of the pandemic and those who bore the weight of its burdens. The “essential workers” not only labored for the lowest wages but kept the lives of others and the supply chains of a global economy approaching some level of normalcy. Only they could give the rest of us what we wanted and needed. These most vulnerable individuals, households, communities, and regions were suddenly recognized, at least temporarily. Made apparent was a new version of the digital divide: those whose work could be done virtually versus those who had to show up at work as usual. Some stay-at-home-to-work parents could supervise their children’s education while others left their children under self-supervision, expecting them to go to the virtual classroom. Subsequent research has shown the unequal effects of virtual learning and growth in the disparity in national test scores between the more advantaged students and others. This divide will be long, if ever, in closing. Similarly, while the pandemic forced the widescale adoption of telemedicine, it brought new attention to the unequal access to health care and the global disparity in the capability to respond to health crises. The uneven response to the pandemic exacerbated the growing inequality of the 21st century. Working at home has contributed to the demand for second homes and ever-larger new homes further from one’s previous workplace. This has accelerated the cost of homes, the rising cost of housing in poorer rural areas, and the unaffordability of shelter for many of those who rent. Germany’s adoption of the “short week” to reduce redundancy during the pandemic was rarely adopted elsewhere. Instead, unemployment soared, and

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the gig economy of contingent workers grew. Governments responded with enormous outlays to support workers laid off and families whose reduced earnings pushed them closer to poverty. This vital spending, necessary and appreciated, was one of several factors that subsequently led to inflation of prices around the world, as usual squeezing the poor most of all. Because of the pandemic, “deglobalization” and disillusionment about neoliberalism is no longer an issue only for progressive and left-radical social movements. It has become a staple of populist and nationalist rallying cries from Hungary to Akron, Ohio. Not only those who endorse America First, corporations have come to recognize the Achilles’ heel of the global supply chain. Governments are now keen to pass legislation bolstering domestic manufacturing. The failure to establish global standards for environmental protection and labor have again been exposed. The declining economic and social health of communities has taken the glow off globalization. The promises made in the 1990s during a love affair with open markets, deregulation of global finances, and the push for efficiency rather than economic resilience now ring hollow. At the same time, in many countries economic nationalism has morphed into jingoism and opposition to immigration. In turn, those who have come seeking a better life or fleeing dangerous situations are confronting hostility fed by nativist rhetoric and a politics of fear and grievance. Their communities, they believe, are becoming unsafe, traditions are being trampled on, and their children’s chances in life are diminishing in light of favoritism toward others and a celebration of diversity that doesn’t include them. It is a potentially explosive narrative driven by neoliberalism’s disregard of the inequalities it fosters. The global recession looming in response to inflation will, as always, hurt those the most who can least afford it. They spend whatever they make on ever more expensive goods, public services, housing, and health care. Regaining price stability and a modest rate of inflation will not happen before whatever wage gains they receive are gobbled up by rising prices. Higher interest rates will put the cost of a mortgage out of reach. To tame inflation, business will scale back or go under, and employees will be left without work. As this litany of outcomes makes obvious, social inequality is the issue front and center of any informed discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why it has had such devastating consequences, what it revealed about the current situation, and the pandemic’s aftermath cannot remotely be understood without an awareness of the structures of inequality. This attention to the importance of understanding social inequality is no isolated example. Like it or not, regret it or wish it were otherwise, social inequality and the structure of social stratification is the edifice on which most of social life is built, is maintained, and changes. That is why it is so important that it be taught well.

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KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Students often resist many of the ideas and research findings about social inequality. It is incumbent on instructors to recognize this and to help students see the importance and centrality of social inequality in their studies and in the world today. • Reference to social inequality, and especially growing inequality, is pervasive in today’s news and public discussions of current events. • Understanding the causes and consequences of social inequality is of great importance for involvement of all citizens in a democratic society. • Teaching Social Inequality focuses on student learning as much as what one might teach in the course. • Discussion is perhaps the most important element for effective learning about social inequality; this book offers myriad examples of what might be discussed. • Social inequality may be taught as a distinct course or a fundamental part of another course, such as introductory sociology, race and ethnic relations, gender studies, globalization, political sociology, or criminal justice. • Advanced graduate students and faculty new to teaching social inequality can read select chapters or easily find suggestions for handling specific material and issues.

2. From inequality to stratification The structure of social inequality is the foundation of modern society, in terms of which all institutions and organizations operate. As such, understanding the structure of social inequality is at the heart of sociology and the social sciences generally. In a recent issue of Contemporary Sociology, of 34 sociology book reviews, 18 are explicitly focused on inequality: of power, gender, interpersonal interaction, poverty and welfare, race and ethnicity, immigration, environmental justice, criminal justice, health care, education, and so on. This journal issue is not particularly unusual. It is not necessary to convince students that inequality is a sociological obsession, but it is exactly that, and for good reason. As Peter Berger (1963) might have said, nothing that seeks to explain “why we do what we do” can avoid confronting the ubiquity of social inequality.

FROM DIFFERENT TO UNEQUAL Very early in the course it is useful to help students distinguish the horizontal from the vertical. What seem to be inequalities of talent, intelligence, gender, age, and so forth may in fact be recognized by students as differences in kind. Such differences, they can aver, proliferate. Personal styles, formative experiences, dialects and language usage, religious preference and level of religiosity, regionality, culinary tastes, enthusiasm for sports and leisure activities, levels of alcohol and drug use … . The list could almost be infinite. In its simplest form, these are categories of social differentiation. What is crucial in understanding social inequality is that such categorical groupings are likely to be recognized and emotionally charged when they carry differential social, political, or economic value. Beyond their seeming categorical neutrality, they are invested with additional significance and social meaning. They advantage some more than others, penalizing or being a liability for some but not everyone. This can be true especially for religious inequality, ethnic or racial inequality, national identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, educational attainment, encounters with the justice system, and various other statuses that privilege some over others. That is the world of social inequality students live in but may not be particularly attuned to. As will be emphasized throughout the course, and the explicit focus in Chapter 8, inequality that is systemic or a basic feature of interpersonal 13

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interaction, organizational behavior, and institutions is woven into the fabric of social life. This is social stratification. It is both structural and dynamic. Understanding social stratification means exploring how inequality is generated, maintained, and occasionally but importantly resisted. Students will learn that social stratification is a moving edifice that slowly arcs toward or away from equity and social justice.

THE FALSE PROMISE OF BIOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM, PHRENOLOGY, AND EUGENICS Many students choose to study physiology, chemistry, biology, zoology, and other life sciences that explore how living things – ourselves included – have evolved and seek to maintain their life form. Using a simple logic, students initially see the dynamic of this evolution as a matter of best fit or survival of the fittest. Life forms change in a changing environment, adapting to new stresses, competing for resources, and becoming extinct. When the topic of social inequality arises, they draw on what they have learned about genetics, biochemistry, hormones, physiology, disease, impairment from alcohol and drug abuse, mental health, biological maturation, and physical decline. From a sociological point of view, this can open up a great deal of discussion about social inequality, full of ideas and opinions that should not be passed over. As a contributor to understanding social inequality, it is only a starting point, a portal, though perhaps not the most comfortable one. For most social scientists, biology offers a metaphor, not an explanation, of social inequality. Because of its popularity, however, it is incumbent to address some or many aspects of the promise biology has for centuries offered as an approach to and understanding of social inequality. Among the many cliches students are likely to offer, nature versus nurture is common. Genetic science shows that this is a false dichotomy, but it is nonetheless a staple of everyday thought. Recognizing this as “biological essentialism,” the writers M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin (2022: 46) put this very well: “The relationship between genotype and phenotype depends on the environment in which phenotype is measured … . We can no more unbraid genetics from environment than we can unbraid history and culture, or climate and landscape, or language and thought.” The easy answer to social inequality – that it is either natural or a matter of environment – is among the first ideas that needs to be dispelled. “The idea of a biological hierarchy of intelligence arose alongside [the first pre-Darwin] theories of human evolution. It never goes away when discredited, just changes form” (Feldman and Riskin, 2022: 43). As early as 1810, nearly half a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, phrenology came into vogue. It posited

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how features of the skull – its shape and contours, for example – reveal plusses and minuses of the brain, which in turn reflect a person’s mental powers, that is, their intelligence. Stephen Jay Gould’s (1981) The Mismeasure of Man describes how elaborate sketches and measurements – not only of the cranium but of the entire skeletal system – seemed to offer proof that White males, especially some but not all Northern Europeans, had superior physiologies and, hence, greater intelligence. They were the forerunners of modern civilization, after which the rest of humankind would follow, albeit with the assistance of these trailblazers. The sentiment that drove phrenology by the mid-1800s led to the embracement and prescriptions of eugenics. If physical/mental features explained why Britain’s superiority led it (along with other European nations) to control so much of the globe, it could also prescribe the means to improve the capability of others to join the nation in civilization. Along with Christianity and a market economy, the systemic control of procreation was the answer. Implicitly this was to be the solution to the vast inequality of material well-being between the civilized few and the rest of the world. Jill Lapore has written about the very popular 1914 Progressive Era schoolbook authored by William Hunter, Civic Biology. This is the book John Scopes was using when charged with illegally teaching evolution in a Tennessee school. Hunter wrote, “Society itself is founded upon the principles which biology teaches … . Plants and animals … enter into competition with one another and those which are best fitted for life outstrip the others” (Lapore, 2022: 18). Greatly simplifying the Darwin–Wallace hypotheses regarding alcoholics, the criminal, and the mentally ill, Hunter concluded, “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading” (quoted in Lapore, 2022: 18). Eugenics not only offered a materially visible explanation for poverty and short lifespans but also gave a scientific imprimatur to racism and imperialism. Though discarded by science and the mainstream public more than a century ago, embers of eugenics thinking have never been totally extinguished. Despite being thoroughly discredited, the racist sentiments driving eugenics can be found in a wide range of both popular and professional narratives. Recently, the psychologist Kathryn Harden’s (2021) The Genetic Lottery makes a more sophisticated argument favoring genetics as the foundation of success (and failure), hence social inequality. A person’s biological acumen as scored on a “polygenic index” is associated with their educational attainment, a key factor in occupational success and lifetime earnings. Causality is implied rather than stated, but nonetheless her recommendations are apparent. Not to be thought an advocate of biology-driven inequality, Harden applies a patina of liberalism by supporting equity-driven social policies that take account of nature’s prejudice of favoring some over others.

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It’s not unusual for students to suggest a biological basis for both individual-to-individual inequality and large-scale group differences. In discussions of eugenics, historical context helps to cut through these narratives, showing how slavery, Jim Crow, and opposition to immigration from Ireland, the Pale of Settlement, Southern Europe, East and South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa kept eugenics and quasi-eugenics thinking alive long after its bogus evidence was obvious. In the case of phenotypic differences, class discussion can lead to physical differences and especially stigma associated with skin color, gender, bodies (too large, too small, too short or tall), missing or unusual limbs, hair texture, and the all-around standards of beauty and homeliness. This immediately takes the focus into the social. Who makes the rules, polices the boundaries, applies or withholds the rewards, and acts with or without privilege for what others see in a person?

WHAT NON-HUMANS TELL US ABOUT SOCIAL INEQUALITY Contemporary sociobiology, too, is interested in questions about the biological basis for social behavior, but the best sociobiology is careful when occasionally suggesting a connection between human and non-human behavior. Even among “eusocial insects” (ants, bees, wasps, and termites), as evolutionary sociologist Richard Machalek has observed, “any sort of social categories that might be thought of as even analogous to social strata among humans are absent among non-human social species” (Machalek, personal correspondence, April 15, 2022). Yes, some ants and some bees live in colonies that appear to be a social community, but the “castes” are a matter of division of labor rather than dominance hierarchies. Machalek points out the obvious: dominance hierarchies that do exist among some non-human species appear to be strata, but this is not a social stratification system. Curiously, zoologists, entomologists, and evolutionary biologists are not always shy about drawing lessons from their own studies and applying them to human society. It would be unheard of for a sociologist or any other social scientist to infer accordingly, say, taking insights from Erving Goffman or Michael Foucault and applying them to scorpions or crows. This simply would be considered anthropomorphism. Students, however, are not always shy about offering such ideas in reverse. And they are often well armed with speculative biology. Typical is recent research published in Behavioral Ecology (Smith et al., 2021: 2) that observed adult red squirrels squirreling away caches of food and leaving them behind for their near-adult offspring, “shaping legacies of inequality along bloodlines.” The authors speculate that this may have a parallel

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in human society. It could be capable of explaining health disparities between the human populations of the poor and the nonpoor, widely made apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Affluent parents, they suggest, leave to their offspring material benefits and what Pierre Bourdieu (1986) called cultural capital that advantages them in much the same way as hover wasps, clownfish, and hyenas. This strongly implies that humans, too, may be wired to promote inequality through intergenerational transfers of wealth, with the implication – harkening back to William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer – that policies limiting or thwarting this are ignorant of nature’s ways. Most sociologists would, at best, entertain the association between red squirrels’ wealth accumulation behavior and intergenerational mobility as only a metaphor. Still, it’s not unusual for students to hold such ideas. It is instructive to bring them into the classroom conversation. Rather than dismissing anodyne observations and spurious thinking as being simply wrong, they can be a teaching moment. Michele Goldberg (2022), a New York Times opinion writer, recently lauded a book that laments the poor quality of creativity in the arts and popular culture today, what she calls cultural stagnation. The book’s author explains this as a result of the ubiquitous smartphone and time-consuming absorption to the internet, deflecting would-be creators from exposure to new art which is often uncomfortable but thought- (and creativity-) provoking. At its heart of this idea is a curious concept of “status struggles.” Goldberg enthuses that the idea “posits cultural evolution as a sort of perpetual motion machine driven by people’s desire to ascend the social hierarchy. Artists innovate to gain status, and people unconsciously adjust their tastes to either signal their status tier or move up to a new one” (Goldberg, 2022: A24). This itself is a stretch of imagination. The pursuits of money, power, and status are real phenomena, but to attribute any of this to some innate desire is to fabricate a causal mechanism out of whole cloth. There is a certain plausibility to the idea of what sociologists have for years called “status striving” along with “status anxiety” and “status envy.” Thorstein Veblen (1899) entertained generations with such ideas in his Theory of the Leisure Class. They are popular descriptions of the visible symptoms of a few, possibly some of the most successful, of us. Like the character of Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s (1952) What Makes Sammy Run?, they make for fascinating characters in novels and movies. Some people may even describe themselves this way. Beyond their descriptive value, however, their validity regarding causality is highly suspect. There are many ways instructors can work with students to both deconstruct these ideas and shed light on the sentiments and class interests behind them. A warning to those teaching social inequality: Be ready for and enjoy discussions of ideas about “human nature.” It’s not pollyannaish to treat

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them as opportunities rather than obstacles. Working through them begins a term-long practice of polite disagreement, offering the tools of research, respect for empirical inquiry, and reliance on conceptualization and theory that actually parse out the suspect but popular opinions students bring to class. Distinguishing plausibility from actuality is part of the dialogue to be welcomed in the classroom.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF INEQUALITY It is always a challenge to help students navigate units and levels of analysis. Because we live a social life full of persons and interpersonal relationships, these are the starting points for most students interested to know why we do what we do. Students are drawn in large numbers to the fields of psychology and social psychology for insights into how people feel and think, make decisions or act impulsively, see themselves and their place in the world around them, and try to understand each other. A course that studies social inequality will almost surely include human psychology as a pathway to understanding the structure of social inequality. Psychology explores the factors that may contribute to unequal treatment in the structure of inequality, delving into psychological differences that manifest themselves as, or become defining features of, social inequality. Psychological research makes important contributions to understanding the maintenance, outcomes, and often the damage of such things as poverty, poor health, financial insecurity, chronic unemployment, and unsafe neighborhoods for individuals. This scholarship has much to offer the social inequality curriculum, especially in tallying the high costs of inequality not only for its victims, but for society as a whole. In psychological studies of inequality, the general approach is to hypothesize how inequality influences or is correlated with such things as a sense of well-being, depression, feelings of social isolation, and such. It is also a critical variable in studies of the treatment of psychological maladies (i.e., how access to and treatments of mental illness – serious and mild – vary across the social classes, races, and genders). In studying the consequences of social inequality for individuals, such things as educational aspiration, racial prejudice, a sense of personal well-being, and the likelihood of developing an addiction are extremely important as part of the picture of living in an unequal society and the costs it incurs. Among the most famous of psychological studies of inequality are those by Ruth Horowitz who in 1939 showed drawings of stick figures to African American students. In the next decade Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted their famous “doll studies.” Both showed the negative effects of inferior, segregated schooling on Black children’s sense of self, personal worth, and

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efficacy. These studies were offered as evidence in the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to great effect and were cited in the Court’s decision. Somewhat more infamous, part and parcel to eugenics, is the more modern emphasis on IQ as a marker of cognitive abilities that apparently explains why some experience more privilege, power, and material well-being than others. Sometimes called biological essentialism, this reductionist logic originated in cognitive tests more than a hundred years ago and, though highly suspect, remains popular today. This pseudo-science attributes to “innate intelligence” the perseverance of differences in educational achievement between ethnic groups. Made popular in monographs, such as the psychologist Richard Herrnstein’s (1994) The Bell Curve, the research designs and statistical analyses of the relationship between IQ and inequality have been discredited by a great deal of scholarship, notably by Claude Fischer and his colleagues (Fischer et al., 1996). Still, this canard lingers today in coffee shops and around dining room tables despite compelling evidence to the contrary. The idea that genotype manifests itself in socially appropriate phenotypic differences in intelligence undergirding social inequality is as old as phrenology. At best, it recommends policies aimed at social equity to remedy the way nature operates. Rather than being dismissed out of hand in social inequality courses, this idea deserves attention and discussion, both as a relic of the history of racial and ethnic discrimination and as a foundational assumption of the misuse of meritocratic criteria and misguided equity measures in education and the economy. Lurking behind the curtain is another largely discredited notion, achievement motivation. David McClelland’s (1961) idea remains a staple of popular thought. With its comparative design, scales, and persuasive measurements, since the 1950s it has provided tools for evaluating personality traits that seem in sync with small-scale capitalism as well as the ambitions of the rich and powerful. Less accepted today in the social sciences in the US, Great Britain, and Europe, it continues to be taught in business courses there and elsewhere. In China, India, and other countries keen to explain the reasons for their entrepreneurial success, achievement motivation is a staple. Most sociology courses will not delve into the fraught concept of personality type, but the sentiments bolstered by the notion of achievement motivation make for useful classroom discussion. Students may have even taken the still-popular Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test to find out who they are. This offers a good opportunity to discuss the importance of reputable versus pop science, cross-cultural research, and the implicit bias for finding drivers in psychological form for existing relations of social inequality.

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PREJUDICE, CONTACT, AND DIVERSITY One of the greatest challenges students face in understanding inequality begins with the unavoidable, compelling concept of prejudice. An attribute of individuals that can be expanded to describe categories and groups of people, prejudice is something about which students come to the classroom feeling they know quite a lot. It is a useful starting point in exploring variations in beliefs and attitudes and the contexts – historical and comparative – in which it plays an important role to strengthen or dilute structural inequality. It is tempting to ascribe prejudice to the vocabulary of motives that do little more than excuse or justify discriminatory behavior. On the contrary, in its public displays, prejudice is such a visible and visceral part of the landscape of group phobias or hatreds – Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and of course racism – that it cannot be brushed aside as epiphenomenal. It is very much a part of the public discussion of social inequality. In the middle of the previous century the psychologist Gordon Allport (1954) assembled dozens of research findings to construct what became a text for understanding the origins, nature, and mitigation of prejudice. Allport surveyed the available studies of prejudice that charted its strengths among populations, its often unacknowledged or veiled expressions, its implications for those toward whom it is most viral, and the means for limiting its consequences. Allport’s conclusion, the contact hypothesis, became a staple of social psychology and political geography, lending itself to empirical research across a wide swath of situations. The idea is quite simple. The amount of contact between potentially conflicting groups is directly and inversely related to levels of prejudice held by the groups. More contact, other things being equal, means less prejudice. Increased contact can, under reasonable conditions, lead not only to a reduction in prejudice but a significant change in relations and positive efforts to alter structural conditions that block contact. A conflict situation that is fueled by ethnic or racial prejudice can be intensified by redesigning social arrangements that inhibit contact, most obviously social and physical segregation and obstacles to opportunity. For nearly three-quarters of a century, Allport’s recognition that structural factors both facilitate and inhibit prejudice has informed studies of ethnic relations, nationalism, and ethnic conflict as well as policies adopted by governments and private organizations. It is, though often unstated, a fundamental feature of diversity studies and practices that seek to counter prejudice and exclusion by giving diversity major importance. Like so much of the efforts to improve interracial and other

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intergroup relations, schools have been a central site of these efforts. This is an opportunity in the classroom to discuss diversity and affirmative action, including legal suits brought against universities and colleges that practice policies to increase ethnic, racial, gender, class, and regional diversity in the student body and teaching faculty.

OPPORTUNITY AND DIVERSITY THROUGH AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Just as segregated, inferior schools were the subject of much of the modern Civil Rights Movement, affirmative action policies have subsequently focused on schools, along with workplaces, to improve racial inequity and race relations society-wide. Affirmative action, an idea that seemed so obvious and reasonable when President Lyndon Johnson spoke of it in signing the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s, quickly became a highly contentious issue and remains so. Students were bused from one part of a city to another, providing some children with a better education while offering increased contact among ethnic and racial groups. As in the past, admittance to the best schools – public K–12 and universities – included consideration of the applicants’ skin color and social identity. Unlike in earlier decades, this time it was not to maintain quotas of Jews, Asians, Black people, or women, but to open opportunities previously unavailable to several categories of persons. Not surprisingly, the backlash was immediate and deeply divisive, becoming a powerful and profitable political issue for conservatives. Courts were asked to decide not their social desirability, but the constitutionality of measures adopted to provide affirmative action in schools. The courts have gradually chipped away at race as a consideration for admittance and hiring decisions. Efforts to rectify past injustices and level the playing field in education that was tilted for generations by prejudice and discrimination favoring White, cisgender, male, straight, Christian, native-born persons have since been radically diluted or totally rejected by the courts. With regard to employment, a somewhat mixed picture unfolded. Initially, transparent efforts to hire women and minorities were met with legal suits by White men who believed they had been passed over. Their contention was that jobs they sought were going to persons less qualified. Because many applicants can adequately fulfill a job’s requirements, however, and there is rarely any certain determination that one candidate is clearly superior to several others, such suits were often dismissed or failed. More importantly, companies – and especially large corporations – pursued the goal of having a more diverse workforce. They did this in order to both reflect the diversity of the society itself and, as a good business practice, to tap

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the talents of individuals who had a better understanding of those the firm was trying to reach. Clients, customers, and citizens wanted to talk about products with and be served, policed, and healed by people like themselves. Businesses and public agencies responded. The pursuit of affirmative action and the contestation over organizational practices laid bare the structural basis of social inequality. It has made readily apparent the residual effect of discrimination and prejudice decades after such practices and attitudes became unfashionable. The efforts to change the way corporations and public organizations operate, to make them fairer and more open to those previously shut out, to recognize the importance of diversity throughout the society has been, despite setbacks, a major accomplishment of affirmative action. The most recent US Supreme Court decisions, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, will end both public and private colleges’ and universities’ directly including race or ethnicity among the criteria used for student admission. (US military academies were exempted in the decisions.) Whether the majority Justices’ reasoning will dismantle affirmative action practices by corporations like American Airlines, McDonald’s, and the global health care company Novartis is uncertain.

FROM PREJUDICE TO STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY As an attitude, prejudice offers an excellent opportunity to study a social-psychological feature of social change. An example is the surprisingly rapid change in attitudes toward marriage between non-heterosexual adults and their family’s ability to adopt children. While the latter receives less positive support than the former, support for “gay marriage” is widespread and many children are now being raised in same-sex families. This is very likely irreversible. Because acceptance of this varies considerably by age, religiosity, educational attainment, and locale, students are keen to see the data. Showing and discussing this variation is a case study in variable analysis, including changes over time, that can build students’ respect for statistical analysis (discussed in Chapter 13) beyond the immediate topic. The relationship of prejudice to discrimination is also not as obvious as students might think. Robert Merton’s (1949) classic typology of the non-prejudiced discriminator and the prejudiced non-discriminator generates discussion that stimulates an interest in empirical data as well as inviting anecdotal observations by students. Research that can be of interest to students continues to chart the relationship between the two. Most importantly, the study of prejudice and face-to-face discrimination accompanied by racist language, what is sometimes called “old-fashioned

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racism,” and its counterparts related to gender orientation, women, nationality, age, physicality, and social class is not confined to obvious manifestations. Without minimizing the importance of microaggressions and less visibly manifested prejudices, studying social inequality goes beyond psychological concepts in exposing and exploring more macro-social relationships and social structure. This is a moving target, less intuitively grasped, that students can find more difficult to conceptualize and discuss. Jamelle Bouie, columnist for the New York Times, put it succinctly. Racism does not survive, in the main, “because of personal beliefs and prejudices. It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor” (Bouie, 2021: SR 7). The challenge in studying prejudice is to extend the discussion beyond the psychology of attitudes and beyond the interpersonal relationships that may be fraught with bigotry, stereotypic characterizations, fear, and avoidance. Much about Teaching Social Inequality concentrates on systemic racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and the like embedded in organizational and institutional structures and practices. These are conceptualized as group phenomena and can only be grasped with concepts about and attention to structures that go beyond individuals and their personal characteristics, their biology and psychology included.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Because social inequality is ubiquitous in societies, it is at the heart of the social sciences. • When differences are transformed in both meaning and substance by unequal possession of power and privilege, they become the stratification system. • Biological essentialism, phrenology, and eugenics – former pseudoscientific explanations – preceded contemporary understandings of why inequality exists, but their residues remain in common thought. • Students bring many bogus and half-baked ideas to the course in social inequality. Rather than dismissing them out of hand, they can be opportunities to learn and develop critical thinking skills. • The field of psychology has much to contribute to making sense of the maintenance and personal consequences of social inequality, especially in the study of race and ethnic relations. • Affirmative action and the controversies surrounding it make apparent the structural basis of social inequality, moving students’ understandings from inequality to stratification.

3. Typical challenges in teaching social inequality In some times and places, social inequality is an unquestioned fact of life. It seems the most natural thing in the world. Even in the 21st century in affluent societies with enormous distance between the poor and the affluent, most people most of the time do not dwell on it. When they do think of social inequality, they are not thinking in the same terms as sociologists and other social scientists. Few people in the US could identify Leonard Blovotnik, Britain’s richest man, and few could say how Larry Page made his money or could name the Walton trio: Jim, Alice, and Rob. In thinking about the very wealthy, they are likely to imagine the life of a celebrity – in sports, in movies, in popular culture – full of glamor and inviting public curiosity. They provide entertainment, not a glimpse into the many dimensions and practices of a stratification system. The occasional billionaire in the limelight – Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling, MacKenzie Scott, Mark Zuckerberg, Paul McCartney – is more often admired and thought to be a positive example of hard work, success through innovation, an intrepid risk-taker or extraordinary talent fully deserving of their wealth. One of the challenges faced by those who teach social inequality is to move beyond unquestioned admiration for the winners as much as dismissal or distain for the losers. Personalities and personal accomplishment are one thing. Systemic inequality is another. The concepts social scientists use and the statistics they generate are rarely produced for widespread consumption. The relationships between variables and the associations they rely on to support their narratives are rarely in the public’s purview. The ways social scientists understand how social inequality structures everything from our sense of self to the operation of our political systems are not in most people’s sights or on their mind. Driving down the street, the many unhoused persons who are huddled in tents or milling about waiting for the shelter or food kitchen to open seldom draw a connection to the multimillion-dollar homes on the hills at the city’s horizon or the luxury condos only blocks from the doorways where the unhoused sleep. Regular radio and TV reports on the stock market’s gains and losses remind few that the great majority of people have no investments to 24

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speak of. They are largely disconnected from the sources of wealth of the most affluent and the richest few.

MAKING CONNECTIONS, RECOGNIZING A STRATIFICATION SYSTEM For many students, millionaires and billionaires have no connection, mentally or physically, to the tens of millions of households who rely on wages or social security that barely cover the most modest expenses. Only credit cards and the ability to pay interest on their outstanding balances keep the wolf from the door. On this and other financial dealings, Wall Street thrives. The COVID-19 pandemic made apparent vast disparities in health care delivery, the facts of crowded housing, weak employment protections, unaffordable childcare, substandard wages, and a host of other problems that flesh out the dimensions of inequality across society. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and other high-profile deaths of people of color in encounters with the police, there has been a growing awareness of how race and social class play a significant part in the daily lives of millions of people, from policing to affordable housing, education, job opportunities, and health care. Today, many people are more aware than ever of the persistence of systemic racism and, as Senator Elizabeth Warren tells us repeatedly, that “the system is rigged.” Perhaps not as rigged as the Senator thinks, but definitely not a level playing field. If, however, corporate and political inaction is a gauge of the level of the people’s discontent and a desire to change “the system,” inequality of wealth and income remains far down the list of things that must change. The economy (i.e., inflation, wages, and employment) was the top issue for voters in the 2022 elections. In the Pew poll, neither vast and growing income and wealth inequality nor the precipitously declining social mobility of younger people was among the 17 issues of concern. Race and ethnicity issues ranked #15 (Schaeffer and Green, 2022). For some students the catalyst for learning about inequality lies in their capacity for empathy. Initially, it perhaps cannot be expected. Imagining the days and nights of “rough sleepers” and others without permanent shelter, living on the street, huddled in doorways or behind park bushes, always watchful for signs of impending violence or coerced displacement, unable to get adequate help to address their mental illness or addiction … . This is far from most students’ own experiences. And the unhoused persons they see are often repellent to them, even dangerous, and may seem to deserve their plight, to have brought it on themselves. At the other end of the inequality spectrum are the uber wealthy. Asking a class, “Who is a rich person?” can elicit reference to a mining engineer or a farmer with thousands of acres of cropland. A three-car garage where

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a Maserati, a Hummer, and a vintage Thunderbird are parked sounds otherworldly to a lot of students. Asking them to describe the privileges of being very wealthy, they might describe flying first-class and being the first to board a plane flying to Monaco, having a vacation home that’s never rented out on Airbnb, or putting two or three children through college without taking out a single loan. It is difficult for most students to actually imagine wealth as it is in the US, Britain, Nigeria, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Seeing connections is one of the first tasks in learning about social inequality. Otherwise, questioning the wealth of a few can sound like envy or resentment. Similarly, without connecting the poor to a political economy that purposefully distributes unequally and inequitably, the student is resigned to searching for reasons for an individual’s poverty in their poor choices, health, dropping out, addiction, age, or some other characteristic that seems most apparent. Symptoms are mistaken for cause. There are many connections between wealth and poverty. The institutional arrangements of things like health care delivery and finance are part of the picture of connections germane to a structural examination of inequality. Medicine is a publicly subsidized pathway to personal wealth. Urban hospitals provide exotic interventions for a few whose insurance will pay, while the medical establishment opposes universal health care. It is simplistic to assert that growing or lessening inequality is a zero-sum game (e.g., that the more wealth Jeff Bezos accumulates, the less money there is, not only for his employees but for a pensioner with no history of working for Amazon). Still, recognizing the connections between wealth accumulation by the few and financial insecurity of millions of people is fundamental to understanding the stratification system. That some should work while others enjoy the benefits and reap the value of labor has long been upheld by religious doctrine, historical narratives, images in popular culture, family memories, political ideology, and state power. Add to this the supporting pillars of language, custom, interpersonal norms, and asymmetrical but strongly held identities. Even in nations with revered constitutions and legal traditions stressing human equality and respect for individual rights, it can take a social movement to jar peoples’ complacency about the disjuncture between these stated ideals and social reality. Inevitably, and sometimes violently, directly and actively confronting this disjuncture can unleash emotional turmoil and interpersonal, local, and regional divisions that rend relationships, communities, or society, driving people into warring camps. That shouldn’t happen in a college course on social inequality, but it might make some students very uncomfortable. What would elsewhere become competing rallying cries to man the barricades can be debated less dramatically in class and espoused or critiqued in student writing. Learning about social inequality includes openly entertaining this debate, not

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only to find common ground where that is possible but to seek clarification and an understanding of what is at stake in divergent, even opposing, beliefs and perspectives. This is where anecdotal accounts may require a fleshing out with statistical data. More often, it requires a confrontation with everyday explanations resting on “human nature” and IQ, motivations and personal responsibility, culture and social change, life choices and deservedness, and the fundamentals of a well-functioning economy and polity. In every society – and especially in the United States – explanations/justifications for social inequality abound. Even the most fallacious of these cannot be dismissed without some examination and effort, like separating the wheat from the chaff, to salvage what is true, to listen carefully, and to expose and help students recognize bigotry, self-interest, misinformation, sensationalism, illogical thinking, and the like.

THE SOCIAL REALITY OF RACE Whether or not a social inequality course concentrates on racial inequality, the questions surrounding race cannot be avoided. They provide an opportunity to directly address the importance of the sociological perspective, including the value of historical and comparative approaches. Looking beyond their own society and back in time, social scientists across disciplines agree that race, as popularly understood, is “not real.” Rather, it is a social construct widely seen as an essential part of one’s identity and, as such, has real consequences for how persons see themselves and how others see, understand, and treat them. This seems obvious and non-controversial to anyone conversant in the social sciences, but it is far from obvious to their students. The meaning of race in antiquity was greatly at variance with its application to chattel slavery after 1619. Its centrality in early evolutionary thought, efforts to establish its essentialism in genetics and phenotypes, and its attribution to variations in intelligence make abundantly apparent its social utility (i.e., its social reality). Similarly, the uses of the idea of race in conquest, imperialism, colonial settlement, and neocolonialism are testament to its human construction. Earlier associations of race to biology were sometimes supplanted by reference to environment and ecology, level of technology, and historical events that sought to soften the story of why some peoples live longer, safer, less burdensome lives of greater opportunity and abundance than others. But lurking in the wings have been the assumptions about race and racial differences in ability, motivation, and an adulterated version of Bourdieu’s habitus.

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In their review of Kathryn Harden’s The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Inequality, M.W. Feldman and Jessica Riskin (2022: 46) remind that Biologists have mostly turned from talking about races to talking about genetic population based on genetic ancestry. The genetic populations they study don’t line up with social categories of race, which don’t even line up with one another across time and place – a sure way to tell they’re social categories and not natural kinds.

The value of comparative and historical analysis is never more apparent than in the sociological approach to race across time, nations, and cultures. Societies are suddenly at odds/at war/enemies (e.g., “Japs” in the US during WWII, Hutus and Tutsis in genocidal conflict, Hindu vs. Muslim in Jamu-Kashmir, Uyghurs vs. Han in Xinxiang, Sunni vs. Shiite vs. Sufi in the Middle East, Nilotic versus Cushitic speakers in the Horn of Africa). While the language of race or religion is often heard in these situations, it is at best only a substitute for many and varied factors pitting one group against another or giving license to one dominant group suppressing another. Rejecting race as “real” yet accepting it as a social reality involves an examination of its fallacious empirical basis and its utility in the exercise of power. The bearers of a racial identity and those recognizing and acting in terms of the identity give race its social significance. Race isn’t real as a biological fact or even a fact of history but, yes, as a social construct it is identified by physical features as well as historical experiences and memory. Its reality as a social construct with very real consequences gives race a central place in understanding inequality and stratification systems.

TALKING ABOUT RACE AND INEQUALITY To students new to the social reality of race, it can be contentious. “You’re telling me I’m not a Black man?” That question is legitimate and valuable, opening up discussion of the reality of race and its importance to understanding social inequality in many of its guises. As a signifier of power, race is real. As a major cultural marker, race is real. As a key to personal experience, race is real. Listing these and other ways in which the social construction of race has real consequences exposes and opens up avenues for inquiry, less about the origins or causes of inequality than about the way a stratification system maintains itself and operates to advantage some and disadvantage others. Times change. What in the past seemed like a reasonable and progressive way to ameliorate the injustices of racial inequality is challenged by events and the persistence of social injustice. Fifty years ago it was expected that legislation, changing norms, and demographic shifts would inevitably and perhaps quickly correct an intolerable situation. In progressive, mostly White

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circles, the attitude was that we are all equal and the best approach is to treat everyone equally. Wash and scrub away the mental stain from living in a racist society. As much as possible, avoid the implanted nonconscious imagery of race, seeing and treating one another as “just people” rather than as racially different or distinct. In the decades since, this effort to effectively wipe the slate clean has come to seem like a White privilege. We are not all “just people,” equal in every way. Some of us bear the scars of racism that cannot be ignored. Nor can the historical record of race-conscious institutional practices that grossly disadvantaged whole categories of people of Latino, Asian, and African dissent be dismissed as if they were unfortunate but no-longer-relevant facts. One could cite William Faulkner’s observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as a reminder. The cumulative, centuries-long costs of abuse and exclusion, along with the orderly operations of capitalism and organizational practices of liberal democracy continue to account for today’s racial disparities. On an interpersonal level, this recognition proscribes seeing everyone as equal in any other than the most abstract and idealized image. Someday, perhaps, but in the present, race matters because the past matters, both as a record of immorality and as a cause of present social inequality. For geographic regions, organizations and institutions where racial differences abound – however racial categories may be construed – social inquiry treats race as a major variable. It is critical in chronicling, describing, explaining, and addressing social inequality. In multivariate analysis, race bears up as a primary factor in wealth inequality, educational attainment, incarceration, opinions on social and political issues, health disparities, and any number of other quality-of-life indicators. The challenge to teaching social inequality is to make apparent what this shorthand indicator – racial identification – embodies, and how findings of its strength of association encapsulate the evolution and operations of social stratification. An instructor may hear their students refer to “systemic racism,” and this is an opening for a learning moment that will take place many times during the term. The phrase became the watchword after the murder of George Floyd, though it often seems those using the term actually mean systematic (i.e., omnipresent and evident on a regular basis), rather than systemic (i.e., an integral feature of the practices and narratives of a society in all its parts). Students may be pleased that the term they use is essentially synonymous with institutional racism and the place of race in the system of social stratification. The terms structural or institutional racism, like systemic racism, not only require explanation but are concepts that take the understanding of social inequality into the realm of social structure. Similarly, the term racist spans the distance between the micro and macro. It describes an individual’s or a person’s action. It is also a shorthand way of

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decrying social inequality propagated by the operations of businesses, public organizations, and communities, as well as political and economic practices that privilege and penalize on the basis of the identities of persons, their own and those ascribed to them. Finally, the idea of race is fundamental to learning about social inequality for its ability to make the connections between wealth and poverty, power and powerlessness, privilege and disadvantage. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the year his life was taken that a cold eye must “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth” and see that “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring” (see King, 1986).

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Most people neither make clear connections between wealth and poverty nor think at all systemically about how inequality structures their lives. • Recognizing connections is one of the first tasks students face in learning about social inequality. • When students bring to the discussion their ideas about inequality – based on IQ, human nature, ambitions and motivation, life choices, deservedness, and a well-functioning economy and polity, they invite the facts and understandings social science has to offer. • Because race is so central to modern society, it is an almost immediate topic for study. This is fortunate because the study of race provides an obvious avenue to the structural examination of inequality. • The topic of race introduces students to the importance of historical and comparative study, approaches emphasized throughout Teaching Social Inequality.

4. Getting started with big questions In any sociology course, there is an implicit if not obvious progression from description to analysis and on to policy. What’s going on? Why is it this way and how has it happened? What can be done differently within our power to make things better or fairer? Sometimes that means stopping what is currently being done. It may also mean making amends for damage incurred in the past in order to have a better future. And it may require some fortitude. As a doctor who works with the unhoused persons observed, “This is what we do while we’re waiting for the world to change” (Ridder, 2023: 20). A simple writing assignment early in the course may reveal a surprise or two. Asking students to do some unsystematic observation can be a first step in becoming more engaged with the topic. Where do people live? Does this tell you anything about inequality? For example, who lives nearest the railroad tracks? the freeways? the golf courses? the boutique shops? Who has the best view of the mountains? Whose view is mostly fast-food franchises with cars and trucks roaring by? Writing can be both a learning experience and a useful evaluation tool not only early on but throughout the course. While policy and looking ahead to the future of social inequality are usually saved for the last weeks of a course, it’s not a bad idea to explore this earlier. Talking about what can be done opens up a can of worms that makes plain the need for patient clarification and a sorting through of facts in order to straighten out a lot of initial confusion and disagreement. These discussions offer a preview of sorts: “We’ll be getting to that,” and, “This raises some questions we’ll be exploring a bit later.” It’s important to remember what students initially talk about, making sure to return to these things in subsequent class meetings. Where to begin? Getting all students to think somewhat systematically in addressing inequality can necessitate a discussion of core values, assumptions, and beliefs guiding policy. Just as the university is founded on core values, the topic of social inequality will probably embrace – whether stated or implied – a belief in the fundamental equality of all people. A desire to support everyone’s pursuit of a decent life, free of chronic humiliations and structural obstacles to opportunity will be voiced. Most students will be comfortable with this, though perhaps not all.

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WHAT IS FAIR? A class discussion may include what philosophers call a theory of justice, such as that developed by John Rawls. Rawls’s Justice as Fairness proposes a thought experiment to decide the fairest thing to do in the good society. This fairness can be incorporated, writ large, into the way society operates. His idea of fairness is reached by proposing a “veil of ignorance,” an exercise that is readily grasped by every student. Rawls asks us to consider the rules for society and the decisions about social arrangements (in light of the current distribution or unequal availability of opportunities and resources) that would be the most fair. We do this without knowing our personal histories, attributes, and abilities. We are ignorant of where we currently fit into the social fabric of a community, the society, and the world, or what fate might hand us. What color is our skin, what size our body? Will we be parents of healthy children, fluid in our sexual orientation, a product of all the comforts of wealth, a recent immigrant, abused by our spouse, or any of the other thousands of possibilities we see around us? Are we male, female, or something else? What language do we speak? What ghosts of tragedy or injustice do people like us live with? How old are we? How healthy, free of disabilities, attractive, clever, or risk-averse are we? Were we raised by two parents, are we a child of divorce or an incarcerated parent, supported by a family well into young adulthood, able to accumulate valued cultural capital through travel, books, and interaction with persons admired by others? Do we live in a beautiful suburb or a gritty inner-city neighborhood? Was our school well-funded and able to serve all the students, or was our school lacking in so many things – including personal safety – such that we learned very little? Rawls believes students will agree that, in pursuit of justice as fairness, no policy or practice should advantage those currently most advantaged to the detriment of those least advantaged. If the economy is growing, how should the pie be divided? Rawls asks us, in effect, to imagine a world where unequal power is not used for personal gain; statuses are shared equally or distributed with reasonable, agreed-upon criteria; and valued resources are not withheld from anyone in need. In short, the playing field is not currently level. How can it be made more fair? How could it be more equitable? This could apply to education funding or shifting public resources away from schools where most of the students are far more privileged, instead directing money and resources (e.g., the best teachers, technology, classrooms) to schools where students with the fewest advantages can learn, even if this means unequal funding per student. Which bond issue is most important: guar-

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anteed loans for a new airport concourse or affordable housing? If taxes are to be cut (or raised), who should pay more (or less)? Should it be the working poor, professionals such as doctors and lawyers, or the very wealthy who benefit primarily from corporate investments and real estate holdings? Drawing students into the discussion, listening to their ideas and opinions is an initial form of evaluating the intended curriculum and possibly changing it. What will become the curriculum may vary little from initial intentions, or it may mean adding and shifting material, taking account of the range of views, experiences, and abilities of the students in the class. The sooner this is recognized and accomplished, the better.

WHAT IS LIBERTY? About the time the modern Civil Rights Movement was gaining the power that impelled the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, Isaiah Berlin articulated an idea that had been developing for two centuries and that undergirds much of modern democracy. His Two Concepts of Liberty put forward the concepts of positive liberty and negative liberty. Both have their appeal. Making them a part of the students’ conceptual toolbox, as Charles Hampden-Turner called it, can be very useful for later discussions. Though students will agree with both versions of liberty, conservative students are likely to embrace the former; progressives support the latter. A discussion of the two, however, need not result in battle lines being drawn. Rather, it can give students concepts they need in thinking about their own fundamental assumptions. It will no doubt be articulated, in some form and at some point, by students in support of or opposition to private responsibility and public policies that address social inequality. Negative liberty (perhaps misnamed) focuses on individuals having minimal constraints on their behavior and thought. It echoes in libertarian discourse, if not libertarianism in practice. Harkening back to Rousseau’s famous lament that we are all born free but everywhere are in chains, negative liberty espouses throwing off the chains of overly restrictive norms. This version of liberty opposes laws that say “you can’t” rather than “you can.” Anarchists – advocates of negative freedom – like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon contended that if each of us can live freely, we will come together collectively for the betterment of each and all of us, without needing to construct a political economy that tries to do good for the whole and is thus bound to be oppressive for some. It is skeptical of solutions that compel people to bind together in a common endeavor. Anything beyond the nuclear or extended family invites bureaucratic bumbling, top-down coercion, and waste. If people want to organize, fine, but they should be free to come and go as they please, participate or with-

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draw, throw in their lot or cash out. Anything else is a restriction of freedom (i.e., liberty). Deregulation of business and finance, low taxes, a state that confines itself only to ensuring public safety and secure borders exemplifies negative liberty. The minimal state, not the “nanny state,” offers the greatest freedom for individuals whose successes will add up to the good society, if that is possible. In the libertarian version, an outcome probably is best when some flourish and some fail. This is the inevitable result of life’s lesson: Each of us is responsible for our own destiny. Positive liberty, on the other hand, focuses on the development of human potential, largely through sharing and supporting one another. The Japanese saying about a high stand of bamboo, “We support each other so that we can all grow straight and tall,” expresses this idea. It takes the family as its ideal image, with innumerable sacrifices on the part of parents in order to provide nurturance and opportunities to children. Organized effort goes beyond the family. Writ large in the community, older adults whose children are long gone still support school funding. They want to increase the potential of future generations on whom the elderly’s pensions may depend. We are stronger when we work together. Each of us is more capable if we pool resources that benefit the commonweal from which we all draw sustenance and security. When Barack Obama told a group of supporters, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” he was giving voice to the positive liberty of accomplishment. His words recognize the effort of many to advance the better good for themselves and others. Implicit, too, is the idea that those who can help should help those who need it, whether or not the two know or have any personal attachment to one another. President Obama’s opponents cited only his last sentence and attacked him as insensitive to or ignorant about the hard work of entrepreneurs and Joe the Plumber. He was accused of challenging a central tenet of American ideology.

WHAT ARE EQUITY AND EQUALITY? Young people – students included – like to think of themselves as autonomous beings who make choices free of constraints. They prize being an individual and extend this to their peers. They pride themselves on their tolerance (but not necessarily on their generosity). People can do what they want to do. Everybody’s viewpoint is equally valuable. The reasons they dress so similarly, listen to much the same music, use the same slang and malapropisms, have much the same anxieties, aspirations, and

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outlooks are rarely examined. Despite their acceptance of “social influencers” peddling items of commerce, it makes them uncomfortable to be told that social forces guide much of what they do, want, and have opinions about. All of this makes the idea of negative freedom attractive to them. At the same time, students recognize that the world is often unfair. Their sense of optimism has not been crushed by the realities they will confront as adults. That’s one reason their teachers feel fortunate to be around them. They object to outright discrimination and see themselves as much more open to and appreciative of individual differences than their elders. They believe in possibilities, for themselves and for others. This makes for a fruitful discussion of two concepts that will be used throughout the course, equality and equity. Being equal or trying to have a society of equals conflicts with the students’ sense of individuality. They identify the dystopia of Kurt Vonnegut’s story of Harrison Bergeron, with its moral admonition that efforts to create equality among individuals drive down the capabilities of almost everyone. As such, they prefer equality as an adjective, not a noun. Equal opportunity, equal justice, equal treatment, equal access to health care, higher education, good jobs, home ownership, travel and leisure. People’s individual choices should guide them in a society that offers these choices to everyone, without prejudice or discrimination. Equity is perhaps a new term for some students. They fear a society that radically enforces equality, seeing it as smothering their individuality or as a race to the bottom. Equity is far more appealing. A very simple illustration of equity is a popular YouTube cartoon of three children of varying height watching (or trying to watch) a baseball game from behind a fence. The tallest child easily looks over the fence, but the fence blocks the smaller children’s view. They all want to watch the game, but how can they with the fence so high? Giving the smallest child two boxes and the other one box, with nothing needed by the tallest, is described as equity. It is a simple solution that takes nothing away from the tallest child. If only all things were so simple. The campaign for equal pay for women gave way to pay equity for women. If she does the same work as her male counterpart, has similar experience, and produces similar results, she should be paid the same as him. But what if the traditional division of household labor has penalized her, causing her to interrupt her career, take more days off than her colleagues, and kept her from social and leisure outings where the guys talk shop, bond, and make decisions? Finding equity becomes a little more complicated. How do we make their school, community, the nation, and the world more equitable? The vast majority of people in the US would not agree that their standard of living should decline in order to raise the living standard of the world’s poor, billions of whom live beyond their imagining. More locally,

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the question of what constitutes a deserved helping hand and what might be a crutch has been in the political rhetoric at least since the Great Depression of the 1930s. When is equity a paramount social good and richly deserved, and, conversely, when is it a means for the more privileged to feel benevolent, less guilty, or an affirmation of their right to decide how others should live? Discussions of equity may return to Rawls’s theory of justice, recommending support for those who need it most, especially if they have been abused or cheated, discriminated against, or unfairly disadvantaged in the past. There will be significant disagreement as to how much this might require a diminution of the current advantages of others, how much it might cut into or erode their privileges, status, and material well-being. It can raise the question of what some may owe others for a past they neither participated in nor clearly seem to have benefited from. Equity is a slippery concept, especially when applied to current situations that require something to be done. If the COVID-19 pandemic was especially hard on children of color and others in lower-income households, as the record shows, what equity measures are appropriate post-COVID? The resources and attention needed for these students to catch up may require taking some of these away from students who continued to learn during the pandemic. Should new curriculum back up or be taught more slowly, making sure everyone is moving ahead? This is a difficult question, but one that can engage students as they learn to grapple with social inequality. Equality, Justice, Fairness … . These are powerful concepts and have been the source of scholarly and popular disagreement for centuries. They admit to no easy answers. In many courses the big questions are never broached, but in learning about social inequality they are unavoidable. They may appear to detract from the material to be learned in the course. Their discussion and disagreements may never reach a consensus. Be that as it may, they should not be shied away from. This is perhaps the only time in many students’ lives when the big questions can be seriously considered, where they can hear and engage with people who not only disagree with them but who have thought long and hard about these things and may know more than they do. That is at the heart of a university education.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • A social inequality course can begin with an in-class writing assignment or a discussion of “what could/should be done about …” rather than leaving such question for later, thus getting students involved and finding out what they are thinking.

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• Three big concepts are best addressed early in the class: fairness, freedom, and equality. These terms will be used in every class discussion, so it’s good to get the discussion going. • John Rawls’s idea of justice as fairness gives students a chance to think about the many ways social inequality penalizes and privileges individuals and groups. • Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of positive liberty and negative liberty provide one method to talk about liberty or freedom in a way that helps students sort out their own ideas. • Students object to radical equality, but most embrace the idea of equity. Knowing the difference and the way these can play out in the search for less inequality is a good place to begin the course.

5. Ideas about inequality Teaching social inequality invites and encourages students to share ideas that are neither as simple as bumper sticker slogans nor as well-developed as theories. This is the case whether the course is entirely devoted to social inequality or considers it as an important part of another course. Their ideas about right and wrong, the past and the present, what’s possible and impossible are the pegs on which they hang many of their most cherished opinions and observations. Discussions may reach into students’ core values – religious and secular – that undergird their sense of morality. Or they may be more casually held but embraced and expressed with confidence. How an instructor approaches and responds to their students’ ideas about social inequality is entirely a matter of personal preference and the learning goals for the course. It seems useful, however, to distinguish early on between ideas about inequality and theories of inequality, though admittedly the distinction is not always clear. A theory is never entirely free of what might simply be ideas, but ideas amenable to the rigor usually associated with theorizing in the social sciences. Chapter 6 discusses the basis for the claim of theorizing rather than what may simply be good or bad ideas. Theorizing is systematic reasoning, including the application of unambiguous concepts that help to clarify questions and guide inquiry into the causes, nature, and consequences of something, in this case social inequality. Whether inductive or deductive, it is subject to testing based on empirical facts. At best, it is falsifiable or at least subject to rigorous revision or rejection using equivalent or better methods of inquiry, reasoning, and available information. The current chapter discusses ideas that have been advanced, many of which were or are the currency of what both scholars and common folk exchange with one another. At some level they were (and some continue to be) thought to explain social inequality. Some of them are based on religious beliefs, others on observations of nature. Some are flights of fancy – attractive and otherwise – and still others have been hatched and developed through what is sometimes considered the most rigorous of methods: rational thinking. When students come to class with their own ideas about inequality, their contributions may not be particularly well-articulated or well-informed. But a respectful airing of them is useful for initial and subsequent discussions. The 38

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discussion may offend some students, but the old saw should be kept in mind: People may disagree without being disagreeable. Most if not all of their ideas, opinions, and beliefs and their fealty to these can be found in historical records, ancient and modern. It sometimes surprises them that they are not the first or only person to have a particular idea. It’s up to the instructor, predicated on her store of historical knowledge and familiarity with comparative material, to admit these popular sentiments into discussions. What is important is for students to realize that their views have often been held and contested, modified, rebuked, and sometimes discarded in other times and places. They come to see that these ideas – however obvious, bogus, or strongly believed – are subject to scrutiny and refutation by the combination of sound reasoning and empirical inquiry. Students know something about the historical past. They know something of other societies. There is value in knowing about another time and/or place for its own sake, a fundamental part of the humanities orientation. A course in social inequality can effectively use both a comparative and historical perspective throughout to broaden and deepen students’ understanding of the causes and consequences of social inequality. The question is, What do you do with this knowledge? How do we learn from the past and learn from others’ examples? Students may know that taxes are high in Norway and Sweden, but knowing about social democracy policies in Scandinavia helps make sense of the poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity in a society with a weaker safety net. Knowing the history of Jim Crow fleshes out an understanding of why racial segregation and access to opportunity in the past manifests itself today. The power of labor unions to mobilize the French public and unionization’s importance for bringing American workers into the middle class following the Great Depression shed important light on a widening gap between the affluent and the working poor today. But none of this follows a straight line. It requires a narrative that attaches facts to concepts, puts circumstances and experiences side by side, and is not hesitant to insert qualifications and exceptions. This is the challenge of helping students understand social inequality.

SORTING THROUGH STUDENTS’ IDEAS Many if not most students come into a course with little consistency about what they believe and the opinions they hold. Few can articulate a sound conservative philosophy or a coherent set of liberal nostrums. Usually, they hold a smattering of each, and they are unlikely to recognize any contradictions or ragged juxtaposition of the two. They may associate themselves with a particular religion or spiritual outlook, call themselves anarchists or free marketeers, believing they are drawing on this when questions of social inequality arise.

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Again, it is usually a pastiche of sentiments with little thought of how they hold together. Their sense of the history and evolution of ideas is vague at best. Even a student who identifies themself as a libertarian or socialist rarely goes beyond a few catchphrases to explain what they think. It’s not the purpose of a social inequality course to straighten out all such thinking, but it is inevitable that discussions will rub up against religious, ideological, and philosophical leanings that invite a deeper investigation of social and political ideas. Patti Davis (2022), daughter of former President Ronald Reagan, said of him: “My father had a tendency to hear a story and assume it was indicative of some wider pattern. That’s how his mind worked.” Many of us do this. Typically relying on a story they’ve heard, hearsay, a personal experience, or dubious information, students will cite such things as serendipity, life-changing events, foolish choices, proflgate behavior, character, blind luck, selfishness, and such in explaining one’s situation, good or bad. They apply this to those who prosper but especially to the powerless and destitute. Bankruptcy, poor health, a flawed self-image, inability to delay gratification, dysfunctional families, laziness, and poor lifestyle choices generally will doom some people to failure and penury. These things will at least nix their plans for affluence and security. They believe this is reality, however unfortunate. On the other hand, clean or righteous living, hard work, and being good with one’s money makes some folks deserving to be better off than others. How much better off seldom goes beyond middle-class comforts. While these attributions don’t recognize inequality as systemically designed, they can be portals to examining social structures that offer a less subjective, less anecdotal understanding. They also offer an opportunity to remind students of the vast gulf in material well-being, wealth, power, and privilege. This gaping divide between rich and poor goes well beyond the kind of differences students in the working class and middle class are familiar with and are making reference to. As discussed in Chapter 9, the typical student has a great deal of difficulty imagining extreme wealth, perhaps even more than imagining dire poverty, despite the celebration of wealth in much of popular culture.

CONFRONTING GOOD AND BAD IDEAS An instructor might show or read to the class literature from the Ku Klux Klan and ask them simply, “What’s wrong with this stuff?” Students may initially be perplexed. This is obviously nonsense and not to be believed. But they will find that disentangling bigotry, racism, fabrications of history, and illogic is not as obvious or straightforward as they might think. Similarly, the proliferation of “disinformation” on social media platforms and throughout the Web can be compelling, is occasionally entertaining, and forms a narrative that

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invites the audience to join in a league of those who claim to know the truth. Rather than simply dismissing these ideas as bunk, taking them seriously and exposing them to critical thinking creates learning moments. Religious, tribal, and racial superiority, patriarchy, and other forms of received privilege require the same sort of confrontation. These ideas have long histories that make for fascinating stories of contention and conflict. It’s good to get them out on the table where they can be scrutinized rather than discarded out of hand. This invites discussion of context, comparisons with other societies, reference to historical legacies, and the exercise of power required for their maintenance. Ideas supporting inequality can be divided, for convenience’s sake, into two sorts: those attributing inequality to individual differences and those attributing it to social-political-economic processes, often treated as “laws.” Both of these may be thought to go beyond human intervention, lest individualism be quashed and society run amok. Rather, social inequality is a human construction, long in the making and not set in stone. How to learn this begins with both good and bad ideas. Ideas supporting some version of equity and equality are similarly divided. On one side are those espousing natural equality and the universality of humanity. Everyone is essentially the same, with the same needs and rights, regardless of where they live, what station in life they were born into, and despite the “poor choices” they may have made. The companion version more readily questions the universalist assumptions. This view posits important differences among people, some historically created, some attributable to human biology, and others to human agency. For decency’s sake there can and should be efforts to create social, political, and economic structures and arrangements that provide for human dignity and positive possibilities to everyone. They can lessen inequality’s most problematic features. They cannot and should not, however, mask differences – individual and social – that equity efforts might intend to obscure. There is a lot to talk about. The Idea of Meritocracy Most democratic societies espouse a general version of meritocracy. What does this mean in practice? Does it mean people should get only the fruits of their labor? Are the best and brightest most deserving of power and privilege. What checks on meritocracy, if any, make sense? If meritocracy is to be compromised, why, and to what effect? Students of social inequality learn, sometimes to their chagrin, that the chance to become fabulously wealthy is greatly enhanced if you start there. Certainly, there are exceptions: sports stars; a select few musicians and

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singers; top television and movie celebrities; that one-in-a-million corporate mogul, visionary entrepreneur, or hedge fund manager. The more recent rags-to-riches story is of Silicon Valley innovators, the business visionaries, in which case being a college roommate seems to be the key to success. The narratives of these individuals fuel much of popular culture’s iteration of meritocracy. Images of their workspaces spiked with toys and break-time recreation, the relaxed, ultra-casual approach to their public presentations, their on-the-run faux-food choices, and their talk of cutting edge social media that sounds to their elders like a foreign language. It is not surprising that students find it so envy-inspiring and their wealth so obvious and unquestionably deserved. The idea of reaching the top tier professionally, financially, and in public acclaim is generally seen as an individual accomplishment. At the most social, there is an extraordinary parent who has devoted their life to a child’s cultivation of attributes that make them successful. Extending the circle of role models, sponsors, and patrons beyond the nuclear family – to a coach, talent scout, teacher, first boss, inspiring role model – is okay as long as it doesn’t distract from the individual themselves and their efforts to succeed, their admirable personal agency. The most trusted avenue to advancement, beyond dogged persistence in a sport or music, is to excel in education. Not everyone stays up late studying the night before an exam. Not everyone can grasp difficult material and make sense of complexity. Not everyone wants to be in their mid-30s before they can apply for a job. Those who do, those who can, are the people who reaffirm meritocracy. Somewhere in their thinking nearly every student believes this, else they wouldn’t be spending their days pursuing higher education. Sitting in a college classroom, students may look around and feel they are part of the selection process, and their professor is making it work through their assignments, class discussions, grading, and letters of reference. They are helping prepare students for upward mobility through the development of their talents, ambition, and desire to have a good life. At this point in any discussion of meritocracy, reality intrudes. How close to having such a system of selection is the world today? As the students will learn, educational attainment is the strongest factor in determining occupational placement and lifetime earnings. Educational attainment is also, however, a dependent variable, predicated strongly, though certainly not entirely, on factors beyond an individual’s control. This recognition moves the learning of social inequality away from the purely subjective and into the structural analysis that helps students understand social inequality beyond their casual observations, hopes, and dreams. This begins to challenge the notion that individual merit is the prime determinant of one’s place in the structure of inequality, that meritocracy and

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meritocratic processes explain all there is to know. Rather, it is a good starting point of a more detailed and analytic discussion of the stratification system. Every student can see winners and losers around them. Billionaires send themselves and friends into outer space, then retire to their massive yachts fitted with ballrooms, heliports, and dozens of bedrooms and baths with gold-plated fixtures. At the same time, not far away are adults and children living under tarps on the city’s sidewalk, encamped next to highway offramps, and lined up for a free meal at the public shelter. In between are massive pickups blasting down the street to check on a crew of roofers toiling away in the sun. Women are catching the bus to return home after a night shift at a fast-food restaurant. Middle-aged men are greeting customers at the big box store, PhDs are Ubering from one campus to another to teach history or sociology for a pittance of what they’d be paid if they had a coveted tenure-track position. Michael Young’s (1958) classic Rise of the Meritocracy could be confused with inspiring books counseling how to make it in a modern society. It is definitely not a paean to democratic capitalism. Rather, it asks the reader to imagine a society organized meritocratically. The meritocratic process makes possible the placement of people on the rungs of material comforts, prestige, and power purely on the basis of merit, both ascribed and achieved. Would there be less inequality? Should winners in a meritocratic society have so much and losers have so little? As importantly, would the losers have any reason to complain about a soggy bedroll and negligible access to health care and personal safety? Would anyone, whether poor, working class, or comfortably middle class, have justification to resent their position in the class structure? In fact, could the rich and powerful even celebrate their status? What would they be celebrating? Their good luck? Hardly. Their deservedness? Perhaps. Other questions can guide the discussion of meritocracy. Proponents of meritocracy begin with the idea that a meritocracy is the fairest of systems, but would merit be fair? If beauty and fitness are to count, should everyone have access to plastic surgery and personal trainers? If the young have more energy to work and contribute than the old (say, those past the age of 45) should this merit them greater benefits? Should power and privilege decline with age? Perhaps even more importantly, what are the determinants of merit? If not age and beauty, should it be intelligence, intuition, experience, concern for others, a sense of evenhandedness, the ability to generate compromise? Who decides on what is meritorious? In a capitalist democracy, most of these decisions are left to those who, as Marx pointed out, control the means of production. They insert themselves into the educational system insisting on technical training and credentialing in the work they need done to advance their interests. These may not be the interests of those who are worried about the

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environment or want a world less prone to fighting wars over natural resources, ethnic identity, and trade routes. Michael Young raises the fundamental question of inheritance. Would every generation have to begin anew in their efforts to win a coveted place in the structure of inequality? Would a meritocratic society more or less have to eliminate intergenerational inheritance? Much of advantage and disadvantage is not in tangible or material goods but in experiences and all of the elements of human and social capital. Some lives – those of the children of the meritocratically determined elite – will be much richer in social capital than others. Should something be done to insure the already advantaged do not selectively or exclusively transmit this to their offspring? If they did, would that be unfair? In the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Mathew Stewart (2018) raised this issue, and Richard Reeves’s (2017) Dream Hoarders did the same. They recognize not the dreaded 1 percent, but a thicker stratum of the elite. Their target is the top 10 percent or the very-affluent-but not-quite-rich households, the kind of household from which the authors came. These families can and do use meritocracy to their advantage, from generation to generation. They own most of the country, administer most of its agencies and manage its organizations, have the highest incomes, hold the most powerful political offices and military posts, and enjoy the finest material goods and privileges the society has to offer. They work hard in a variety of ways to ensure that their children can enjoy the same. In fact, Stewart and Reeves argue, this wealth-holding one-tenth of the population deliberately constructs obstacles not only to prevent the downward slippage of their offspring; they are the gatekeepers who accept some newcomers but prevent excessive infiltration into their ranks by the lower-90 percenters. Discussing the ironies and dilemmas of meritocracy is useful as a teaching strategy, inasmuch as it begins with personal characteristics, moves to processes of placement, then segues to power: the power to define what is meritorious, decide what merit deserves, and perpetrate a narrative of fairness and societal good. The confrontation with inheritance and intergenerational transmission of both material and immaterial advantage and disadvantage previews what students will learn about mobility and life chances, the topic of Chapter 8. Are Inequality and Democracy Incompatible? The idea of a society led, if not run, by a select few seems inimical to a democracy. Harkening back to Plato’s Republic, wise, ascetic leaders would need to listen and respond to “the people” and work for the common good rather than their own interests. People can go about their business knowing they are in capable hands. This sounds pretty good, as long as there is peace and prosperity.

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Who should be the responsible leaders, not only in the political realm but in the economy, academia, the judiciary, medicine, the entertainment media, and national security? Such responsibilities shouldn’t be left to chance. In China, perhaps the closest thing the world currently has to a Platonic republic, these leaders are mostly engineers. They set the agenda and appoint underlings who specialize in law, education, medicine, and such, carrying out the program devised by those at the top, including the supreme leader. Peace and prosperity are the payback to the people for accepting this system of leadership. Few would characterize it as a democracy. The lack of procedural democracy in China has proven compatible with the state’s orchestration of an economy that has lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty and into a modest middle class. China’s billionaires must continually look over their shoulder to be sure they are not in the state’s gun sights. China’s prisons are open to those who amass wealth in a way that conflicts with the nation’s blueprint or use unauthorized means to amass a fortune. What has been called “the Chinese compromise” has been applauded by increasingly authoritarian leaders in Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, and elsewhere, voices in an increasingly robust debate over the future of democracy. Because capitalist democracies are rife with inequality, and policies redressing the problems of inequality are fundamental to democratic society, it is impossible to engage in policy discussions without invoking some sense of how inequality relates to or impacts democracy. There is a plethora of possible discussions to be had. These range from Aristotle’s preference for political participation exclusively for privileged citizens to Mandeville’s fear of “wild democracy,” from Edmund Burke’s defense of tradition and elite authority to many of America’s founding fathers’ skepticism about broadly representative government and suppression of equality and universal human rights. Most social scientists will not be comfortable or interested in devoting their course to the history of social and political philosophy debates. Some familiarity with these ideas, however, makes apparent to students that this has been a serious matter for a long time. It has occupied the minds of fine and decent people who disagreed, fought one another, and often failed to come up with a good solution. It is part of the ongoing struggle to establish a democracy that works for everyone. How we should govern ourselves cannot be divorced from how we live and how we want to live better lives. The key elements of democracy, the freedoms enumerated in most modern constitutions (e.g., an independent press, the work of civil society organizations, freedom of movement and assembly, the rule of law crafted with the peoples’ participation) rest on some measure of equality. Democratic societies grapple with rights that respect both individual differences and the commonality of everyone. They embrace the sense of

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a commonweal while disagreeing on what makes for the best community, society, and nation. Recently, conservative members of Congress and candidates for office have taken to declaring that the United States is not a democracy but a republic. This accords with their revitalization of the primacy of state sovereignty, rejecting federal jurisdiction regarding business and environmental regulations, taxation, policing, access to voting, and any number of other issues. It harkens back to opposition to the modern Civil Rights Movement and the Massive Resistance campaign. The power of states over federal authority was invoked in defense of the enslavement of people, laws forbidding immigration from Asia, and the carving out of states themselves after seizing Indigenous peoples’ lands. It has much to do with social inequality. The vast gulf between the wealthy and the poor in most affluent nations, and especially in the United States, and the striking, almost unimaginable global chasm in living standards between what is very generally considered the “North” and the “South” is often the subject for political observers and public intellectuals. The problems created by national and global inequality seem too great to be solved by the debating societies and policy gambits of representative democracies. Those writing about democracy’s future express fear that vast material inequality will erode democracy’s legitimacy and usher in authoritarian rule, dictatorship, or fascism. The current attraction of nativist populism and Christian nationalism in North America and Europe is replete with xenophobia, nativism, and ethnocentrism. Critics often attribute such sentiments and social movements (e.g., the Yellow Vests, France’s mouvement des Gilets jaunes) to declining life chances of hardworking people who do not benefit from rentier capitalism and a bullish stock market. Liberal values and even libertarian dispositions seem to be challenged by the promises of nationalists who would use the state to better serve the deserving masses or those “left behind.” Anti-democratic leaders raise doubts about the messy inefficiencies of democratic politics, the confusion generated by a diversity of opinion and conflicting facts, and the noisy demands of minority groups. Women, gays, undocumented immigrants, and people of color seem to be crowding in line while everyone else stands patiently queued up for the time when their lives will improve. But for how long? This is the formula for a politics of resentment and grievances, the catalyst of nationalist populism. On many levels, social inequality is both a catalyst and an appealing solution for those who hope to restore a bygone status quo. Instead of diving into political philosophy, instructors can go to fictional accounts. In undergraduate courses, non-academic writing is especially valuable in opening the field of ideas about the sources, nature, and political responses to social inequality. Students are probably familiar with George

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Orwell’s Animal Farm and the amended Seventh Commandment: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Textual analysis – better left to the language arts – isn’t required to have useful discussions of the ideas in a range of literature, including science fiction, focused on inequality and democracy. Utopia: Its Dreams and Nightmares “It is not open to doubt that utopianism has some kind of commitment to equality,” observed George Kateb (1972: 221) in his survey of utopian ideas. Inequality motivated and continues to inspire both utopian and dystopian writers – Thomas More, William Morris, and George Orwell included. Equality, especially equal power, seems utopian to about everyone. Equality of conditions, material and otherwise, is only a bit less conceivable. Equality of outcomes to the point of uniformity seems flatly dystopian, whether the consequence of good intentions or deliberately totalitarian. To quote the quintessential iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche (1978: 18) in his mocking condemnation of conformity as the antithesis of freedom, “No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels different goes, voluntarily into a madhouse.” Reconciling equality with liberty and individuality is the greatest challenge of utopian thinking. Worth discussing is a useful heuristic distinction between subjective and objective equality offered by Walter Lippman in 1937. He observed that everyone may have the same “things” but this does not insure equality of happiness or a sense of satisfaction. Conversely, everyone may find their own happiness or sense of satisfaction in different ways (i.e., through differences in material conditions). This is easier said than done, but worth discussing. To prize individuality while being committed to equality – seen largely in utilitarian terms of happiness and satisfaction – raises problematic questions. Some may experience much more than others the things utopian societies consider inequalities: for example, exposure to the arts, opportunities for travel, educational attainment, leisure time, health and a long life, access to labor-saving technology. Should everyone? For some, a “frictionless” daily routine may give happiness. For others, George Orwell (1958: 194–210) included, accomplishment realized through toil, exposure to obstacles, uncertainty and even failure may be the path to happiness. More than personal taste, what brings happiness and self-satisfaction may be a considered choice, pursuit, or an important element of one’s cherished identity. When the young Marx, paraphrasing Henri de Saint-Simon, wrote that some may “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” the good society free of exploitation is

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what he had in mind. It is a more nuanced utopian ideal embracing choice and individuality as well as equality. The limits of individuality, of individual choice, are usually extended in utopian thinking to a respect for the individuality of others. Differences, including a sense of personal safety and well-being, venues of individual expression, and desired paths to personal accomplishment are not the same for everyone, nor should they be. A healthy respect for diversity is not just a value attached to the modern university. It is part of the utopian ideal. When it comes to such things as vice and criminality, vulgarity and perversity, folly and ignorance, most utopian thinkers draw the line. These, as Rousseau and many others would argue, are the products of an unhealthy, even unjust, social order. Thankfully, they will fade away when social, political, and economic arrangements are made right. Of course, as Moses discovered in his trek from Egypt to Canaan, it may take more than one generation to reform the habits cultivated while living in a deeply flawed society. Conservatives who have no use for utopian notions prefer to embrace a limited malleability of human nature. They reject the optimism of any utopian project, no matter how limited in scope. As Albert Hirschman (1991) explains in his Rhetoric of Reaction, the conservative distaste for utopia predicts that any efforts in this direction will be either futile, perverse, or likely to jeopardize all that is currently good. Better to prepare for people to be chronically self-seeking, even underhanded, ignorant, disinterested, deceitful, duplicitous, and greedy. Better to invest in a sound authority backed by the power to protect life and property. An economic system in which “the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone,” as John Maynard Keynes described unbound capitalism, may be the best we can hope for. Perhaps less misanthropic, other conservatives warn against utopian or even progressive excess and oppose any efforts beyond tinkering with existing institutional practices. Chaos comes from moving too fast. Dystopian writers raise the specter of a rapid transformation of society disintegrating into a lawless, chaotic, unmoored wasteland or a totalitarian prison. Lord of the Flies is a warning, a reminder of what can happen. For dystopians, the pursuit of utopia serves only the interests of a small, ruthless elite, opening opportunities for misguided or ideologically driven tyrants. Whether planned or a calamitous opportunity, such dystopias are inevitably replete with injustices, suffering, fear, persecution, and above all inequality of power and privilege. Even heroic individuals in dystopias – whether they succeed or fail – set their sights on goals much more modest than anything utopian. Greater equality is measured not by what can be imagined as possible but by the absence or lessening of the worst that humankind can envisage.

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Significant measures of social control are vital to prevent the nightmare of Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. At best, we can find ways to limit impulsive and avaricious behavior and find ways it can contribute to the social good. Learn to live with the imperfections of both human nature and the inability of human beings to create significantly better cultures and societies than what they’ve accomplished thus far. Be realistic; the path to utopia is littered with, yes, good but misguided intentions. When students read and discuss these ideas, it is a learning and teaching moment, both accessible and productive. There are so many ideas surrounding social inequality that no course can deal with them all. The ones chosen by an instructor and the ones voiced by students can cover only a small portion of the possibilities. They raise as many questions as they answer, and many are not amenable to reaching a conclusion. They do, however, help to make real what the course is about: social inequality. For many students, they open up the topic, making it more of a personal quest to gain consistency in their thinking, find and apply reliable information, and care more deeply about the society and world they are in, replete as it is with no end to the ways inequality structures people’s lives, including their own.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Students come to the course with popular sentiments and their own ideas, opinions, and beliefs, sometimes calling them theories. These should be considered and discussed. • Students’ ideas can be addressed by looking to the historical past and reference to other societies in ways that show them the uses of history and comparative studies. • Meritocratic practices sound ideal until the meritocracy is closely scrutinized, as Michael Young did in Rise of the Meritocracy. • Can a democracy be sustained if inequality is great? The current polarization in the US may have its roots in growing class inequality. • Utopias in novels almost universally celebrate equality, but what does this mean in light of an equally compelling commitment to individuality?

6. Theories of inequality: functionalism to power-conflict Overlooked by generations of scholarship but now recognized as one of the most perceptive observers and theorizers of racial inequality, W.E.B. Du Bois was an activist organizer, public intellectual, critic, teacher, researcher, and theorist. His insistence on the centrality of race as a political and economic force in American society is as true today as when he lived a century ago. His concepts clarify the myriad ways in which race and racism are embedded in social life and organizational practices as much as in individual psychologies. In a similar vein, Thorstein Veblen’s outsider status gave him insights into cultural practices and organizational irrationality (universities, businesses, etc.) replete with class distinctions and the often-hidden power of status privilege. His seemingly curious take on evolutionary theory opened up sometimes whimsical speculative hypotheses but also pinpointed with laser-like accuracy contradictions of capitalism and the remnants of pre-modern legacies in contemporary society. These two scholars’ ideas about the societies in which they lived are insightful and revealing. Both took their ideas a step further, into the realm of theory. They sought clarity and explanations while composing a picture of the social edifice that contextualizes both the questions and answers they wrote about. At the center of their theorizing is social inequality. Whether theories of inequality are explored in the writing of Montesquieu or Marx, Spencer or Schumpeter, Ralf Dahrendorf or Erik Olin Wright, they provide an opportunity in a social inequality course to apply theory as social scientists use it. Students learn that theory is not conjecture, apophenia, or a spurious claim about correlated events, a flight-of-fancy opinion, or even a single, sound hypothesis in need of testing.

THEORY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Students offer explanations that are usually little more than opinions. They often say this is “their theory.” Others request explanations and ask the instructor, “What is your theory?” These exchanges open doors. Initially, this is an opportunity to explain what a theory is not. Discussing why opinions and short 50

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narratives about the way things work are not theories offers a chance to discuss what theory really is. Social science theory is a set of connected concepts that help to disentangle the threads of, or make approachable, a portion of the social world. It guides inquiry in a way that invites and provides the foundation for empirical challenges and correctives, hopefully resulting in a more coherent and parsimonious explanatory narrative that the new theory becomes. Social science theory is empirically based and capable of being tested with well-designed research. It is not a literal description of empirical reality. On the other hand, it is not a product of imagination, a description of a world as it might be or never was. Rather, it recognizes and identifies consequential and problematic general phenomena and their connections and relationships. Understanding how, under what conditions, why, and when these empirical associations exist is the goal of theory. As such, it can help describe a specific situation, event, or case study in terms that are applicable to other similar situations, events, or cases. In this sense it is both inductively derived and deductively applied. Social science theory often speaks in variable language, understanding that variation in one thing is caused by or causes variation in another. It may, as well, speak in terms of path dependency, charting empirical events that impact subsequent events in ways that help establish their consistent relationship under similar circumstances. Strong theory also provides the reasons for, the timing of, and the direction of observed relationships, allowing it to make statements of causation rather than correlation alone. When applied carefully and without hubris, it may even project into the future or the unknown. A great deal of what passes for theories of social inequality is little better than bogus assertions drawing on incidental, anecdotal, or even fabricated facts. QAnon’s theory that a cabal of elites are running a child pornography ring; White supremacists’ theory that a conspiratorial group is trying to “replace us” with people of color, including immigrants and Jews; and the idea that Democrats are encouraging an invasion of immigrants across the southern border of the US in order to recruit voters to their socialist agenda are not theories at all. Not many theories fit on a bumper sticker or can be chanted in a protest march. A more valid example would be Gordon Allport’s contact theory of racial prejudice, discussed in Chapter 2. At the most critical time of the modern Civil Rights Movement, Allport drew from available scholarly research about variations in the level of racial prejudice and its relationship to the amount of contact or familiarity between racial and ethnic groups. He found that, given a fairly well-stipulated set of enabling conditions, greater proximity and interpersonal familiarity were inversely correlated with racial prejudice.

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Allport’s is a structural theory that helps to explain prejudice and discrimination as elements of systemic racism. It makes sense of prejudice across contexts and across time. It has stood the test of time, with important modifications, as a result of hundreds of research endeavors around the world. It helps students make sense of the world, theory’s most important goal.

INTRODUCING STUDENTS TO SOCIAL THEORY If students care a great deal about social inequality, they may initially find a journey down the theory trail distracting or think it is irrelevant to their concerns. Inequality is obvious, and its operations are so consequential it doesn’t need to be theorized. It needs changing, and now! Other students may balk at the mention of Karl Marx, hear the words “capitalist exploitation” and reach for their smartphones to begin videoing. By the time class is over, the thought police are at the classroom door. Within days the instructor is a social media celebrity, a political prop, a propagandizing villain brainwashing young minds, intent on cultivating hatred of their country. Well, maybe not. But venturing into the world of theory, especially theories of social inequality, can be met at minimum with blank stares and yawns. No matter what caveats are offered, no matter how much of this material will be on the exam, theory is not a welcome topic for more than a few students, graduate students in the social sciences included. How, then, is theory to be taught? If a headlong plunge into theory and theories is possible only in a course specifically designed to teach theory or theories of social inequality, what are options for other courses? Theory begins by asking questions. Taking a step back, going back in time and place, begins to show students the ways theories have developed to address large and important questions. What was going on in England and Northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries? How was the growth of global trade and its opportunities for accumulating wealth destroying ways of life for millions of peasants practicing subsistence agropastoralism? What economic advantages did the enslavement of millions of people – Africans and Indigenous people of the Caribbean and South America – yield? Why did it take more than a century after industrialization began before its material benefits would begin to improve the lot of its workers? As crafts were transformed into instructions for mass production, how was labor forced to learn to be bought, sold, and made dependent for a livelihood on the people who accumulated capital? A description of the emergence of various theories, say, from Wallace and Darwin to Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and beyond is a fine story. The way theories struggled to accommodate and celebrate imperialism, leading to the popularization of race as a biological reality, is bound to catch students’ attention. Most courses that deal with social inequality, however,

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have limited space for the elaboration of such narratives, fascinating though they may be. Still, it’s hard to avoid the emergence of capitalism’s critics two centuries ago. That is where modern social theory began to take hold, not only among the radicals but among those like John Locke, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith who counseled the amelioration of its worst features to fend off social upheaval. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were not the first to find this social change – the industrial transformation of society – alarming. Marx was the first, however, to try to solve what he saw as the riddles of capitalism. How did capital accumulation actually operate? Economists were content to determine value by the price paid, but what, beyond David Ricardo’s musings, was its actual source? As a dynamic process, where was capitalism going? The enormous potential for human betterment in science and the new technologies of production were not making life better for those who toiled in the mines and factories. It was building a stratification system of power and privilege that elevated the few and degraded the lives of millions. Ideas of progress were the foundation for all serious secular thought at the time. The engines of history seemed to be moving societies from barbarism to civilization. For Marx and Engels, a closer look at the engines revealed a dynamic of change with inequality as its catapult. Inequality and its changing forms create a dialectical tension that propels societies from one form of stratification to another. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,” wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The ensuing conflict between the classes ushered in a new form of inequality, but each one inexorably drew society toward the final battle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The hierarchy of power based on the control of labor and the unjust expropriation of labor’s value is destined to be abolished, ushering in a better world. Despite some polemical writing (e.g., “Critique of the Gotha Program”), Marx wasn’t quite sure of what post-capitalism would actually look like. This is not the only story to be told, read about, and discussed. It is only one of many that can help guide students into theory and locate social inequality at its core. It has been and remains, however, even in this crude form, a compelling narrative that has given rise to an evolving, far more sophisticated understanding of capitalist society, including late-stage global capitalism. This discursive approach may seem a roundabout way of introducing theory, a backdoor incursion into a different way of thinking about social inequality. And that is the point. What seems abstract or dissociated from their here and now shows students how others have grappled with the complexities of their world and the seemingly impenetrable world of political economy, culture, and social structure.

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The discussion that follows may be focused on a socio-political philosophy like that of Pitirim Sorokin, Schumpeter’s creative exegesis on the dynamics of capitalism as a political economy, or something closer to Max Weber’s historically specific sociological analyses that yielded concepts and propositions as relevant today as they were more than a century ago. For many, theory makes the most sense when contextualized. This is the case for macro theories like Marx’s, or middle-range theories like those of Robert Merton (1968) and hundreds of other social scientists. No theory of society and its workings, Talcott Parsons’s social systems theory included, is immune from the influence of its time and place. It is the way theory is hatched, developed, and takes hold. The concepts of successful social theorists (e.g., Sorokin’s sensate culture, Du Bois’s double consciousness, Durkheim’s division of labor, Schumpeter’s creative destruction, Mannheim’s ideology, Veblen’s pecuniary emulation) came out of the time and place of their originators. They can, however, become the language of students who find value in the concepts and connect the ideas they express to the world around them. Concepts invite an understanding of relationships and processes, and most importantly show a new way to understand social inequality.

ON THE FUNCTIONALITY OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY Since the 1960s sociologists have distinguished theories of inequality along an axis that positions functionalism at one end and power-conflict theory at the other. The former envisions social system organization, maintenance, and adjustments while the latter dissects social systems into loci of power. Though social inequality’s causes and consequences can appear to be quite different from these two perspectives, students are able to glean insights from both. Ideally, they can become conversant enough with these approaches to see the role theory plays in making sense of social life, inequality included. The Social System The basic logic of functionalism begins with the social system, a concept vital to sociological thinking but potentially reified into something that creates its own narrative. The characteristics of a system involve all the elements of Parsonian thinking: needs, goals, internal and external sources of stress and strain, shared values, adjustment mechanisms, information flow, acquisition of resources, distribution of power, and so on. Once elaborated, the place of inequality in the social system is essentially assumed, though functional theorists have gone to some lengths to explain it.

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Social inequality in itself is not a problematic part of the social system. On the contrary, it is a feature of the social system that meets system needs, a vital part of its operation. The most important thing is to ensure the system has what it requires to operate effectively. This includes making sure the people who staff the system are sufficiently educated and their talents developed, that they are distributed where needed, and are motivated to stay there. Inequality keeps the gears turning. Inequality does benefit the social system, greatly tilted though it may be in favor of those who already possess power and privilege. A healthy measure of inequality works just fine for them and the social system, a convenient convergence of interests. Despite its occasional appearance as unfair or excessive, we are all better off thanks to those who do what we all need doing, as the social system requires. Incentives to Inequality Borrowing from Western economic thinking, incentives are the key in the functional theory of stratification. The price of labor follows the law of supply and demand to meet the needs of the social system. The more arduous the acquisition of abilities, the scarcer the raw talent, and the more limited the commodity relative to society’s needs, the greater the demand. Rewards such as financial compensation, retirement and health care benefits, time off for vacations, parental leave, protection from being laid off arbitrarily, public acclaim, and even golden parachutes are provided to some – not because they have organized and demanded it, but to meet the needs of society. Stocking grocery shelves, picking strawberries, cleaning offices, and emptying bedpans take little training or scarce talent. Anyone can do it. Supply exceeds demand, and a low-wage workforce is the consequence. But even these jobs must be incentivized. The threat of poverty is one incentive, according to functionalist theory. The diminished status of being an unemployed person is another. Even finding friends and the chance to acquire a love interest is an incentive that keeps people showing up for work. How does the social system respond? Small businesses, especially in the age of globalization, can afford only limited incentives. They must keep wages low and maintain a flexible approach to their workforce. They can hardly afford to give employees a fixed schedule two weeks in advance. Workers can’t be given any employment guarantees. If artificial intelligence (AI) can do the job faster, a human relations manager recommends a way to slim down the workforce. If a financial analyst recommends some people be dismissed in order to boost the company’s stock value, this has to be done. These things, too, meet system needs.

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Though proudly conservative, people in business, whether small or corporate, and those in industrial agriculture look to the state. The state incentivizes working in the low-wage economy with the earned-income tax credit, child-care tax credits, the promise of social security, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) that replaced “welfare as we know it” during the presidency of Bill Clinton. To qualify for these incentives, people need a job or must be training for one, regardless of how it might match their education, experience, or family obligations. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, “essential workers” were publicly celebrated. Incentives for them and others were temporarily enhanced, else they stay at home – like those whose salaries were far higher. During a brief period of the pandemic the Paycheck Protection Program supplemented or replaced people’s lost income. The Child Tax Credit was expanded to include direct payments to families based on the number of children in the household. People were sent direct payments to help pay their bills. These kept millions of people from penury but were discontinued with barely a whisper of protest. This hyper-incentivizing was no longer needed. Nothing personal: that’s the way the system works. Functionalism’s Explanations Functionalism was developed as a deductive theory occasionally searching for empirical support. In approaching theoretical confirmation, functionalist theory is much like an amateur zoologist who observes a curious trait. He conjectures a reason for its persistence. How does it contribute to or not impede reproductive success? It must do this, else it wouldn’t be around. Often with a bit of anthropomorphic reasoning, an explanation presents itself. Functionalism uses a similar mode of post hoc explanation. If it exists, it must have a function, it must enhance reproductive success (i.e., maintenance and the smooth operation of the social system, whether that be the family, community, or society). In its quest, it finds some utility for innumerable exceptional and objectionable phenomena, including vast differences in power, privilege, and material conditions. Inequality primarily warrants attention in functional theory because too little or too much of it can upset the balance of a smoothly running social system. Like the market, in time the stresses and strains of inequality will be adjusted for, lessening its threat to the system. Among the many fine scholars who developed and applied functional theorizing – Kingsley Davis, S.M. Lipset, Wilbert Moore, Melvin Tumin, Robert Merton, Neil Smelser, S.N. Eisenstadt – their questions were largely answered in terms of functionality. The perspective was developed in an era before the tumult of the modern Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall Inn, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex took hold. Rare was any condemnation of or

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suggestion offered for markedly reducing inequality. If its lessening was recommended, this was conditioned on its functionality for the operation of the social system. Functionalism’s Time and Place Functionalism was, in many respects, an artifact of a society – or at least its academic, political, and business elites – comfortable with itself. It was a time of US global dominance when national gross domestic product (GDP) was doubling. This largess was being shared more widely than in any era before or since, the “Great Compression,” as Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo (1992) labeled it. The very rich were heavily taxed and estate taxes were barely contested. Home ownership was affordable for most (White) young adults; medical care and higher education could be had with a middle-class income. Gasoline prices were low and changed little until the Arab oil embargo. Many in the working class traded in for a new car every two years. Immigration was restricted, while gays and lesbians stayed closeted for the most part. There was no environmental movement, save a few people who’d read Rachel Carson. Ralph Nader hadn’t investigated the Chevy Corvair, and Michael Harrington had yet to publish The Other America. Labor unions were under attack by political conservatives, but most people approved of unions. A large portion of the US labor force belonged and benefited. The military– industrial complex was growing, as President Eisenhower warned, but it seemed to benefit community after community and was only an embryonic version of today’s leviathan. Race and gender inequality were topics in academia but seldom made a ripple in public discussions. The modern Civil Rights Movement was still on the margins of public awareness. Obvious racism was acceptable even in polite society and was embedded in political configurations. Second-wave feminism was barely on the horizon. All of that began to change a decade after World War II. Functional theory began to be challenged. A new way of imagining society was emerging. Teaching about theories of inequality, showing students how theory informs and can guide inquiry, need not begin with functionalism. It does, however, provide a fairly accessible framework for students. They can see how theoretical thinking moves between levels of analysis, applying functional reasoning – however flawed – to different aspects of the social world and vice versa. Much of it is highly accessible, mirroring the image of thriving capitalism as it does. This thinking has seeped into and colors conventional thinking, the students’ included. Many of the questions students ask and many of their observations express some version of functional reasoning. Even those who

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raise objections to functionalism’s treatment of inequality find a measure of recognition in functionalism. Bringing Functionalism into the Classroom “What about a person who gets a job because they know someone? How fair is that?” Ralph Turner (1961) had a sound functionalist answer: sponsored mobility. Yes, for those who don’t know someone who can get them into an elite school or a desirable job, it seems unfair. They prefer what Tumin termed contest mobility. But paramount are system needs. Getting the inside track through sponsorship is just one way of many that capable people who might not have the background to compete successfully are discovered and cultivated, developing the talents society needs. Another student asks, “How can poverty be functional?” In a conception of a social system that runs on incentives, poverty should be a powerful disincentive. It turns out that poverty and even the low-wage economy are functional. People need to know what awaits them. The social system’s legitimacy rests on their knowing that poverty may be their future. By way of poking some fun at functional analysis, Herbert Gans (1972) provided a somewhat tongue-in-cheek catalog of the less-than-system-maintenance functions of inequality. He showed how functionalists tended to overlook the way inequality benefits the nonpoor and the affluent. The “functions of poverty” are not incentives. They hardly make the social system work better. Rather, they make the lifestyle of the nonpoor less expensive and more comfortable. As Ezra Klein (2021) points out, “Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful, and the two of them together require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages.” Gans provides a thoughtful interlude that humanizes and demythologizes what may feel to students like theory in its most abstract and impenetrable form. Another student follows up: “Is it functional that the only job available to a graduate with $80,000 in student debt is to work in retail selling sports clothing?” Is it good for a society to apply so much of its resources to educate the young, then cast half of them into dead-end, low-paying work they could have done with far less schooling? Again, borrowing from the logic of the market, perhaps too many people are getting too much education. This is the social system’s way of getting that message across. Beneath the theoretical edifice of functional theory is a strong conservative perspective in its prescriptive and proscriptive measures. Like the glitches in global capitalism, it admits that some interventions may be necessary, some careful adjustments are possibly a good thing. Fundamental change, however, including the elimination of poverty, is not only a pipe dream. It can be so disruptive as to threaten the social system.

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SOCIAL ORIGINS OF POWER-CONFLICT THEORY The mid-century professional consensus lay with functionalism as an original and compelling theory. As early as 1951, however, with C. Wright Mills’s publication of White Collar and then The Power Elite, an emergent class theory that became a more explicit Marxian theory by the mid-1960s began to compete for attention. Trying to synthesize or find common ground between functionalism and an alternative became a cottage industry of sociology. The impetus for power-conflict theory was and is social inequality. The emerging scholarship in the early 1960s raised questions about social inequality and the forces that benefited from a society stratified by race, class, and gender. This began to chip away at the dominance of functional theory and can be traced to functionalism’s failure to take the costs and injustices of social inequality seriously, offering no route to seriously critique or challenge the stratification system. As the name indicates, in the power-conflict perspective not only power but also conflict is taken far more seriously. Social, political, and economic life is not the search for equilibrium. To understand society, one should look at what is actually going on, not a highly abstract construction of the social system but a contention of forces seeking advantage. This is the essence of understanding social stratification. It not only had an immediate appeal for many students. It offered a wide-open research agenda that takes inquiry into any and every corner of social life. While functionalism often sounded like a highly complex theory, the real complexity and the contradictions of social structure and social processes were often skated over. Reliance on “the social system” to dictate social forms and solve social problems seemed to avoid the realities of protest marches and water cannons, National Guard troops on campuses, worker strikes and lockouts, and the many legal contestations over civil rights and discrimination, the rights of labor versus capital, and access to opportunities long denied. Missing or minimized in functionalism, perhaps even more tellingly, was power. Who gets what and how? As discussed in the next chapter, social inequality and the structure of stratification are forged and upheld by power. It comes in many forms and operates through many channels, but its recognition is fundamental to any understanding – especially any theoretical understanding – of social inequality. Students can see this in intimate interaction and what has come to be called microaggressions, think sexual harassment and jokes targeting transgender individuals. It is apparent in communities and cities. It is true in societies and nations as well as global affairs where the power of finance capital, media, and military might are most in evidence.

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For the generation of social science students who first embraced power-conflict theory, poverty and the demands of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, and the push for gay and lesbian rights could not be ignored. In the same era, widespread opposition to the Vietnam/Indochina War, especially on college campuses, eroded trust in conventional thinking. It became more difficult to explain social inequality, and especially racism, sexism, and homophobia, as system-maintenance phenomena, gradual change as exemplary, and power as merely a phenomenon of orderly interest group competition. Conflict theory emerged, literally, from conflict. Historians and economists began more and more to show how the price of prosperity in the US and much of Europe rested on the neocolonial control of resources and markets in the poorest parts of the world. This was usually exercised with coercion and violence as the US and the Soviet Union spread the tentacles of their military, financial, and diplomatic power across the globe. Capitalism sought investments, new markets, and profits everywhere, including poor societies that had been exploited in earlier eras of mercantilism and the slave trade. These regions might resist the imposed transformation of their economies and cultures but, with the exception of the Middle East, to little avail. Though dressed up in a rhetoric of democracy and progress, these changes were of benefit primarily for the wealthiest and most powerful parts of the world. Power-conflict theory recognized how the world system actually worked and how it continues to operate. The war in Indochina not only exposed the duplicity of political leaders and their Cold War foreign policies. It stimulated research in every social science discipline that began to revise the picture of the nation and the world, exposing its untold stories hidden between the lines of the sunny texts from which its children had been taught. As Yeats wrote prophetically, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Skepticism reigned and a new way of seeing was required. The good life had for too long excluded African Americans and other minorities who had not only answered the call during wartime. They were, for centuries, among the builders of America’s and Europe’s wealth. Then, in the last decades of the 20th century, people of color globally became the labor force of the world’s most powerful economies. Domestically, they continued to be relegated to serving the needs of the White majority in vital, demanding, often unsafe low-paying work. Gays and lesbians who knew stigma and ostracism, as well as the legal penalties of being who they are, recognized that they were powerless unless they organized and “acted up” publicly and unyieldingly. Because they were not seen as a public burden needing government help and costly to taxpayers, and because they were predominately White, their battle could take place not only in the courts. They worked effectively through dialogue and narrative.

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They often worked discursively, making themselves heard in the arts and by personal example. They came out of the closet and engaged their opponents in conversation and debate. They told their story, and it was compelling. By pursuing marriage equality and the right to adopt, LGBTQ+ activists presented themselves as just like you and me, normal to the point of mundane, embracing unobjectionable traditional values such as marriage and parenthood, community involvement, and neighborliness. They used their financial power to muster funds in support of sympathetic political candidates. And they worked directly in the political arena for the passage of antidiscrimination legislation. Students know surprisingly little of this story, and equally little about anti-poverty efforts, the feminist, the anti-war, and other movements that became the impetus for power-conflict theory. In helping them grasp theories of inequality, these origin stories are important. They can bring theory alive and help to make coherent decades of scholarly effort, the results of which are many of the things they are learning about social inequality. The Influence of Marxian Thought on Power-Conflict Theory Most of the originators of power-conflict theory turned to Marx and Engels in constructing a comprehensive alternative to functional theory. They did this in different ways, some hewing closely to Marx’s original ideas, others preferring the humanism of the early Marx. Others adopted the “plain Marxist” sensibilities of C. Wright Mills (Burrows, 2007; Mills, 1961). Many earlier writers, including John Locke, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo, considered extreme inequality a moral wrong and a catalyst for resistance and disorder. Marx went further, addressing inequality as a global, historical, and structural phenomenon that was the impetus for revolutionary change. Like earlier scholars who embraced progress as a historical inevitability, Marx marveled at the evolving economic organization of industrial societies. He greatly admired its productive capability, the way it promotes and harnesses science and technology, its inventive financial instruments for capital accumulation, and most of all the way it dismantles earlier systems of power and privilege. Marx and Engels contended that the growing contradiction between capitalism’s means of production and its class structure was generating the power to realize a new form of society. Because every previous system of political economy relied on structures of inequality that benefited those who controlled the economy, every previous system was a moving target to be superseded. In Marx’s view and in the historical record he assembled, the demand for greater equality underpinned and drove social change.

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For the first six decades of the 19th century most people in England experienced deplorable wages and pitiful living conditions. Industry continued to replace small-scale agriculture to the detriment of millions. This new source of wealth not only paid for ostentatious estates and mansions. It invited speculative investment ventures that resulted in bankruptcies, rocked the economy, and brought on depression after depression, with unpropertied workers suffering the most. The revolutionary spirit had fertile soil. As E.P. Thompson (1963) and others have shown, that began to change in the final decades of the 19th century, just as Marx was assembling the first volume of Capital. Movements and demands for greater equality continued, but the revolutionary spirit diminished in industrialized countries and never took hold in the US beyond a largely immigrant segment of the working class. Instead, Marx’s theory of societal transformation flourished in poor, largely peasant nations: Russia and China, and later in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. When Marx wrote that capitalism “remakes society in its own image,” he recognized the strength of capitalism to not only dominate academic and political thought, but to construct a pervasive culture and make it appear entirely natural. Power-conflict theory, while recognizing the truth of this, set itself in opposition. It declared its agenda: to pursue a critical understanding of inequality and promote activist agendas to change both social relations and the structural disparities that had, for generations, invested power and privilege in a largely White minority. Social Class in Power-Conflict Theory Central to conflict theory is the concept of class, discussed more fully in Chapter 8. It poses a challenge as a central concept in power-conflict theory. What is a social class? What is a modern society’s class structure? To paraphrase what Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, everyone knows it when they see and experience it, but no one can say exactly what it is. Does its everyday usage suggest that it is too vague and full of contradictions to withstand application in a coherent, compelling theory of inequality? Or can it withstand scrutiny and bear the weight of social theory? Efforts to pin down the concept of social class have been myriad and difficult, despite Ralf Dahrendorf’s (1959) and Anthony Giddens’s (1973) careful examinations of Marx’s writings, rigorous theoretical exegeses by Nicos Poulantzas (1975) and others, Harry Braverman’s (1974) analysis of capitalism’s transformation of the labor process, Eric Wright’s (1985) efforts to accommodate the complexity of class structure in late-stage capitalism, and Frank Parkin’s (1971) analysis of classes in non-capitalist societies. None of these writers doubted the reality of social classes and the powerful role the

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concept occupies in understanding modern societies. Social class and class inequality are, in power-conflict theory, essentially synonymous with social stratification. Marx explicitly rejected “the size of purses” as a synonym for social class, emphasizing that class is one’s situation in relation to the means of production. In both popular and scholarly parlance, however, income and wealth are often the most recognized categories of social class. When income or wealth data are not satisfactory or available for those writing about social class, educational attainment is a reasonable surrogate. In analyses of political views and behavior especially, educational attainment is the most oft-used independent or explanatory variable. A very serious Marxist would find these “operational variables” objectionable, but for most social scientists they are the best data available and sufficiently reliable surrogates. The less Marxist and popularized invocation of social class in no way obviates the work of class theorists. They continue to find great insight in the way class structure locates economic, political, and ideological power and its uses. Althusser’s (1970) and Miliband’s (1969) examinations of state autonomy versus upper-class domination, Wright’s (1985) concept of class boundaries as a crucial barrier to social mobility, and Giddens’s (1984) influential reconfiguring of social class as class structuration have stimulated much discussion and no little empirical examination. Much of this discussion sounds like ancient history to, and is unlikely to interest all but a handful of, students. They may surmise that the difference between functional and power-conflict theory is simply the attention one gives to social systems and the other to class inequality. While this is too simplistic, it isn’t a bad starting point. Power-conflict theory shows how a theory’s strongest concepts lead to the questions it asks and the way they are posed. It directs attention to those aspects of societies and social relations where its questions are amenable to the logic of inquiry and empirical verification or refutation. As Arthur Stinchcombe (1968) described the goal of teaching social theory, it is no small or simple accomplishment to successfully guide students through this project. Introducing Students to Power-Conflict Theory Kenneth Pomeranz opens his masterful study, The Great Divergence, with the observation that, “Much of modern social science originated in efforts by late-19th- and 20th-century Europeans to understand what made the economic development path of western Europe unique” (Pomeranz, 2000: 3). Among the greatest scholars asking this question was Max Weber. Like nearly every theorist of his time, Weber was interested in power.

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For him, power is exercised in many realms and many ways. While he gave primacy, especially in the emerging industrial societies, to class power (i.e., one’s place in the economy), he often spoke of social class in terms of one’s life chances. Whether located in status hierarchies, control of capital, or political organization, the stratification system of a society is fundamental not only to how it operates but how people live within it. Sociology texts are likely to introduce students to the study of social inequality through Max Weber’s designation of class, status, and party. For the last of these, party, is often substituted the term “power.” This is unfortunate, given that the three express a version of power dynamics especially as found in modern societies. Students can get the idea that there are three pillars of inequality, three hierarchies that sometimes cross and may stand alone. A more accurate treatment of Weber’s ternary of concepts is to recognize the sources and uses of power to bolster class formation, legitimate status hierarchies, and confer on some (especially well-organized participants in the political sphere) unequal access to society’s resources. Power lies in all three – not separately, but shoulder to shoulder. It was to Marx and his acolytes that Weber directed much of his analysis of modern society, and for some, his more accurate, historically informed view of social inequality. Weber’s challenge to Marx (i.e., to radical political efforts a generation after Marx’s death) was not so much a rejection of social class as a valuable concept. Rather, Weber dismissed the contention, the dream, that class is the driver of social change that will of necessity culminate in a classless society. Weber was, however, insistent on the significance of social class in understanding social organization and social change. To class, Weber added status – including ethnicity as a status identity – that he believed can be equally or more powerful in some times and places. He showed that power, too, is not always or only a matter of wealth or control of the means of production but a consequence of organizational superiority as well as the effective mobilization of popular ideas and received opinion. Rather than referring to this as power, he called this “party” in reference to its application to organizations vying for power in the political arena. Today power-conflict theory, too, goes well beyond the question of classes and the role social class plays in society. It need not embrace the eschatology of Marx’s notion that classes in capitalist society mark the final stage of exploitation. It goes well beyond the question of economic groupings and embraces race, gender, and other forms of inequality. In taking this approach, power-conflict theory encounters the many ways societies operate to create, maintain, and advance social inequality. It focuses, especially, on the consequences of inequality for those deprived of opportunity, security, human dignity, and social justice.

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Power-conflict theory has challenged the more sedate, consensus imagery of functional theory by asking questions of control: of the media, large corporations, and the state itself. It engages in historical reconning with colonialism and imperialism, the legacy of slavery, the turmoil of past and current migration across national borders, and the structures of patriarchy, homophobia, and militarism. To do this, it not only uses history but embraces comparative analysis in ways that make apparent the human construction of social inequality. It confronts social inequality’s malleability rather than its inevitability and reified embeddedness in differences among peoples and societies, whether historically evolved, deliberately chosen, or coerced.

THEORIES’ CONCEPTS AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY One of the more difficult issues in social inequality involves the one William Julius Wilson (1978) grappled with for many years: the primacy of race or class in explaining persistent inequality and current life chances of Black people in the US. Going beyond the contexts of Wilson’s studies, this issue can be pursued for almost any group or category of people almost anywhere in the world. It generates discussion that gets to the heart of the importance of conceptualization in theoretical explanation. Racism – interpersonal, old-fashioned, structural, and systemic – and race as a signifier of social worth and inequitable treatment is central to ethnic relations as well as issues such as immigration and the provision of social services. Yet Wilson knew that social class is equally real, a tangible manifestation of historical circumstances that is not only apparent but creates and obstructs the pathways along which people must go in seeking a good life. Concepts are more than the coinage and meaning of words. Concepts have enormous significance for theoretical thinking and the understandings it provides. Wilson was criticized for the elevation of social class over race, conceptually and empirically, but in the final analysis could not return to his earlier view that racism is the key to understanding social inequality in the US and elsewhere. For an appreciation of social theory in social inequality, Wilson’s grappling with race versus class is an excellent case study to be explored and discussed. Beyond ideas and opinions, no matter how interesting, theoretical approaches introduce students to the importance of clearly understood and agreed-upon concepts. Whether the course is focused solely on social inequality, includes the topic of inequality within a specific group of persons, or confronts inequality in a particular context, the toolbox of concepts associated with inequality and their application in social theory is something every student, in whatever course, can make their own.

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Students can become comfortable using the concepts and asking the questions they and the theories in which they are embedded raise about social inequality. Perhaps no concept is more important in understanding social inequality than the topic of the next chapter, power.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Theory in the social sciences is connected concepts that help to sort out a portion of the tangle of human activity such that empirical inquiry can find answers to questions about the social world. • An engaging introduction to theory is by sketching a historical context or moment when significant questions were widely felt to be in need of answers. • Functionalist theory dominated theoretical thinking for a generation without effectively addressing social inequality, in part reflecting its time and place: the Great Convergence of wealth and income in the United States. • Power-conflict theory, inspired by Marxian thought, is not a single systemic theory but a range of concepts with power at its core, asking questions about inequality in all its forms. • Max Weber’s conceptions of class, status, and party provide an example of historical and comparative theory in approaching questions of power and power inequality: its sources, uses, and consequences.

7. Inequality as power Power is fundamental to social life. It is formative of the ways we live, who we think we are, the means to assuage our fears and doubts, and how we seek to make a good life for ourselves and others. It is so broadly applied in everyday usage as to almost appear as a deus ex machina that explains everything. The power of positive thinking; the power of attorney; a number to the x power; the power of love; the will to power. As a word with so many connotations, it cautions that care be taken if it is to have a legitimate application in the social sciences. A rule in social science concepts is, of course, clarity and specificity. That is what Max Weber did throughout his work. For him, the concept of power meant “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance” (Weber, 1978: 53). From this he classified one form of power as the authority to lead others in the now-familiar threesome – traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal – introducing the subjective recognition of power along with the iron fist within the velvet glove. Weber’s emphasis on the actor’s will is also important in suggesting that power is intentional, a capability and tool wielded by those who can. He often went beyond this, as social science does today, to recognize how power is exercised by the arrangement of social forces reaching beyond individuals and identifiable groups. This is the essence of systemic racism and the many inequality-isms recognized today.

SEEING POWER IN SOCIAL STRUCTURE It can be a bit tempting in discussions of power and social inequality to attribute power to everything. Like “culture” and “human nature,” rather than explaining, it can bring explanation to a halt. “They have all the power,” and “It’s just a question of power.” Such statements are closers, summing up but more often shutting down or making redundant any further discussion. It is tempting to avoid the term, if not the concept, letting the facts “speak for themselves” with the implication that they sufficiently display power. It can remain unspoken and sometimes does. Power is, however, a concept that opens doors to inquiry and understanding. What are the sources of power lying dormant or hidden? Does the applica67

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tion of power, despite resistance, expend and reduce, or does it enhance and strengthen power? Is there a lifecycle of power, nurtured and conserved in order to become stronger and more long-lasting? How is power mobilized, exercised, squandered, captured, and reformed? These and many other questions open the door to empirical inquiry and the application of middle-range theories that take the topic of social inequality in a highly instructive direction. Social structure becomes readily accessible when power is understood as a central concept in social inequality. From Georg Simmel to Anthony Giddens, structural constellations have been seen as endowed with various but limited qualities, readily identifiable resources and goals, and outcomes that can be predicted and tested. Countervailing power, power-dependency relations, and other well-established concepts are applicable at both the micro and the macro levels and are readily grasped by students. Students recognize, for example, the way a weaker third party can enhance their own power by forming a coalition or playing off others against one another in the triad (Simmel, 1955). They can discuss various scenarios of this and Simmel’s other ways in which triadic relations configure power from their own experiences (e.g., three siblings or three living in a dorm room), events in the news, and material from other courses (especially diplomatic history, business management, and international relations). This is an opportunity to discuss asymmetrical power of various sorts, returning to the multidimensionality of social inequality and the crystallization or intersectionality of economic, status, and political domination. Examples abound. Before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriage, who had the power to control marriage? Where was power exercised before the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide? It certainly wasn’t African Americans in the first instance or LGBTQ+ couples in the second.

GUIDING STUDENTS INTO AND THROUGH THE LABYRINTH OF POWER School counselors advise students, perhaps unconsciously, on future plans based on the students’ apparent statuses of gender, class, and ethnicity. Store clerks suspect some shoppers but not others of shoplifting. Who can talk a police officer, a sheriff’s deputy, or a highway patrolman out of a ticket? Who was not only suspected of disloyalty but forced into concentration camps after the US entered WWI and after Japan struck Pearl Harbor in 1941? Who is likely to seek out marital counseling while nursing a black eye? Students offer no end of illustrations of unequal power. Get them started and find out they have much to offer.

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Students may suggest confining power to the formally political. This opens up a range of ideas and opinions that can move discussion in a fruitful direction. Does the political happen the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November? Or does the political begin after an election when successful candidates take office and begin having lunch with lobbyists? The local newspaper announces the passage of a bill that will fund, at the city’s expense, a new racetrack, interstate exit near a proposed brewery, or an executive suite hotel. Social life takes place in an environment permeated with power relations. Illustrating Weber’s concept of power, second-wave feminism took inspiration from the phrase “the personal is political.” It recognizes that power can be pervasive, close by and distant. It focused the lens of awareness on the things women are engaged in, whether it is housework, motherhood, paid labor, sexual encounters and intimate relationships, joking, mixed-gender conversation and language more generally, and any other part of everyday life in which patriarchy, sexism, and the confining strictures of feminine identity are found. Having the power to change this, to shift power, is what feminism is about. In discussions of power in everyday life, students can readily begin to recognize the way power is fundamental to social inequality. To be humiliated and denied the status accorded others recognizes that some of the “others” – vis-à-vis the stratification system in which they live – are far more powerful gatekeepers. Who has the power to decide job qualifications and why one person rather than another is redundant? What power, historically derived and continually rekindled, lies behind the early morning exodus of women of color from the office buildings they have been cleaning through the night, just ahead of the incoming morning traffic of the mostly White office employees?

STATUS, CLASS, AND POWER Social class immediately conjures up for students the image of hierarchy. Not so the concept of status, which for them equates with identity. Like many categorical designations, statuses can be on a horizontal axis with no inequality implied. It is not difficult, however, to project statuses onto a vertical axis. This is a useful discussion that invites students to offer their ideas. Recognizing Georg Simmel’s (1950) ideas about social types, students from smaller towns recognize how newcomers are quintessential strangers. They know that the stranger is not only defined by the length of time she has lived there but by her status as both confidant and outsider. Uncertainty about her background may raise doubts about her suitability to join the school board, questions about the number of times she has been married, opinions about her vacation locales, and even judgments about the choices of her everyday attire. Yet, her status as a newcomer may invite intimacies, sharing secrets or gossip

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that more familiar neighbors are not privy to hearing. Whether to win her favor or simply discount her importance, she occupies a kind of privileged status. Conversely, students from cities can describe the opposite. The anonymity a city offers (like the uses of anonymity on social media) invites a kind of privilege attached to the status of city dweller. Urban anonymity confers a privileged status of impunity. Rude things can be said to strangers with little or no consequence, given the unlikely chance that paths will ever again be crossed. Drivers can be aggressive and discourteous. Waitstaff can be left without a tip. Norms of reciprocity of all kinds can be flouted. This, too, is status morphing into power. A surprisingly small amount of public policymaking is devoted to the issues most important to the lives of the poor. The mention of this strata in political discussions is usually devoted to the problems they pose (the unhoused living on the sidewalks, addiction, mental illness, petty theft, general unsightliness, and threats to public safety) and the expense of social service remedies paid for by someone else. The nonpoor decide what is to be done or decide to do nothing at all. The message “Eat the Rich” is more likely to be scrawled on a dirty Mercedes by a well-fed youth than an indigent person. Rarely is the voice of the poor heard, and rarer still is it taken seriously. Their lower-class position and lack of a scintilla of prestige dictate their absence of power. Class, status, and power often work in tandem, but exceptions abound. Those questioned by pollsters and social survey workers have little trouble offering ranked scores for dozens of occupations. These don’t necessarily reflect social class. Public servants (e.g., those in the military, the police, teachers) and religious leaders are often ranked higher than some who are in better-paid but perhaps less powerful occupations. But those at the bottom and those at the top of the status hierarchy are certainly in vastly different social classes. The lesser power of women in many societies seems to reflect their lesser status. It was, however, an awareness of the costs of patriarchy that made apparent to feminists that women can, in fact, be considered a social class (Goldthorpe, 1983). Occupational status is a key element of class standing. Though the prestige score of Supreme Court justices has declined in recent years, no one would describe them as middle class. What parent hasn’t asked their daughter what her new boyfriend’s parents do for a living? When a publicly celebrated hedge fund manager or cyber currency billionaire is indicted for fraud, his new disreputable status makes him deserving of a loss of his favored class position. He’s now a crook and should soon be penniless. In a strongly patriarchal family, the pecuniary accomplishments of the male breadwinner take precedence and confer power. “He who brings home the bacon makes the rules!” While many husbands earn less than their spouses in today’s households, the idea that the man of the house should make major

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decisions, especially financial decisions, is widespread. Whose career can best be scratched if the other has an opportunity for a promotion that demands more of their time and effort or even a cross-country move? Who is the final arbiter about a child’s deserved punishment? Very wealthy families and individuals, though today vastly wealthier than the average household, have always held political sway. This is not a question of the chicken and the egg. Class and power are conjoined by design, a design drawn up, regularly revised, and enforced by the power invested in social class. That a jury will be more likely to select a wealthier White man as their presiding juror (formerly the jury foreman) tells much about the intersectionality of gender prestige, social class, and power. Status is, in social inequality, a category of inequality intertwined with social class. The possession of and deferral to status privilege reflects the symbolic as well as the material aspects of class. Who can be first to board a flight, drink alcohol while others board, and have their own assigned restroom? As a public relations gimmick to soften the crass transactional image of the airlines, military personnel and families with small children are offered first boarding regardless of their economic circumstance. This is a curious nod toward separating status from class, an exception that proves the rule. Returning to reality, a comingling of status and class awaits the traveler as soon as the low-paid, gender-neutral cabin crew begins their service in the steerage. And the truly wealthy? They fly by charter or personal jet. Intersectionality of statuses extends to the distribution of power. Jamelle Bouie reminds that as little as 50 years ago, interracial marriage was disfavored by a large majority of White Americans and codified in anti-miscegenation laws. Bouie (2022) concludes that “the ability to circumscribe rights for particular groups of Americans was itself constitutive of that hierarchal power [to dominate].”

THE POWER OF STATUS PRIVILEGE AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION Changes in both laws and public opinion concerning such things as interracial and gay marriage can be a useful guide to conceptually sorting out but never isolating class, status, and other sources of power. Students recognize and welcome attention to aspects of their lives and the events in which they participate. Since the rise of Black Lives Matter, young people have given renewed attention to status privilege. Status privilege is, to many students, a critically important expression of power. “Park your privilege at the door” became a watchword several years ago, especially at young people’s parties. White, male, well-educated, mannered in mainstream or elite subcultural style – it was not difficult to read the

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subtext. It had everything to do, not with status per se, but with the power that privileged status accords. Since the US decennial census began offering a wider range of ethnic identity options, hundreds of thousands of people in the US have chosen to identify themselves as American Indian/Native American for the first time, adopting at least a sliver of the status of First Nations people (Nicholas et al., 2021). They did this not as an antidote to the prejudice commonly expressed toward Indigenous people but to acknowledge the legacy and significance of their own ancestry. Urban Indians, having lived away from the reservation for some time, lose much of their connection to Indian country. With the option the census now offers, they may have chosen to renew or refashion their Indian identity. For some, they could now more comfortably embrace Native American beliefs and practices, such as using traditional medicine, experiencing the sweat lodge, and attending festivals with drumming, dancing, and celebratory dress. And it can be more than this. Given a history of genocide and denial of civil rights for Native Americans, the prejudices many White people still have toward Indians, and the hardships of life on a reservation, saying that, “Yes, I am an Indian” is a way of bringing to account the history of colonial expansion with all its violence, duplicity, and injustices. It is strongly reminiscent of the power of a memorable message during the modern Civil Rights Movement. Striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968 made an indelible status claim, expressed on the t-shirts they wore and the signs they carried: “I Am a Man.” An ethnic or nationality identity is, in purely descriptive terms, simply that, one of many on the horizontal plane of diversity. Like Mary Waters’s (1996) idea of “optional ethnicities,” it can be a form of cultural adoption, temporary and situational. If a family has Norwegian ancestors, they may celebrate Syttende Mai by dining on lutefisk, lefsa, and krumkake. If one is Irish or just needing a chance to celebrate the onset of spring, St. Patrick’s Day and the novelty of drinking green beer is a welcome invitation to be Irish for a day. There is, however, controversy associated with optional ethnicity. For people with Indian ancestry, claiming their original identity is not only a highly personal expression but an exercise in power. White people with no Indian ancestry can blithely claim Indian identities. They may have good intentions, doing this to signal support for the recovery of history and the memory of past crimes. But it is for Indians to decide who is an Indian. While Whites identifying as Indians is problematic, Whites dressing up as Indians for parties, football games, and pranks is a bald-faced expression of superior status, a choice made from the position of assumed power. Similarly questionable are high schools and colleges adopting Indians (or some version: Warriors, Redskins, Braves) or a tribal name as a mascot for their sports teams.

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These illustrations make readily apparent that power is the issue. Who has the power to claim an identity, let alone market it and profit from its appeal of a stereotype or ethnic trope? Who sits in the stratification system and can reach down for a claim rightfully held by another, less powerful someone? And what power is required to break the grip? In a more general sense, this is the controversial concept of what’s come to be called cultural appropriation. On the surface it appears to involve the idea of status: Who can claim it and who can practice it? Who can open a restaurant or food cart that prepares and sells Mexican food? Who can dress for a costume party as Duke Ellington? The Riverside County Fair California National Date Festival brands itself as Arabic. This is cultural appropriation pure and simple. The events since the murder of George Floyd have laid bare the privileges and the power that Max Weber recognized in social status, the status of race. White privilege, despite the controversy the term has generated, is real and exists in many respects as a supplement to or reinforcement of social class. This is another place, as students recognize, where status and social class combine to visibly display social power. Class discussion can entertain questions about cultural appropriation and seek out some general agreement. When is appropriation blatant exploitation, implicit admiration, or naïve imitation? Who benefits from the appropriation? What harm is caused or cost incurred by others appropriating from a group? Who should be able to decide who can join in the cultural practices of their group? Is cultural appropriation different from sharing and melding ethnic or national practices, skills, and objects, long a hallmark of a society largely populated by immigrants? Is anything off-limits from the charge of cultural appropriation: food, language and expressions, fancy dress, artistic creation, home decor, hair style, song or dance? The discussion will probably elicit a range of situations, from egregious and unacceptable to trivial and inconsequential. At some point, however, the concept of power intrudes, drawing a vertical line through the upward sloping vector. Power demarcates the point at which students can agree that cultural appropriation is going too far. It amounts to taking from a group what they see as belonging to them alone. It highlights the power inequity between those who may be new to, historically marginalized by, or simply less powerful in the society and those who have casually taken from them whatever suits their fancy. Helping students become aware of the possession and application of power, not only in organizations but in everyday life, is a sensitizing exercise. While some feel very strongly about power inequality, not everyone is likely to condemn it. A lively discussion may ensue.

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DISSECTING POLITICAL POWER In many respects, sociology is as focused on the exercise of political power as is the discipline where one might expect it to dominate: political science. This is especially true in scholarship about power’s centrality to social inequality. Typical is the March 2022 issue of Contemporary Sociology. Lane Kenworthy (2022) reviews 14 books on economic inequality and plutocracy. Several offer both compelling arguments and empirical tests of the role of income and wealth inequality in politics. The dependent variables in these studies are most often policy preference and political influence. Both seem intuitively to be subject to inequality, with the very wealthy and those with the highest income getting their way with the law. Nothing is this simple, however. Since G. William Domhoff (1978) explored how the wealthy obtain, hold, and exercise political power, much scholarship has expanded and elaborated on the topic, creating a complex map of social class and political power. Between the 1970s and 2012 the wealthiest 1 percent increased their holdings from 26 percent to one-third of all wealth held by individuals in the US. The top 1 percent of income earners increased their take from 9 percent to 16 percent of all annual income (Porter, 2013). In comparative terms, this inequality is greater than that found in nearly all industrialized countries in the world (Milanovic, 2016), yet the US claims to be an open society, a democracy with deep roots, a flourishing civil society, and to have the freest press in the world. Has greater income and wealth inequality made this claim of being a democracy less true? The question is one that students care about. It provides an opportunity to follow questions with research findings, the application of guiding concepts, possibly conflicting interpretations, and different ideas about what, if anything, is to be done. Political influence is undoubtedly enhanced with campaign donations. For those seeking and holding office, the need to be incessantly on the hustings collecting money from people who want to influence your vote discourages many potential candidates from running for office. With its Citizens United decision in 2010, the US Supreme Court opened up a new world of what Jane Mayer (2016) christened “dark money.” The court invited Congress to pass regulatory legislation, but meaningful campaign finance reform has been stymied by both major political parties. Political Action Committees and politically focused nonprofit organizations (also called social welfare nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) hoover up vast sums from individuals, corporations, and, to a lesser amount, labor unions. They cannot contribute directly to a candidate and so remain anonymous donors by giving support for and against policies and legislation espoused

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by a candidate. The Chicago billionaire Barre Seid gave a quarter of a billion dollars in charitable donations prior to 2018. He avoided taxes on his wealth in 2021 by transferring most of the worth of his corporation ($1.6 billion), Tripp Lite, to a small social welfare nonprofit organization, earmarked to be distributed over time to conservative causes, issues, and campaigns. This is shadow support for individual candidates who voice the conservative position on issues Barre Seid favors (Vogel and Goldmacher, 2022). Political officeholders are not usually taking money directly from donors for personal use. That is a crime most avoid. Donations are prized because they provide not only for media messaging, staff, travel, and rallies. For the donors, they make possible access to candidates and officeholders. Influential, often highly effective communicators, whether the donor herself or her staff, can make the most of a one-on-one conversation, an intimate dinner, or a plane ride with a politician, access unavailable to everyone else. In the last half-century, wealthy families have established or given lavishly to organizations that generate and disseminate ideas and arguments, collect and publicize survey data, and enlist would-be scholars, tasking them to engage in favorable public discussion. These organizations work on behalf of political strands ranging from libertarian to socialist, but many, especially on the political right, espouse ideas that reflect the interest of the wealthiest stratum of society. Their narratives become the talking points for the media. Their hirelings pose as opinion leaders, public intellectuals who seem to know so much more than everyone else. This is where a great deal of legislation originates and public support is mustered. The $3.5 billion spent annually on lobbying usually comes from corporate coffers as well as union funds and – again – very wealthy families. As well, the very wealthy have for most of this country’s history put themselves forward for public office. What is new, perhaps, is the incredible amount of their personal wealth that is expended on behalf of their own candidacy. As Michael Blumberg and Tom Steyer found after spending tens of millions of dollars on their campaigns, they don’t always win, though the US Senate is home to several dozen millionaires. Win or lose, as candidates with access to the public airways, they can put forward the talking points endorsed by their stratum of society. The public and media discuss what they want to discuss. Their concerns become the news. Students find interesting the divergence between what public opinion indicates should be politically important issues in need of legislation and policy and the actual work being done by legislatures, both state and federal. By far the greatest attention is given not to the things most people find problematic but the things the wealthiest individuals find in need of fixing, changing, or getting governmental support for.

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One of the most important functions of government is to keep the capitalist economy from destroying itself. Its tendencies toward monopoly, its every effort to limit competition, and its aversion to taxation, regulations, paying for externalized costs, budget deficits, and worker well-being fill much of the political space and legislative energy that might otherwise be given to the common good and the most problematic, everyday concerns of working people. Protecting investments, keeping the price of borrowed money affordable for corporations, limiting expenses of regulations for worker safety and environmental protection, and keeping subsidies (“corporate welfare”) flowing is job number one. The efforts to pare down or eliminate social security, paltry efforts to reduce the cost of – while opposing the expansion of access to – health care, and the virtual elimination of the estate tax, ensuring the perpetuation of a wealthy elite, generation after generation, are definitely not legislation the public is clamoring for. But democracy is often – as Michael Parenti (1980) reminds – for the few. Issues like access to reproductive health, transgender rights, and safety from gun violence cannot be dissected in strictly social class terms. Today the level of organized effort to influence legislation, policies, and enforcement – employing armies of lobbyists, creating and funding interest and advocacy groups, and building a phalanx of research institutes and think tanks – is critical in favoring the rich, but not only the rich. Conservative parties in the advanced democracies have been able to espouse social issues popular with the non-wealthy. Offering them visibility, respect, and a sounding board for their grievances, the wealthy are able to enlist the support of those whose lives are dramatically different from their own. The object of resentment may be professional expertise, a self-serving bureaucratic elite, Jewish billionaires, socialist professors, or desperate immigrants. This politics of grievance has been an effective strategy of power that uses the language of social class, status, and power. The genuine concern over the long-term health of democracy may be a topic worth pursuing in some courses that focus on social inequality, but especially political sociology. The link between political practice and social stratification, an examination of growing inequality’s impact on the polity, will bring forward many contemporary issues. The question lends itself to comparative analysis by looking at European countries as well as the US, Canada, Japan, and Australia. It invites historical analysis and comparison to other times when the potential for the erosion of democracy was very much on the public’s mind. Liberals are prone to seeing the threat that great and growing inequality poses for democracy as a harbinger of authoritarianism. Conversely, conservatives see the linking of arms of the rich with those having no wealth at all as a joining of forces in the battle for freedom. They will, together, bring to heel

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a gargantuan federal government run by people unlike themselves who are insinuating the state into every facet of their lives. The more students understand the history and dynamics of social inequality, the better informed and more fruitful this discussion and investigation can be. When students can think and speak about such fundamental and critical issues as democracy, authoritarianism, and freedom in light of what they are learning about social inequality and the power within the stratification system to guide the state, the better off we all are.

PATRIARCHAL POWER Even a passing encounter with a nation or region that tolerates, treats positively, or even authorizes male control over females is a jarring experience. As well, acquaintance with the recent history of the US and Europe is a reminder that men were until recently expected to dominate both public and private life. Women were or are relegated to a subordinate status, devalued, and expected to remain invisible or absent. Like the embers of Jim Crow, patriarchy’s legacy has been dampened in much of the world but not extinguished. Nor have the costs of patriarchy, like those of racism, been tallied up and paid back in full. Religious beliefs, traditional norms, and the law may dictate marital choice, reproductive health, care for and claims to children, control and inheritance of property, acceptance of sexual dominance and aggression. These and other longstanding patriarchal practices not only demean and harm women; they limit access to and opportunities for education, health care, entrepreneurship, economic autonomy, and leisure activities. A student may think but will rarely openly suggest that patriarchy stems from physical prowess (not just strength) or an emotional bearing needed for doing difficult tasks but thought to be found less in females. There are many spurious ideas about women and gender, however, that can and should be aired in studying patriarchy and its more modern variant, sexism. Case studies of less affluent and distant societies where patriarchy is widely accepted and enforced provide a valuable comparative perspective. These may seem exotic and far from one’s own concerns. Beheading women accused of adultery, condoning gang rape, denying food and health care to female children, aborting prospective female fetuses, arranging marriage without concern for the bride’s wishes, and dictating attire that hides the shape of a woman’s body can be simply dismissed as ignorance. They can be shocking and disgusting for some students, but considered merely to be practices of a bygone era or an artifact of culture lag in societies yet to be brought into modernity. While important to expose students to patriarchy in the world as it is today, such case studies threaten to make patriarchy seem like something far away, an anthropological oddity. It is important to

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challenge these opinions and help students recognize the ethnocentrism and shallow reasoning that guides this thinking. A structural approach like that of Marvin Harris (1979) goes deeper into the foundation and maintenance of beliefs and practices, showing why they make sense, clothed in however contrived a guise. When they no longer make sense because the economic foundation or, more broadly, the foundation of power on which they provide support is significantly altered, this initiates an abandonment of even strongly held theological justifications, social norms, and legal statutes. A hypothetical example might look at changes in manufacturing as a consequence of globalization. This offered US corporations cheaper overseas labor. The result was stagnation of household incomes and a threat to retail sales. Increasing household income by enlarging the available labor force was one avenue to averting a decline in demand for products and services. With both social movement action and support from business, women in the US began entering and remaining in the paid labor force in numbers not seen even during WWII. Many of the doors previously closed to women were pried open. Two-earner families became common. Household incomes rose. As a result, though labor could be paid less, households could continue to buy, a win–win for global capitalism. Discouraging women from engaging in paid labor, an element of patriarchy, had conflicted with people’s ability to cover a mortgage, save for college, get orthodontic work, and take a vacation to Disneyland. The rules changed. Equal opportunity for women, not only for jobs but for job training as lawyers, doctors, and college professors, became a new norm. No longer would sexism, sexual harassment, and unwanted sexual advances be okay. In their place were demands for pay equity and challenges to the glass ceiling blocking career mobility. Most students are glad about these changes, as they should be. The legacy of patriarchy, however, remains apparent in the gendered control of capital, gendered representation in legislatures, and the abuse that goes on in households. This is part of the discussion of patriarchy. Among the many benefits of second-wave feminism has been its examination of and insistence that academic inquiry into social inequality prioritize patriarchy. In women’s and gender studies courses, a historical and comparative examination of patriarchy is a fundamental part of the curriculum. Across the spectrum of courses dealing with social inequality, however, patriarchy can – but should not – be overlooked, despite the continued residual denial of equality, equitable treatment, and opportunity for women. The study of patriarchy is not only the description of one dimension of inequality (i.e., gender inequality). It is an inquiry to the sources, forms, and consequences of power to the detriment of females and others who identify as both or neither male nor female.

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Too, it is not a settled issue for everyone that complete gender equity is a good thing. Exploring and enumerating assumptions and selectively referring to religious texts and legal arguments, as well as exposing long-term practices deeply embedded in families, is neither a comfortable task nor to be avoided. Like racism and homophobia, sexism embedded in patriarchy is an instrument of domination and should be understood as such. Recognizing the totality that is patriarchy is a study in power. Anecdotal accounts, opinions, and misconstrued he-said/she-said stories make for a lively discussion. It is challenging for an instructor to keep discussion on track. It is a discussion that will involve indisputable facts and an effort to understand the organizational and institutional contexts in which patriarchy is imbedded. Challenges to the deep roots of patriarchal thinking expose what Sandra and Daryl Bem (1973) labeled a “non-conscious ideology” that privileges males and is likely to be prevalent across the genders and social classes that populate a college classroom. This is also a time in the course to revisit the meaning of social status. Male privilege, like White privilege, is something students think about. Mansplaining, the ubiquity of female supportive work in conversations, and similar patterns of male–female interaction are a starting point to exploring the many ways males are privileged. Here, too, trends over time – including the weakening grip of patriarchy and growing resistance to it – are a valuable part of the curriculum. The positive consequences of changes that have taken place in societies and organizations that previously were highly patriarchal are many. More intimately, changes in family dynamics and personal relationships for most students have been for the better. Students have their ideas. It is worth exploring what they think has caused this to happen and to add social science research findings into the study in patriarchy’s decline. For example, students benefit from reading and discussing empirical evidence of pay inequity and male bias in performance evaluations. Despite enormous gains, there remains an implicit bias against women and their capabilities in sports since the passage of Title IX. What about discrimination and blocked opportunities in the visual arts, and the most demanding fields of medicine, architecture, and engineering? How does this result from the intersection of gender and race, gender and social class, gender and age or special needs, or any combination of these? What evidence is there for this bias, and what costs are incurred by women? Students interested in a career in writing may be surprised to learn some history of journalism. The Washington Post hired only its second Black reporter in 1972. The two main press organizations in Washington, DC, the

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Gridiron Club and the National Press Club, were bastions of White male privilege not that long ago: The National Press Club did not have a Black member until 1955, which was the first year that women were allowed to attend luncheons where members were briefed by officials. The women had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to ask questions. The National Press Club did not have a woman member until 1971. (Menand, 2023: 61)

Students are at least somewhat familiar with the issues raised by the #MeToo movement, and for some it remains controversial. It exposes only a tip of the iceberg of patriarchy but can be an opening to understanding sexism’s scope and depth. Conversely, looking at the backlash against #MeToo makes apparent the resilience of patriarchy even in a wealthy country in the 21st century. Women’s favorable enrollment in law school, their pursuit of careers in medicine and science, and their representation in government and the judicial system contrast to their representation in positions of leadership in major corporations and many religious bodies. The gains against patriarchy and its residual impact raise a curtain for many in the class to ask questions and engage in the kind of discussion that invites them to actively inquire into forms of power and the implications this has for the pursuit of greater equality.

POWER OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Along with class and status, Max Weber outlines “party” as a third category of power, one based on organizational capabilities or superiority. He could have been writing about successful social movements, a term that didn’t exist in his time and place. Because social movements are recognized – and occasionally participated in – by students, they are an excellent portal to the study of power and inequality. This discussion of movements and power anticipates a more extended discussion in Chapter 14 that focuses more generally on how social movements organize to challenge or uphold the system of stratification. Whether justified or not, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and other entrepreneurial billionaires are the public face of a widespread sense that respect and comforts are out there and within reach. Even a small measure of social mobility is anticipated by most people. Enjoying the fruits of hard work, practicing thrift, forgoing immediate enjoyment for future rewards, making good choices, and taking sensible risks are deeply felt to be the formula. Most people hold a set of beliefs about the things that give promise to their own and their children’s improved prospects. Why this is compromised for whole categories of people becomes the genesis of ideas and narratives that articulate the sense that something is wrong. That

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vague “something” becomes the object of change for a social movement. Most often what needs to change is a condition of unfairness supported by unequal power, driven by conflicting interests, and fueled by prejudices. Linking social movement theory to social inequality is both a comparative study in the history of social movements and an exercise in middle-range theory. For example, Ted Gurr’s diagrams in Why Men Rebel provide visible sketches of scenarios of the gap or disparity between expectations and reality. These show a difference between how people expect to live and the reality of inequality they are experiencing in some shape or form. These sketches can be shaded in with real-life situations offered by the students in a course. This exercise makes Gurr’s middle-range theory very real. Young people, especially, are aware of March for Our Lives. They know their lives have become less safe, both in school and out. They see their life chances declining. Many know that it has been Iran’s young people like themselves leading recurrent protests against the mullahs’ rule, many of whom have been killed and imprisoned. Occupy Wall Street was generationally distinct. They contrast their own concerns with those of the Tea Party movement, encapsulated in the color of participants’ hair: brown, black, and blond versus gray. The old folks had it good. What about our chances in a world increasingly tilted toward the richest 1 percent and an environment endangered by climate disasters fueled by ignorance and greed? Is our future doomed? Academic studies of social movements tend to describe them in sometimes sterile academic terms, but for participants in protests and demonstrations it is the injustice, corruption, and literal pain and suffering people experience that fuel social movements. Emotion and commitment propel participants’ actions and give voice to their cause. They are seeking change, in most cases for greater equality. Rather than engaging with the dreary, cynical, and compromised world of conventional politics, a protest or demonstration is their most immediate means for having the power to do this. It is a common image that social movements are spontaneous outpourings of resistance and anger. Students are sometimes surprised that spontaneous protests and flash mobs are usually one-off affairs that rapidly peter out, producing no hoped-for outcome. They may spring from a sense of injustice, a shared frustration, or a sense of impending doom, but these are not social movements. Protests and demonstrations, sit-ins and lockouts, organized public outcry may be needed to bring attention to a grievance but are far from being sufficient to make a viable social movement. The well-trodden life-history approach to social movements shows them to be much more than this. Successful social movements are a study in, to use Weber’s term, “party” organization. Social science has for many decades approached social movements in terms of their organizational features, includ-

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ing the background, catalysts, and initial expressions of objection, injustice, and protest, thus charting what makes one successful and another a failure. The road to success begins when protests and demonstrations morph into sustained efforts to build an organization, one that accumulates its needed resources, hones its messages and frames its mission, represents itself to both those toward whom it is aggrieved and to the wider public, and develops tactics to move from protest to successful social change. It is a slog where persistence and commitment count for more than outrage, excitement, and the articulation of a grievance. The US modern Civil Rights Movement is often seen as the best example of this building processes. It is a sterling contrast to both short-lived proto-movements and movements that seem well on their way but then sputter and die, are brutally repressed, splinter into ginger groups and competing movements, or take their eye off the prize, so to speak. How a small percentage of social movements succeed in achieving their goals are studies in power. While social movements may be organizationally sound and become skilled in strategies that give voice to their concerns, sustaining themselves and offering policy proposals, they may be checked by more powerful opponents, or for myriad other reasons. Resistance to a social movement is usually successful. They never acquire and wield enough power to reach the goals they seek. Social movements that succeed have in common several sources and uses of power. Successful social movements change public opinion by inserting their narratives into the way people talk and think about an issue. They instigate behavioral norms and link themselves to widely shared values. They offer tangible and emotional ways for would-be participants to identify with the movement. They provide the experience of activism and involvement for participants, creating an enduring commitment that sustains the movement. They create policies for public and private bodies to embrace and shepherd or forcefully coax them – with political acumen – to adoption. Only a social movement that is organized sufficiently to gain power and use it well can accomplish the change it seeks. In doing so it reconfigures, in ways large and small, social stratification. It opens up opportunities, it displaces or diminishes the power of a ruling stratum, it reconfigures the distribution of material well-being, social status, opportunity, and human dignity, thus altering, at least for a time, the system of inequality.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Power, as Weber conceived of it as resting in social class, status, and political organization, opens doors to inquiry and understanding of how the landscape of social inequality is created, maintained, and changed.

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• Social status, often joined to social class, carries with it a good measure of power, sometimes independent of but usually associated with social class. • Students readily understand status privilege, but the privilege of appropriating identities and cultural items from a less powerful group is a topic for constructive disagreement. • Political power, Weber’s notion broadly understood as party, is today tied to social class, with the wealthiest providing most of the resources for campaigns and receiving most of the attention and benefits from those they patronize. • Patriarchy is not an exotic or historically remote form of power. It is manifest today in gender inequality and the treatment of women in both affluent and poor countries. • Social movements are efforts to gain and use power, most often addressing a grievance associated with some form or condition of inequality.

8. Stratification and mobility What is the difference between inequality and stratification? Is it just another term in social science argot? Is inequality what we all know and can see, while stratification is what only specialists call inequality? Is this similar to a doctor’s description of a skin blemish as pigmented nevus or actinic keratosis, what most of us call a mole? Teaching about stratification necessitates explaining the distinction. More importantly, stratification makes clear how the study of inequality moves beyond seeing, describing, and even recognizing inequality’s sources and consequences. The term itself, social stratification, may seem abstruse for students new to the study of social inequality. Images of geologic stratification can help to make it more accessible, but this image suggests something static, a layering, with strata of populations on axes of inequalities (e.g., life expectancy or lifetime income). This is a starting point, but stratification is best understood as a verb (to stratify) that can be a gerund (stratifying) as well as a noun. In contesting mid-20th-century functional theorists’ construction of the social system discussed in Chapter 6, power-conflict theorists emphasized the way inequalities of power – economic, cultural, institutional – organize much of what happens in people’s lives. The study of social stratification merges the social systems and power-conflict narratives and offers the best opportunity to help students see the way social inequality is structured into the fabric of society. They can come to appreciate the way stratification circumscribes and shapes the lives of people in the past, across the globe, and – like it or not – the future life they hope to make for themselves. From power-conflict theory, studying stratification recognizes power differentials and resistance to these, providing a framework to understand a very wide range of phenomena. Who decides what kinds of human capital have value? Where are toxic waste dumps sited? What few law schools best offer a ticket to a clerkship for a Supreme Court justice? Is racial targeting by police increasing or decreasing, and for whom? Why does family wealth so often beget even greater wealth? Answering these and myriad other questions requires an understanding of social inequality as a systemic process, a moving, evolving social organization of inequality and inequity. That is social stratification. As course titles go, Stratification and Mobility is usually reserved for upper-division undergraduate and graduate sociology courses. It may sound 84

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technical and impersonal to a student interested specifically in racial discrimination, poverty, or elite power. What they come to see is how the concept of social stratification is at the heart of a structural approach to social inequality, revealing the contours and eddies of the systemic maintenance of unequal power, status, and material well-being that inform their particular topic of interest. Mobility, too, is far more topical than the term may imply. Its study helps the student understand not only the formal and informal ways a society’s organizations and institutions staff their positions and provide their services. Students can assess the likelihood of achieving their own goals while seeing the obstacles and dilemmas they and others face in the ranking and sorting process of a society that is anything but a level playing field. Studying mobility reveals the degree to which the promise of what former President Bill Clinton called “hard work and playing by the rules” does and does not hold true. A bedrock not only of liberal democratic capitalism but of successful authoritarian states is the promise that things are getting better. Being able to get ahead, improve, and have a less problematic future is very much a key to the legitimacy of democracies and autocracies alike. In the US, Britain, and democracies elsewhere, widespread participation in political life and the personal freedom to choose and work toward one’s goals justify the seemingly chaotic, often circus-like electoral and sclerotic legislative processes. A largely unplanned economy that generates poverty, untold waste, and precarious livelihoods is the price paid for an essentially impersonal, even amoral market system that rewards not only risk takers. Hard work and a willingness to play the long game should lead somewhere, to something good, to the promised better life.

SOCIAL MOBILITY, PERSONAL AND SOCIETAL Economic security; physical and mental health; emotionally rewarding work; privacy; personal safety; access to nutritious food; informed citizenship; family stability – almost any important feature of social life can be a consideration of mobility. Are these changing over time? For you or your family? For the place where you live? For the nation? The world? The answers to these questions are usually expressed as trends. Introducing social mobility by looking at such things, even without emphasizing the dimension of inequality, can be a starting point in teaching about social mobility. A second step is to distinguish among categories of people. Are women – and which women – more economically secure than were their mothers? Do Black people, Asians, and Latine have better access to health care than previously? Do younger people have a lesser chance than their parents to accrue savings through home ownership? Are today’s young women, setting out on

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a professional career, foregoing marriage and children more than in previous generations? Why these trends exist is the next obvious question and opens the door to the study of social mobility. In starting with the personal, a simple writing exercise can anticipate many things students will learn about social mobility. Call this “tiny biographies.” Students can be asked to write a paragraph after being given the first fictive line of a mini-autobiography. Here are some examples: “She had trouble finding her footing and seemed to be slipping away from the things she wanted to do.” “No one would have thought, after spending the last two of his high school years in reform school, that they’d see him at the class reunion.” “He kept his head down and studied more than most, and it paid off, sort of.” “The training she got in the Army seemed to be a lucky break for her.” “Her folks could give her everything, and they did.” “Even though he knew three languages, he wanted to stay close to home.” “Her mother never got it together. That made it hard.” “When he left River City for Chicago in his old car and with a bundle of scripts, he had high hopes.”

What students write tells about their ideas of social mobility. This exercise immediately raises questions to which they want answers. Does education really pay off? How much is family wealth and privilege an advantage for the child? Does a criminal record matter in the long run, if you’re willing to get up when you get knocked down? Does the place where you grew up give you an advantage or a disadvantage in life? How exceptional is the rags-to-riches story? Do the wealthy ever fall from grace? The assembled ledger of what social scientists call “variables” is the starting point of empirical inquiry. For students it is an assembly of facts about the reasons for both upward and downward mobility: for example, education, family background, social networks, first jobs, human capital, mental and physical health challenges, marriage, parenthood, divorce, raising children as a single parent. How and why these and other social facts vary with one another is how social mobility is understood.

MOBILITY IN THE STRATIFICATION SYSTEM Less apparent but equally important are the social, political, and economic arrangements that are constantly changing during one’s lifetime: recessions, depressions, technology changes and shifts in the labor market; laws and government policies that address opportunity for marginalized groups; school funding and access to higher education; and job discrimination in hiring, promotions, and dismissals.

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These are not individual factors but parts of the social system they live in and may or may not be aware of: government hiring advantages for veterans and those with disabilities, favoritism for and discrimination against people based on their physical appearance, networks of opportunity for those applying to and matriculating from select schools, the significance of where one grows up – rural vs. urban, suburb vs. inner city, ethnic enclave vs. diverse neighborhood. This is an opportunity to return to discussions of the intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity that may only be revealed in analyses of large sets of data. As a companion to the study of social stratification, teaching about mobility employs a lens that is wider and deeper than the individual. The unit of analysis is what Durkheim called a “social fact,” the category, the self-identified or demographic group, the statistical measure of some social feature. It focuses the eye on social structure, the character of which influences, guides, and channels social life. And it introduces the ways in which what might be called the gates of opportunity are opened, closed, or left slightly ajar. Studying mobility need not, however, be without a human face. For a great many of the 8 billion people on Earth, there are few ways they can improve on their life chances or enhance their control over circumstances. Just holding their ground is a life’s work. Some choose the path of migration, and many others under threat of violence or starvation are forced to leave their homes and communities. If they are fortunate, they will come to reside in a place where a better life is possible – safer, with modern health care, educational opportunities, higher-paying jobs, and the chance for more choices. Their geographic mobility will open upward social mobility. Examples abound of individuals and groups (e.g., immigrants from Sudan, Mexico, Iran) who have “made it” despite humble beginnings. They began life in a new country with apparently few tangible resources and the stigma of being an unwelcome outsider. Theirs is an experience of upward mobility deep in the bosom of the country’s image of itself. When people voice anti-immigrant sentiments or insist on closing the border, is this what they are thinking about? Is this what students are thinking? In a society with a strong economy and a well-functioning state, life can be good and getting better, especially for those born into access and privilege. They can expect multiple chances to recover from their mistakes and make corrections in their life course. Rarely are they subject to the more severe penalties meted out for purposes of social control. While the dominant narrative may emphasize bootstraps and perseverance against all odds, the well-off understand their head start, their select privileges, and how they can give these to their children. The poor and respectable working class may speak the same language, but they know and impart to their children a different message. A missed opportu-

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nity or a wrong turn can be determinate. One should have hope but also have realistic expectations of what lies ahead. These parents have little or nothing to give their children beyond the teen years. Their social network is people like themselves. Their social capital transfers very little advantage to their children. They may work hard to enhance their child’s chance in life, but it remains that, a chance. Good luck! Music celebrities, sports stars, successful small business entrepreneurs, public figures who rise through the political and civic maze are examples that significant social mobility is possible. They are exceptional. The degree to which they are exceptions, whose path is seldom replicated, does not contradict the facts of mobility. Rather, it offers an opportunity in learning about social mobility. Their exceptionalism can be illustrated by moving beyond the individual level to look at aggregate data. These expose just how unusual they are, admirable though they may be. More importantly, the discussion can elucidate why and to what degree these individuals are the exception. Recognizing the ways that some parents of one generation can help their children navigate the hierarchies of inequality tells a great deal about the social system. While not the sole criterion, the use of legacy preference – admitting students to an elite college and university on the basis of a parent’s alumni status or the size of their donation – is openly practiced by elite universities. Explaining this and other elite prerogatives can be a portal to the ways social class structuration is upheld and remodeled for new circumstances. Similarly, that some parents cannot or do not have the assets and knowledge to help their children tells a similar story. Students readily recognize which forms of human and cultural capital are valued and which are not. They may, however, need someone to point out the power of those who make and enforce the rules and control the organizations of which they sit atop. There are any number of illustrations, supported with empirical research and documented on film, to help impart the way the social stratification sorting process operates to the benefit of some but not all. Knowing how wealth disparity between White people and Black people has been institutionally structured by banks and other mortgage lenders, in tandem with local housing ordinances and the administration of federal and state home-ownership loans, is an easily understood episode not only in racial discrimination but also the biased promise of opportunity embedded in social stratification. The post-WWII GI Bill was applied in a discriminatory fashion such that – being administered state-by-state – only two of the 3200 government-secured home loans in Mississippi went to Black veterans (Delmont, 2022). Past racial and ethnic discrimination is poignantly addressed in the film Race Matters. The practice of structural racism resonates in consequence three-quarters of a century later.

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Social mobility is most often identified as the difference between one generation and the next, parents and children. It is less often but importantly also considered to be the difference between one’s situation at the point of early adulthood and their subsequent position in the social hierarchies of occupation, income, and life experiences. In both cases movement will be a short distance rather than a leap from top to bottom or vice versa. In the US, the increase in inequality since the Great Convergence of the mid-20th century has been accompanied by declining social mobility. As Emily Beller and Michael Hout (2006: 21) explain, “an increase in inequality over a period of one’s lifetime increases the probability that someone who starts life in extreme privilege will stay there and (simultaneously) increases the probability that someone whose parents are poor will also be poor.” Time will tell, but it appears from most analyses that Generation Z, born after 1996, are slated to be the first generation in the US to do worse than their parents in terms of their standard of living and economic security as they age. This is not lost on young students. In a 2021 UNICEF/Gallup survey, less than half of the 15–24-year-olds in the US believe they would be better off than their parents. Adjusted for inflation, among those born in 1980, only 50 percent believe they will earn more than their parents (Miller and Parlapiano, 2021). This is compared to 92 percent born in 1940 and 79 percent born in 1950, and despite the expected steady growth of the nation’s GDP. In this case, they are about right. According to Hout, among Americans born in the late 1980s, 44 percent were in jobs with higher socioeconomic status than their parents, and 49 percent were in jobs with lower socioeconomic status. His data “show a slow, steady decline in the probability of moving up.” He concludes that “millennials might be the first American generation to experience as much downward mobility as upward mobility” (Hout, 2019: 29).

CONVEYING A PICTURE OF SOCIAL MOBILITY Nathan Hale (2022: 39) recently wrote about “education as a funicular, boarding everyone and lifting them together.” A funicular, though, has two cars counterbalanced; the one going up is propelled by the one going down. Social mobility is both upward and downward but not balanced or symmetrical. And the hillside is constantly shifting, as are the supports for the cables. Sometimes the suspended cars seem to have halted. There are excellent ethnographic studies with the theme of social mobility to be drawn upon. Jay MacLeod’s (1995) Ain’t No Makin’ It is not yet dated. Studies of working-class life, the struggles of the poor, and immigrants’ stories, including fiction like Amy Tan’s, are poignantly true to immigrants’ experiences. These often deal with the twisted paths of upward and downward

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social mobility. Aspirations, unexpected turns of luck, support from families and mentors, the payoff of affirmative action, diligence and perseverance, and the door-opening effect of education are among the things these studies and writings associate with upward mobility. And there is much writing about the things that lead in the opposite direction. As sociology has become an increasingly quantitative discipline, social mobility studies became both more revealing and more complex. At a minimum, introducing students to the facts of social mobility requires some reliance on these data. Mobility tables are among the clearest form they can take. The tables emphasize one’s “chances” of moving up or down the occupational ladder and for what distance, though even in the third decade of the 21st century these tend to be data for fathers and sons. Blau and Duncan’s (1967) seminal study of the US occupation structure (for males only) gave rise to thousands of research publications charting the mobility path – upward and downward – and the factors that fuel mobility. Making occupation the dependent variable in understanding mobility reflects, to some degree, the quip attributed to Mark Twain: “Why does the drunk look for his dropped keys under the streetlamp? Because the light’s better there.” Still, occupation is a reasonable, if not completely satisfactory, surrogate for income, wealth, status, and power (i.e., social class). What Blau and Duncan documented, and has been replicated in quantitative studies since, is the major role education plays in social mobility. Parents’ education is important, as is their occupational status and income. Important, too, is the community in which a person grows up, a child’s place in the birth order, whether or not one has a scrape with the law, whether one’s parents divorce, and so forth. Educational attainment, though correlated in part with all of these things, is the single most important factor in determining one’s mobility chances. With changes in the economy and workforce participation as a background, occupational achievement diagrams can be introduced. The statistics (path coefficients derived from linear regression and correlations) connecting the variables in these diagrams will be taken as matters of faith for most students. As noted in Chapter 13, some discussion of their meaning is required, but for attentive students they are readily understood and appreciated for the way they isolate the contributing factors. The importance of education can be reassuring to students sitting in a classroom. Today, however, young people in the US are among the least likely of youth worldwide to believe education is the most important thing that determines success. They are also the most likely youth to attribute success to family wealth or connections (Miller and Parlapiano, 2021). Is this cynicism or an expression of the actual decline in social mobility in the US?

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Though there is much left out of the focus on occupation, it documents many things about social mobility worth discussing. Beyond educational achievement being the most important factor in individual intergenerational mobility, such factors as urban geography and geographic mobility, the characteristics of one’s family of origin, and the possession of social capital are important. The diagrams also make apparent that mobility is not only an individual climb or descent on a stationary ladder but a function of a changing society (i.e., structural mobility).

STRUCTURAL MOBILITY To return to the funicular metaphor, the hillside is constantly changing. Mobility studies require discussion of structural mobility, that is, changes in the economy and labor market that may seem to confer mobility automatically. For example, as farming declined, the children of farmers gravitated to towns and cities where they became skilled laborers and personal service workers, appearing to be upwardly mobile. By the time the US entered WWII, automobile factories and transportation sectors were unionized, and other industries followed suit. Maintaining a productive workforce during the war required the adoption of benefit packages – pensions, health and life insurance, and paid vacation time – that were made available to millions. After the war productivity and the national economy grew, and inflation remained low. Profits throughout industries were distributed more evenly between workers and management than ever before. Even the less educated could own homes, travel for vacations, and look forward to retirement. They were socially mobile thanks to changing social structure. Mobility is, of course, not always upward. Individual mobility in a lifetime or across generations is both upward and downward and, as mobility tables show, tends to be of a shorter rather than greater distance. In the 20th century structural mobility seemed to provide improved life chances even when a person’s standing relative to others had not changed. Somewhat ironically, a changing labor market (the decline in farming and the upsurge in professional service and other high-skilled work) for the WWII generation and Baby Boomers meant that millions of workers were upwardly mobile, though they stayed in essentially the same place relative to others in the stratification system. In the 21st century their children and grandchildren could not “move up” as far simply because the labor market offered fewer opportunities in their lifetime (Hout, 2019) and, in some cases, the same job became less desirable in terms both material and immaterial (Kelly, 2020). In late-stage capitalist societies, in China, and in other countries with growing economies, quality of life has gotten better for a great many people, but not all. This has been an outcome of more generous social welfare provi-

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sions, improved public infrastructure, new technologies, and the insistence on the part of citizens that they be treated with greater respect and attention to their needs. This improvement, this structural mobility, is challenged in the current century. Fewer and fewer well-paying, secure jobs are available in domestic industries. The service sector is sharply divided between high-skill services and low-paying personal service jobs. Workers’ wages have lagged behind inflation while productivity gains are funneled to those at the top. Global financialization has taken hold. Both finance and corporate decisions are focused on shareholder interests in accumulating wealth, while national economic well-being, environmental protection, and workers’ interests are either sidelined or left to be addressed by the state. In the US the ideas of a family wage, universal or affordable healthcare, and free higher education seem ever more fantastical. The combination of growing inequality, credentialization, technology’s substitution for human labor, a successful war on unionization, and the shifting of manufacturing’s labor markets to ever-poorer countries is a study in the social structuring of social mobility – downward.

THE RISE OF THE PRECARIAT Young people have been asking themselves for three or four decades if they can “have it all”: a family, a good job, and a home of their own. Many began to lose hope or adjust their life plans to forego one or more of these, jettisoning a long-term commitment to a partner; adopting a casual, self-protective approach to work; and knowing that escalating real estate prices make home ownership a distant dream. A more recent example that Millennials and Generation Z can readily identify with is the rise of the precariat. In the current economy, a large portion of the workforce earns money as contingent, part-time, or self-employed adjuncts to the corporate and small-business workforces. Generations long past, especially young people with a degree in higher education, could look forward to full-time, benefited employment. Job security and advancement depended on their education and skills developed in their work experience. They would have made personal decisions out of loyalty to the firm and the promise of a secure career and reasonably comfortable retirement. Many of the similarly gifted, well-educated young people today are gig workers who use a mobile app to line up remunerated tasks: delivering prepared food, groceries, and household items; giving rides; running errands; and so on. Other gig workers, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, work from home, finding and doing individual tasks or working for a specified time period without becoming employees or ever entering

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a company worksite. Even that young person selling you running shoes may not be an employee but an independent contract worker, at least for purposes of pay, benefits, and taxation. Not all gig workers are among the precariat, and gig work is not what was once called a dead-end job, with no career path and rarely a raise in salary or benefits. A dead-end job is boring, redundant, and probably slated for elimination. Gig workers usually don’t see their jobs as a dead end. They may be graphics designers, freelance writers, data analysts, promoters of products on social media, or any number of things for which they are paid by the job. Some of these jobs require significant skills, creativity, and can confer status claims. Their boss is not only freed from providing a workspace. As freelancers and short-term contract workers, they pay their own social security, workman’s compensation, health care premium, and contributions to an IRA, or not. Among the possibly 75 million adults in the US who work this way, most consider this work their primary source of income. While many gig workers don’t feel particularly insecure, trusting that jobs will continue to come their way, a great many belong to the precariat. The term originated with British writers ten years ago. Employing people temporarily became part of the design by corporations to increase their “flexibility.” Like just-in-time inventories – a scheme that backfired when the COVID-19 pandemic created massive disruptions in the global supply chain – the precariat exists in a tenuous situation, largely defined by insecurity. They are, in a sense, at one end of the axis of working conditions. At the other end are employees who go to work every day, are represented by a union or strong association, can depend on raises each year and possibly a yearly bonus, have a binding agreement that ensures them fair treatment and safety on the job, provides benefits for which they may pay a portion, and offers long-term employment if not promotion for work well done. The precariat are at the opposite end. Discussing this alteration in labor invites an empirical investigation into the rise of a growing class of workers whose long-term fate is unknown. As a subject of social mobility, it speaks to both young students and those returning to school. Not all of them who are past or future gig workers worry about becoming part of the precariat. Gig work gives them a sense of freedom, pride in self-employment or entrepreneurship, and a chance to be with friends more spontaneously rather than always being on a set schedule. On the other hand, many older students – what are sometimes called nontraditional students – may have returned to college after an entrepreneurial effort or spending years among the precariat. They want a real job with security, benefits, and a future. While some gig workers can be considered upwardly mobile, most – and certainly those of the precariat class – are worse off than they might have been one or two generations past. Ballooning real estate prices, student debt, and

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health care costs beyond their imagining automatically shut many of them out of middle-class life even before they’ve knocked on the door. They know that children are expensive, and parenthood is an expendable option. The rise of the precariat is a historic alteration of how the stratification system creates not upward but downward mobility. Showing students why this is so provides a valuable lesson for understanding the processes of structural social mobility. Fifty years ago British sociologists coined another term, embourgeoisement, to describe the idea that workers were becoming middle class. No one hears that anymore. It was first replaced with the 19th-century term from Marxism, proletarianization, and now with the term precariat.

DOWNWARD MOBILITY AND ITS BACKLASH Marxism and other left-isms predicted that capitalism would ultimately immiserate as large a portion of the working population as it could, narrowing the difference between what workers and their families absolutely needed and what they were paid. But who could buy the stuff being produced? It wasn’t long before the ability to consume the products of capitalist production proved as important as squeezing the value of labor from the labor process. It was only economic sense that buying and using the goods and services needed to be proportionate to supply. The determinant of supply was the optimal amount of production to maximize gain for owners and their executive accomplices. This supply had to grow and so did demand. An impoverished workforce wasn’t a good consumer. If the Marxian thesis of immiseration was ever an accurate prognosis of the relationship of capital and labor, this picture is, of course, dated. The essential sentiment behind it, however, is not. Labor in late-state capitalism is seen as a cost as much as it is a source of value to be exploited. Especially in light of state subsidies and tax credits for research and development, it is a wise corporation that substitutes technology for human labor wherever possible. Where it is not, perhaps it can be dumbed down. This lowers labor costs and adds greater predictability to production. It eliminates not only expensive workers but their managers and supervisors as well. They, too, can be replaced with technologies of surveillance, and decisions can be made by AI. The deterioration of the capital–labor compact of the mid-20th century has meant stagnant wages for a large portion of the labor force. Those with less education have fallen further behind while a small portion at the top has seen steady growth in their incomes. How sustainable this is vexes progressive economists. In the meantime, the middle class has shrunk. If, as Barrington Moore (1966) advised, democracy rests on a large and secure middle class, this spells trouble.

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China’s leaders accept the importance of a large middle class to ensure political stability. This is sometimes called the Beijing Consensus, in contrast to the neoliberal Washington Consensus. It consists of strong state control of the economy in order to build up the country’s productive capacity and distribute its value widely to a large segment of the previously rural but increasingly urban poor. The tradeoff for an average Chinese citizen is political quiescence in return for a rising standard of living. Hardly a road to democracy, it largely defines democracy as an equal-opportunity system with widespread improvements in peoples’ lives and relatively equal material well-being. The promise of mobility is fundamental to capitalist democracies as well as state-directed capitalism. Many people sense this promise is in jeopardy. They feel downwardly mobile and want to return to a bygone time. Arlie Hochschild’s (2016) “deep story” attributes their anxiety to affirmative action, an upsurge in immigration, calls for social justice for people of color, and progressives’ efforts to be more gender inclusive. Even the environmental movement favors everyone else, while the respectable White working class lose their jobs. Though likely to draw out among students considerable misunderstanding, deep disagreements, and even racial prejudices, this is a discussion that needs to be a part of a social inequality course.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION AND SOCIAL CLASS Despite being a rather off-putting term, the concept of social stratification is the beating heart of the topic of social inequality. Societies are stratified. Whether by wealth, status, or power (and usually all three), it is the most fundamental of all features of societies. Understanding how stratification develops and changes over a long span of time, the benefits it bestows and the costs it incurs, recognizing how it is enforced, justified, accepted, and challenged, in short, identifying the ways structuration – Anthony Giddens’s (1984) concept – defines so much of social life is fundamental for any serious study in the social sciences. Floating the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is a study in stratification that metaphorically mirrors social stratification. Hundreds of millions of years of sedimentation, uplifts, erosion, and volcanic and metamorphic intrusions have created a complex landscape once occupied by exotic plants and creatures. It is more recently the home of Homo sapiens and recognizable flora and fauna. Indigenous people flourished here only a few centuries ago. Some records of the past are buried in the rocks, and much has been lost to time. It is readily apparent that finding one’s way through this terrain is a matter of trial and error, judgment, luck, and stamina, and subject to the wiles of nature. Of course, metaphors have limited value and can deceptively distort the things they try to clarify. A geological metaphor for the social system suggests

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a certainty and stability to the layering of society that does not actually exist. Efforts to draw lines between social classes can never resemble the distinct demarcation between the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Shale and Muav Limestone. The forces creating sedimentation are many and disputed geological processes not amenable to political economy. And the erosion that carved the Grand Canyon is far different than any diminution of inequality. The metaphor definitely has its limitations, but the image is not a bad place to begin. The data-driven impulse of sociology reaches for empirical indicators of social class: wealth, annual income, and especially educational attainment. Thomas Piketty lists several factors determining social class – nearly as lengthy as Erik Olin Wright (1985). These include, “ownership of the means of production, housing, level of income, education, occupation and sector of activity, age, gender, regional or foreign origin, and sometimes ethno-religious identity” (Piketty, 2022: 39). This yields five “income categories”: the disadvantaged, middle class, upper class, wealthy class, and dominant class. Like many non- or neo-Marxist configurations, it includes no working class and is far removed from Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s inevitable “splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” These and other social class configurations, however, do emphasize the shifting contours of the stratification system. They provide useful interval-level variables ripe for statistical analysis. Their power of explanation of (or at least correlation with) such things as susceptibility to crime, support for or opposition to various social issues, and the ownership of property has more than the ring of authenticity. It has empirical appeal embedded in a larger understanding of how the stratification system ranks, sorts, rewards, and penalizes. Class identification, a quantifiable version of what Marx called a “class-for-itself,” however, is not strong in most industrialized countries and probably weakest in the United States. When offered four choices, nearly as many people identify themselves as middle class as they do working class. Less than 10 percent identify as lower class and less than 4 percent as upper class (National Opinion Research Center, 2022). When not offered categories, most people say they are middle class. Beyond the desire to enunciate a democratic ideal that we are all essentially equal, most middle-class identifiers describe their own social class much like working-class identifiers. Rarely does anyone mention class conflict or express social class resentment. So much for revolutionary class struggle.

SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS CULTURE Class culture is an interesting topic for students exploring stratification for the first time. Courses dealing with race and ethnicity inevitably examine class

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culture, but LGBTQ+ courses and those on gender relations, women’s studies, immigration, criminal justice, and more are likely candidates as well. It could be hoped that education courses, especially those instructing about diversity and their students’ expectations of working with a diversity of students, can explore issues of class culture in ways that not only help teachers understand their students’ sometimes perplexing behavior but also acknowledge and respect diversity. Select documentaries and a few feature-length films exploit or contrast class culture. Barbara Stanwyck’s portrayal in the eponymous 1937 film, Stella Dallas, portrays a woman whose working-class manners and language threaten her daughter’s marriage into the ranks of the affluent. The 1970 drama, Joe, portrays a racist working-class male’s (Peter Boyle) fatal friendship with a business executive (Dennis Patrick) in search of Patrick’s daughter who was lost to Haight Ashbury hippiedom. The 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley contrasts a working-class youth (Matt Damon) with the snobbery of an entitled bon vivant (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who exposes the ruse of a young man striving for upward mobility. Many British films, especially those of Mike Leigh, portray working-class culture with great empathy. The plays of August Wilson, many of which have become feature-length films, portray working-class Black families and friends in ways most White people will never know. The lives of the middle-class, however, is the preferred subject matter for Hollywood that seldom portrays a lifestyle of any social class other than the very wealthy. Portrayals of LGBTQ+ communities, ethnic and nationality groups, women, and those with physical and emotional challenges are not difficult to find, but the distinct conditions of social class and systemic inequality are usually nowhere in sight. Stories focus instead on love, adventure, personal angst and alienation, misunderstanding, mystery, individual travail, and the struggle with identity. Students can readily cite examples outside the instructor’s awareness that lend themselves to discussing class and culture (e.g., in hip-hop and rap). Class culture is a topic inviting a lively discussion among students and another opening for serious inquiry into the concepts of social class and stratification. Something as mundane as seating arrangements can display class culture. Two couples are traveling together. How do they sit? Are the men in the front and the women in the back? Does one couple occupy the front seats and the other the back seats? Or do the couples exchange partners … for this occasion only? How many of your students or their parents have traveled with another couple in this third way? What seating pattern is most often found among the middle class? The working class? Social class culture exists alongside and colors regional and ethnic subcultures and nationality traditions. It is reflected in leisure activities, home décor, common expressions and language style, child-rearing practices, vaca-

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tion agendas, food and drink, and other spheres of life that are not directly dictated by economic circumstances. Students can add to this list, and they can disagree about what constitutes or typifies working-class, middle-class, and upper-class culture. It might be that the discussion entertains sub-class categories, reminiscent of the class in which George Orwell located his family. In very class-conscious 20th-century England, they were, he said, in the upper lower-middle class.

CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM: DANIEL BELL REVISITED The failure of class politics to gain traction in the US, in contrast to much of Europe, confirms the largely uncontested power of its corporations and popular media to construct a compelling narrative of mass consumption, celebrity, and respectful envy of the ultra-wealthy. In light of the absence of class politics, the political appeal of religiosity, nativism, capital punishment, heterosexuality, nationalism, abortion, patriotism, and gun ownership thrives. This narrative, as much as the actual situation in which most people live, has spawned a politics of resentment and grievance against urban cultural styles and the embracement of diversity. It can appear to demand that others, the “silent majority,” give assent to unwelcome values, norms, and mores or risk being cultural barbarians. The grievance narrative of nativist populism obscures or cancels out the politics of class differences and class interests in favor of tribal politics. It cancels out the radically different positions of power, wealth, and status between local pipefitters and ultra-wealthy CEOs, small business owners, and jet-setting billionaires. Union members vote for the candidate on the right when their leadership urges them to vote left. While police officials and organizations push for more gun safety measures, many police officers support the Second Amendment in its most extreme interpretations. They are voting with the tribe, not their personal or immediate economic or political interests. Students in an inequality class share in the contestation over the size and reach of the government, specific social issues such as gun safety, access to abortion, prayer in schools and public displays of religious symbols, tax dollars for schools operated by religious organizations, any form of affirmative action, and gender transition among youth. These not only dominate political discussions but establish identities and erect quasi-tribal boundaries that contradict class position and interests. Daniel Bell’s (1978) conservative critique of the growth of state power as a response to popular demand for greater personal consumption through economic growth saw this as contrary to socioeconomic reality. The focus on rapid change, embodied by modern art and advertising, was out of sync

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with what is economically feasible and politically desirable. This, for Bell, is a serious, possibly fatal cultural contradiction. Similarly, the misfit between the socioeconomic reality of a class-riven stratification system and the seeming obliviousness of people negatively impacted by structured inequality is a conundrum. For the political left, this is the familiar “What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome (from Thomas Frank’s 2004 bestseller). It has been discussed and dissected by left-leaning writers and progressive public intellectuals for decades, to little avail. At the same time, the seeming contradiction itself barely penetrates the public consciousness. Why is social class, the fundamental concept of social stratification, not more prominently a political issue? In part, it is because social class is deliberately obscured in the public mind. But it goes beyond the cynical millionaire running for public office who dons a flannel work shirt and jeans, drives to campaign events in a pickup truck, and uses a coarser or simpler language thought to be appropriate for their less sophisticated, far less well-heeled audience. One answer is consumption that appears to democratize daily life. Credit cards, consumer loans, and buy-now-pay-later financing make middle-class culture available to just about anyone willing to pay exorbitant interest charges. With sufficient credit, even the respectable working-class person can drive a Tesla, take a St. John vacation, or make a down payment on a condo. And outward appearance? Just like young billionaire geniuses and their apprentices, anyone can wear tattered jeans, cargo shorts, hoodies, and baggy t-shirts. Though they won’t be admitted into regal assemblies of the ultra-rich and powerful, even the working poor can practice symbolic democracy. Inventive consolation prizes in the way of moral superiority (e.g., being “pro-life” and ostentatiously honoring fallen soldiers on multiple national holidays) are offered to those left out of the spoils of financial and human capital accumulation. These and other “family values” may be offered to renters who can’t build modest wealth through home ownership. Consolation prizes are given to workers who, having no employee-based pension or savings plan, will try to live on disability benefits and social security when they retire. These prizes are offered to parents who have little or nothing to give their college-age children a boost or to help a recent graduate with a down payment on a home, the millions of would-be small business owners bankrupted within a few years, and those left with little or nothing when their modest savings are sucked into the black hole of medical bills. The hesitation to stress class differences is, in part, attributable to the less obvious demarcation between classes than is found in caste societies or Downton Abbey. Social mobility, in fact and fiction, also plays a bit part in the script. Though rarely spanning the distance between the ranks of the affluent and the working poor, it seems to prove that class boundaries are porous. They

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may be viscous but not so impermeable as to be a barrier that people, mustering individual initiative, cannot pass through or clamber over. Just lucky? Many people would agree with the sentiment attributed to the stoic philosopher Seneca, that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Many of the most compelling empirical examinations of social stratification are qualitative rather than strictly quantitative. Class Matters, The Hidden Injuries of Class, and other accounts of the reality of social class in people’s lives describe a version of reality noir. It is readily apparent in a drive through a city. Yet it is contested in the political arena, evoking charges of “class warfare” and resentment of the successful strivers who beat the odds. Students understand and possibly identify with the many contradictions embedded in the stratification system. Understanding how stratification/ structuration operates, not as a thing but a process, becomes the foundation for students’ more informed and constructive appreciation of social inequality. Social stratification can become a fundamental organizing principle of their understanding of political, economic, and social lives. Whether they will defend it or resist and seek to change it is a choice they can make. They will be better informed and more effective, whatever they do.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Stratification, a staple of power-conflict theory, can be understood as the way social inequality is woven into the fabric of society. • Understanding social mobility provides a link between the personal and the social, showing how structured inequality and power in societies offer opportunities and maintain barriers. • Teaching about social mobility offers a lens that is wider and deeper than the individual, focusing on what Durkheim called “social facts” and the shifting contours of the economic, political, and social order. • Mobility studies, benefiting from the availability of and ability to analyze large data sets, are able to isolate personal and structural factors that influence mobility chances. • The rise of the “precariat” is a story of structural mobility with which students can readily identify. • Social mobility, and especially an improving standard of living, is a staple of political legitimacy. Without it, legitimacy of the political system can evaporate. • Social class is elusive to empirically pin down but is a widely understood concept. Many other things (e.g. educational attainment, income, occupation) are used as substitutes for social class to understand differences in attitudes, behaviors, and life chances.

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• Students readily grasp the idea of stratification when discussed in terms of social class culture and the cultural contradictions of capitalism in the 21st century.

9. Wealth and poverty Most students have no idea about the incredible wealth possessed by a few of the world’s 8 billion people. Immense wealth can be for them akin to grasping geologic time, the scope of the universe, or the world exposed by electron microscopes. They can relate to thousands of dollars, even a few million, but a billion dollars or several billion dollars is as difficult to grasp as an intergalactic collision that happened billions of years ago. That is one of the first challenges, among many, in teaching about wealth and poverty. They may know the numbers, but like trying to comprehend light-years or nanoparticles, few students fully grasp even the most basic facts of wealth concentration. The wealth gap, the disparity between wealth and poverty, is so wide it is difficult to see across it. Even when given the facts, regardless of the quality of visual presentation and real-life illustrations helping to make the point, the reality barely penetrates and the bridge between the wealthiest few thousand and the vast majority of the world’s population is wrapped in fog. Here is one effort. Over a 30-year period, 1200 scientists, technicians, and engineers built and launched the James Webb telescope that replaced the Hubble telescope to search out the origin of the universe. It had an enormous cost overrun, took longer than planned to complete, and set for itself almost impossibly lofty goals. Its success is one of the greatest feats in the history of aerospace engineering. In total the Webb telescope project cost $10,000,000,000. In late 2022 Elon Musk purchased the social app Twitter for nearly 4.5 times what the Webb telescope cost, and it barely dented his fortune. Just simply talking with the class about wealth and poverty is a good starting point. What is it to be very, very wealthy, to be poor in an affluent society, and is there any connection between the two? It may be that, for many students, they have normalized wealth and poverty. Seeing people unhoused and with little hope is just part of the landscape. That only a few should own so much and their decisions make a huge impact on others’ lives may seem perfectly natural, even unobjectionable. Why even think about it? In time, it is important to remind students that such wealth is unusual in the history of humankind. Poverty of the scope that exists in their country is not present in several nations that have chosen otherwise. It’s anything but natural. It might be worth discussing the wealth sideshows: celebrities flaunting their lifestyles to the fascination of millions of people; multi-billionaires and their friends’ trips into outer space; politicians trekking to the homes and 102

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enclaves of the richest 0.01 percent to kiss the ring. The most important point to be made, however, is that wealth confers power which, in turn, affects taxation and public spending, business regulation and financial accountability, corporate concentration and the diminished power of workers. All of these contribute to the contour of a society that favors with privilege and opportunity those who already have the most of both. Poverty, too, can be difficult to grasp. Students often say they are poor, that they know what poverty feels like. But for the vast majority, student poverty is not their actual or long-term condition. Many students can hardly afford gas for their car or pickup truck, must fly a red-eye special for a visit home or a spring-break vacation, live in an apartment with thin walls, traffic noise, little upkeep, and no chance their rent deposit will be returned. Their student debt will not easily go away. Their part-time job intrudes on their studies and may keep them from doing as well as they’d hoped. Is this poverty? How often do the poor, including the working poor, give public accounts of their own poverty? Who represents them as a voice pushing for their interests? The occasional liberal takes seriously their plight and works for solutions to their problems. The even less occasional candidate for office voices concerns, but this is rare in a political environment that more profitably rewards the view of the nonpoor: poor people themselves are the problem. Crime, homelessness, trashy neighborhoods, delinquency, to say nothing of the public costs these things incur, is most often the public’s perception and attitude toward the poor. Behind the airing of conventional opinions, poverty is poor people. End of story. And what of poverty, per se? Poverty as a major characteristic of the stratification system is rarely discussed in the mainstream media. The poor, yes. The statistics on poverty, yes. But the way poverty is generated and maintained as a function of how a society operates, no. The challenge of teaching about poverty is to move the discussion away from the simplistic level of anecdotal observation to the study of stratification and the way organizational and institutional practices create and sustain poverty. Poverty is not normal in any sense implying that it is intractable or part of human nature. That hundreds of millions of people across the globe live in poverty despite the global wealth created in the last few centuries is also not natural. It is a human construction, the result of both unintended consequences and intentional designs in the adoption of technology, economic organization, state policy, and a host of other forces. Most of all, like wealth, it is a consequence of the distribution of power, of which the poor have little.

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WEALTH – LEARNING JAY GOULD’S LESSON Students may sense that wealth is seldom accumulated in one lifetime, that it is extraordinary for people of humble beginnings to ascend to the ranks of the very wealthy. Most of the uber-rich began there as infants. Donald Trump was a millionaire by age eight thanks to his father’s tax avoidance schemes. Only about one in five households in the US inherit any money from parents or other family members, and this inheritance averages only $46,000 – not quite what John Paul Getty, Jr., received on his father’s death: he “instantly became the sixth-richest man in Britain” (Osnos, 2023: 36). Those who do manage this feat of radically upward mobility through means other than inheritance have inspiring stories. That it happens, especially to non-White sports stars and entertainment celebrities, is a valuable part of the ideology of an open, competitive society. Their rarity makes them unique, adding to the admiration of impressionable young people. They believe, as the old saw goes, “You can get it if you really want it.” This is a good opportunity to introduce a few statistics of wealth inequality, especially highlighting the vast distance between the very wealthy and everyone else, but especially the tens of millions of US households with essentially no wealth/savings or negative wealth, owing more than their assets are worth. National surveys regularly report the large numbers of households that could not immediately pay for a new set of tires or an emergency room visit (Grover, 2021). Credit cards hide much of this dearth in liquid resources. It might not be necessary to contrast this to the price of first-class airline tickets, a meal for the family at an expensive restaurant, or routine servicing of an expensive automobile – all priced well beyond what most working households could afford or even contemplate. But it can begin the conversation. Students can grasp the facts that a relative few own just about everything. The top decile of tax filers have more than three-quarters of all the wealth in the US, and of these, the top 1 percent possess more than a third (38 percent) of all wealth (Saez and Zucman, 2020: 9). It is part of a course on social inequality to examine how, exactly, contemporary wealth and income inequality have been created, are maintained, how they have grown of late, and why this matters. Wealth, much more unequally held than annual income, is to some degree tied to income, though much of the income of the most wealthy is never reported as such. The income of the top 0.01 percent of the population increased by nearly 300 percent in 20 years (between 1984 and 2004). At the same time, income of the bottom half of the population grew by only 21 percent (Zucman, 2016). “[T]he richest 1 percent now receive 80 times as much income, and own 950 times as much wealth, as an average member of the bottom 50 percent” (Mann,

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2020). Along with this, “wealth has skyrocketed.” In 1980, “the top 1 percent owned wealth equivalent to 60 years of average US income. In 2020… they owned 200 years of average US income in wealth” (Saez and Zucman, 2020: 11). Why? Of late, the accumulation of wealth has been highlighted by what is increasingly called – adopting Bernie Sanders’s term – the “billionaire class.” In 1990, 66 individuals in the US were considered billionaires. Forbes (2023) calculates that their number is now 735, with a collective worth of $4,700,000,000,000. That’s $4.7 trillion. This hardly reflects productivity growth or entrepreneurial acumen. Some call it rentier capitalism. Assisting inheritance as the main source of extreme wealth are tax laws that have increasingly favored the rich. The wealthy park their money in obscure places (e.g., tiny islands with sham financial offices) to avoid paying taxes. Financial instruments and skilled estate planners help, too. The wealthy are “smart,” as former President Donald Trump described himself, to not pay taxes. They enlist armies of smart tax accountants and smart lawyers to find every legal (and sometimes questionable) means to keep their taxes to a minimum. Some very wealthy individuals dismiss the aphorism attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society.” For many years the former president, a billionaire, paid no or a tiny amount of federal income tax. Jeff Bezos and other millionaires and billionaires take no income from their ownership of assets, choosing to live on and buy luxury property with borrowed money. Loans are not taxed as income. They pay interest on the loans at a far lower rate than they would pay taxes on income, and claim the paid interest as a tax deduction. Their fortunes remain intact and grow. Not everyone is as clever or wealthy as Jeff Bezos. Saez and Zucman calculate that the richest 0.01 percent of Americans’ effective tax rate is about 30 percent, barely more than the average of 25 percent for the lower 90 percent of tax filers, despite the idea that taxation in a capitalist democracy should be progressive. It is much more progressive elsewhere. In France, largely due to taxation, the bottom half of income earners pocket 22.5 percent of the national income. In the US the figure is 12.5 percent (Saez and Zucman, 2020). The concentration of wealth is at a level not seen since before the Great Depression of the 1930s, the time F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about in The Great Gatsby. Students appreciate the implication of this. Though it can be an endless stream of numbers, if offered sparingly, empirical data on the distribution of wealth is a good way to solidify their understanding. Modern research of global and national inequality offers highly accessible graphs and charts in their publications, and there are many videos available with excellent narration.

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In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street protests following the Great Recession captured the widespread outrage over the uneven economic recovery. It highlighted the enormous and growing wealth of financial elites, including those who created the recession and paid no penalty. Though it was a short-lived protest movement that never materialized into a social movement, its message struck a chord and sparked protests throughout the US and other affluent nations. The protests were moderately successful in exposing the depth of economic inequality and its consequences. Its failure as a social movement notwithstanding, the Occupy Movement of persons identifying as the 99 percent briefly shed light on the fabulously wealthy and powerful few who seem to live in an alternative universe.

A PATH TO WEALTH OR A REVOLVING DOOR? Among the One Percent are not only CEOs and hedge fund managers who garner tens of millions of dollars annually, but owners of auto dealerships and successful professionals, especially in finance, law, real estate, and medicine, many of whom grew up in the middle class. They may be inheritors of their parents’ estates and advantaged in the way of social networks, but they acquired their elite status in adulthood through business and their professional position. The very wealthiest, say the 0.01 percent or one-out-of-a-hundred of the One Percent, in comparison, control corporations that many of them were born to run. Other heirs occupy themselves with philanthropic activity, pose as artists, speculate in venture capital, spend time traveling and living in one exotic locale or another, and trust experts to provide oversight of their money. They inherited considerable wealth and now live on investments. Their head start in life gave them entry to the rarefied air of the super wealthy where they will most likely stay and provide for their children’s inheritance. Rare, indeed, but highly visible is the tech or digital marketing billionaire who sits atop a social media platform or devises a way to make our lives more “frictionless.” Their enterprises are highly capitalized, but their investors are fickle, making them subject to sudden losses and bankruptcies when new, competing technologies are adopted by their competitors or when government regulators come calling. “Move fast and break things,” their mantra, sometimes describes their own fate as well. The Panama Papers and other leaks of the financial records of tax havens document the means by which the wealthy avoid taxes and, in some cases, hide ill-begotten income. Low-tax jurisdictions (i.e., states like Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota, and countries like Ireland and the Cayman Islands) present themselves as favorable incorporation sites and

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postal addresses. This financial chicanery enables the wealthy to avoid billions of dollars in taxes, increasing the power of the wealthiest worldwide. Less scintillating but probably as important is a look at campaign contributions where hundreds of millions of dollars are collected from only a handful of politically engaged individuals. Today in the US approximately 40 percent of all campaign donations come from the top 0.01 percent of income earners. Writing in the New York Times, Paul Krugman (2020) reported that 400 families accounted for almost half of all money raised in the 2016 presidential campaign. The situation has only become more extreme in the years since. These individuals and corporations giving to Political Action Committees recognize the dollar value in legislation that reduces their tax bill, deregulates their means of acquiring wealth, and gives them access to new sources of wealth accumulation. It signals a great deal of power to be used for legislative favors. As an example, Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave nearly $173 million to conservative causes and Republicans in the 2020 elections. As a portion of their wealth, that would be equivalent to the average American household (median net worth of $122,000) giving $528, not a paltry sum. How many average households would have to make this same contribution to match what the Adelsons contributed? Nearly a third of a million. Whose invitation to their home will the presidential or congressional candidate accept? Occupy Wall Street objected to the “One Percent,” but many participants in the protests were themselves highly privileged. They are part of the top 10 or 20 percent, what Peggy Noonan (2016) calls the “protected class” and Richard Reeves (2017) calls the “dream hoarders.” Mathew Stewart (2018) provides a cogent discussion that explains how this group protects themselves and limits the mobility of would-be intruders. Through the design of social, legal, and economic barricades and obstacles, they not only protect themselves but guarantee this protection for their progeny. They can give themselves competitive and noncompetitive advantages not available to others and seamlessly pass these on to the next generation in their families. Here some basic statistical facts on mobility and the inheritance of wealth, the elimination for all practical purposes of inheritance taxes, and the ways children of the wealthy and the affluent are advantaged by their parents’ largess are worth spending class time on. As vividly shown in Rachel Sherman’s (2019) ethnography of very wealthy parents with young children, these advantages may evoke mild guilt. Her Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence shows how they want to think of themselves as responsible adults who are not perpetuating a managerial and ownership class of entitled children. The stratification system, however, has other plans.

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NOT POOR, BUT NOT DOING SO WELL Because it is difficult for students who are not attuned to macroeconomics to grasp the ways wealth accumulation is linked to poverty, it can be more instructive to work down the tiers of wealth and income inequality rather than to draw this link directly or initially. Better to remind students how those who are not poor, how the low-wage, less-educated working class must worry much of their lives about making ends meet. They know this worry is through no fault of their own. They believe it is just part of the way things work. This story may hit close to home for some students and be familiar to others whose families are not a great deal better off. Much of the middle class (i.e., people who probably own their home, work for a salary, are able to afford childcare, and have some savings) see their situation as precarious. Statistics show how the characterization of the middle class in early television as a White family where the mother of two or three children works unpaid at home and has dinner ready when Dad returns from work held true only for some. As a social reality, it has been diminished for several decades since. Most households need two or more earners to meet their wants, or at least their needs. There are arguments over bills, household repairs go untended, gray income is unreported, bargain shopping and coupon clipping is a necessity, and myriad other strategies help the household fend off the wolf at the door. The income divide between those with higher education and those whose education stopped at or short of a high school diploma is huge. This chasm is expressed in lifetime earnings, political opinions, types of illnesses, quality of health care, financial insecurity, and life expectancy. Much of the US White population that never attended college were once able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle with its security and status claims. For many, that is no longer the case. King County (Seattle), Washington, Teton County (Jackson), Wyoming, and countless other locales provide another stark example of this shrinkage of the middle class, with secure affluence on one side, an often precarious, low-income life on the other. There are two income classes, two distinct labor markets. In one are people who have six-figure salaries and benefit from having assets, including their home or homes. On the other are those who make lattes, stock store shelves, teach in public schools, clean the homes of the more affluent, roof their houses, patrol their streets, clean their teeth, and collect their trash. They work, but their children may qualify for free lunch at school, depend on Medicaid for health care, and would be in even more dire straits without childcare, dependent, and Earned Income tax credits.

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Middle-class neighborhoods are a declining portion of the urban landscape. As they age, neighborhoods either decline so as to provide housing for the poor or are gentrified and become unaffordable for many middle-class families. A generation ago in Seattle, for example, “seven out of ten families lived in middle-class neighborhoods. Today, only five out of ten do. Nearly a third live in wealthy enclaves” (Kasakova and Gebeloff, 2022). Low-income employees work for the more affluent but may not even live in the same town or city. Fewer and fewer working households occupy the more comfortable middle space – physically and fiscally – of the middle class. Recognizing these situations can begin the discussion of a political economy that is tilted in ways that increasingly leave millions in an uncertain situation with few prospects for improvement. This is part and parcel to an organization of society that increasingly heaps lavish benefits on the few and threatens or stymies the efforts of many families to have a secure, comfortable life. The rise of Christian nationalism, populist nativism, and xenophobia, and the lure of a more authoritarian but morally righteous politics, is the subject of many journalists’ and social scientists’ portrayals of this change. They provide a searing portrait of uncertainty and resentment felt by many people, especially in declining or economically marginal rural areas. Those living there are becoming increasingly aware of the narrowing gates of entry into and challenges to maintaining a middle-class lifestyle. People in this struggling, respectable working class may feel, rightly, that this is not only hurting their own lives but is also foreboding for their children’s life chances. They are confused and angry at those they may refer to as elites, but only to select individuals whose gains are ill-begotten or who seem to be conspiring against them (e.g., George Soros and other “global elites”). They much more frequently blame the poor, people who seem to them, chronically and without justification, dependent on the government. And these people, they often imagine, have dark skin. A staple of American mythology is that people work hard to avoid poverty. It is supposed to serve as a warning of what could happen if they quit or seek another job. To remain employed, they will bear capricious and biased work rules, unsafe environments, inequitable pay, and the indignities of a workplace whose design is dictated by the financial office of a giant corporation. While conservatives may contend that the prospect of poverty is a prime motivator of hard work, careful expenditures, and saving for a rainy day, this is not how millions of people see their situation. There is little or no empirical evidence to support this myth. It is a non-sequitur to ask a good student if they will work hard for the next exam in order to avoid a life of poverty. It is, however, an opportunity to discuss how the more complex structural role poverty plays in a society is more than what lies behind Door Three, the one you don’t want to choose.

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POVERTY IN AN AFFLUENT SOCIETY One of the many difficult tasks of teaching about social inequality is to disabuse, even dissuade, students of their casual opinion that people’s free choices have landed them in poverty. When discussing or describing the unhoused in their towns and cities – people very often mentally ill, not infrequently addicted, or suffering a physical disability, but willing to admit they’ve burned all their bridges to those who might have helped them or taken them in – it is not unusual to hear talk of choices made and consequences suffered. It might be instructive to remind students that everyone makes bad choices. The affluent can be bailed out or will find opportunity, remediation, and forgiveness time and time again. Not so for the less fortunate. The poor know that even a single poor choice can spell their fate. This is their reality, one that starkly reveals class inequality. This only needs to be pointed out to move the conversation to the shared foundation upon which the political economy of capitalism creates both the wealthy and the poor. Poverty is a moving target. Millions, perhaps 4 or 5 percent of the US population with an income half the poverty threshold or less, live in deep poverty. They have, in terms of a modern society, nothing. Millions more live in poverty much of the time, with an occasional foray above the poverty threshold. Still others will briefly experience poverty, then rejoin the nonpoor for a spell before possibly returning to the ranks of the poor. Today, roughly 7 million US children live in poverty. More than half of all Black children will experience poverty, many of them for several years, but not for their entire childhood. At any one time, however, a quarter to a third of all Black children are living in poverty, while a greater number of White children live in poverty. Today the poverty rate among that diverse group the US census calls non-White Hispanic children is less than this, but their greater number means that more Hispanic children than Black or White children are living in poor households (Haider, 2021). Quantitative data displayed in charts and graphs are useful in showing movement in and out of poverty, deep and persistent poverty, and the life chances (mortality, health care, educational attainment, etc.) poverty confers. As discussed in Chapter 11, excellent studies on the long-term consequences of early childhood education and interventions that improve poor children’s life chances are accessible for students and effective in helping students think seriously about the corrosive effects of poverty as well as the importance of policies and societal commitments aimed at poverty reduction. In the mid-1970s the US Congress changed the way Social Security was calculated and substantially increased benefits for the elderly. Almost overnight the portion of elderly poor was cut in half, from more than 20 percent to a little

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over 10 percent. In 2020 the US Congress authorized payments to households with children by an amount that cut child poverty nearly in half. When the law expired it was not renewed by Congress. Children again make up a third of the country’s poor. It is unimaginable that the earlier changes to Social Security would ever be reversed, but the return to a rate of child poverty in the US that is higher than almost all affluent countries, was met with barely a protest or any discussion in Congress. This, once again, was a matter of choice. Rather than trying to eliminate poverty, the state’s response – like that of most anti-poverty organizations – seeks to plug the holes in a low-wage economy. Often attached to wages are social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, the Earned Income and Child Tax Credits, and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) that help the working poor. Other programs like school lunches and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamps), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), rent assistance and home weatherization (when available), and time-limited cash payments to single parents with dependent children looking or training for work seek to mitigate poverty’s worst consequences. Social safety net programs have increased in recent decades as wages stagnated and recessions created more unemployment. To get a more accurate picture of a household’s ability to pay for food, shelter, and other necessities, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) was devised. It takes account of the monetary value of new and older poverty-reduction measures as well as household income earned directly through employment. For example, a family of five profiled in the New York Times (DeParle, 2022) has an annual income of $20,500. This is income after payroll taxes and work expenses are deducted, but not net of sales taxes and property taxes folded into their rent. This income puts them at 66 percent of the poverty threshold. They are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credits valued at $10,000. School lunches and SNAP provide another $10,000 valuation. After these and other supports, the family’s income is calculated to be $42,600, 137 percent of the poverty threshold. Regardless of the SPM and how the poverty threshold (a line whose determination has been much disputed for decades) is calculated, there is a great deal of upward and downward movement of households into and out of poverty, though these households rarely move far above the threshold. Many of the lower-working class who do receive social assistance experience little change in their prospects. For most it is not sufficient for them to be able to improve their circumstances in such a way that they leave poverty behind forever. Below the working poor are the permanently poor and near-poor, including the millions of elderly who depend entirely on Social Security, people who are disabled or sightless who receive SSI, and those who chronically depend on food banks and other nonprofit organizations for help. They are, because

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of age, infirmity, and a variety of other reasons, unable to materially improve their situation or that of their children. They are among the most vulnerable to the whims of political theatrics. The permanently poor and near-poor are often mothers raising children alone. They may be trying to help elderly relatives who are equally or even more destitute. Why these persons should live in such insecurity and share so little of the largess of an affluent society is the consequence of a long list of political and economic choices made, not by the poor themselves, but by those who find benefit in, or are not directly threatened by, a stratification system that generates enormous wealth as well as a great deal of poverty. Unless blind, disabled, or a veteran with a service-related injury or illness, little or none of the social services and cash payments for the non-working poor are available to males who are not elderly and who do not have dependent children. This group make up the majority of those at the very bottom of the stratification system. Many are so poor as to be shunned and shunted off to the hidden recesses of a town or city. When they make an appearance or pitch tents on the sidewalk, they remain invisible to most people, though their encampment does not. They are the much regretted, occasionally reviled unhoused individuals. The unhoused offer a troubled picture for many cities, and changing their situation is a conundrum, expensive and uncertain. Their misfortune poses a challenging opportunity to build students’ understanding, not only of the ways poverty looks but the system of sorting and ranking, of rewarding and penalizing, of addressing and ignoring, of privileging and rejecting – that is, the stratification system. Most students support more services for unhoused individuals: mental health treatment, addiction interventions, public or affordable housing measures, even harm-reduction rather than penalization and criminalization. A cursory look across affluent nations, however, makes clear that homelessness is a societal, not a personal, choice. There were no ghettos in Eastern Europe during the late Soviet era. China has plenty of poor people, many of whom find a perch in a hidden alcove or squat temporarily on the street, but it has nothing resembling the favelas in Latin American cities. Some nations abhor homelessness. Some nations base their legitimacy as a democracy on successfully confronting it. And some nations not only tolerate but normalize it.

WEALTH, POVERTY, AND SOCIAL CHANGE What advantages accrue to those in the 0.01 percent, the top 1 percent, the affluent 10 or 20 percent of households whose assets and sources of income shield them from significant worry about medical bills, foreclosures, or the rising cost of higher education? What are, and how do they perceive, their

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opportunities, life’s difficulties, and those of others? What does it mean for the political and economic systems that the most affluent have inordinate power to decide the shape of spaces others live within? A wider lens takes in social upheaval in poorer countries and looks historically at reform and revolutionary movements. These tell a story of the consequences of wealth inequality and status privilege to foment social change. This may or may not be prophetic for affluent societies today, but it is very instructive for understanding how the modern world, including students’ own country, was created. These examples of social reform and revolution, along with the means the wealthy employ to inoculate themselves against such a possibility, offer some interesting applications of the power-conflict perspective. In past moments of US history wealth was flaunted. Images of opulence in newsreels and newspaper society pages told of their riches and fabulous lifestyles. At such times there was both admiration and widespread resentment, spurring the breakup of monopolistic corporations and the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that created the income tax, first taxing only John D. Rockefeller but soon taking in the very wealthy. There was not, however, a strong enough radical movement to bring about upheaval to the excesses of wealth. Similarly, today only a few students, frustrated by the older generations’ failure to address problems of climate change, student debt, gun violence, and social injustice, have concluded that the solution is to “burn it down.” These students probably also take issue with the gaping chasm between the wealthy and everyone else. It’s worth showing students how Britain’s National Health Service, the Social Security system in the US, and a wide variety of other changes following WWII were begun as a response to the recognition that capitalism benefits some people far more than others. It leaves behind far too many when it operates without a strong state to reign in its excesses or make compensation for its disinterest and failures. International comparisons are an important part of their developing a structural understanding of inequality as well as an avenue to address it through public awareness, social movements, demands for changes in organizational practices, and the law. Anand Giriharadas (2022) reminds that, “if enough of us decided to, we could enact labor, tax, antitrust and regulatory policy to make it hard for anyone to amass that much wealth.” And, he might have added, “to grow up or live in poverty.”

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • The first challenge in learning about wealth and poverty is to help students grasp the great wealth of a few families and its connections to widespread poverty, a challenge that goes beyond showing them the numbers.

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• Wealth inequality is great and growing due to the disproportionate distribution of productivity favoring owners over workers, the near abandonment of estate inheritance laws, and tax policies and loopholes, all of which are driven by unequal power. • Beneath the 0.01 percent and the 0.1 percent who control major corporations, are the 1.0 percent, the very affluent who live quite well. Not only they but those just below them (the next 10–20 percent) protect their advantages and privileges from those below them in terms of wealth, income, and privilege. • The middle class in the US is growing smaller, and the number of middle-class neighborhoods is declining, not because of upward mobility but due to stagnant or declining wages and rising costs for households. • Without a firm commitment to eliminate poverty, the state instead offers income supports and social benefits to the working poor rather than requiring they be paid for work sufficient to support a family. • The state’s policy choices, including choices regarding the economy and corporate behavior, leave millions destitute, many unhoused and living on the streets and in public parks.

10. Global inequality Much of the world is very poor. Nearly a billion people go to bed hungry every night. The World Bank (2022) estimates that almost 400 million people live in deep poverty. One in eight people on the Earth have less than $1.25 a day on which to live. Possibly half of all the people in large cities in Latin America and Africa live in slums, lacking minimal health and personal safety amenities. Thousands of children die needlessly every day from illnesses that are easily prevented. The list of facts about global poverty are shameful for those living in comfort. They seem, prima facie, to be the reason that studying social inequality necessitates a global perspective. The world’s people and practices are connected in myriad ways. Some of this is captured in the history of imperial conquest and colonial domination, in the neoliberal practices of globalization, and in the recognition that we all share the same atmosphere and contagious diseases. Economic recessions and depressions are global phenomena driven by wars, economic nationalism, and the glitches and ambitions of global capitalism. They drive up the cost of bread and everything else in affluent countries, but are most damaging in the poorest places in the world. When this connectedness is recognized and even minimally understood, it becomes a backdrop for examining the ways in which social inequality is perhaps the single most significant variable in explaining the events and human consequences of what happens across the globe. There is no limit to the illustrations of this, and it makes for a lively discussion as the course ventures into this complex but intriguing awareness. It is surprisingly easy, even routine, however, to read or hear a list of tragic statistics and move on. How many of us watch a video of emaciated babies victimized by another famine, whether caused by crop failures, war, or climate change, and feel sad for a few moments, then return to our screens? It’s not that students are uncaring and think they should not learn about the way the least fortunate live and die, but it is perhaps not the best, most effective way to introduce them to global inequality. Drawing comparisons between nations is important, but the scale of differences and the mental barriers to imagining this are so great they are almost numbing. A slightly more circuitous route that begins with social structure is an alternative and perhaps more effective learning approach. Students’ attire and the technologies they can barely live without are the handwork of people far away 115

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whom they will never see and can barely imagine. The corporate headquarters and those with creative and entrepreneurial acumen may be nearby, but the tedious, sometimes dangerous work of making these things is not. Why others do this work and they, students in a vastly different milieu, acquire and use them is a question worth asking. Why do their castoff (donated) clothes choke the local markets and their discarded computers leak toxic waste thousands of miles away? This is worth thinking about. Why is this, and their place in this seemingly organized global system, the way the world works today? Where can LGBTQ+ individuals feel safe and accepted? Where might their efforts to build community meet with repression and violence? Where would they and activists working on their behalf be imprisoned? Where are other unfavored minorities, religious groups, and those identified as lower caste accorded fewer rights and less access to the things others take for granted? Women and girls around the world suffer from patriarchy and sexism, sometimes to a degree that threatens their very lives. They experience restrictions in their freedom of movement, less education, poorer job opportunities and the ability to earn a living. This discrimination clearly falls under the Weberian concept of inequality of social status, but it is equally associated with class and power. To extend Weber’s conceptualization, what status privilege continues to lavish benefits primarily on a handful of men? Why do they, and few others, dominate the global economy, trade, manufacturing, and financial services? Why do men, and only a smattering of women, spread much of its popular culture and lead countries into violence for which they themselves will pay few if any consequences? The world’s wealthiest men are honored with public acclaim. Their words are repeated endlessly, even on topics for which they have no expertise or experience. “Billionaire geniuses,” their critics call them. Without venturing too far into the domain of political science, it is worth drawing attention to the way powerful nation states with enormous corporate and military advantages seek to make the world work best for themselves, rarely supporting a greater sharing of wealth and opportunity across nations. This may not be a popular topic, but the questions themselves begin a more open discussion and focused inquiry than the initial recitation of data (important as they are) that display the consequences of vastly asymmetrical power.

WHAT IS GLOBAL INEQUALITY? That one person in a hundred has in their possession more than a third of the world’s wealth, and the least wealthy – half of the world’s people – have a mere 2 percent is worth knowing. Most people rely on wages to live. It matters that a mere one in ten people garner more than half of the total income distributed worldwide. These are the usual measures of inequality among

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nations. They only begin, however, to tell of vastly different living conditions, health, security, and more. Citing these statistics evokes the ritual question: Do we have to know all of these numbers for the exam? Yes, there are many facts about global inequality. They are important to know because they help to tell a story usually out of earshot of the world’s comfortable. But the numbers are only part of the story. What does it mean that people have no access to clean, safe drinking water? What does it feel like to know your baby has a one in ten chance of dying before her first birthday? How do you cope with old age and its infirmities? Will you just have to learn to live with a disfigured, crippling wrist, ankle, shoulder, sternum, or pelvis if you have an accident and break it? Will you have to hobble or scoot around on a cart the rest of your life? Different national incomes can confer a similar quality of life and vice versa, depending on the many factors that distinguish one nation or society from another. Public policies, the way families distribute their resources, and environmental uncertainty with growing threats attributable to climate change factor into people’s quality of life. They militate against treating income (or wealth or national GDP) as the sole measure of economic inequality. This raises or invites the question nearly always raised by students: Can poverty or wealth be compared across societies? Isn’t the poorest American – in terms of their daily cash expenditures, even if it’s not much – less poor than a person of average or even greater than average means in a very poor country? It takes some discussion to show students a better way to gauge inequality and evaluate quality of life. Amartya Sen (1997) offers an approach to understanding inequality beyond numbers. A country’s GDP and per capita income are gross and often inaccurate measures of inequality as it is actually lived. He recognizes and recommends a broader conception of economics. Sen’s view of the economic – what he calls “entitlement” – includes, among other things, access to health care and public health measures that improve life chances, educational facilities, access to reproductive choice, security, economic opportunities, and quality of working conditions. In country after country there is enormous variation both in the availability of these things and the personal challenges that must be undertaken to acquire and keep them for oneself and one’s family. They go beyond per capita GDP and income. What Sen is proposing, and relevant to understanding global inequality, is that social inequality includes that vague but important notion of quality of life. It includes some of the things enumerated in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice: rights, liberties, opportunities, and the social basis of self-respect as well as participation in public life. Researchers, such as those compiling the annual United Nations (UN) Human Development Report, cite infant mortality, maternal health, life expectancy, and educational opportunity as indicators of

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quality of life. Shaefer and colleagues (2017) include risk of homicide and risk of incarceration. It is interesting to discuss with a class what they think quality of life is. Students have their own ideas about what should be added to this list. A discussion that includes access to land for family farming, village or rural clinics, and locally trained health workers; modest but well-stocked schools that welcome girls as well as boys; respect and care for the aged and disabled; and the absence of fear of gun violence helps steer the conversation away from the naïve “poor but happy” scenario. This can also enhance their image of what life in a poor country looks like. Of course, videos help.

THE GROWTH OF GLOBAL WEALTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY The study of global inequality has benefited mightily from the labors of economists and sociologists since the early to mid-20th century. Across the globe nations collect taxes on income and in many cases wealth as well, statistics now widely available. Vast surveys of spending have been carried out in scores of nations. These have generated a great deal of data researchers love. Scholars have drawn up complex but increasingly sophisticated and reliable measures of comparative national income and wealth. They have been keen to understand patterns of inequality by tapping into the growing availability of this information, using new technological means for gathering and making sense of these data. Simon Kuznets’s work that began to be published in the 1950s ushered in the quantitative study of global inequality by charting changes in the distribution of income in the US during the first half of the 20th century. This was a period in which the nation gained preeminence in the global economy, with massive immigration to supply the labor market and increasingly abundant capital for a growing national economy. It was, of course, a period in which a worldwide depression of the 1930s that sent shockwaves through nations gradually began to force them to heed the Keynesian message. Capitalism needs both the help and the regulation only states can provide in order to minimize crises and, when they occur, get the economy going once again. On the one hand, states accomplished this by creating military might. They did this in the runup to WWII and in the conduct of the war, postwar reconstruction, and the creation of a permanent war economy. And they did this by funding reconstruction after the war and establishing global neocolonial rule to aid the spread of global capitalism. Along with this, states undertook the building of national healthcare systems, funded the expansion of educational opportunities, created modern transportation systems, and established global institutions to manage the

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expansion of capitalism throughout the world. On the other side of the Cold War the Soviet Union did much the same thing, with less success in building new economic might, but success nonetheless. Kuznets created one of the most famous models for the distribution of national income for this period of national economic growth and widespread prosperity following WWII. He proposed a robust bell-shaped curve and, despite many caveats, strongly suggested it applies not only to the US but to all nations undergoing industrialization and growing national wealth. At the outset, a relatively stagnant agricultural economy has inequality but not the vast inequality to come. As economic growth and industrialization take off, a small sliver of elites enjoy material abundance far in excess of what most people experience. They, in effect, seize the new wealth for themselves and seek to multiply it. In time, this growth becomes available to most of the population and there is a dramatic narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. The French call this Les Trente Glorieuses while in the US it is known as the Great Compression of the mid-20th century. As Thomas Piketty (2014) has described, Kuznets’s model became accepted wisdom for both university courses and the public at large. Piketty and his colleagues’ World Inequality Database, covering a much longer timeline and including dozens of nations, however, shows a significantly modified picture for not only well-developed capitalist nations over the past half-century but a different picture for newly emerging economies and their adoption of market forces. Kuznets’s optimistic view of declining inequality in late-stage capitalism clashes with a reality of growing inequality, the Great Divergence of the second half of the 20th century that continues today. Lakner and Milanovic (2016) created a simple graph of income inequality from 1988 to 2008 that extends and diverges sharply from Kuznets’s bell-shaped curve. Economic growth 30 years later was not as equally distributed as it was in the 1950s. Far from it. Based on extensive household surveys conducted worldwide, they show how the wealthiest have garnered a much larger portion of economic growth while incomes of the lower half have essentially stagnated, creating what they call the “Elephant curve.” The extension of Kuznets’s bell curve (the elephant’s back) is an upward-sloping line, like the head and rising trunk of the beast. Piketty and his colleagues (Alvaredo et al., 2018) replicated this curve with tax and national income data, stretching it back to 1980, drawing a similar conclusion. The wealthiest have gotten much wealthier and their share of national income has grown overnight, while those with little or no wealth have gained far less or nothing at all. These two graphs capture both inequality between nations and inequality within nations. The wealth of the wealthiest in wealthy nations has grown, while the lesser wealth in poorer and middle-income countries has gone inordinately to the wealthiest social classes.

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Comparisons are the backbone of sound explanation. Experimental and control groups; company A and company B; before and after; earlier and later; this country and another country. Among the many ways of organizing the learning of global inequality are three comparisons: inequality between nations; inequality within nations; and comparison of the various networks of globalization that influence – in some cases exacerbating and in others seeking to reduce – inequality throughout the world.

INEQUALITY BETWEEN NATIONS Everyone knows that some nations are exceedingly wealthy while others are desperately poor. Madagascar and Belgium could almost be on different planets. The world’s nations contain what Paul Collier (2007) calls the “bottom billion,” materially poorer than even the persistently poor in the US. These are often people whose countries are cursed by internal conflict, poor health care delivery, food insecurity, corruption, and broken state systems. In most cases, they are countries and regions that were once the possessions of imperial powers who used, transformed, then left them poor, disorganized, and with civil wars brewing. Some became pawns in the Cold War where compliant dictatorships were preferred over unruly, independence-seeking democracies. Their national incomes stagnated or declined while other, better governed and peaceful low-income countries made modest progress. And so it continues. Poorer countries are subject to the power and influence of others. Larger and more powerful countries influence, if not dictate, global processes (e.g., the price of oil or the availability of vaccines). Poorer countries may be sites of proxy wars between powerful nations or dumping grounds for these nations’ household trash and toxic and radioactive waste. While international migration happens everywhere, poor countries are the starting point for the vast majority of the world’s migrants who try to make their way to wealthier ones, though often blocked and turned away. Many of them end up in refugee camps or holding facilities where they are physically abused and extorted. Too many drown in the sea or die in the desert in search of a better life. Today’s richest countries of the world have for centuries used an inordinate amount of the Earth’s raw materials, to say nothing of the labor of Indigenous people that has gone into making inexpensive goods that are consumed in affluent countries. They gathered gems, ivory, ores, and precious metals far from their own countries, giving them value and converting them into luxuries. More importantly, these became tender, new wealth to pay for further conquest and economic expansion. This expropriation involved considerable violence and enslavement or forced recruitment of people, confiscation of their possessions and their land.

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As Kenneth Pomeranz (2000) and others have shown, the enslavement of people fueled much of the economic growth in Europe and their New World. Estimates of the value of enslaved people in itself exceeded the annual GDP in Britain, France, the US, and other countries long after the trade in enslaved people ended. The value that chattel slavery created was fundamental to the growth and prosperity of the unenslaved, especially the wealthiest, citizens. The non-industrialized regions (now nations) of the world did not stand still while this was going on. They were not waiting to “catch up” when the time came for them to take advantage of markets and the knowhow incubated by wealthier countries. Imperialism and empire transformed non-European societies by devising social, political, and economic systems in vast regions like Bengal, East and West Africa, and South Asia that serviced Europe. Far from catching up, they were set on a radically different course. In many cases these transformations impoverished millions of people. Prior to the European invasion, they had been living a difficult, arduous life but one that usually satisfied their needs, gave them modest security and a sense of community, and reaffirmed their traditional practices and beliefs. No longer subject only to the uncontrolled power of nature, their communities and societies were irreparably damaged as they became subject to the hubris, greed, and controlling interests of foreign powers. Today’s global inequality was built by exploitation and imperialism under various guises, the most cynical of these being what Kipling poetically titled “The White Man’s Burden.” How this happened is a fundamental part of the discussion of global inequality. Students may take the discussion into current questions of global reparations, restitution for those previously enslaved, and funding for the calamities of climate change largely created by wealthy countries and now taking its toll on poorer ones. Since the early 1980s the flow of capital from poorer countries to richer ones, in the form of repayment of loans made on behalf of development, economic stability, and the forging of strategic allies has exceeded new loans from international financial bodies. Not only does this put them under the thumb of the International Monetary Fund’s neoliberal economic formula. Their vulnerability has intensified. Today, it is estimated that countries on the brink of defaulting on these loans have seen 100 million of their citizens pushed into poverty by the combination of economic disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and post-pandemic inflation (Rappeport, 2022). Wealthy countries have not only used the Earth’s resources and people to their benefit. They have generated the vast amount of pollution, including an inordinate volume piped into the atmosphere and oceans. On average, each of India’s 1.4 billion people generate less than 10 percent of the per capita CO2 emissions of the average American. China and India are major contributors

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to climate change today, but they have a long way to go before matching the total contribution of countries that have known industry and prosperity for the past 200 years, nations whose wealth and lifestyle were built on burning fossil fuels. Today, per capita resource use (including energy) and pollution created in post-industrial countries is far greater than elsewhere. The UN Human Development Planetary Pressure Index offers a great deal of information about this. Inviting class discussion about the decision to have children who will consume vastly greater amounts of the Earth’s resources and create more pollution than the world can bear makes for a possibly contentious exchange of ideas but is part of the meaning and significance of global inequality. Back to the Numbers on Global Inequality The world’s nations are often divided into categories based on the size of their economies calculated as per capita GDP: small, medium, and large. Income and other figures on these categories give students an immediate sense of the disparity between countries. This comparison opens up discussion of what Branko Milanovic (2007) describes as a “shrinking middle class of nations,” with some far wealthier, and with GDP per person far greater, than the majority of nations, and few nations in between. Credit Suisse regularly publishes issues of Global Wealth, showing the usually steady growth of wealth globally, but also the unprecedented wealth of North America (largely the US), followed by Europe. Global wealth increased about 7 percent per annum from 2000 to 2007, then fell with the global financial crisis. Growth resumed, but at a slower pace, much of it reflecting increased valuation of existing assets (e.g., real estate). In the last 15 years the US has gotten the lion’s share of new global wealth, while Japan and African nations have lagged (Shorrocks et al., 2022). If it’s data and good visuals an instructor is looking for, here is no shortage. Tables, maps, and charts (e.g., in the 2013 World Inequality Report, the UN Development Programme’s annual Human Development Report, and the World Bank’s annual World Development Report) tell the facts of global inequality, such as per capita GDP, the size and growth of national economies, and the many consequences of this. Pathways, the publication of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, is an excellent source of comparative information written such that they work well as assigned readings. The UN Human Development Index (HDI) has been continually refined, with data far more reliable than in the past. Strongly correlated with other quality of life measures, its indicators are life expectancy, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling and gross national income (adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity [PPP]). Because inequality is vast even in some poor

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countries, the HDI is adjusted for within-country inequality. Also calculated is a Gender Development Index. This index, too, is adjusted for inequality. By many non-economic measures, inequality between countries has declined since 2000. The UN Millennium Summit was held in that year, followed in 2002 with the adoption of an action plan to realize the UN Millennium Development Goals. They include the eradication of poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; and promoting environmental sustainability. These goals were vigorously pursued in many poor countries. The success in approaching or reaching these goals by 2015 has been widely touted. It is worth discussing these and why they matter, especially for the poorest countries. None of the problems addressed by the millennium goals have been accomplished completely, but millions of the world’s poor are better off today than they were three decades ago. There are fewer people in absolute poverty and more people living modest but not impoverished lives. Perhaps ironically, the overall statistics on this have China to thank. If China is taken out of the calculation, the decline in global poverty is significantly less. These are a lot of numbers, and they do not tell the whole story. Documentaries and other videos, TED Talks, journalists’ accounts, and so forth can be very instructive and effective. One of the simplest illustrations of global inequality is Material World, a pictorial of the things – many and few – households around the world possess, arranged in front of their home or other domicile. It needs no words or numbers to make the point. Students get it.

INEQUALITY WITHIN NATIONS A good place to start the inquiry into why the poor in poorer countries are and remain so poor is to ask students what they believe could be the reasons for this. The list that can be assembled offers not only a glimpse of their thinking. It provides another portal for their engagement with the most important features of a society. They can begin to think of society as a system, and power in society as the hydraulic fluid that drives the system. Inequality varies country to country but is also strongly associated with similar factors that occur in place after place. Sorting through the inequalities in different countries – the differences and similarities – may be the first time students have seriously applied comparative analysis to see the ways it helps explain the social world. Students can appreciate that economic and social conditions have improved in dozens of countries. How the pie is divided, however, is not as positive a story. Despite the improvement of people’s way of life, especially in many of the poorest countries, inequality within countries has increased since the turn

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of the 21st century. In wealthier countries, too, the distance between the very affluent and the working poor has increased, nowhere more dramatically than in the US. Inequality of Power As a measure of within-country inequality, democracy is a measure of the degree of asymmetry between the most powerful and the powerless. In recent decades, despite some reversals, political power has become more widely distributed. The greatest growth in democracies has been in Latin America, Eastern and Central Europe, and the Balkan and Baltic states. On the other hand, the greatest disappointments for democratic activists have been in the Middle East, especially since the Arab Spring’s promise of greater democracy was either crushed, subverted, abandoned, or all of these. There, power remains very unequally distributed. In some countries a democratic system has been compromised but has not disappeared. Leaders in Turkey, Hungary, Indonesia, and elsewhere have been able to exercise more one-party or anti-democratic rule by rewriting the nations’ constitutions, controlling the news media and silencing independent journalism, harassing or outlawing civil society organizations, packing the courts with compliant judges, and remodeling the electoral system to ensure their hold on power. These measures perfectly reflect Max Weber’s notion of “party,” the use of organizational means to ascend and control the state system. What Kay Trimberger (1978) calls “revolution from above” may be ignited by perceived corruption, incompetence, and self-dealing by a faction of a county’s traditional elites. It is often carried out in the name of the common people and makes efforts to create more equality, especially of material life, and occasionally offer more power to more people. This was true in Ghana under Jerry Rollins and in the Soviet Union in its initial iteration. These efforts often fail as a result of inexperience or incompetence, are torpedoed by displaced elites or foreign incursions, or are never intended to be true to their slogans and egalitarian narrative. Post-revolutionary leaders like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua find it easier and more personally advantageous to transform the government into one-man or one-party rule by jettisoning power-sharing and keeping only the faintest trappings of democracy. In Latin America and countries in Asia and Africa that gained their independence in the decades following WWII, there is a persistent ebb and flow that looks positive in one decade and less so in the next. This is currently the cycle in nations such as Egypt and Myanmar, where a military dictatorship gives way to democratic government, only to be overturned by a coup, leaving the military in control. The generals then exchange their uniforms for business

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suits. In many cases elites who, for generations, have perched at the top of the social and economic hierarchy facilitate the military takeover, finding it more to their liking. The great majority of citizens beg to differ. In time, they protest and organize in opposition, and if successful, power again shifts toward democracy, however tentatively and precariously. This is a pattern with which students may be vaguely familiar. It bears repeating with an illustration of one or more case studies. Protests and demonstrations chant for democracy, but within the unrest is a distaste for hierarchies of privilege and wealth that accompany dictatorships. Students can readily find in political upheavals a focus on inequality as the impetus for popular demands for democracy. Learning about their successes and failures is part of understanding social inequality within nations. Asymmetrical power is probably the most important explanation of the vastly different opportunities for health, education, material well-being, personal security, and political participation within a country. Who holds power and their agenda tell a great deal about inequality within a nation. Russia’s kleptocracy, so named for the theft by agents of the KGB and directors of national enterprises and the financial system when the Soviet Union collapsed, had an agenda of serving themselves first. The catastrophe in Russia of plunging life expectancy, shrinking pensions, joblessness and crime have been the result. As Thomas Piketty (2022: 9) has written, “inequality is first of all a social, historical and political construction.” There are many ways to organize an economy and society: “these options are political,” that is, matters of power. Barrington Moore’s (1966) axiom that a large middle class is a sine qua non for democracy and robust human rights has been challenged and qualified but never dismissed. Many Latin American countries seem to be on the road to greater democracy amid a growing middle class. Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, however, Russia’s middle class has shrunk under the leadership of Vladimir Putin. Ethnic nationalism, anti-immigration, and anti-globalization political messaging have contested the kind of open society where democracy flourishes. This, too, offers support for Moore’s thesis: a declining middle class reverses the likelihood that a healthy democracy can grow or even survive. China and many other nations (e.g., Turkey, Hungary, Vietnam, and the Stans of Central Asia), however, present a challenge to the Moore thesis that directly involves social inequality. They are promising a better life, a route out of poverty and into some version of the middle class in exchange for political quiescence and top-down command. Sometimes called the Beijing Consensus, a willingness to accept authoritarian control over the economy, polity, and daily life is the price millions are asked to pay in return for greater prosperity and improved life chances.

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The Chinese Communist Party has orchestrated the lifting of possibly 400 million people out of poverty in the last three decades. Its income per person “has grown almost 15 times as fast as that of the United States” (Porter and Russell, 2017: B3). This feat presents a compelling model for addressing poverty and a challenge to Moore’s theses worth discussing. It presents an attractive alternative to democracy: a command political economy, rather than a democracy tied to late-stage capitalism. Distribution of the Economic Pie In country after country, an ever-larger portion of national wealth and income is, on average, being possessed by a small segment of society. While global economic growth has meant a rising standard of living in poorer nations, this growth has not been evenly shared or divided such that the least favored receive an equal or greater portion than others. In fact, a smaller share of economic growth usually has gone to the lower half of the population. The already-better-off have taken a larger share. Credit Suisse’s Wealth Report (Shorrocks et al., 2022) shows that in the first years of the 21st century the poorer half of the world’s people and nations saw a 12 percent growth in wealth, greater than the overall growth in global wealth. The pie was growing, and their portion was growing even more. This trend has been reversed since 2008. Again, the wealthiest are becoming wealthier. The poor may not be poorer, but the gap between the rich and poor continues to grow, globally and within countries. In the US, too, since the Great Recession and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, incomes have risen (more slowly than inflation) but income and wealth inequality are increasing at a brisk pace (Horowitz et al., 2020). Though a crude measure of inequality, the Lorenz Curve that yields the Gini Index is an important tool for students to understand. It provides easily recognized comparisons of intra-country inequalities of wealth and income, with the former much greater than the latter, and considerable variation across a range of countries. Like so much that is taught in a social inequality course, there are several videos explaining the Gini Index to choose from. An interactive demonstration, available on the World Bank website, and class discussion works well to get students on board. A recent US Census report used the Gini Index, showing how inequality in the US increased every year from 1993 to 2011, then rose again in 2021. By calculating the Gini Index for income groups, the data show how greater inequality at the bottom, but also at the top of the income hierarchy, drove overall pre- and post-tax income inequality upward (Semega and Kollar, 2022). Once again, the rich have gotten richer. The poor have not.

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This invites a look at some statistical tables that include the Gini Index and begins an examination of how it relates to such measures as infant mortality, life expectancy, causes of death, and even social mobility. The UN regularly reports on this, using data from the World Wealth and Income Database. These data are subject to several problems, mostly in national recording and reporting, but show the sobering facts that, for instance, nearly two-thirds of national income in the Middle East and more than half in India and Brazil accrue to only one in ten citizens. The US has a less dramatic disparity than Saudi Arabia and Egypt but, unlike Western Europe, its income and wealth disparities increased dramatically in the past 25 years. In 1980 the top 1 percent took less than 11 percent of the nation’s annual income. The percent of national income for one in 100 households nearly doubled by 2020 while the bottom 50 percent declined from over 20 percent to less than 12 percent of the national income. Few affluent countries and most poor countries cannot match this degree of inequality. Still, comparing inequality within the US to other countries may appear inconsequential. As discussed in Chapter 9, how comparable is poverty in America to poverty in poor countries (Shaefer et al., 2017)? Similar to the question of the meaning of poverty, students may ask: Don’t things cost less in other countries? Maybe they have traveled in Mexico and found cheap accommodations, meals, and drinks. Isn’t a decent life in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and most Latin American countries more affordable? They imagine that having a decent life in those countries doesn’t necessarily involve paying for cable service and smartphone data, gasoline for a daily commute, health insurance premiums and expensive health care, a comfortable house and its upkeep, vacations, and the like. Introducing PPP, a measure of what the local currency will actually buy, is one way to address such questions. How much does a dollar, pound, or euro buy in Malaysia, Peru, Laos, or Zaire? Groceries enough to feed a family are better understood if calculated using PPP. Someone with a low income when translated into dollars can, in fact, make their money go further. Conversely, imported, highly processed foodstuffs are very expensive, imported automobiles can cost a great deal more, and fossil fuels are dear as well. Government policies and subsidies make necessities less expensive and taxes on luxuries more costly. How people spend their money can be very different. And what about other affluent countries like Norway and Austria? Health care? Public transportation? University tuition? Aren’t these almost free for everyone? Even if incomes are more equal, does that really matter? What about taxes? Do you really want to be taxed the way Norwegians are? And by the way, how much innovation and risk-taking is coming out of Norway? There’s a lot for an instructor to be prepared to answer or suggest the class look into.

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Handling this topic requires boring down into the particulars of one country or another. In the end the discussion may lead to an important question: What does a person need in order to have a dignified life that is not only respected by others but includes the ability to make choices, not fearing an early death, or expecting a life of endless drudgery? What is needed to actively participate in community life? In country after country inequality is increasing. A decent life, measured in any country-specific way, is increasingly out of reach unless a nation’s economy is healthy and productivity is widely shared. The latter is not happening in the United States, and neither is it the case in much of the world. As Professor Sen has shown, this is an issue that reaches beyond the usual economics of inequality. It is part of the picture of inextricably formative connections among people and nations around the world.

MAKING SENSE OF GLOBAL POVERTY Discussion of global inequality – both between and within countries – almost always raises suggestions about the attribution of poverty to population growth. Population demography and how a nation handles reproductive health and family planning matter, but the key is not the number of people, per se. How a nation and the world’s collective efforts address economic inequality, especially poverty, is far more important. A stagnant economy, weak states, widespread corruption, and the control wealthy countries have over poorer nations’ opportunities are far more important. Sen’s (2011) comparison of life expectancy, maternal health, and a broad measure of quality of life in India and China explores the way governments have dealt with poverty and inequality. India does not compare favorably. This is partially a consequence of China’s one-child-family policy from 1979 to 2016. India’s efforts to reduce family size have met with much less success. Its poorest hundreds of millions continue to suffer status and material deprivation and experience stifled lives. Does this provide proof that controlling population growth is the key to reducing poverty? Despite problems with its current and future dependency ratio (especially the ratio of the working population to the elderly), China’s economy grew approximately 9 to 11 percent nearly every year from 1989 to 2020. Manufacturing and assembly replaced rural farming as the main source of livelihood. China has many billionaires and many more millionaires, as well as hundreds of millions still living impoverished lives. But the enormous growth of its middle class is impressive. At the same time, poverty in India is widespread. The share of national income going to one in a hundred households now exceeds 20 percent while that of the bottom 50 percent has declined from 22 percent to 14 percent since 1980 (Piketty, 2014: 82). Population size versus the size of the

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national economy matters, and it is worth taking time to address this. But it is only part of the whole story of global inequality.

GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL INEQUALITY Globalization – like its forebearers, mercantilism and imperialism – can be understood as a network linking nations and regions across the globe. Manufacturing and trade, finance and monetary policies, security pacts and the sharing of military capabilities, agreements on human rights, the rules of civil strife and the rules of war, the spread of fashion, popular culture, scientific research, and opportunities to learn and work – these are all part of globalization. Central to this network of sharing is inequality between core and periphery, urban and provincial, post-industrial and industrializing, affluent and poor. In a word, power. Enormous asymmetry of power between nations is fundamental to globalization. Recognizing this invites a different reading of both the past and current events than most students have been offered to date. Making sense of global inequality begins with the changes of its many manifestations. One face of globalization, practiced for centuries and what most of us were taught, was the bringing together of the world’s people under the banner of civilization. Whether this meant the spread of and conversion to Christianity, drawing distant nations as junior partners in the global capitalist economy, or imposing the rule of law that facilitated their subjugation. Indeed, the world’s poor regions were transformed – but not necessarily making them more like their betters, their conquerors, their redeemers. This was an era of transparent exploitation, followed by neocolonialism that made European nations, and later the US, the wealthiest and most powerful force the world has ever known. The other face of globalization is a softer one that discards the old and replaces it with the modern (i.e., the Western). Sometimes referred to as “soft power” that includes diplomacy, the export of popular culture is its most visible manifestation. For much of the 20th century American films and their stars dominated the movies everywhere. Jazz, British and American rock ’n’ roll, along with rhythm and blues and soul, took over the global popular music scene. Food preferences shifted, with considerable help from abroad. Wheat flour and spaghetti replaced rice and other local grains for millions. What was to be considered fine contemporary literature, painting, architecture, and design came from Europe and North America. Indigenous sounds, styles, and practices might be assimilated into the new, but the unmistakable stamp of the West remained prominent. Farming? Do it like Iowa corn and soybean farmers do, with a tractor, combine, nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides. Traditional irrigation systems and water pacts that held communities together were dis-

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carded. Science and medicine, too, imposed a specific formula for the search for truth and human health, elbowing out other versions of inquiry and healing, relegating them to the status of queer customs and exotic practices not far removed from alchemy and astrology. Outside the Western world nations were expected to adopt monetization and market mechanisms, abandon reliance on kin networks in favor of Western banks and faceless bureaucracies. They were seduced into exchanging their uniqueness and discarding their authenticity for the homogenizing offerings of Western materialism expounded through advertising. As James Scott (1998) has so clearly shown, Western influences and state power – cultural, political, economic, and military – offered a seductive vision, a society to be emulated if not always freely chosen. Of course, the societies being changed are only tangentially the beneficiaries. In some cases their elites’ interests meshed with global capitalism, they became strategic allies to Western nations, and their economies grew. In others, not so much. In many countries the winners in this process were a tiny sliver of the society whose ill-begotten wealth has been stashed overseas or invested in Texas real estate. As Kuznets predicted, inequality soared, but the elephant’s trunk doesn’t droop. It continues to point upward. It is widely recognized today that not every country can acquire the material affluence of those currently at the top of the global hierarchy. Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians since the implosion of the Soviet Union know this. They are “looking west” rather than east for their future. They fear the door will close on countries that hold back from or resist the mindset; the political, economic, and cultural alure; and the power of the West. Only the Middle East has resisted the Western example. Ernest Gellner recognized this in his studies of nationalism and ethnic conflict long before neoliberal commerce, the Internet, and social networking tried their best to bring Westernization to the Levant and places east. The theology and morality of Islam, sharia law governing families and finance, oil wealth that obviates dependence on Western capital, and pride in a historical image that venerates Arab and Persian history have proven to be significant barriers to Westernization. The Middle East is participating in globalization on their own terms and establishing their own networks of influence, irrespective of Western views on human rights and liberal democracy. After 200 years of being subject to the power of the West, since Mao Zedong’s passing, China also is forging its own path in the globalization network: socialism with Chinese characteristics. China–US competition looks like a proto-Cold War, but the Middle East remains a battlefield, both military and social. Students may wonder why the US has 18 military bases stretching from Jordan to Oman, including the largest US military base in the world, Al Udeid, in Qatar. Why does every US presi-

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dent travel to Saudi Arabia – the most repressive country in the world – to kiss the ring of the king or his designated heir? Why does the US treat Israel as a US outpost, lavished with military might and the largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world? In short, why won’t the Middle East cooperate in coming under the umbrella of the West’s globalizing agenda?

DEVELOPING A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE The news media broadcast stories about faraway places and people. Does this seem a little peculiar? What interest does a young person in Sidney, Nebraska, have – or is expected to have – in families 12,000 miles away, families she will never meet, can barely imagine, and whose newsworthiness is in a context she knows almost nothing about? For some, it may simply be interesting to find out about something so different, exotic, mildly esoteric, or even puzzling in a nonthreatening way. For others, and perhaps for her when she has learned more about global inequality, it will be important to know. She will suspect it has something to do with her own life, and she will be right. It is an invaluable task to help students develop critical thinking skills involving not only historical and comparative inquiry but a willingness to depart from a comfortable way of seeing. Most people in affluent societies take the poverty of others in the world for granted, especially if the others live in vastly different circumstances, hold beliefs and embrace a culture so different from their own. Students learning about global inequality are invited to think differently, to entertain a perspective at odds with the one they have been taught. This presents a distinct challenge to their instructor. Helping students cross the threshold into others’ lives and finding the connections that help to make sense not only of the others’ lives but their own is never a simple matter. Under the heading of globalization are the strands and fibers of so many connections, feedback loops, ironies, and contradictions that the task may seem too daunting. And in a course that deals with only one aspect of social inequality (e.g., race, gender, or criminal justice), time also may be the limiting factor. The world today is, as has often been noted, both much bigger and much smaller than ever before. In large part due to digital technology, the world is available in real time. A soccer match in Qatar is immediate, with fans shouting themselves hoarse in a London pub. Public protests in Iran and Thailand take place not only in the streets but on one’s smartphone. Distances contract and are crossed effortlessly. At the same time that the world is more accessible, it is also filled with more images, more information, more ideas, more experiences, more troubles, more seemingly insoluble problems. Immediacy and accessibility confront complexity and information overload.

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It can be too much, too overwhelming, numbing. One pedagogical approach is to show how making sense of any subject is a matter of taking it apart and approaching it in smaller increments. A young boy is told by his father to pick up all the pecans that have fallen from a huge tree. The job seems overwhelming until he and his father take stakes and twine, cordoning off sections the way a pie is divided. On Monday the boy gathers all the pecans in one section into buckets. The same on Tuesday and so on. By the weekend the ground is clear of pecans, and they go fishing. A dissertation is never written. Rather, it is divided into chapters, and chapters are divided into sections. The candidate writes section by section, chapter by chapter. In time, it becomes a dissertation. The complexity of the world, seen through the lens of globalization, can be similarly dissected. One approach is topical. How does popular music or some genre of it travel across the globe? What path does the treatment of a viral transmission take to reach those in need? Dark money: where does it originate and where is it plundered, hidden, laundered, and converted into power and privilege? Social inequality is a part of these more specific topics and can be learned as such. Another approach, as suggested earlier, is to introduce case studies. A good place to begin is the World Inequality Database that offers an interactive examination of within-country inequality. It compares national income shares of the top 10 percent to the lower 50 percent. Picking out poor and rich countries and running the cursor over the years in which the data show the range of incomes can stoke curiosity and invite students’ pursuit of answers to their own questions. What is their history of interethnic conflict? What version of patriarchy and sexism can be found? How about the status, legal and otherwise, of LGBTQ+ individuals? Where does the country fit into the network of globalization: culturally, militarily, economically, and politically? How much inequality is there and what actions has the state taken to address it, if any? Pick a country, any country, and you’ll find something interesting about social inequality. Depending on the course and an instructor’s goals, this can readily encourage students to go further. They may want to undertake a case study that plunges them more deeply into the many reasons for a nation’s economic, political, and status inequality. How is a particular mix of inequalities nested in ethnic relations, geography and national resources, the distribution of political power, or dependent on the way a global economy delivers the goods or thwarts aspirations? And finally, if the class includes international students, get them involved. Students from other countries tend to be from a more privileged position in their societies, but they too have a story to tell. How inequality manifests itself in Japan, Saudi Arabia, or Kazakhstan would be interesting for the class to hear. The effort to get an education in a host country may have involved their

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confrontation with gender, ethnic, or class inequality in their own country. They may also share their views about the privileges and entitlements of their fellow students, some of whom may take offense while others will nod in agreement.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Initially discussing global connections and issues students can identify – merchandise they consume, treatment of LGBTQ+ persons, women’s rights, global climate change, and pandemics – helps to get them thinking globally and about geographic connections, as well as the ties between wealth and poverty. • National incomes cannot always be thought of as conferring the quality of peoples’ lives, raising the question of the comparability of poverty across the globe. • Since the 1950s the Kuznets bell curve was thought to describe how, with industrialization, wealth distribution becomes more unequal, then becomes more equal as nations become more affluent and the middle class grows, an image challenged by more recent global wealth data showing an upswing in wealth inequality, the rising trunk of an elephant. • Inequality between nations is growing, with few middle-income countries, in part as a remnant of imperialism and the colonial past and a reflection of the distribution of global power today. • Inequality within countries is growing, both in terms of the distribution of income and wealth and in terms of power that waxes and wanes between democracy and dictatorship or oligarchy. • Globalization links nations and people more than ever before. Recognizing this linkage is fundamental to understanding global inequality.

11. Consequences of inequality: spillover or by design? Social inequality is a critical dimension of nearly everything students learn in social science courses. It may be less obvious in physical anthropology and physical geography, but in the other social sciences inequality tells at least part of story after story about how institutions and organizations operate, why change occurs, why cultural features take the forms they do, and the public and private sources of self and other. It shines a blinding light on social injustice and helps students probe that most important question of the social sciences: Why do people do what they do? Whether the topic involves gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, disability, or any other concept in which socially constructed differences are examined, students can readily come to identify and recognize the importance of differential class, status, and power. While the sources and maintenance of these inequities are important, understanding why they are important – their consequences – is both the reason for and the ultimate goal of the study of social inequality. Why do Black people and other people of color experience such differences in health and life expectancy from Whites? Why do statistics reveal such differences in arrest, conviction, and incarceration? Why are some advantaged by new technologies, while others’ work and leisure are being channeled, constricted, and controlled by the same? Political contributions – the gateway to political access and influence – made by the very wealthy have become enormous in recent decades; why does this matter? Families differ by social class in fundamental ways. For example, the norms and mores by which children are expected to abide, how children are provided for, and the different ways families cope with material demands, health needs, and legal difficulties matter beyond descriptive differences. Class-based geography – housing, schools, air and water quality, public services, access to healthy food, crime and safety, job opportunities – has significant consequences. That Black people are more likely to live in states with lower unemployment payments (e.g., Florida, Texas, and Alabama) means that Black workers overall receive about $40 less per week than the average White worker (Badger et al., 2020). This matters in more than material terms. 134

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Why are differences in wealth and income, college attendance and graduation, career mobility, work-related disabilities, and the investiture of human capital consistently related to the key concepts of social inequality? Why does it matter, in public and private terms, when status privileges are accorded to heterosexual cisgender persons but withheld from others? What are the consequences for communities: a small town that is losing its young and best educated to cities; a blighted neighborhood with poor public services, few decent job opportunities, and enormous need for outside help; a gated and insulated enclave of affluent recent retirees with time and money to become politically active? And of course, why does it matter who gets ahead? A very small portion of the citizenry have access to, have the ear of, and fill the campaign coffers for those who make the laws in a democracy. There is ample cynicism about this; students may shrug it off. Helping them understand why it matters is an invaluable task. Public expenditures and tax credits inordinately go to the more affluent and the businesses that provide and service their affluence, while the medical needs, personal safety, quality education, and the provision of well-paying jobs for others are neglected. A stark differential that makes this an everyday reality matters.

SOCIAL INEQUALITY: TELLING STORIES Approaching, exploring, analyzing, and seeking to explain any of these issues includes an understanding of the system of stratification, whether it is the chief focus of the course or not. No course will encounter all of them, but they provide a menu of topics to choose from that students want and need to be exposed to. In exploring the consequences of social inequality, the course transitions more deeply from the theoretical and the recitation of what social science seems pretty certain about into the world where students live. The unscripted and often free-wheeling dissection of how social inequality matters – and especially the structured inequality that has both historical roots and is informed by comparative illustrations – helps make sense of things they care about and animates their critical thinking skills. Among the many important consequences of social inequality, learning about migration, global inequality, early childhood intervention, and the financial costs of inequality provide examples of the way discussions can take form with the intention of understanding why inequality matters.

MIGRATION Millions of people today are desperately fleeing intolerable situations of crime and violence, ecological crises and natural disasters, ethnic prejudice and discrimination, and internecine war. The consequences of global climate change

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are already great and will become overwhelming in the years ahead. With its destruction of coastal homes, drought-plagued farmland, and storm-ravaged towns and cities, there will be an acceleration of migration worldwide. What are called economic migrants, people seeking a better life, are not a random assortment of individuals. Whether penalized by ethnicity, gender, or social class prejudice, they are often the more ambitious who want to escape the unfairness and deteriorating opportunities of their locale. Whatever the cause for their decision to emigrate, they are people who, at best, are unable to thrive and want something better for their children. They believe they can do better elsewhere. Should students be less sympathetic to economic migrants than those fleeing gang violence, war, or the disasters of a warming planet? In emphasizing social inequality as a compelling force, a closer look at the facts of a particular situation can bring to life the motivations and travails of migration with which students readily identify. Two features of economic migration can be emphasized. The first is the practice of repatriating earnings in a new locale back to those who the migrants left. The second is the centuries-old practice of migrating temporarily and returning with earnings that can boost one’s life chances, sometimes making this back-and-forth journey many times. It is not unreasonable to see this as a “development project” at the grassroots. The hundreds of millions of dollars that are repatriated from a more affluent country to a poorer one is a highly efficient, cost-effective endeavor, unlike a great deal of the money normally spent as international aid. The skills learned by migrants who return to their former homes increase their human capital, the pool of local knowhow, and the sense of empowerment to build out of poverty and benefit not only themselves but others. The common notion is that migration reduces the income of workers in the host country. This is not a fact, but it is true that it modestly reduces the income of earlier migrants with whom the new migrants compete for low-paying jobs (Vargas-Silva and Sumption, 2023). This, too, is a topic of social inequality. Who does these jobs and what liabilities – including suppressed wages and the threat of deportation – go along with them? How are these liabilities buttressed by laws and their selective enforcement? What does this mean for the migrating family’s children who are born in a new country? Recent research shows that the second generation is more likely to have greater social mobility than their native-born counterparts. There are structural reasons for this. The parents begin in occupations lower in income and status, and requiring less educational attainment. Their children – largely through education but also by the family’s hard work – obtain better jobs at higher pay. That the community’s economy benefits sometimes needs to be pointed out

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to students skeptical or resentful of the greater competition this may seem to impose on themselves.

GLOBALIZATION’S TOLL Despite worldwide protests the past 30+ years and an accumulation of professional doubt, globalization is promoted by affluent countries as the way to grow the global economy. Globalization’s critics believe that globalization sacrifices millions of people for the sake of opening their countries to powerful, much larger, and more technologically enabled economies. Without requiring the course to focus extensively on globalization, exploring how globalization restructures a country’s stratification system highlights both the plusses of a more globalized economy and its negative effects as well. Globalization has meant making developing countries’ markets more permeable, reorganizing poorer nations’ economies to try to compete with larger, more robust economies, and in some cases providing relief and help to those whose lives are upended. As with so much of rapid social change driven by late-stage capitalism, it is the most vulnerable who pay the highest price. They are the victims of sweatshops and unsafe work, urban pollution and the absence of infrastructure to accommodate rapid population growth, crime and the corruption endemic to the disorganization of weak governments and the loss of community. Massive rural to urban migration and the haphazard construction of slums that may house half a city’s people is an issue of social inequality. Assembly, manufacturing, and service jobs unavailable before globalization in poorer countries usually pay more than agricultural work and offer greater benefits to many workers, especially young women. The work is often grueling or dangerous, low paying, and done with little job security. Garment workers in Bangladesh, miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, telemarketers in the Philippines, and nannies in Qatar and Israel are workers in the global economy. Few students could imagine doing this work, but fewer still can imagine the way this upends the families and societies from which these workers come. As described in Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s (2003) Global Woman, this is a picture of global inequality in its least favorable light. North Carolina textile manufacturers have shipped their plants to poor countries. The fate of their workers and the workers’ communities was largely left to chance. First the Rust Belt, then the hollowing out of towns and regions throughout the country has meant the wholescale loss of good jobs at good pay that was in times past negotiated by unions. The outmigration of people aspiring to have financial security and opportunities for their children has reduced the tax base and hence the public services and infrastructure of thousands of cities and rural communities.

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It comes as no surprise that in the 2016 presidential election the 50 most educated counties in the US voted for Hillary Clinton and all of the 50 least educated counties voted for Donald Trump. The personal costs and the growth of a politics of grievance, distrust, and nativist populism are results worth discussing at a time of radically divisive narratives of what the country has become, in part, thanks to globalization.

SOCIALIZATION, EARLY CHILDHOOD, AND THE FOLKS NEXT DOOR Even the most calloused students find some sympathy for children whose life chances are constricted, even strangled, by the circumstances of being born into poverty. These children’s families and communities may provide love and lessons in survival, but they get little of what it takes to navigate the complex, competitive organizations of today’s society. Poorer children literally hear fewer words, develop fewer skills needed early in school, and are rarely exposed to the social networks that help others get a good education, present themselves in accordance with dominant society’s expectations, and find entrée to the better parts of the job market. A great deal of social-psychological research has found that poverty and even small dips in income among the poor and near-poor have measurable effects on a range of outcomes. These include tenuous parent–child relationships, behavioral problems, stunted educational achievement, and strategies for coping that may exacerbate rather than solve one’s problems. The links between poverty and stress, depression, and mental health generally are part of the package that explains, at the psychological and interpersonal level, many things associated with the consequences of poverty. Childhood poverty means growing up in a world that confers not only an unenviable status but withholds much of what it offers others. Annette Lareau’s (2011: 236) research found that “family practices cohere by social class,” and that “social class dynamics are woven into the texture and rhythm of children and parents’ daily lives.” Her work on child socialization and child–parent interaction breaks with earlier work by Albert Cohen and others that compared child-centered socialization of the middle class to a more rule-governed, quasi-authoritarian style of the working class. Lareau proposes that the “concerted cultivation” practiced by the middle class and affluent does not always compare favorably to the “accomplishment of natural growth” of the working class. Which version rings truest for students studying social inequality? Would students who describe their mother or father as a helicopter parent identify with Lareau’s characterization of concerted cultivation? What about the “natural growth” students? And what do these socialization

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approaches tell about social stratification and their consequences for social mobility? This discussion could digress into a wasteland of personal anecdotes, but hopefully it can move into a discussion of why socialization varies across the class structure, including how some socialization practices penalize and others reward toddlers and school-age youth in later years. Socialization takes place not only in the family but in school and among peers. It happens in interactions with neighbors, on the street, and in vacation locales. Where one lives, the characteristic of a neighborhood makes a difference in a young person’s life chances. It is well established through excellent research (see Badger and Bui, 2018) that where one grows up, differences in neighborhoods are important in and of themselves. They are strong contributors to peoples’ life chances, including chances for educational attainment, juveniles’ contact with law enforcement, and employment. This discussion introduces the topic of the geography of social stratification (i.e., the social geography of becoming who we are). Poor children are often ill-prepared to move beyond the confines of their place of origin, temporarily or permanently across boundaries to places that can be more personally safe, affirming, and open up new experiences and opportunities. Prepared or not, the cost of housing may preclude such a move. Beyond social geography are the questions of who makes the rules, establishes and enforces the norms, and holds the keys for entrée into organizations: for example, magnet schools, good colleges and universities, internships, and first jobs. A discussion of this can take the course into the world of work – what is expected, rewarded, and forbidden – and how these norms are instilled by families and friends to help children succeed, however the family may understand success. The development of human capital, tied as it is to social capital, engages students and makes real to them much of what is most important about the structure and dynamics of social inequality. Whether due to zoning regulations, neighborhood association bylaws, banks’ mortgage loan practices, “old-fashioned” discrimination, or other realities of social class, students can begin to think about and discuss their own neighborhoods and those they admire or avoid. Where are the well-maintained public athletic fields, courts and swimming pools, libraries, best places to find good food, shopping malls, theaters, parks, and streets where people can walk at any hour? It can be a chance to discuss efforts to integrate neighborhoods by modifying the economic requirements of home ownership increasing housing density with multi-family housing, and requiring that a portion of new apartments be available for low-income households, measures often met with NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) protests. Helping poor families relocate to a more favorable neighborhood enhances children’s life chances. More immediately, helping mothers to have good

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pre- and postnatal care, helping parents develop constructive ways to interact with their children, relieving or reducing household stress, providing quality childcare and early childhood education, and ensuring that children have the nutrition, health care, and opportunities they need for cognitive and emotional growth and development is money well spent.

PAYING FOR INEQUALITY Who pays for inequality? This is perhaps the most opportune time in a social inequality course to make clear that one of the greatest consequences of inequality is its significant costs. A child raised in poverty has a good chance of being poor as an adult, but they are also far more likely to require public spending if they have learning difficulties or behavioral trouble in school, have multiple encounters with the criminal justice system, or require serious medical treatment that could have been prevented or minimized with timely, less expensive intervention. Dollar figures of the cost of early childhood interventions compare more than favorably to those requiring a punitive response or special-needs intervention to problems of adolescents and young adults. Models vary, but most see the dollars saved as a fraction of the dollars spent when serious problems emerge (Heckman, 2006; Karoly et al., 1998). More importantly, what does it cost the individual in the way of lost potential that would benefit themselves and those around them? What are the opportunity costs paid by the society when human potential is squandered, and productive, contributing (yes, tax-paying) lives fall short? This is an opportunity to remind students of what Isaiah Berlin described as two versions of liberty, discussed in Chapter 4. During his successful run for the governorship of Pennsylvania in 2022, Josh Shapiro echoed this distinction in questioning his very conservative Republican opponent’s repeated claims about protecting peoples’ freedom, sounding very much like Isaiah Berlin: It is not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed to do with their bodies … . It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they are allowed to read. It’s not freedom when he gets to decide who you’re allowed to marry … . Let me tell you what real freedom is. Real freedom is when you see the young child in North Philly and you see the potential in her, so you invest in her public school … . Real freedom comes when we invest in that young child’s neighborhood to make sure it’s safe so she gets to her 18th birthday. That’s real freedom. (Tomasky, 2022: 35)

The costs of inequality, especially the egregious inequality in affluent societies like the US, begin at the personal level and ripple throughout the society and across nations and the world. From social-psychological maladies and the sense of who one is to relationships based on asymmetrical status and power, inequality has enormous costs. Communities, local governments, and

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businesses bear much of the brunt of inequality. It colors their expenditures, policies, practices, and leadership. The cost of inequality is also gauged by national figures, especially those having to do with criminal justice and educational attainment, by limiting human capital and distorting resource-use efficiencies. Calling forth military might and responding to national financial insolvency, often as a consequence of widespread poverty, the suppression of a people’s aspirations, elite corruption and ill-gotten wealth, and the plunder of a nation’s resources and economy … these are expensive. In short, social inequality as the world knows it today is terribly wasteful.

GLOBAL INEQUALITY MATTERS While it’s easier for affluent nations to ignore or overlook their responsibilities as a consequence of a history of imperialism and neoliberalism imposed on poorer countries, the costs accumulate nonetheless. Inequality does matter as a moral issue that calls for social justice, but it matters in more transactional terms as well. It is a reinforcing cycle, where inequality reduces life chances that exacerbate inequality and all of its consequences. Not addressing inequality literally makes things worse. In a world where 3 people in 20 have more than half of all the global wealth and nearly three-quarters have only 1 percent of it, inequality matters (Milanovic, 2016). In the US, those who could least afford to be indebted were encouraged to take out housing mortgages that went “underwater” when the Great Recession struck. Debt piled on debt, poor credit put eventual home ownership further out of reach. Similarly, poor countries are encouraged to borrow from international banking systems like the World Bank and the African Development Bank. For many, it is utterly impossible to repay these loans in full. Even debt forgiveness for no fewer than 40 countries has left them highly indebted, a situation that makes worse the poverty of their poorest. Vast poverty and the hoarding of a country’s wealth by a small elite is obviously detrimental to growth of the nation’s economy that otherwise could create jobs, educate everyone, collect money for infrastructure, and offer opportunities for new businesses. Wasted lives, corruption and misappropriation of public funds, and the instability this creates, met often by increasing state security to control a restive public, can become a powder keg. Health inequalities abound, including life expectancy, child and maternal mortality, nutritional diets to prevent stunted growth, vaccinations for preventable diseases, and treatments for chronic illnesses. These may be happening far away, but they have costs for everyone. Along with an absence of economic opportunities and personal safety, they contribute to the migration of people – often the most able people – from poor to wealthier countries. This stokes

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demagoguery and a demand to circle the wagons, build walls, and strengthen the security state. This, in turn, makes a political consensus impossible, with nativism and nationalist xenophobia acceptable on one side, and repellent on the other side, of a gaping political divide. Environmentally, poverty is a global disaster. The world’s poor use few of the Earth’s resources and emit a very small fraction of the pollution that is causing global warming. The poor, however, must find a way to make ends meet. This can mean endangering their lives with environmental pollution, whether it is inhaling smoke from household fires or salvaging precious metals from computers that are the refuse of wealthy countries. The poor labor in mines for ores needed for digital devices. They illegally harvest timber for multinational corporations and deforest semiarid lands to make charcoal that fuels backyard iron-smelting furnaces. This is a terrible immediate cost for the poor, but the long-term costs are shared by everyone. When catastrophe strikes – an overloaded boat ferrying migrants capsizes, torrential rain sets off a mudslide that inundates rickety hillside homes, toxic fumes from a railcar spill or a chemical plant explosion inundate a neighborhood with poison gas – it is the poor who suffer the most. When sea levels rise due to a warming planet, it will be the poorest, those who live on coastal planes, in seaside villages, and along river deltas, who will lose their homes, livelihoods, and lives. The poor pay first and most dearly.

POLICY MATTERS A quip in Britain is that poor schooling resigned half the population to half an education. This may have seemed to benefit the low-wage economy that needs people with few options than to do essential work for little pay. This is no longer as true in late-stage capitalism where jobs are steadily being redesigned, retired, and replaced with technology. Self-service via scanners, bots, automated phone replies, robotics, AI, and more are eliminating many of the tasks previously or potentially done by human beings. Increasingly, an audio directory, webpage chat, or YouTube video make it almost impossible to communicate with a living human being. You say you want to talk to someone who can actually help you fix a broken appliance, change your Internet carrier, or explain a medical bill? The marvels of algorithms and AI escape many of us. What we know is that the person you might have talked to is no longer available. The unemployment and underemployment rate is much higher for the less educated or those without valued marketable skills, leaving them at the mercy of a social safety net set at a low bar and full of holes. Despite the way the COVID-19 pandemic made people aware that many employees who are essential to daily life are underpaid and often work without pensions or health

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benefits, little has changed. Theirs is a job that will not protect them against mounting debt, poverty, and in the worst case, homelessness. On the other side, the low-wage, precarious job market is a huge cost to those who are salaried and paying most of the taxes. The wages of the half-educated may make some products and personal services cheaper. But to keep them housed and fed, they seek and need support from the public. Rather than earning a sufficient family income, they fall short and try to make up the difference by getting help from the government. In the US the Earned Income Tax Credit runs to tens of billions of dollars, giving supplemental income to those with substandard wages. Medicaid costs the federal and state governments a similar amount, as does SNAP. Jointly, governments provide rent subsidies and home weatherization to some households in need. In addition to federal childcare tax credits, some states subsidize or pay for childcare for eligible working families, and many states supplement the federal program to provide universal health insurance for children and minors. While more than 40 percent of workers are immune from paying federal income tax, they do usually pay state income tax and regressive taxes (i.e., those that take a greater share of income from the less affluent than from the most affluent). These include payroll taxes that cover workman’s compensation, Social Security and Medicare, and local and state sales taxes. These are levied against the working poor as well as everyone else. Local governments are pressured to keep property taxes low, to tax at the same rate a $3 million estate and a modest bungalow. All of these costs borne by the underpaid could be covered by families and individuals themselves if a living wage was required by law or custom, but it’s not. And, because so few benefits are available to the poorest males who are not caring for a child, they are disproportionally in the ranks of the long-term unhoused. Homelessness has blighted many major cities, and in response these cities (and a few states) have allocated resources to help those in need. The first order of business, however, is to get their encampments out of sight. The funds will not solve the problem and the costs will continue to mount until a nationwide emergency is declared and big changes come about. While social welfare benefits, important as they are in reducing the number of persons living in or near poverty by approximately half, they too are insufficient to change the stratification system. That would require policies the current political configurations in the US, Britain, and most other capitalist democracies are unwilling to entertain. It would mean distributing wealth and income far more equitably, especially using tax policy to diminish the wealth accumulation and take-home pay of the very wealthy. It would require expanding the middle class with family-income provisions, establishing a universal basic income. Individual kindness, concern and generosity matter, but solu-

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tions require concerted action locally, nationally and globally. As discussed further in the next chapter, only public and private organizational practices, but especially those of the state, can solve the enormous problems posed by social inequality. Policy matters.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Understanding the importance of social inequality rests on the recognition of its consequences and is ultimately the goal of the study of social inequality. • Among the many examples that illustrate why inequality matters is migration, most often proceeding within countries and between countries from poorer to more affluent locales. • The toll of globalization is highly unequal, with it contributing to growing economies and greater affluence for some, and the loss of jobs, outmigration of talent, weakened state systems, and declining power for others. • Social class is woven into child socialization. The problems this raises for the poor, including the working poor, can be met with early childhood interventions that begin to level the playing field while being fiscally smart. • Rather than addressing inequality before its consequences grow, the usual approach is to “pay later” at a much higher cost in terms of both dollars and the loss of human potential. • Education deficits, the lack of productive work and health care, damage to the environment, and natural catastrophes (including climate change) where “the poor pay more” are not local problems. They threaten people everywhere. • Short of radically transforming capitalism, the state can guarantee a family wage and a universal basic income to address the enormous problems of social inequality.

12. Current trends in inequality: forces at play There is widespread recognition that income and wealth inequality are increasing globally and within most nations. Many countries with lucrative natural resources and people willing to work hard should not have widespread poverty, but they do. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people who once lived in abject poverty now have a standard of living that gives them more food security, better health care, technology that is a window to the world, and greater promise for their children. These contrasting observations raise several points about the forces that are driving social inequality upward and downward today. How nations are governed, their judicial commitment to equal justice, how technology is developed, how technologies are adopted, and how their economy operates are primary. Fair and unfair institutional and organizational practices do not appear out of thin air. They are created and maintained, and they are changed, by people. A strong and stable state capable of channeling sustainable economic activity in ways that widely benefit the nation and protect the environment is elusive but possible. One that can work for everyone and one that works for only a few are both in evidence today. Elusive or not, they are human constructions. All governments want their nation’s economy to grow. Some people – but not all – believe it can be done in a way that addresses the challenges of climate change and environmental resource depletion. This can happen by reorienting the sources of power away from fossil fuels. Manufacturing would be done such that materials are more readily recycled. Transportation would be entirely refashioned, and the allocation of water and other resources would be more fair and efficient, requiring major changes in law and policy. With some exceptions (e.g., Tim Jackson, author of Prosperity Without Growth, 2009), conventional thinking is betting on a growing economy. This idea dominates much of the national and international policy discussions addressing global inequality. Only a larger economic pie can satisfy present aspirations, breed innovation to increase productivity, and expand opportunities for more people. A growing economy generates the goods and services needed to improve the lot of everyone, especially the poor.

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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY As data on national economic growth over the past several decades reveal, with some notable exceptions, the distribution of a growing economy is anything but fair, seldom providing equity to the less privileged social classes and only occasionally improving the condition of those who need it most. Increased wealth due to growth in productivity – much of it fueled by new technology – has gone disproportionately to those social classes and nations already benefiting the most. A social inequality course, or one that includes a serious look at social inequality, cannot ignore or overlook the way political economy fabricates to a lesser or greater degree various forms of inequality and asks: Who benefits from this power? Who doesn’t? For example, one reason for a shrinking middle class in affluent countries is declining union membership and the difficulty of establishing collective bargaining agreements. This is a consequence of both legislation and judicial rulings fought for by corporations and business interests. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on the workforce has resulted in a historically low unemployment rate. The pandemic caused an almost immediate loss of jobs for millions of workers. Government action in the US in the form of payroll subsidies and increased Child Tax Credits softened the blow of unemployment and kept many businesses and families afloat. A surprise for economists was that, years later, many people did not return to their jobs and may never return to the workforce. Every low-wage business is short of workers. And the ratio of available jobs to job seekers pushed up long-stagnant wages and salaries. High inflation following the pandemic surpassed average wage gains, but low-wage workers on average saw an increase in their income, at least in the short term. Adding to the prospect for wage gains is the behavior of young people in the workforce. The absence of corporate loyalty to employees has been matched by Millennials’ withdrawal of a sense that they should stay in a job if another job or a vacation from work looks more inviting. This, too, creates pressure to increase wages and expand offers of new benefits. There is much pressure on legislatures to help businesses incentivize the labor market, either with carrots (e.g., a higher minimum wage) or sticks (e.g., reducing unemployment benefits and tax credits to lower-income working households). This, too, is a matter of state action that influences social inequality. Just as trickle-down economics recommends lower taxes for the wealthy and the elimination of any taxes on inherited wealth, progressive taxation reduces the absolute gap in mean income between the richest households and everyone else. It’s a question of power as much as political will.

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An economy is never just an economy. In the real world, in contrast to the theoretical, hypothetical world – the world frequently portrayed in economics courses – it is always a political economy. Political choices, directly and indirectly guided by corporations, have a huge effect on how individuals and households experience the economy. The usual intervention in the operations of the economy, taken through legislation and executive action, involves regulations and taxation. Along with this, monetary policy that seeks to contain inflation and maintain a low rate of unemployment, though determined outside the formal channels of politics, is anything but nonpolitical. It assumes that it is supposed to defend the solvency of financial institutions and major corporations that are legally bound to work on behalf of the best interests of shareholders. Still, the financial industry continues to create instruments little better than Ponzi schemes, despite the debacle of the Great Recession they caused. Legislatures turn a blind eye as tax lawyers and accountants devise trusts that hide enormous wealth from taxation. Redistribution is, in the political arena, a dirty word, one that can get a politician vilified if spoken in public, as former President Barack Obama found out. The market prevails and the state pretends it has no role to play in significant redistribution of wealth, income, health care, education, and public safety. Its conservative citizens agree. This, too, is part of the political economy of a late-stage capitalist democracy. As Thomas Piketty (2020) concluded, lessening the gap between the rich and poor in modern times can be, and almost always has been, accomplished by taxation. The occasional alternative to taxation’s reduction in the gap between elites and the masses, between the propertied class and those who work for a wage or salary, has been social upheaval. This has, in the past, resulted in a radical transformation of the economy. Better the rich pay more taxes than have their vaulted position dismantled and lose everything. Capitalism hates competition. But a broad swath of regulations and laws can make capitalism as competitive a system as possible. In recent times this opportunity has been badly compromised. If a merger or consolidation means lower consumer prices, it is approved. Go ahead and consolidate. This tends to ignore the other reasons for anti-monopoly and anti-monopsony regulations. These include the degree to which the consolidation can cause unemployment, lower wages, tolerate onerous working conditions, increase environmental damage, the abandonment of a community, and so forth. Massive corporations may not have license to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, age, and disability. Sexual abuse and racist practices are against the law. But their size and power give them an ability to settle out of court and avoid negative publicity and having their executives go to jail. As every potential litigant knows, they have the resources to prevail in cases

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of employee suits and arbitration decisions. And they usually never have to admit guilt. Like a winning coach who cheats in college basketball (Parkinson, 2019), their officers move from one seven- or eight-figure job to another without trailing a criminal record. The political economy of big-time college basketball prevails.

POWER IN THE LAW Stephen Breyer (2021), before retiring from the US Supreme Court in 2022, wrote poignantly that judges are obligated to decide disputes strictly in terms of the law. Guided by the doctrine of stare decisis (decisions made in earlier cases) and their interpretation of the Constitution, judges are expected to put their personal opinions and political considerations aside. Many observers of the courts doubt this happens, especially in cases with significant social impact. A smaller group on both the left and right rejects it as an ideal in the first place. The good of the society and its people is a matter for legislatures to debate and decide, and the court should abide. The US Supreme Court’s current conservative majority seeks to take little account of social change and tectonic shifts in how peoples’ lives have changed over the decades and centuries. They prefer to adhere to the understanding of the world as it was when the Constitution was written – with a nod to the words of the Constitution’s framers – along with amendments added to the Constitution. While seemingly a nonpartisan, objective approach, it too carries enormous political baggage – packed through years of efforts by political bodies to influence the Court’s decisions and the makeup of its justices. Those who disagree are also engaging in legal, legislative, and public opinion efforts. Both sides are expending their power, hoping the Court will side with them. At the federal district level and beyond, judges are openly recognized as political appointees. Thousands are elected in state and local, seemingly nonpartisan but not nonpolitical, elections. Most people are unaware of the awesome power these judges have over their lives. In most civil cases, judges can openly side with a plaintiff or a defendant, or they can rule in favor of their own idea with no involvement of a jury of one’s peers or a reasonable chance of being reversed on appeal. The National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938 initiated the high-water mark of workers’ power. They established the right to form a union that could collectively bargain with employers, set a federal minimum wage, made legal provisions for overtime work, and more. Since WWII, Congress has successively passed laws to effectively erode the intent of these policies, most significantly with the Taft–Hartley Act of 1947. Subsequent Supreme Court rulings have made it harder to form a union, limited union actions in pursuit of a binding contract

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with employers, and reduced the terms under which workers can file and win grievances. Union membership has declined from a high of nearly 40 percent of the US workforce in the mid-1950s to less than one in eight workers today, with the majority being employed in the public sector. There has consistently been strong public support for unions and unionization, but changes in the economy, the failure of unionization to adjust to these changes, an active campaign by corporations to thwart the formation of unions, and anti-union legislation have been largely successful. The failure of unions to adjust to all of these forces has contributed significantly to stagnating wages and workers sharing an ever-smaller portion of an economy’s increased productivity. For students interested in the law as a social force for good, it is instructive to insert the matter of social inequality into discussions of legal decisions. To what extent does or could the courts act to staunch the growing divide between rich and poor? How could the law be interpreted such that those who have the least, rather than those who have the most, benefit from its decisions? Why isn’t growing inequality – known to destabilize democracies – a prime factor in judicial decisions based on a constitution that expresses a commitment to upholding equality? This perspective is likely to clash with those of students who agree with the “originalist interpretation” of the Constitution. If the Founding Fathers didn’t see technology’s contribution to inequality as a problem, it’s not a problem the Court should decide. Yes, the Constitution endorsed slavery, but why should its decisions try to rectify the consequences of human bondage of the past? Weren’t the 13th, 14th, and 15th “Civil War” Amendments enough? Others will see the courts as protecting religious persons’ prerogatives to discriminate against those perpetrating sin or living in a way their religion abhors. Using the language of rights will probably move the discussion nowhere. Looking at the consequences for the good of a society that enshrines equality of opportunity and human dignity could be a better tack than questioning religious beliefs and practices that warrant discrimination. Regardless, like so many areas in which inequality is at issue, an instructor can only imperfectly anticipate the heat that may be generated in such a discussion.

TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY Among the many forces that influence social inequality is changing technology. An unresearched but suggestive notion is that such things as consumer technology, and particularly smartphones and the recreation (distraction?) they provide, has been an enticing consolation prize to the lesser prospects of home ownership, secure employment, and social mobility for many, and especially

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younger, persons. The absorption they invite, the sense of empowerment to easily stay in touch with others and build virtual communities, acquire access to a prodigious amount of information, and have their opinions read by thousands at a mere click of the thumb has obscured – possibly made irrelevant – the limits the stratification system imposes on them. Expensive smartphones, like designer analog watches, have become a thing of beauty, symbols of personal worth, and an alternative to tangible social status and opportunity. More obviously and well understood is the way digital technologies have been developed to reduce labor costs in manufacturing and the provision of services. The dual effect has been to dumb down many jobs and eliminate others. If technology can take over the role of decision-making and technical expertise, the job can be done by almost anyone and requires little training or experience. AI chatbots can write the memo, letter, routine document, and whatever else a person with an undergraduate degree might have been hired to do. Research skills? It’s all there on the handheld computer. Checking out groceries? Even shopping, fixing a car, or solving computer problems can be done with robots and other digital engineering feats that eliminate human contact and the work of human hands. Better yet, if technology (e.g., robotics, scanners, bots, and automated chats) can make shopping checkout-free, compose legal briefs, handle correspondence, and perform surgery, it can eliminate the work once done by human beings, further reducing costs, especially when tax credits are lavished on corporations for investments in technology. But people still need an income to live. With a large pool of redundant labor, it shouldn’t be difficult to find someone to fill the personal service job at the lowest possible wage, with few or no benefits or job security. At the other end of the labor market are those in the upper 20 percent of wage earners who today benefit from new, complex technologies. This is part of the education divide that has been created by what sociologist Randall Collins (1979) termed the credential society. Much of this work is difficult and does require not only human judgment but valuable skills that only a few possess. The distance between these workers and the lower 80 percent has grown and will continue to, so long as technology needs skilled human beings to keep operating effectively and solve new technological problems. They are the beneficiaries. But AI is moving rapidly to fulfill their job description. In the future, these workers, too, will be challenged to keep their vaulted status and affluence intact. In times past, the very wealthy inherited most of their wealth and were expected to use it wisely to build even more wealth. That remains true today, but added to the very wealthy is a new class of entrepreneurs who sit atop the “unicorns” or tech corporations worth, in terms of capital invested, at least a billion dollars. Sacrificed in this technology, privacy has become the prov-

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ince of fewer and fewer people – the very wealthy and the minority of Luddites who somehow live outside the social network. Students today seem oblivious to the erosion of personal privacy. Is this indicative of a devaluation in one of the pillars of democratic societies: the right to have one’s own opinions and movements, associations, and relationships free of unwanted and unsuspected scrutiny? Most people are ignorant of how their private information is collected and used (Singer and Karaian, 2003). Others seem to accept that they will never be free of the prying eyes and public recording of digital technology, to say nothing of privacy breaches and pervasive surveillance by technologies employed by the state, advertisers, and those for whom they work. Power is shifting away in ways that have repercussions barely anticipated by most, but not by those who are gaining power. Suggesting this is an issue of social inequality, an erosion of the power individuals and groups have long enjoyed, can provoke lively discussion. While digital technology in the form of social media allows “bad characters” to share ideas and grievances, plot, organize, stake out sites to attack, and mobilize like-minded conspirators, what about the “good guys”? Crime can be traced with the help of thousands of surveillance cameras in a city, police access to all of the personal information stored on the cloud, and courts willing to mine the record of one’s thoughts, utterances, and movements. Digital media in its many forms has normalized the surrendering of privacy and the personal power privacy affords. The original, highly successful business plan Mark Zuckerberg devised is simple. Under the guise of democratizing the world, digital platforms and apps track users’ movements, physiological changes, personal communications, eye contact, interests, purchases, and attention spans. Social media platforms and app owners sell these data, opening users’ lives to corporations and political groups keen to sell them something or mold their worldview. The billions of dollars acquired doing this make them even more powerful and likely to intensify the design: if it’s free, you’re the product. And the result has been fabulous wealth for a few alongside a diminution in power in exchange for ambiguous benefits for the many. The “digital divide” was widely recognized and discussed as computer technology, Internet access, and access to digital media spread unevenly around the world. The availability of the power of computing and vast amounts of information, connecting to places and people far away, and the development of skills to gain employment in the burgeoning field of computer technology was and remains unevenly spread. Across the world’s regions, inequality of technology influences differential economic development, students’ learning, and civic engagement. Access to and use of digital media are creating new forms of inequality and reenforcing well-established ones (Hargittai, 2021). Because media technology is such an important part of students’ lives, this discussion can find an attentive class-

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room of young people. Most of them have never known a world where these capabilities and pitfalls didn’t exist. Like inequality generally, this seems like the most natural thing in the world (Katz et al., 2021).

HEALTH CARE AND HEALTH CARE DELIVERY Among the many forces shaping social inequality is the delivery of health care. This is true in the US and around the world. It is a topic ripe for discussion when students take even a cursory look at comparative health indicators. Social inequality is evidenced in shorter life expectancy, higher maternal illness and death, infant mortality, and the greater incidence of many chronic and acute diseases. The US fares more poorly than other affluent countries on most of these indicators despite its much higher per-person health care expenditure. It even fares worse than many poorer countries. Lifestyle and the production and processing of food play their part in jeopardizing health, but health care delivery – both preventive and curative – is a significant contributor. Methods of delivering health care invite a comparison to other countries that have universal healthcare provided by the private sector (e.g., France), those with a national health service (e.g., Great Britain), and those like Canada whose universal health system varies across provinces and is supplemented by widespread use of private insurance. Most of these countries treat medical care as a right for anyone with physical or mental health needs. More than half of Americans have some form of government-provided health care (e.g., TRICARE for military families, veterans’ benefits, Medicare, and Medicaid, including SSI). The Affordable Care Act of 2010 (“Obamacare”) enrolled others in subsidized policies and includes CHIP. Because of these programs and state programs that guarantee health care to children, only 8 percent of Americans lack any kind of insured health care, most of which pays only part of the bill and is delivered by private hospitals, clinics, and medical practitioners. This does not mean, however, that health care is equitably distributed across social classes, ethnic and racial groups, rural and urban, alike, when the quality of health care and the coverage of health insurance is considered. It is generally agreed that the US has the finest, most advanced medical training and technologies in the world. It is a worldwide destination for medical education and often the best place to find capabilities to address rare and complex medical problems. It is also the most expensive. This, and the concentration of good medical care in those parts of the city and the country that can pay the most for health care, means that certain categories of people – especially the rural and urban poor – are much more likely to fail to receive its benefits.

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The approach of the US medical system is, as Paul Starr (1982) explained, one possibility among many. It was the strategic efforts of an emerging paradigm of medicine – privately administered and focusing on illness once symptoms appear – that prevailed over other approaches. It is a classic example of power. The result was not only expensive but neglectful of preventive medicine that is much more cost-effective. It never intended to be, and many of its practitioners are actively opposed to, universal health care. It would surely alter the distribution of income for many of its wealthy practitioners. The obesity epidemic in the US is not a contested fact, nor are its major contributing factors and its poor-health consequences. The opioid epidemic claimed more than 100,000 lives in 2021 and again in 2022. The proliferation of guns combined with a failure to enact gun safety legislation contributes to almost half as many deaths, a major health hazard. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in more than a million deaths in the US, many of which were avoidable if vaccination and other public health measures had not been politicized. These numbers are not the result of chance, as any comparison to other nations makes clear. They have much to do with how health is understood and the locus of power to address health proactively and distribute health care equitably. Public health, arguably the single most important approach to reducing infant and maternal mortality, infectious disease, environmental health hazards, and unsafe food has been hugely successful in the US. It was radically marginalized throughout the 20th century, however, and receives a tiny fraction (perhaps as little as 1 or 2 percent) of the $1.2 trillion spent annually in the US for health care today. Agencies of the federal, state, and local governments pursue public health (e.g., clean air and water, workplace safety, safe travel) largely outside the private healthcare system. These reduce its stratifying influence, but it is a constant battle to democratize health care delivery across communities and businesses, to make the spaces in which people live and work equally healthy.

FORCES AT PLAY ACROSS THE CURRICULUM When second-wave feminism began to influence academia, traditionally taught courses were faced with the question: Where are the women? Where in the course on international development are women the focus? Where are the data on women in criminal justice and pre-law course topics? How are women overlooked in courses on race and ethnicity? In time and overdue, bringing women into the discussion was accomplished. Making women visible strengthened research and teaching across the social sciences, more and more of which is now done by women. To some degree, this parallels learning in a range of courses about the forces at play, the forms, dimensions, and consequences for social inequality.

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The examples discussed here – political economy, the judicial and legislative systems, digital technology, and health care delivery – are just that, illustrations of the way organizational practices and structures embed social inequality into the ways people think and live, into their desires and needs, their choices and efforts. There is no course in the social sciences in which a confrontation with the consequences of social inequality can or should be overlooked. There is no topic that cannot entertain the question: How is social inequality part of what is being taught? Learning about social inequality exposes the way power is unequally allocated and applied, the assumed status distinctions that accord privilege to some and deny it to others, and the practices that maintain class structure. It is the choice of instruction to select the features of society – within a community or nation, or globally – that are most germane in illustrating the drivers and consequences of social, political, and economic inequality. How organizations – formal and informal – operate has intentional as well as unintended consequences. Taxation and regulation of the actions of economic actors, judicial and legislative considerations and decisions, the focus of research and the development of technology … these are not arbitrary. They have a ripple effect and sometimes a tidal wave barely foreseen. They sometimes irrevocably change people’s well-being and life chances. In many cases these things make them poorer, more insecure, less healthy, and less the agents of their personal lives. They divide and separate people, making it hard to communicate across boundaries of class, status, and political tribe. Who lives a long and productive life is not up to chance. It is structured in the way valued resources are allocated. It is built into the stratification system. It could be different, and in many, many cases it should be. This is a bold assertion. Students will respond, for sure.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • A national economy is fraught with political choices that have multiple effects on how individuals and households throughout the class structure experience the economy. • Court and legislative decisions can be instrumental in reducing inequality (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education) or eroding prior legislation aimed at reducing inequality (e.g., the Taft–Hartley Act, which weakened the power of organized labor). • New technologies designed to do work previously done by people, and the power – to say nothing of the wealth – that digital technology gives to those who control it are creating new forms of inequality. • Health care can be delivered in a variety of ways. In the US, where health care costs greatly exceed those of other countries, the consequences of

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a mishmash of private and governmental delivery matrices have serious effects beyond health, especially for the least affluent.

13. Learning with quantitative material A great deal of what we know about the consequences of social inequality is revealed in carefully gathered empirical data and statistical analyses. The remarkable scholarship of the past half-century has opened up a terrain of inquiry previously inaccessible. The limits for getting answers have been greatly expanded with the collection of information – quantitative and qualitative – by ever more sophisticated means. The power of quantitative data analysis and the quantification of qualitative data (e.g., Hodson, 1999) has had an enormous impact on what we know and will know about social inequality. Can status inequality be quantified? White privilege? Can the social cost of having a less than conventional physical difference – a lost or disfigured limb, large body, difficulty speaking, sight impairment, random twitches, or an ambiguous gender identification – be quantified? Students might be surprised that, imperfect as much quantification is, such things do lend themselves to numbers. The numbers can be displayed, statistics can be computed, findings can be communicated and acted upon. The “social facts” about social inequality are often expressed in numbers and visual presentations of quantitative information. In upper-division courses there might be some expectation that students will have taken a basic statistics course or mastered the interpretation of statistical material in social science courses previously taken. At the lower division, the challenge of using quantitative data pedagogically can be great, given many students’ difficulty with basic math. To understand social inequality at any level, in any context, or to address any topic, statistics and statistical techniques are unavoidable. Making quantitative data meaningful and generative of the kind of conversations that enhance learning can be very challenging but is fundamental to the enterprise. Wealth and income have grown more unequal in the past half-century. In Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s (2001) phrase, the Great Convergence of the post-WWII period gave way to the Great Divergence. These are not merely lines on a graph. Since W.E.B. Du Bois displayed his charts and graphs at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, the visual presentation of data has become vastly more creative and informative. These charts, graphs, and other constructions give students an accessible picture of quantitative information. They invite an interactive engagement among students and the instructor, going beyond the numbers and sometimes afield of the class discussion that may have been anticipated. 156

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Behind the data and statistics are forces and consequences to be explored. The average take-home income of Black males has remained less than two-thirds of White males’ income for several decades. Behind this number is the story of structural racism’s persistence despite improvement in many measures of segregation and exclusion, the pursuit of affirmative action in hiring and promotions, and increased educational attainment unavailable to earlier generations of African Americans. What’s going on here? What’s missing from this picture? Where can we get the information to know? Why are wealthy students far more likely to graduate from college than students in the lowest quartile of US households, a difference of 58 percent versus 11 percent? Students can provide many answers, but a full discussion of the credential society and the gatekeeping that is the prerogative of those who are affluent requires an instructor’s guidance. Facts can be a catalyst for unexpected and sometimes explosive discussions that challenge anyone who teaches social inequality. They can also lead down paths that test students’ taken-for-granted ideas or casual opinions. That’s where learning takes place.

TRUSTING THE NUMBERS Having a healthy skepticism about information is a part of critical thinking. Students will not hesitate to question the facts that may be presented to them, especially when the facts are at odds with what they believe. Two questions often voiced in this regard are: Whose data are they? and How good are the data? These are both fair questions and can be an opportunity to help the student hone their critical thinking skills. In a world of commerce where no one is expected to really believe what they are seeing, in a political environment that provides no end to “alternative facts,” and a digital media world that finds pecuniary value in fabricating information and bogus “theories,” confronting the question “What makes facts trustworthy?” is unavoidable. Because students can be keen to know the veracity of data, it is useful and necessary to not only provide them but to show them some of the research from which the data come. Even a brief introduction to research methodology helps to dispel the cynical but widespread idea that anyone can get the facts to support their opinion. Imperfect as they are, the facts at our disposal are not all equal. Why this is so is worth discussing. Establishing the quality of the statistics of social inequality is necessary. The subjects and questions to which they are applied can then be debated and dissected. This propels the discussion forward. What they actually prove or make clear can be disputed, but this is the way learning happens. If the reliability or validity of an instructor’s choice of data is questioned, this is an invitation to explain why the data are being cited and the extent to which they can be trusted. There is no shortage of sources for quantitative

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information, and in a highly contested subject like social inequality there are many vying for attention. The source of information should be reputable. It should be unremarkable and unsurprising. Though non-partisan sources may have a reputation for being conservative or liberal, this does not make them unreliable. It is good to remind students, however, that they may be selectively assembled, with a caveat about their ideological slant. The methodology used in the data collection process should be transparent. Basic social science research methodology checks for bias, for example, how questions are worded and the size of the sample can be discussed. Statistics generated by the data may be too simplistic or may fail to account for confounding variables. Time taken to cover some of these issues is time well spent in giving students some of what they need to evaluate information on their own.

ASSESSING SOURCES OF INFORMATION Government data are cited more than any other in examinations of social inequality. At the federal level some of the best data are available through departments and agencies. Quantitative information at the state or local level may be less credible, but this is not a certainty. The quality of the professionals involved in data collection and analysis, the many checks employed, and the fact that they can be and are used by individuals and groups across the political spectrum make the federal government’s data especially valuable. The entire universe of subjects (as in the decennial census, all federal taxpayers, the nation’s federally incarcerated population) give the statistics credibility by eliminating any sampling error. Elsewhere, large sample sizes and good sampling protocols provide highly reliable statistics. Many quasi-governmental organizations provide high-quality data, often with good visual presentations. The Council of Economic Advisers, the US Federal Reserve and several of the Federal Reserve city and state banks, the United Nations, and the World Bank publish high-quality data and analyses. These reports are replete with illustrative charts and graphs. Their publications, those of other organizations, and scholarly books are usually available online and can be assigned to students. An occasional academic journal article, like Devah Pager’s (2003) study of race, criminal background, and finding a job, offers clearly understood numbers and graphs for students. Information about attitudes and behaviors has been gathered and made available for decades by polling organizations – Gallup, Roper, Zogby, and many others. Their published data are ripe for student research that focuses on changing attitudes over time. Unfortunately, these data are rarely available in a form that allows students to do their own analysis; they must rely on the presentations of the pollsters.

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Older, well-established polling organizations have been asking many of the same questions for decades, giving them an ability to present trends and other changes of interest for social inequality. Today there are many newcomers, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, university-affiliated institutes, and several reliable political polling organizations. Polling now benefits from much more powerful technologies for gathering and analyzing their survey data than was possible just a few years ago. Some do excellent work; others are justifiably suspect. Nate Silver (2012) provides a good guide to this difference. Most disaggregated polling data are proprietary and not readily available to outside researchers. Thus, it is difficult to answer many of the questions the data raise, especially when seeking a more granular analysis. Rarely do polling organizations perform the kind of multivariate analysis social scientists expect or need for their own inquiries. For that reason, polling data are best used to introduce information about what is known rather than offering the final answer. For students who want to dig further into data, the General Social Survey is a good place to go. This is discussed in Chapter 14. It is important to point out to students that the beliefs, attitudes, and opinions gathered by polls are just that, what people say they think and believe. As Duane Alwin and Jacqueline Scott (1996) explain, beliefs are strongly held ideas about what is and what is not. Values involve desired end-states and ways to accomplish goals. Attitudes are “latent predispositions to respond or behave in particular ways” (Alwin and Scott, 1996: 75). Usually, a pollster or survey researcher can trust that the subjects have answered to the best of their ability. The facts of their beliefs may be in error, but indeed they are the subjects, beliefs, values and attitudes. Among the serious problems of most polling data is its failure to gauge subjects’ knowledge in answering the questions. Rarely do pollsters seek to gauge the subject’s level of knowledge about the topic. Most Americans could not find Libya on a map, but most have a strong opinion about the topic that was used to criticize Hillary Clinton: “Benghazi.” Most have no idea that the US spends a lower portion of the nation’s GDP on foreign aid than any other affluent nation, but most believe it is too much. Millions of people believed Donald Trump was a self-made man, though his father made him a millionaire and bailed him out as a failed casino owner. Bias not of the pollster’s making can intrude. A Black candidate may appear to have more prospective votes than she subsequently receives if polled subjects fear their answer will be interpreted as racial prejudice, what is known as the Dinkins Effect that caused pollsters to inaccurately predict the margin of victory in New York City’s 1989 mayoral election. As well, what people say can be influenced or even dictated by temporary mood swings or some inferred feature (e.g., accent, gender, age) of the questioner. Most people hesitate to provide complete and accurate information on their marital history, wealth,

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debts, and income; others unintentionally miss sources of income received in addition to wages. Income and wealth data are the most trustworthy when collected by agencies that are backed by the law (e.g., the Internal Revenue Service). Online polling is fraught with problems of representativeness. Finding a representative sample when reaching people by phone is a great challenge. Polls are often commissioned by news organizations but also by commercial and political interests that are not necessarily looking for difficult, conditional, or nuanced answers. Some avoid collecting answers that run counter to the agenda of the pollster’s paymaster. Others phrase questions in a way that elicits a desired answer. Can newspapers and magazines be trusted to publish reliable data? Students may feel confused about these sources, given that magazines and newspapers can be partisan or sectarian. Newspapers of record such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many others with a reputation for practicing the best journalistic standards are respected for accuracy (and willingness to publish corrections), as are magazines such as Business Week and The Economist. While their editorial position may hew to the right or left, this is admitted openly, in part to lend credence to the information they publish, whether it is their own polling data or quantitative information from other sources. Some of the very best visual presentations of quantitative data are published by these sources. It is important to help students know something about sources. For instance, the Pew Charitable Trusts was established by a couple who are often described as conservative, but few question the quality of data the Pew Research Center provides. The Center for American Progress, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and many others admit to a political and social leaning but pride themselves on the accuracy of the information they provide. More partisan organizations, including NGOs committed to an issue, such as the Guttmacher Institute, generate data that can be useful and trusted but may be selectively reflecting the point of view, or may be cited in support of the agenda, of the organization. Academic institutions generate a great deal of information gathered from other sources or through their data collection efforts. Some of the most usable information on wealth, poverty, and the social safety net, replete with simple-to-understand diagrams and charts, is published by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. The University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center is among the best of the many research centers in the world providing valuable survey research data. Its Poverty Research Center, now Poverty Solutions, publishes excellent, student-accessible work. The World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, compile the most comprehensive and

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up-to-date data on global wealth and inequality. The country-by-country accumulation of household surveys and other national data from 120 countries by Branko Milanovic (2007, 2016: 12–29) is highly respected and widely cited with confidence.

DATA AND STATISTICS Students drawn to the social sciences tend to be interested in the human condition as experienced by individuals. They are likely to have been attracted to the field through personal experiences, but also by accounts of individuals in both interesting and troubling contexts they have only read or are curious about. The best qualitative study has the feel of a novel, bringing students into a new world that engrosses them and fires their imagination. Tally Jackson, at the heart of Elliot Liebow’s Tally’s Corner, can hook a student as readily as any character that Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald created. Liebow’s Tell Them Who I Am, Alice Goffman’s On the Run, and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted draw the reader in just like a novel, as do the works by Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich. There are many good reasons to include ethnographic studies or some elements from qualitative fieldwork to build students’ acquaintance with and understanding of social inequality. Quantitative information rarely if ever has this effect. The individual can feel lost in the aggregate statistics when the mean and median, the distribution, or the line of best fit is the point of interest. When moving from descriptive data to statistical data derived from individual pieces of factual information, it can feel like an abstraction, an abandonment of the individual, or even a blotting out of the living, breathing world of people. One of the more interesting exercises in bridging the qualitative and quantitative realm, The Financial Diaries (Morduch and Schneider, 2017), goes beyond income surveys that record at one moment in time how people are spending their money. The authors stayed in touch with 235 households of working people for two years, many of whom crisscross the poverty threshold or live just above it. They recorded daily decisions about handling what for many households were earnings chronically insufficient to provide financial security. The precariousness of their lives was amply recorded not only in their cash flows but in their accounts of how decisions were made to pay or not pay bills, to save or spend, to seek extra income, and to share income with others. This is a more qualitative version of the many excellent panel studies that have been done, beginning in the 1960s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Panel Study of Income Dynamics began with more than 18,000 households and continues today. Since then, longitudinal studies have proliferated, tracing the path from school to work, careers and financial ups and downs, family

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dynamics, health, and the like. Similar panel studies have been carried out on youth, persons with disabilities, men, women, and ethnic and racial minorities. The studies have generated an enormous amount of fascinating findings, but the data can be challenging for students. These data have been and continue to be mined by advanced students and academics in constructing patterns of social mobility and the life course of individuals in a rapidly changing society, resulting in hundreds of publications. They give a much more detailed and complex picture of how individuals and households navigate the ups and downs of a changing labor market, a landscape of laws and court decisions, demographic trends, changing gender and race relations, and economic recessions and recoveries. The narratives derived from longitudinal panel studies can never be simple, but their combination of synthesis and documentation make for some compelling portraits of the real lives of people in a dynamic system of structured inequality. As the social sciences, and especially sociology, have become more and more quantitative, another challenge to teaching is the use of statistical methods about which students are unfamiliar. The ability to “hold constant” several variables and gauge the effect of a single factor is an invaluable tool for sorting through complex questions. Because multivariate analysis is such a prominent part of understanding social inequality, it is worth spending some time to explain how it works. Unlike polls that often raise more probing questions than they answer, analyses of the causes, extent, and consequences of inequality are greatly enhanced by multivariate analyses that allow the individual influence of multiple factors and their combinations to be assessed. How much does neighborhood, family structure, household income, educational attainment, racial identification, or health status contribute to lifetime earnings or occupational attainment? With some qualifications, multivariate analysis can provide an answer. Among the qualifiers, however, are the quality of data analyzed and the particularities of the sampled population. Students may be quick to dismiss any single study, so it is important to be ready with supporting studies when available. Caution is required. Most students will be lost amid standard deviations, beta weights, dummy variables, and standardized coefficients. It’s worth the risk to show students how data are assembled and handled. It is advisable, though, to keep the descriptions free of social research vernacular and the argot used by statisticians. Best to avoid belaboring the decisions the statistical operations require. At best, hearing all the details, they’ll lose interest. At worst, they’ll interpret this as massaging the data in order to get a preferred outcome. This is an opportunity to talk about science as a form of inquiry. No single study has a claim on the truth. Findings seek refutation, correction, and alteration as much as they appear to seek confirmation. The logic of this, including type I and type II errors, is important for students to understand. Perhaps most

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important is their recognition that science is only as certain as the current moment allows. Like world record holders who are honored as the fastest or strongest, scientific facts are only as good as the competition allows, which will surely, and sometimes very soon, be bested.

TOO MANY NUMBERS? Quantitative data are out there waiting to be retrieved with a few keystrokes. The amount of information available can overwhelm students. Even engaged students with an eye and high tolerance for numbers can quickly tire of quantitative findings. Academics may want more and more information, but students – some worried that an obscure number will be the answer on an exam – appreciate numbers best when they raise eyebrows (e.g., the wealth gap in the US), when they settle a dispute (e.g., the rate of taxation wealthy Americans actually pay versus the official tax rate for their income bracket), or when they provide interesting comparisons (e.g., how the length of time convicted felons spend in prison varies across affluent nations). And a good rule of thumb is that students appreciate an accompanying narrative that goes clearly and seamlessly to an answer. Student learning is the goal of any instruction. In this instance, the best approach may be to talk about an issue and raise questions that guide students toward thinking about how it might be answered. It may seem obvious to someone who has been seeking answers to questions for years as a researcher or teacher, but it has to be learned. Many students struggle to pose a question in such a way that an answer can be forthcoming, that is, to imagine what information would help answer the question. Assembling the information, assessing its relevance, and evaluating its sufficiency is an acquired skill. Learning to do this is a useful interactive exercise between mentor and students. At some point, a chart or graph can help continue the discussion, possibly moving it toward even more specific numerical findings. If students have not had a course in social research or statistics, they may need simple instruction in reading charts. Graphs that involve three (or more) variables can be wonderfully inventive but can also be vexing. The instruction becomes even more involved when tables of numbers are presented, especially when relationships are not obviously linear. How strong is the relationship, and is it grounds to infer causation? Correlations and other measures of association help clarify relationships but are easily misinterpreted. Scatterplots that include lines of best fit can be helpful. It is not difficult for students to understand a Rho that varies between zero and one, but some explanation is required when r is small but significant and consistent across independent studies.

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This raises the question of causality, inviting a visit to the conditions for deciding that A causes B, necessarily and/or sufficiently (or does not). Beyond a correlation, time order is usually not difficult to establish. Nonspurious correlations may take a bit more reasoning. Establishing why this relationship exists or proposing a mechanism, so to speak, that makes sense and has empirical backing threatens to invite speculation. But the facts remain, and discussion can be very interesting. Though it varies across time and space, educational attainment is the best predictor of many important outcomes in one’s lifetime, including income, health, and civic participation. Understanding why educational attainment matters so much has been a focus of research at least since Blau and Duncan’s (1967) classic study, The American Occupational Structure, and James Coleman’s (1966) Equality of Educational Opportunity. Embedded in educational attainment, however, are many factors, not all of which lend themselves to clear-cut statistical treatment. What cluster of experiences associated with educational attainment (e.g., the quality of one’s schools, the school’s ethnic and class diversity, the cultural capital of classmates, a family’s ability to assume debt, and the health of the economy when considering prospective careers) are most important? Options for reproductive health, marriage, and prospects for home ownership are unmeasured, but knowledge and perceptions of these, too, are probably associated with educational attainment. There is ample empirical evidence to follow up on this line of inquiry. Rather than seeing this as a rabbit hole of numbers into which students can be plunged, it can be a venture into which their questions and ideas can lead. Much of the focus on the causes and consequences of inequality is highly quantitative, but much of the narrative about what is known goes beyond the numbers. When students feel they are being buried in numbers, good instruction requires a give-and-take between what could be and what is well-established knowledge, between the quantitative and qualitative, between what professionals believe they know and what students want to believe. Numbers help, but good discussion helps more.

WHAT’S BEHIND THE STATISTICS? WHAT’S THE POINT? Would students want to end affirmative action in higher education? For whom? Affirmative action in higher education has had a significant impact on the opportunities and careers of tens of thousands of women, people of color, and working-class students who otherwise would have been frozen out. That’s well documented. It is also strongly opposed. To pass muster with courts that have increasingly disfavored affirmative action, higher education has come

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to emphasize diversity as a means to increase minority enrollment and compensate for many decades of blatant discrimination, exclusion, and blocked opportunities. Is diversity a smokescreen for racial preferences? Is this a ruse or a backdoor conspiracy perpetrated by liberal do-gooders? Is it simple dishonesty? These questions get to the heart of an undercurrent of the history not only of the United States but many other nations where, for centuries, racial superiority was assumed. It guided the rule of law and interpersonal relations between those who could claim to be White and others: Indigenous nations, darker-skinned and non-Christian immigrants, enslaved people. Affirmative action is a response to a legacy and current reality of this often-contested history. Means-based scholarships, Perkins Loans, and federally subsidized Stafford Loans, Pell Grants, tuition discounts, and other means of supporting lower-income students have acted as class-focused affirmative action vehicles. Colleges seek geographic diversity advantaging applicants from states with fewer people. Rhodes Scholarship competition is regionally administered. If you finish high school in New York City and aspire to be a Rhodes Scholar, you should go to university in Wyoming or Montana. Are these, rather than minority preferences, a good form of affirmative action because they are free of the taint of racial preference? These are questions of inequality and equity. Posing them means offering empirical facts and quantitative information. Answers to them may involve resorting to data gathered and statistical analyses published by skilled researchers. It is important for students to know this. Opinions and beliefs may differ, but there are facts that should be considered in clarifying and deciding not only what one knows but what one believes. Knowing the history of racial superiority and its expressions in law and custom is important. Quantitative facts are also important and sometimes the best way to sketch the picture of the past. The facts of society today – incarceration, housing, health care, education, occupation – tell a story of the residual effects, and make apparent contemporary sentiments, of racial superiority. The brouhaha over students learning about this, popularly if inaccurately labeled “critical race theory” offers a teaching moment that invites instruction in the facts of the matter. Seeing, learning, knowing, and referencing the facts, a great many of them in quantitative form, is vital if students are to be a part of the process of forging a better-informed populace. It starts with their own learning in a classroom, but extends to conversations with their significant others, their colleagues, workmates, family, and friends. It may sound like a hackneyed aphorism that an informed public is the cornerstone of a free and democratic society. Fortunately, it is also true.

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It is indisputable that empirical science most often poses questions it thinks it can answer. Many important avenues to understanding are the province of novelists and playwrights, poets and composers, visual artists and choreographers, clerics and mystics, philosophers and photographers. Without an appreciation for the lengths to which social science goes before making claims of facticity, its contributions can seem of limited value or even trivial. What science, including social science, contributes, however, is not insignificant, either for the questions it poses or the answers it provides. Senator William Proxmire bolstered his public image by ridiculing what he saw as esoteric research. He made serious scientific research sound like a joke and a waste of money. Yes, the topics of many social and biological science journal articles can appear arcane or esoteric. The caution “needs further research” seems to add a qualification to research findings: Should they be taken seriously? Teaching quantitative material has two qualities that put it forward as vital to understanding social stratification. It is a portal to inquiry about social inequality. It opens up lines of investigation that can engage and involve students in aspects of social stratification and the contours of society about which they were unaware or thought unapproachable. The well-documented (quantitative) facts about the value of early-childhood intervention on behalf of poor children, the stagnation of mobility that has accompanied declining unionization, and the shifting burden of taxation that facilitates a vastly greater accumulation of wealth by the few than was possible 50 years ago – these are broached with data and statistics that invite inquiry. And it is a shorthand story about social inequality. To see a chart that plots income inequality for income quintiles over the past several decades is to read a narrative of a nation in change. Rather than speaking rhetorically for itself, it insists on a response, a reaction, or a sense that something worth knowing is going on here. The 1960 US Census data for Mississippi (after Brown but before serious civil rights legislation) says on nearly every page that discrimination and exclusion of nearly half the population spells economic stagnation. To waste, through segregation and racial animus, the talents and potential of so many people is not only immoral but also foolish. It squanders the potential of individual human beings; it squanders opportunities and possibilities for the entire community and region. Statistics have this power. Perhaps the full range and the pain of racial, class, and gender discrimination cannot be captured in numbers, but numbers have an important role to play in learning about the extent, cost, and personal tragedy of discrimination. Asking students what numbers they might expect to find and showing them how to find them is not only possible. It makes the point that, yes, knowing the facts – the data and the statistics – is a good idea.

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KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • In recent decades the collection and analysis of quantitative data and the visual presentations in inventive charts and graphs have vastly increased the ability to ask and answer questions about social inequality. • Even a brief introduction to research methodology and statistical techniques helps to dispel the idea that anyone can get the facts to support their opinion. • The quality, veracity, and usefulness of available data vary widely. How to recognize this and to know what sources can be trusted is a skill that can be learned. • Just as qualitative data tell a story, there is a story to tell when quantitative material is being learned. Instruction into why the numbers are meaningful, including an account of the trek (e.g., a panel study conducted over many years) to find answers through research that generated the numbers, can have a similar appeal. • Instruction using quantitative information offers an opportunity to introduce the way social scientists go about their research, the logic of research, the way multivariate analysis isolates individual factors, and how to frame a question such that an answer can be forthcoming.

14. Responding to inequality: social movements Thomas Piketty (2022: 10) reminds us in his A Brief History of Equality that social movements throughout history have usually made social inequality their target. Charles Tilly, and the scholarship of hundreds of other social historians, shows how peasant upheavals and bourgeois revolutions, as well as their sideshows, bear out Piketty’s observation. The independence movements in Africa and Asia, innumerable movements to wrest power from dictatorships, the many national movements to abolish slavery, and the modern Civil Rights Movement are obvious examples. Protests against corrupt governments, movements to end a war, protect gun ownership, save the environment, end police misconduct, stop inhumane treatment of animals, build a border wall, abolish the death penalty, defend LGBTQ+ people, and lower taxes may appear less obviously about social inequality. It is not hard, however, to ferret out a thread of anxiety or anger about unequal and elite power, privileged lifestyles, disproportionate costs borne by the poor or working class, or animus toward a minority group among the energizing motivations of these movements.

GIVING VOICE TO ALL STUDENTS Not all students will conclude that social inequality is unfair, a human construction, thwarts human potential, is environmentally damaging, and obstructs progressive change. They possibly see human nature as an unavoidable obstruction. As Albert Hirschman explains (1991), they may resist movements out of fear that a perverse, unexpected something may emerge, that it will destroy what is currently worth keeping, or that the effort will be futile. While they are likely to support a slim version of equality of opportunity, the onus for people’s situation is on the persons themselves. Success shouldn’t be penalized. Inheritance preserves quality. These students are consistent in that way: the rich have a right to their fortunes, and perhaps it’s unfortunate that the poor largely deserve their misfortune. This doesn’t mean they fail to grasp better than their more liberal classmates the forces and structures that create millions of unhoused individuals and families, that rank and sort people such that millions must fail to “measure 168

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up,” that resign millions more to the stress and disappointment of working hard and playing by the rules with little chance of improvement. They, too, see how these are the same forces and structures that benefit many others, protect family wealth, provide an enviable celebrity culture and billionaire geniuses, and allow a few to dominate political messaging and legislative initiatives. They may well understand the connectedness of poverty and wealth and accept or even support the gaping divide while assuming they know which side they are on or expect soon to be. A few of these students see themselves as social activists in support of social inequality – that is, working to make sure it is not radically diminished. They may identify with the Tea Party or Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, which insist on lower taxes and reduced government services. They possibly work to push back against Black Lives Matter issues, “wokeism” and critical race theory, or oppose any form of affirmative action. They disagree with marriage equality for LGBTQ+ individuals and antidiscrimination legislation, including for transgender youth and adults. Conservative students may be intrigued by Identitarian movements in Europe and think a similar, respectable one – rather than an openly White supremacist movement – is needed in the US. Their view of the unhoused is likely to be from a distance. Their communities, homes, friends, work, and leisure seldom put them in proximity to the tents and fabricated hovels on the inner-city’s sidewalks, empty lots, and parks. Government regulation to ensure food safety, limit air pollution, and block racist Internet forums are overbearing, statist solutions. Instead, market forces will do a better job of taking care of these problems. The Second Amendment is absolute. Gullible people visiting provocative social forums on the Internet invite their fate. Caveat emptor. Perhaps they are conservative Christians who, rather than class, status, and power, believe the most important divide is between believers and nonbelievers. They see those guided by their religion on one side, those who embrace a secular world and moral relativism on the other. They might call this the faith divide. The real inequality divide pits the Born Again, who accept a literal interpretation of the Holy Bible, and evangelical and Pentecostal Christians against everyone else. They skew heavily toward political conservatism across a range of issues. Despite the decline in religiosity among young people today, a less orthodox religious morality may surface in class. Even students identifying as secular or nonbelievers are as likely to agree with Matthew 26:11, “The poor will always be with you,” as Deuteronomy 15:4, “There should be no poor among you.” Some students hope and work for more laws embracing their religious views, despite the unequal treatment and denial of equity this might entail. Or they may, as evangelical Christians who align with traditionalists and secular upholders of the status quo, see an affinity between themselves and those who

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fear that immigration will hijack their or their children’s chance for social mobility. School books should not include homosexual couples or mention alternatives to cisgender identity. They may see themselves as embattled defenders of conservative social values that emphasize traditional feminine and masculine family roles and designate distinct civic responsibilities for men and women. They almost certainly reject the right of a woman to make her own reproductive choices. All of these views can be the basis for social activism. Campus organizations exist to support them and provide an opportunity to participate in club meetings, forums, and demonstrations. Their ideas about social inequality may influence not only how they vote but also their support for or opposition to voter initiatives and referendums. A few students, in time, may put themselves forward for campus and local political office or other leadership positions. They seek to influence friends, neighbors, and family toward their views and may be active in showing their support for social inequality, just as those who oppose or want to reduce inequality may be active and engaged. Even in conservative communities and regions, however, most students who are interested in learning more about social inequality hold a liberal, progressive, or radical-left view of social inequality closer to their instructor’s (despite, perhaps, her occasionally taking a devil’s-advocate approach). It would be unfortunate if the conservative students, feeling like a minority who hold unpopular views, remain silent throughout the term. Their beliefs and ideas can be the catalyst for lively discussions and a spur to inquiry. Giving voice to a contrary or even an unpopular viewpoint and the arguments it musters is a valuable part of the entire class’s learning experience. Because those teaching social inequality in social science disciplines are more likely to view social inequality as problematic in its scope, forms, and consequences, it may feel like a failure to communicate that some students see social inequality so differently. Teaching is not a matter of making converts. Conservative students’ points of view provide an opportunity for the entire class to think about their own views, beliefs, and opinions. How well-grounded are they? How consistent and compatible are they, or are they full of contradictions? It challenges the class to ask what they actually know, not just what they believe to be true. Students in courses focusing on social inequality are also more likely to embrace social activism that is critical of social inequality in whatever forms it takes. While they might engage in the same sorts of club activities as their conservative classmates, they will probably be more likely to join protests and engage in social movement activity on campus or in the community. They want to be part of social change. It, too, requires their activism, building on the long history of opposition to the many forms of social inequality.

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Regardless of their personal views, there is great benefit in learning about the protests and movements to change the structure of inequality in one’s own and others’ societies. This is where comparative and historical investigations are especially revealing. Knowing about antebellum abolitionists’ actions informs an understanding of how civic protests become national politics. Recognizing why state action against the Arab Spring in Bahrain, Egypt, and Morocco was effective in repressing efforts for a new politics of democracy sheds light on social movements more generally. Social movements have been around for longer than we know. Some, like the Bengali independence movement, developed organizationally, grew in strength, and engaged authorities in effective ways to change the system that distributed class, status, and power with gross inequities. Admittedly, most protests have been spontaneous and never develop into a social movement – either to organize effectively or to achieve the changes sought. In some cases, the movement takes its eye off the prize, is co-opted, or its goals are diluted. Even in embryonic form it can meet strong opposition and violent repression. Most social movements fail, and for many reasons. Rejecting the lessons of organization-building and dogged persistence, the Occupy Wall Street movement’s legacy was successful only in coining the catchy but misleading phrase, “We are the 99 percent.” The movement surrounding former President Donald Trump, built on grievance and suspicion, became a cult of personality rather than a social movement, nearly bereft of policy goals and susceptible to transitioning from populism to authoritarianism. Protests in Egypt following the military coup that brought Abdel el-Sisi to power and the protests against the rule of religious leaders in the Islamic Republic of Iran are successfully crushed by the states’ use of lethal weaponry, suppression of information, imprisonment, and executions. The history of social movements seeking change in the stratification system, the reasons some have succeeded and most have failed, and the ways in which students themselves can be involved in social movements to address a particular issue of social inequality is a valuable part of the social inequality syllabus, including topical courses that give attention to social inequality. Social movements are interesting to students and offer one more way to engage those who may not otherwise be excited to learn about the state of the world today or the past.

THE MODERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT AS A TEMPLATE The Civil Rights Movement in the US is the go-to model for understanding successful social movements. Because the context was a democratic society governed by laws with a great measure of journalistic freedom, the move-

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ment’s choice of nonviolent protest was a good one that contributed greatly to its success. Typical state and civil violence against protests – massacres, assassinations, imprisonment, torture, and exile – could not be practiced with impunity. These things had been done to Native Americans, free and enslaved Black people, and others, but they were not a viable option in mid-20th-century America. When reactionary violence did occur, it reinforced the wider public’s understanding and appreciation of the nonviolent strategies of the movement. Reactionary violence to uphold White supremacy roused the sympathies of millions of White people to the injustice of racial segregation, discrimination, and prejudice. The decades-long history of chipping away at Jim Crow in the courts began soon after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. Public transportation was an obvious object for challenging the legality of segregation. Disenfranchisement and violence against any Black person who sought to exercise their citizenship right to vote was another. Legal suits against barriers to jobs and union membership were largely unsuccessful. The fact of more than 2000 lynchings of Black persons between 1880 and 1930 made a demand for anti-lynching laws even more compelling. Legal remedies to these travesties were pursued, but the most effective route was to focus on inequality of educational opportunity. This was Charles Houston’s strategy, followed by his protégé Thurgood Marshall and the many others who challenged segregation and the denial of opportunity. It was successful but not decisive and sparked the Massive Resistance Campaign in the South to uphold school segregation. Ten tumultuous years passed between the Brown v. Board of Education decision and meaningful federal legislation. During those years, the Civil Rights Movement emphasized voting rights and all forms of discrimination, and led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act a year later, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Federal anti-lynching legislation was not passed until 2022 with the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. Black churches and clergy were instrumental in giving organization to the movement and the ability to mobilize resources. Bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins led by high school and college students told stories most White people had avoided hearing. Increasingly, mainstream media gave coverage of norms and practices of racial superiority and subservience that showed the daily, often petty humiliations of racial segregation. Mass protest marches enlisted supporters from across the nation. The images of police and patrolmen attacking peaceful marchers with German shepherds and powerful water hoses were searing. These and the brutal murders of civil rights workers turned millions of previously ambivalent Whites against racial prejudice and discrimination. The movement revealed with great clarity the obvious: injustice was built into the stratification system. That system had to change.

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Much has changed since the early 1960s. Though many of the goals of the movement have not been fully realized, the Civil Rights Movement in the US has become the model for social movement success. Social movements since have used other tactics and adopted new technologies with mixed results. For example, social media has proven to be a double-edged sword, as an instrument for information, mobilization, and coordination and as a tool for surveillance and the spread of misinformation. Photos of lunch counter confrontations and videos of acts of police brutality have a powerful effect. But systemic racism offers fewer images that engage the unaffected. The deeper structural forces revealed in statistics and personal testimonials are harder to digest and a weaker catalyst to spark demands for new, fairer organizational practices. Still, the symptoms of institutional racism – the arrests, convictions, sentencing, and incarceration of people of color; poorer health and access to health care; lower educational attainment and rates of college attendance; poverty and its toll on children raised in single-parent homes; housing and household wealth – give plenty of reason to organize. The work of civil rights organizations, advocates, and efforts abound. The movement continues in different forms, including the Movement for Black Lives.

RECOGNIZING THE CENTRALITY OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS From Crane Brinton to Barrington Moore, Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, and the many scholars in between and since, social inequality is recognized as the major impetus for social movements. Class and status privilege, the unequal distribution of wealth and the means to earn a living, the use of state power that undergirds social inequality, and the lasting effects of human bondage, patriarchy, institutional racism, nativism, and homophobia have all led to powerful social movements and social change. Including social movements in a social inequality course is important for the historical knowledge imparted in recognizing and understanding how people have, for millennia and across societies, rejected and fought against their relegation to lower status, class, and access to power. This can be linked to contemporary social movements and other efforts today to effect change and create more equal life chances for those the stratification system denies. An initial starting point is to ask students what issues interest or concern them personally. What issues do they care about, what is the spark of protests they know about, what protests are in the news, and why? If the concern is global climate change, where is social inequality in the matter? For example, are the costs and probable destruction caused by climate change shared equally across the nation and the world? Is opposition to addressing climate change a class issue, a matter of unequal power, or both? Who, at least in the short

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run, can more readily escape the anticipated ravages of a changing planet? If effective mitigation is possible, who will pay for it? More generally, is global environmental justice possible? How would it operate? What would need to change for this to happen? Right to Life/Freedom to Choose Students feel strongly about abortion, the intentional or medically necessary termination of a pregnancy. What is the status, legal and otherwise, of both the person who is pregnant and that portion of her body that could become a person? The US Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abolished any constitutional right to abortion in the US, while at the same time Latin American and Caribbean nations are making abortion more readily available, largely as a consequence of massive protests and social movement organization. Inequality is woven throughout this issue. The questions a class discussion can pose are almost endless. How does restricting or outlawing abortion play out across the social classes? Who is penalized the greatest by restrictions on and the unavailability of ways to prevent as well as terminate pregnancy? Which women are most likely to suffer damage to their health or even death when the means to abortion are blocked? Whose lives will be affected most by having to undergo an unwanted birth, with regard to their age, level of financial and personal support, the circumstances of the pregnancy, and the person’s life goals and aspirations? Should men who can never make this choice for themselves decide on a woman’s right to reproductive choice? Race, gender, and most of all power are intertwined in this issue that students can readily recognize and – along with religious beliefs and secular values – can become the basis for a probing discussion. Movement for Black Lives Another topic to probe is the Movement for Black Lives/BLM. On May 20, 2020, a Black man, George Floyd, was murdered by a White police officer on a city street in plain sight of dozens of people. The virtual explosion of public outrage led to more than 1200 protests, the largest number of simultaneous protests in American history, eclipsing the Women’s Marches that followed the election of Donald Trump. Racial inequality, linked to class inequality, is a stain, not just a blemish, on everyday life that could not be ignored when, along with the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Atatiana Jefferson, Tyre Nichols, and others

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were killed by police officers or died in police custody. This forced millions of people to reexamine the promises of the Civil Rights Movement and confront the reality that the issues of police brutality toward Black people continue the indelible, lasting injustices. They may have eased but they have not been erased. The Movement for Black Lives offers a prime example of how grievances about inequality and injustice propel social movements. Begun in 2014, Hands Up United became the hub of a coalition of 150 community-based organizations and groups such as Pennsylvania Stand Up, Black Vison Collective, Electoral Justice Project, Three Point Strategy, and the Black Census Project that make up the Movement for Black Lives and initiated the annual Black National Convention. Young people especially have become organizers, advocates, leaders, and candidates for public office in support of social change and an insistence that the status quo, rife with the consequences of slavery, Jim Crow, and the slow pace of realizing the promise of the modern Civil Rights Movement, cannot continue. Across the country, a new, more accurate recounting of American history has taken place. Why did the country nearly tear itself apart and wage a four-year civil war? Was secession a matter of the Northern and Southern states being at odds over trade and commerce, or was it actually an act of sedition? Was it a rebellion waged by noble patriots or a conspiracy of elites to use organized military violence against the United States? If slavery was at the heart of the Civil War, why did it require a war to end human bondage? What happened to undercut the Civil War amendments (the 13th, 14th, and 15th) that allowed Jim Crow to thrive for a hundred years? These questions are being asked in schools and homes across the nation because of the Movement for Black Lives. In the 21st century the facts of race, not the biological basis but the social construction of race, are everywhere. They are in the statistics on education, employment, maternal health, home ownership, life expectancy, arrests and incarceration, voting preference, poverty and wealth, the control of corporations, and social mobility. Why is this? Why do race, ethnicity, and nationality – not just Black people but Latine, East Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Southeast Asian – reveal themselves so consistently in the statistics of social inequality? This is, of course, a major part of a course focused on race and ethnicity, but it is unavoidable in any class dealing with social inequality. It provides not just the backdrop but the central issues driving social movements for racial and ethnic demands for equality before the law and an equal chance to be respected and successful in all walks of life. Being involved in some aspect of these movements, engaging in anti-racism as it has become known through Ibram Kendi’s (2019) scholarship, resonates with many students. Understanding

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movements for greater racial equality is important in choosing how to engage with or participate in any social movement. The #MeToo Movement Gradually and somewhat begrudgingly, France has joined the #MeToo movement. Prominent French celebrities, women included, initially scoffed at objections to unwanted male advances, but revelation after revelation of sexual abuse and sexist practices began to accumulate. Men’s use of wealth and status against women who exposed acts of sexual violence struck a chord, especially with younger French women. Misogyny and the many prejudices and practices that are part of a “soft” patriarchy began to sink into the public consciousness, just as they have in the US and countries across the globe. For decades before #MeToo, date rape and marital rape had been exposed and debated in the public airways. These seemed to be individual, isolated experiences. They were not. The #MeToo movement grew out of thousands of women voicing experiences of past sexual encounters, from the merely clueless and unwanted to the violent. At first only a few women came forward to recount experiences of humiliation and fear as well as attacks and rape. But very quickly this voicing empowered tens of thousands of women to speak up, making apparent like never before that men had to change not only their attitude of gender privilege but their behavior, in small and large ways, at work, school, social occasions, and in the home. Organizations had to take #MeToo seriously and institute policies and penalties for behaviors long accepted as customary, harmless male prerogatives. It is obvious that gender inequality, and especially power, is at the heart of the issues raised by the #MeToo movement and third-wave feminism more generally. In discussing and learning about the contemporary feminist movement, historical and comparative examinations are an obvious starting point. Why have women, so often and so widely, been relegated to a status where they are considered inferior, have less personal safety, and perform less valued work regardless of its importance? Why and how has the power to change the circumstances of their lives and those of other women so often been out of reach, their efforts dismissed, and their stories unheard? The #MeToo movement is not a singular, centralized movement but has many strands and clusters of activists. They partner with other activists and have a variety of messages and narratives. #MeToo is no longer only about cisgender persons and heterosexuals. Pay equity, the glass ceiling, balancing motherhood and careers, and personal safety and respect are closely tied to issues of unwanted sexual advances and sexual abuse. At issue in all of them is social inequality and the power of patriarchy.

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Giving primacy to gender over race and class has been a major point of contention in the analysis of gender inequality. Race matters greatly in addressing the status and power of women. Class, as well, determines a great deal of women’s opportunities and obstacles. The concept of intersectionality seems to be a comfortable compromise. Fortunately, there is a record in statistical analysis of race, class, and gender that lends itself well to seeing empirically how intersectionality operates in the stratification system. By looking at patriarchy comparatively, other factors in addition to gender are recognized, including the tenacity of custom and the historically rooted supports for patriarchy. Case by case and across the globe, women have organized to change the structures of inequality. This can be diagnosed and addressed to good effect in a social inequality course or another course such as race and ethnic relations or a criminal justice course, as well as courses in gender studies. LGBTQ+ Movements Those who study or pay attention to social movements express amazement at the rapid change in public perceptions, understanding, and acceptance of gay marriage and the rights accorded married couples. By large majorities, gays and lesbians find public support for laws forbidding discrimination against them, whether in finding a place to live or landing a job. Increasingly, adoption and surrogate births are recognized as a right for every adult, including gay and lesbian individuals and same-sex couples. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and its repeal in 2022 with passage of the Respect for Marriage Act are the bookends of the most recent change. This period more or less put the nail in the coffin of legal discrimination based on sexual preference, though Supreme Court decisions remain to consider religious exemptions to deny equal treatment for LGBTQ+ persons. In this quarter-century period, legislation supporting LGBTQ+ rights was passed, favorable court decisions were handed down, executive action rescinded the Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy of the US military, and hundreds of local and state measures eroded the legal and customary barriers to equal rights and treatment, as well as recognition of and respect for persons regardless of their sexual orientation. This has mirrored and, in some cases, been fueled by a sea change in public support. Violence against gays and lesbians remains endemic, however, and has resulted in several mass shootings at clubs and other gatherings. In this rapidly changing situation, bisexual, queer, and transgender individuals face a more ambivalent public. Antidiscrimination laws have not kept pace. Celebrities who identify as such have given a boost to public acceptance. Young people are much more inclined to fully accept gender fluid and trans

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individuals than are older people. Women are more accepting than men. There is a strong association between political leanings and the degree of acceptance and support, with Republicans much less so. The change in attitudes toward gay and lesbian individuals has been fueled by their coming out and forcing the issues of discrimination on the public. As a result, straight individuals were likely to recognize how the larger community’s unwillingness to accept, respect, and support gays and lesbians hurts their friends and family members. This change-of-attitude-by-association process has been less salient for transgender and nonbinary individuals. Transgender, nonbinary, and queer people make up less than 2 percent of the adult population, and only one person in five says they know someone who doesn’t identify as a man or woman (Parker et al., 2022). Social inequality exists for transgender and nonbinary people as a chronic and highly contentious reality, whether it’s denial of the identity, blatant discrimination, hate- and fear-inspired violence, or is lodged insidiously in organizational culture. Theirs is a question of identity, an identity different from what appears on their birth certificate, a change of identity most people have never considered for themselves. Rather than social class or even a direct confrontation with power, equal status is the goal of the LGBTQ+ movement that is seeking a significant shift in the way people are treated and are able to live their lives. Despite opposition, according to a 2022 Pew Charitable Trusts survey, eight in ten adults “say there is some discrimination against transgender people, and a majority favor laws that would protect [them] from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces” (Parker et al., 2022). Obviously, not everyone agrees. Conservative religious views are behind much of the opposition to equal rights of access, participation, and representation. Equal treatment in education and employment is not widely contested, but who can use which public bathroom, against whom can someone compete in sports, and who can be represented in the books of school libraries remain potent, hot-button political questions. What is it about being male, female, straight, gay, trans-, or nongendered that arouses such strong feelings? What are the social bases for their attendant beliefs? Is there an economic dimension that is being overlooked? Who benefits from the disparity in gender-identification status? Why are political narratives that feed on anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and practices evidently so successful in a society that, at a very general level, endorses the right of everyone to be who they are and have the life they make for themselves, come what may? The past and present social movements insisting on LGBTQ+ equity are instructive in the use of both protests and legal avenues for social change. GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and similar groups

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offer case studies of how power, in the original Weberian meaning of organizational capacity, can effect social change. This topic allows students to dig deep – as in the study of race and ethnicity – into the cultural manifestations of social stratification and the status of seemingly implacable traditional identities. Anti-Globalization Movements Close to Home Known as the Battle in Seattle, the anti-globalization demonstrations of 1999 had their share of violence and mayhem. Protests since have drawn thousands of activists when the annual World Trade Organization ministerial meeting is held in accessible locales. Though cloaked in myriad issues associated with neoliberal economics, including “free trade” and “austerity” policies for poorer countries, scratch very deeply and the issue impelling anti-globalization is growing inequality by the designs of those who have the most to gain from globalization and promise trickle-down benefits for the poor. These demonstrations are part of a larger movement that has increasingly linked opponents of global capitalism on the left with nativists, populists, nationalists like “America-firsters,” critics of international institutions, anti-immigration groups, and groups opposing military and humanitarian interventions in foreign conflicts and crises. Anti-globalists on the right and left seldom rub shoulders or endorse each other’s actions and opinions, divided as they are on questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality. As well, those on the left oppose global capitalism, while those on the right endorse even the rawest version of capitalism. Their espousal of economic nationalism that fuels opposition to global capitalism, however, is not significantly different from the opposition on the left. Anti-globalists on the left, unlike those on the right, find common cause with a wide range of environmental groups and those advocating for a deep ecology of conservation and community, smaller non-growth economies, and radical changes in lifestyle. This breadth makes anti-globalization a collection or amalgamation of dozens or hundreds of local and more specifically focused groups. It is plural, hence, anti-globalization movements. As discussed in Chapter 10, it can be a bit treacherous to introduce the topic of globalization in a class of undergraduates. In the first instance, it induces the “glassy-eye syndrome” for a large portion of students who quickly fall into a semi-conscious state. The portcullis for almost any student trying to remain engaged is lowered when the topic turns to an examination of global economics – whether it’s recent history or reaching back to the 16th century. For those still awake and aware, globalization can seem like an all-encompassing, conveniently applied term that explains everything when included in a brief

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sentence fragment. Like “culture” and “human nature,” it can be used to gloss over any serious explanation. What to do? This is a topic that can start with the facts of social inequality associated with declining regions (e.g., the north of England, rural France, and Spain) or anywhere close to home. These areas have been transformed by the expansion of production into far reaches of the globe that were heretofore only lightly touched by earlier expansions of the global economy and its accompanying cultural imperialism. In the US, the globalization of the supply chain and the pursuit of cheaper labor, more lax environmental regulations, less accountability to communities, and instantaneous long-distance financial transactions spelled the fate of the soon-to-be Rust Belt cities of the 1980s and ’90s. It quickly spread more widely to rural communities across the continent. This is usually called the “hollowing out” of places far from global manufacturing or global finance’s interest. More profit to be made elsewhere. Economic opportunity in rural and rust-belt areas shrank into an economy of low-wage jobs. Now the better jobs are found predominantly in the public sector – schools, highway maintenance, upkeep of public lands – provided by state and federal governments, paid for by taxpayers who live elsewhere. Much of rural America has become a cluster of motels, filling stations, and fast-food restaurants that travelers fly over or pass as they speed along on their way to and from more prosperous places. Behind these business franchises and their low-wage service jobs is an industrial agriculture heavily reliant on massive public subsidies, market manipulation, and tax privileges no working individual could dream of having. The production and transport of meat (beef, pork, and chicken) provide low-skill jobs while being a major producer of atmospheric methane and carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. As farmland has been consolidated and farms corporatized, young people unable to make a living closer to home have emigrated from rural locales in search of better wages, taking their skills, education, ambitions, and more liberal politics elsewhere. The inequality associated with these consequences of globalization is currently fueling a politics of resentment, a grievance politics of people who feel overlooked or even invisible when national problems are discussed. Their problems are unaddressed, played down, or considered, as J.D. Vance does in his Hillbilly Elegy, largely of their own making. Their values and lifestyles seem to them unappreciated or even dismissed as inferior or reactionary. Rarely expressed as class issues, they sense that elites and so-called experts are in control, to their detriment. They have revived the distrust of the UN and international organizations that give priority to global issues over national sovereignty. Unspoken is the notion of status, but they feel looked down on. They have few of the privileges that seem to be going to minority people and

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women unlike themselves who get special attention in the form of affirmative action and the promotion of diversity. The companion to this is urban inequality, the growing gap between baristas and those grabbing a coffee or quick bite as they hurry to and from their offices. The disparity of wealth, income, status, and power in cities is nothing new. A general belief in urban archaeology is that cities – perhaps not the first but the great cities for which early civilizations are known – were erected when the unequal distribution of an increasingly productive agriculture allowed a few individuals or families to create powerful positions. They could force others to build the cities and clear the urban refuse. The spread of global capitalism has only intensified this inequality by encouraging the rapid, expansive growth of cities and structuring the inequality that resides there. Because this is where real wealth and power reside, unlike rural areas, modern cities are the showcases of inequality. The many consequences of the great urban divides stir more focused protests and calls for action. Often these are seen through the wider lens of social stratification. Whose neighborhoods are sacrificed for a convention center, ring road, or sports stadium? How racially disproportionate are incarcerations and even deaths of those awaiting trial in a city’s jails? When the bloom of gentrification has faded, who had to move out, most likely to unsafe and unstable neighborhoods with more crime, poorer schools, and fewer places to buy real food? Where are the police feared and resented, and police brutality sparks violent protests? What is a socially just answer to organized groups of homeowners who espouse NIMBY and use their good name to convince city officials to do something about the blight in the downtown? And by the way, who are the unhoused? Where do they come from and why are they here? What happened to the homes and apartments where the very poor used to live? How many of them are directly or indirectly the victims of rural poverty, of the hollowing out of their communities and the growing gap between rich and poor? All of these issues and causes, sources of protest and demonstrations, nascent and active, local and national social movements can be traced back to the inequality within the city or between cities and rural areas. Together these are the many, diverse, and largely uncoordinated critics of a global capitalism. Their protests and movements vary in the degree to which they oppose, but they all find much fault with globalization.

STUDENT ACTIVISM IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Social movements are highly relevant to students studying social inequality, regardless of where they stand on different issues. Grasping the many ways inequality permeates situations that have drawn protests and been addressed

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with social movements is an eye-opening experience for many. If they engage in social movement activity firsthand, they will embark on experiential learning that may not only inform their understanding of social inequality; it may lead them to ideas different from the ones they had at the outset. Time permitting, students can benefit from learning about the many historical moments of triumph (and defeat) in the battle to make modern society fairer, to ensure equal dignity and respect for everyone, to more generously spread prosperity and opportunities across their own and other societies, and to make possible the full development of every person’s human potential. For some students there is a sense of inevitability or fatalism, that inequality is either a naturally occurring phenomenon or so resistant to change that nothing can be done to address even its worst consequences. Many students, however, want change, more fairness, less inherited or ascribed privilege, equity wherever it is feasible, and evidence that social change efforts pay off. The question for progressive would-be activists today is whether any fundamental change can come about so long as capitalism remains the dominant arena in which people’s life chances are decided. Hopes for historical inevitability aside, however, capitalism doesn’t seem to be going away, even in its late stage. Most students find themselves somewhere between two poles: naïve optimism and unfounded pessimism. It is not easy to leaven the hopes of students who believe there is little they can do, that it is just too complicated, and the forces of resistance are too strong and tenacious to even try. For others who believe they are the first to try and will be the first to get it right, knowing some history can impart a healthy dose of reality. When a student recommends “Burn it all down!” the class is primed for discussion. Young people are prone to focusing on their own bête noir, issues they consider close to home that they may really care about. Their engagement in social activism may address things such as health equity, criminal justice reform, sexual assault, regressive taxation, abortion rights, political influence, climate change and environmental justice, discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons and communities, and corporate practices that are barriers to equity. All of these offer an opportunity to know more about social inequality. A course on social inequality should give them plenty of ideas about what they don’t like, how to better understand it, and what they and others might do to change it. This need not be a primer for direct action. Focusing part of a course on social activism, however, can impart an understanding of the promise and challenges of seeking to change the structures of inequality. At some point, they may need to be reminded of what Darren Walker (2020) observed: “Inequality in America was not born of the market’s invisible hand. It was not some unavoidable destiny. It was created by the hands and sustained effort of the people who engineered benefits for themselves, to the detriment

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of everyone else.” The benefits of an affluent society and a world that provides a good life to so many need not be withheld from those who share so minimally in its possibilities due to an accident of birth, bad luck, or even their own actions that continue to penalize them. It’s not a pipedream to believe the hands that created and maintain the structures of inequality can be loosened and replaced by those who would make a new, more fair reality.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • One of, if not the, major impetuses for social movements throughout time and throughout the world has been social inequality. • The ideas of conservative as well as liberal students provide an opportunity for the entire class to think about their views, beliefs, and opinions, challenging the class to ask what they can actually know, not just what they believe to be true. • Including the study of social movements in social inequality classes is a valuable opportunity to learn about the history of inequality and recognize why inequality is a catalyst for social change. • The Civil Rights Movement in the US provides an iconic example of how social movements are successful in effecting social change. • Current social movements, such as the #MeToo movement, the Movement for Black Lives, the Right to Life and the Reproductive Choice movements, the LGBTQ+ movement, and anti-globalization movements, all reveal how social inequality is woven into the fabric of social movements.

15. Student research on inequality Teaching Social Inequality has throughout emphasized how the topic is fraught with resistance, especially when students begin learning about theory, are bombarded with numbers, and are expected to grasp a structural analysis of the global system. The topic of social inequality can be confusing and disquieting and, yes, sometimes make students uncomfortable. It raises questions and asks for answers they might prefer to avoid. It’s not unlikely to initiate arguments and bad feelings. It can be hard to talk about it with their sorority sisters, hunting buddies, skater friends, workmates, and parents. While the course can lay to rest misunderstandings, dislodge half-baked opinions, show the error of long-held truisms, and replace misinformation with established facts, for many students the topic can still be too abstract. For them, thinking and talking about social inequality remains confined to the classroom, its assignments, and tests. Student research – by breaking out of the classroom’s curriculum of reading, discussions, response papers, and exams – is perhaps the best reason to include it in the course syllabus. For instance, when a student pursues a project to learn about the unhoused or a specific group of persons and families without permanent shelter, they may personally empathize or even sympathize, though this is not the goal. Hopefully, their inquiry will provide ideas about and understanding of homelessness they had not anticipated. They will confront for perhaps the first time the structural barriers and personal obstacles that are the context of the crisis of the unhoused. They are gathering information that fleshes out and goes beyond what they are learning in class. If they do some firsthand fieldwork, it may give them a more nuanced, deeper, more multidimensional understanding. The people to whom they talk and the kinds of situations they see will go beyond what they have read or heard about in class. It may signal the application of concepts they have been exposed to in the course readings and discussions. Elements of theories of inequality may begin to fit together and become applicable. Seemingly unrelated things – quantitative data, other’s accounts, their observations – may begin to gel into a clearer picture of social stratification. Educators know there are many avenues to learning. There are learning “styles” that variously appeal to students and facilitate the ways a wide range of students learn. Different research approaches mirror this range. The following discussions of how students can do research is not exhaustive but 184

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suggestive of ways to give students an experience in pursuing their interests and answering their own questions.

EXISTING SOURCES AND UNOBTRUSIVE MEASURES Professors of a certain age remember the pleasure of browsing library stacks, curling up with a magazine, and finding a secluded study carrel where they could read and work uninterrupted, in warmth and quiet while the wind and rain beat on the windows. In a bygone era they and other students did “library research.” With the Internet, Wikipedia, Google searches, and now ChatGPT, all that has changed. The physical pleasures of a library are still available, but when tasked with research, a computer is much more efficient and likely to be available wherever one lives or hangs out. If Karl Marx had had a computer connected to the Internet, poor Friedrich Engels wouldn’t have had to posthumously compile the second and third volumes of Das Kapital. Marx wouldn’t have spent years in the circular Reading Room of the British Museum Library and would have had time to do it himself. Some of the information for Das Kapital, like much of that sought out by various sorts of historians, biographers, novelists, and other writers keen to know the facts is not yet in digital format. But billions of pieces of information are. Access to this is made possible by university library staff, to whom researchers owe a great deal of appreciation. Some researchers, including students who frequent and labor within library archives and collections, must still depend on research librarians in the flesh. It’s important for students to know this. Research skills are honed from others’ instruction as well as personal experience (i.e., the process of doing research). Finding out what information is available, following threads that new information suggests, sifting through and compiling information – this is research using unobtrusive measures, wherever it happens, by whatever technology. Do rich people leave the water running when they brush their teeth? A student has the idea that affluence gives some people a sense of privilege in their use and overuse of scarce resources. The scope of her idea is enormous, but her time is short and she needs a practical way to see if she is wrong (her null hypothesis). She is able to find market values (not assessed/taxed values or Zillow’s prospective sale prices) for homes on her small city’s website. She records several hundred of these on a city map and demarcates areas in terms of average home price. She divides the city into 22 areas and designates each as being one of five socioeconomic levels. These are her population of clusters from which she randomly selects five neighborhoods, one in each level. A scarce resource? What about water? Maybe it’s not scarce, but it is valuable and can be used profligately. After making some phone calls she finds

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that information on quarterly water bills is not available on the city’s website. She trudges to the city office where she can access this information and records water bills for 40 households in each of her five selected neighborhoods. She averages and matches these with the average market value of the homes on the city website. Is there a difference in the amount of water used? How much more water is used, on average, by households where houses are most expensive versus other areas? If she had time, she’d control for the number of people per household, but she’s not sure how to do this. Nonetheless, she is able to compute some simple but suggestive statistics to test her suspicion. Yes, she finds, the wealthier the area, the more water they use, either to brush their teeth, take a shower, or water their lawns. Public records may be less accessible than the term “public” implies. Which of a town’s or city’s records are available to the public? What about 911 calls, police responses, or other emergencies across a city? The data may or may not be available to indicate who gets public safety attention and for what reasons. Many cities have online household information about property values, taxes, and permitted home improvements. If these data cover the life of a home, they can reveal gentrification as well as declining neighborhoods, and much more. With information that is readily available, research with existing sources can tell a student a great deal about social inequality. Newspapers are an obvious source, not only for information but as a microcosm of the stratification system of a community. What issues and events are considered newsworthy? Which are not? Who is quoted or cited as an expert or reliable witness? Who and what is celebrated, admired, emulated, ridiculed, discounted, and condemned? When is race or age of an individual noted, and when is it not? Who are most visible in good-news stories? Stories about blue- and white-collar crime? What would a reader not learn about social inequality in a community or city from newspaper accounts? Journalists, local newspaper reporters, citizen journalists, and amateur sleuths can be good sources for existing information. They also provide a lesson in not going after information that already exists but going beyond. It might involve updating older information (e.g., changes in the composition of persons frequenting free-food outlets or the ethnic composition of military recruits from their city). Some local written accounts raise questions that spur further inquiry, and students can pursue these. Young women living near the campus may have been reported to be anxious about sexual harassment, stalking, and violence. Is there more to this story? What information is it based on? Are teachers’ unions portrayed as greedy and self-serving with no mention of their desire to raise the quality of the profession by attracting better students? Is drug addiction occurring equally in every social class, across genders, in every ethnic group? Who would know? Can I rely on the data?

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Finding existing information may require legwork as well as thumb work and searching skills. Unfortunately, much of the information available on the Internet has not been vetted or fact-checked for accuracy. Other problems abound. Some students will be tempted to cut, paste, and sign their own name. AI ingenuity has created chatbots to write research papers, speeches, documents, and so forth that purport to be original and untouched by human hands. If this is the first time a student has tried to write a research paper, it may be labor without much love. Maybe an app or a ghostwriter can do it for them. It is not necessary to remind instructors today about the vast amount of writing – much of it posing as independent student research projects – available on the World Wide Web. Because it is such an unfiltered morass of not only reliable information but misinformation, opinions, and falsehoods, time spent working with students to develop critical thinking skills that help them distinguish the trash from the treasure may well be required. All of this recommends the instructor think twice about assigning research using existing documents to students. It can take a brave heart, but students will benefit. Whether working in library archives, an office of public records, or on a computer, students can profitably explore questions of social inequality and possibly find an answer or two.

COMPUTING WITH EXISTING DATA An ambitious student may want to assemble their own quantitative data set. The records of water use and home values gave a student her own data to analyze with social statistics. Counting the race and ethnicity of players on a university’s sports team over several years can be a project that might reveal some interesting things, or at least raise questions to be pursued with follow-up interviews. This is a worthy exercise for the student so inclined. For students who want to work with existing quantitative data sets, the General Social Survey (GSS) is a good place to go. It requires some familiarity with handling data, and surveys do not consistently phrase questions exactly the same year to year, so charting trends can be tricky. The GSS is a very good place, however, to give students a sense of empowerment. They can ask a question and get an answer almost immediately. They can control for variables and compute simple statistics. They can compose tables, charts, and graphs. And the margin of error is usually small enough to make general statements about findings that have a high degree of reliability. As discussed in Chapter 13, more challenging is research using data from longitudinal panel studies of youth, persons with disabilities, men and women, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth. Venturing into these data necessitates even more skill handling quantitative data and applying statistical techniques

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with SPSS, SAS, and other programs that require abilities only a few undergraduates possess. Information about attitudes toward groups and categories of people has been gathered and made available for decades by polling organizations – Gallup, Roper, Zogby, Pew, and many others. Their published data are ripe for student research that focuses on changing attitudes over time. Unfortunately, these data are rarely available in a form that allows students to do their own analysis; they must rely on the presentations of the pollsters, but examining the polls over several years can yield trends and changes the pollsters didn’t examine.

INTERVIEWING When research is suggested as a student activity, the first idea many students have is to simply ask people. What do people think, believe, know, worry about, aspire to? What do they think of others richer and poorer than themselves? What are their experiences? What are their life stories of strife, failure, and success? How do they feel about privilege, or do they even recognize it? Are they prejudiced but don’t know or deny it? Do they justify being discriminatory, for example, objecting to public housing in their neighborhood? What do they think about businesses that refuse to hire transgender persons? What are their reasons? If knowing “why people do what they do” was a simple matter of asking them, this might be a great way to go, but it isn’t. People think they marry another person because they fall in love. Yes and no. Yes, they fall in love. But why that person? About the same age, same ethnicity, religion, educational attainment, interests, social class? Did they go to school together, work together, share the same Peace Corp assignment, meet in the gym, share mutual friends? Are they both heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or gender fluid? All of these are sociologically relevant in knowing who marries whom. Love is almost beside the point. It is very appealing to devise and conduct a survey that uses forced-choice questions. These don’t require the surveyor to have a probing conversation or apply the social skills fieldwork demands in order to gain information from respondents. What this kind of survey does require is a great deal of thought before any questions are asked. This is a lot more work than students anticipate, and they may need their instructor’s help. The simplest way to do any survey research is not to draw a sample but to survey a population: for example, everyone living in a group home of recovering addicts; all of the sales people in a car dealership; the international students in a residence hall. This can provide a means to convert answers into numbers and an opportunity to work with quantitative data to generate simple

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statistics. Results have limited if any generalizability, but that’s also a lesson to be learned. The best advice to undergraduate student researchers is: Talk to who is available. Depending on the research question, that may mean surveying a diversity of individuals to answer your questions. If you’re getting the same answers over and over again, go further afield looking for those who think or will say otherwise. On the other hand, students may want to focus on a single category of respondents, such as members of fraternities or sororities, the elderly living in a single high-rise, young people who frequent a certain park playground, members of a sports team, prospective graduates in business, people waiting for a subway or commuter train. Unless they’ve taken a research methodology course, students usually know very little about sampling. Their efforts for a research project in a social inequality class should not require sophisticated designs. A familiarity with “accidental sampling,” some idea of proportionate sampling, or a snowball design that seeks out respondents who represent a range of variation is probably sufficient. Informal interviewing is an option. For some students, spending time with people like themselves is interesting. For others, talking with persons whose experiences are far different from their own is more appealing. Some students would rather focus on a single individual or a small number, probing what they’ve experienced and know or think about social inequality: police officers, the person holding up a “Help, Any Amount, God Thanks You” sign, a mortician or coroner, disabled veterans, or real estate agents. A student’s project can be as simple as talking to older relatives, interviewing them about what they know, believe, value, and think about the good old days. Older people probably have more time and are more open to talking with an inquiring student than the employed adult with family obligations. This can be a research approach when students are interested in ethnicity, gender, nationality, or any category of identity that has an evolving status dimension. Compiling a person’s life history can reveal much. What was it like to be a woman “back then”? Were some of their jobs off limits or lost due to marriage or pregnancy? How did your grandfather handle the everyday humiliations and the barred doors of Jim Crow? Did your parents or grandparents migrate here? What is their story? A young woman may find much she didn’t know in talking with her mother who fled her country, lived for years in a refugee camp, traveled hundreds of miles on foot to reach a point of departure for the US, only to be faced with deportation because of her religion. Has she ever talked about this? Not only compromised social status but hearing about the many ways social class manifests itself in people’s biographies can be an eye-opening experience for young people. If there has been class discussion of Robert Merton’s (1949)

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typology of prejudice and discrimination (non-prejudiced discriminators, etc.), hearing examples of this firsthand can be an opportunity to apply concepts to data they have gathered. Persons with physical disabilities or stigmatized attributes may have much to say about what Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb (1972) called “hidden injuries.” Not every student has the social skills to do this kind of work, but a few do and can learn much from it. Research topics can be motivated topically or in terms of targeted respondents, but the two will always be connected. Being interested in unequal access to medical care might lead a student to interview nurses or in-home care givers. Understanding the difficulties of raising children in low-income households can begin at a Head Start facility or other daycare center before doing interviews with willing parents. Teachers, too, know the challenges for parents whose children are doing poorly in school or who were absent most of the time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the parents of their students may be amenable to an interview. Experienced realtors know their community and may have a sense of both the financial status and class representation that is part of buying a home in one or another neighborhood. Seeking visible symbols of status and understanding people’s motivations in pursuing these is well understood by salespeople selling high-end shoes, expensive watches, or automobiles that only a few can afford but many hope and try to acquire. On the other side, salespeople understand the vulnerability of low-income people to market forces, whether they are in a bind and must purchase a used car or can find few apartments that they can afford to rent. Depending on the research design, the limitations of validity and reliability will vary, but for most this is not the most important thing. The student researcher will have found something. They will have something to discuss that is new to them, something that is the result of their efforts to go beyond classroom instruction. Whether using a structured interview schedule or a more open-ended set of topics to discuss, interviewing can provide a way to deepen the student’s appreciation of the structures as well as the personal experiences of social inequality.

ETHNOGRAPHIC AND FIELD RESEARCH Many excellent studies have no clear idea of where they are going and make no pretense about sampling. Greta Foff Paules’s (1991) Dishing It Out is based on one person’s experiences as a waitress in one restaurant. Arlie Hochschild (1983) spent many hours with women in writing The Managed Heart, but its value doesn’t lie in her interviewing a random sample of what were then called airline stewardesses and bank tellers. She watched them work and talked to them about it. The same can be said of her classics The Second Shift (2003) and

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Time Bind (1977). Her Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) started out with one idea in mind, then became a book she never intended to write. Fieldwork is not for every student. It can be too time consuming, fraught with dead ends, and too taxing of students’ abilities to put themselves in unfamiliar, even difficult situations. Similar to their not having taken statistics, it is likely that students enrolled in a course that focuses on social inequality will not have had a research methods class. That is not a barrier, but it puts a burden on the instructor that may require time and attention, as well as presenting risks, that make the research assignment problematic. That students understand the ethics of fieldwork and the cautions required to carry out a project, especially when the topic is social inequality, will be part of the instructor’s many other responsibilities. A lack of familiarity with qualitative studies, never having tried to do (non) participant observation, and the difficulty making sense of what is seen and heard obviate a fieldwork project and recommend another tact. Informal interviewing is a good alternative. It gets students out there, but they have a more focused task and a clear idea of what they’re talking to people about. Not so with ethnographic fieldwork. Field research can, however, be as simple as visiting a cemetery, then doing some follow-up research with existing records. What story does a cemetery tell about social class, status, and power? What does it say about women as bearers of children, their mortality, and their public status? How much has life expectancy changed? What is revealed in the names of the nationalities of those buried there? Whose gravestones have the oldest dates and how have the names on them changed throughout the history of the town or city? Cemeteries are curious in the matter of social status. Many times the most wealthy announce their status with monumental markers: obelisks, large statues, replicas of castles, and so forth. For some families of lesser means, however, there is a sense that a family should honor their dead with a similarly ostentatious marker. Does this speak to social stratification? Can anything be gleaned from the location of graves? Are there graves outside the formal cemetery with Chinese characters chiseled into gravestones? Middle Eastern, Slavic, or South Asian names? How about the direction the dead lie, especially in older cemeteries? East to west or west to east? Students often come to a research project with some experience of a situation that involved social inequality. They may want to write about this, providing a kind of retrospective participant-as-observer account. While this kind of project can be illuminating as the student works through an experience with a new perspective, it is not fieldwork per se. They might want to return to their previous situation, however, where they can carry out observations and inquiries (e.g., by going back and working fast food). If they’ve worked in a department store, they may want to return there with new eyes and ears. Like

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Christine Williams’s (2006) Inside Toyland, this can be illuminating in seeing for the first time what they didn’t see before.

MIXED RESEARCH METHODS: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS As the examples in this chapter have indicated, students may do research by both interviewing people and gathering existing data. As well, they may do library research and enter the field for a firsthand look at what they’ve read about. This mixing of research methods is how much professional research is done. Some students may want to do the same. One of the things they can pursue, among any number of topics, is a social movement. Though they may not have participated themselves, most students are aware of efforts to organize workers at Amazon or Starbucks, right-to-life and reproductive choice movements, Trumpism’s Stop the Steal movement, the earlier Tea Party movement, the gun rights movement, or the animal rights movement. These all have a dimension of inequality that makes them possible research topics. A social movement articulates what needs to be changed and how this can come about. This may be the reason that solving the nationwide phenomenon of the unhoused, with millions of people living without permanent shelter, has not generated a coherent or cohesive nationwide social movement. It is such a complex and seemingly intractable problem in search of a solution, but much of the nation sees no reason to get involved. Haven’t the poor always been with us? A student would have much to learn about inequality by taking on this topic: a pressing issue without a social movement. As sociologists have found, the most important factor in explaining social movement participation is having been involved in a social movement activity in the past. A student engaged in activism might want to continue or resume participation, now as a participant observer. Or they might want to be a non-participant observer in another, possibly opposing, movement. If the movement is involved in activities such as fundraising, publicity, workshops, and demonstrations, this becomes the field in which the student does their research work. Researching a social movement, the student may first want to interview participants, activists, and those who oppose the movement. If they know little about the topic, there are good reasons to do some research before interviewing. They can also build a background for the presentation of their fieldwork by spending time studying the history of the movement and learning about similar movements elsewhere. In doing this, and in order to ask more informed questions of individuals, the student researcher will be combining library research and interviewing with observation, again, an approach much more akin to how professional researchers do qualitative fieldwork.

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Some discussion between the student and instructor about the possible inequality issues before work is begun is a good idea. A movement may not appear at first to be relevant to the course but can reveal social inequality in various ways. For example, gun safety versus gun rights movements raise questions about who inordinately dies in gun homicides and suicides. Social class and status are very apparent in the sentiment that rural conservatives are “bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” as Barack Obama remarked in 2008. Having done some fieldwork, what might a student find regarding this idea? The environmental movement or one of its many strands is, at some level, concerned about environmental justice. Dumping mining wastewater into the local watercourse (or the potential for this during a flood) or mining that depletes the groundwater of people’s wells doesn’t affect everyone equally. Chances are, it is most likely or most damaging to people who can least afford to be damaged. Health consequences of a new mine discharging toxic waste into the water and air, the loss of arable land small farmers depend on, the forfeiture of community control, and a new, transient workforce that brings an upsurge in crime may or may not be problematic for some people, but for others – the poorest, least powerful, and those least able to relocate – it will be significant and possibly a disaster. Students may be interested in movements they’ve only read about (e.g., Eastern and Central Europe’s democracy “color” movements, the aborted movements of the Arab Spring, and the Yellow Vests movement in France). These lend themselves to a more conventional library-research approach, but on a college campus there may be an opportunity to use a mixture of research methods. There were once many students on US college campuses who were part of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Are there people on campus (or in the community) who have participated in any of these more recent movements? The student’s topic is a social movement, but the emphasis of inquiry is the place of social inequality in the movement. Was there a grievance about inequality in the origins of the movement? Had inequality been accepted or unrecognized for a period of time, but rising expectations ultimately disrupted the status quo? Was there a catalyst? Did issues and movement actions bring inequality to widespread attention? Which strata of the community or society responded positively and negatively to the movement? Do the movement’s participants cut across classes, genders, castes, and races? If not, why? Discussions with persons familiar with or involved in a social movement will reveal how new ways of being, thinking, and identifying are offered or insisted upon by the movement. Black is Beautiful was an insistence of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Today Black Lives Matter plays a similar

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role. India’s Dalits or untouchables had what looked from afar to be an awakening – that they, too, are valuable and deserve all the respect society accords others. Social movements often insist on changes in media and language that are demeaning, degrading, or stereotypic. Students may find that acknowledgment of and respect for private family and community practices, dress, gestures, celebrations, food, and other cultural elements are also part of the movement’s goals for achieving equality and equity. Sometimes exaggerated displays, street and gorilla theater, and biting humor draw attention to a taken-for-granted situation the movement participants find objectionable or intolerable. Social movements use biographies, memoirists’ stories, poetry, songs, plays, and other narratives to expose a previously unexposed saga of inequality. These make apparent the slights, humiliations, thwarted ambitions, and larger social injustices a group was born to but will no longer tolerate. The student researcher can read and talk to others about the measures the social movement puts forward as proposals for changes in the law, policies, and widespread practices. Which current laws and policies need to be swept away by organizations, legislatures, and the courts? Are there actions that should be taken, laws that should be changed or enacted to right past wrongs? What arguments are put forward that seek to make this happen? Social movements are only one of the many topics that can be independently researched using a combination of methods. They tend to be of interest for students across the political spectrum as well as students who think the course is overlooking an important aspect of society, for instance, religious discrimination, or a focus on a national group to which they belong or with whom they are familiar. It offers an opportunity many of them welcome.

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING AS A RESEARCH PROJECT University and college courses that include opportunities for students to engage with their community offer experiential learning opportunities. In the “real world” they can evaluate and expand what they are learning beyond the classroom. It is a chance to think creatively about the topic. What can this look like in a social inequality course? Usually called experiential research, students engage in activities outside the classroom that require they pay attention to what they are learning. This is not so much to uncover new knowledge as scholars know it; it is new knowledge for the student. Its delivery is based on their own first-person study design, somewhat akin to participant-as-observer fieldwork. Whether they intern in an office, get firsthand exposure to a medical practice, or are subject

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to an employer’s treatment of employees, they are learning. If they volunteer at a food bank frequented by people in need, it is a chance to learn. Grauerholz and Settembrino (2016) describe a very simple exercise in experiential learning that involves students traveling on public transport and photographing what they see. Certainly, care must be taken when cameras are pointed at strangers. Given this, students are tasked with finding illustrations of social inequality they may have been unaware of or treated as too normal for notice before taking on the assignment. Their eyes are more focused when looking through the lens of a camera. And they have a visible record of inequality ready for discussion when presented to the class. Observation and consideration of what one is learning by exposure to new people, situations, challenges, and skills appeals to a generation that is more hesitant about, or disengaged from, reading as the best avenue to learn. There is nothing particularly new in this pedagogy, dating back to the anarchist Francisco Ferrer, the iconoclastic Ivan Illich, and the pragmatic philosopher of education John Dewey. It has probably always been the primary mode of learning for most people. Not only young students but nontraditional students as well are keenly interested in experiential learning that puts a premium on learning by doing. A summer job or part-time gig offers an opportunity for experiential learning. The key is for the student to be open and inquiring about the way social inequality manifests itself, is maintained, and marshals both resistance to and efforts for greater equity. A job may show them the diminution of personal agency (e.g., the introduction of robotics or an AI device that degrades initiative or discards long-held organizational culture). The power of employees is taken away with the hiring of a new manager who changes routines with the intention of increasing efficiency; it feels like a speedup or unfunded mandate. Experiential learning should not be confused with sensitizing or transforming the student. When a theological seminary sends its novitiates out to live on the streets, requiring them to interact with those very unlike themselves, the intention is to build empathy and a deeper concern for the plight of the most unfortunate. As noted earlier, the goal of higher education is learning, not conversion. As life-changing as an experience can be, it’s important to keep an eye on the prize: knowing more about and knowing better how social inequality drives so much of what happens in the world today, writ large and in tiny corners of one’s life.

STUDY ABROAD? “My son did his study abroad in New Zealand. He spent most of his time bungee jumping and camping on the beach.” Indeed, study abroad can be great fun, even amazing. Nightlife in Santiago is very different from nightlife

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in Duluth. Visiting and buying food in Zagreb’s open market on Kaptol Ulica is nothing like going to Costco on 142nd Avenue. Study abroad is, however, intended for study, and it offers a fine opportunity to discover and investigate social inequality. When students study abroad, they normally take courses in their new country. It is also possible for them to go abroad with the intention of doing their own independent study of a topic (e.g., some dimension of social inequality). They may want to go further than they could in the classroom to follow some idea or issue that originated in a social inequality course. If a student goes to Buenos Aires, she may cross the Plaza de Mayo and see where The Mothers have been standing for decades, bearing witness to the disappearance of their children. This may give her impetus to know more, to learn about the crimes of Argentina’s dictatorships. She will find this embedded in the inequalities of class and status which have bequeathed to Argentina the misuse of power by the few. In some places, a student studying abroad may be able to participate in a community activity or organization that offers an opportunity to study inequality. If a student goes to a country where social caste, ethnic differences, language barriers, or perceived security needs of the dominant group deny equal rights and opportunities to a portion of the population (e.g. Palestinians in Israel), they may want to know more about this. They could conceivably engage with a social movement focused on this inequality. Depending on the country, this could be dangerous and out of bounds. It would not be a bad idea to have a conversation about the need to take care of personal safety when joining or even observing protests and demonstrations where one is a stranger.

LEARNING ABOUT EFFORTS TO LESSEN INEQUALITY FAR FROM HOME The first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, wrote that freedom in his East African nation would be to have a radio and a bicycle for every household. This would give them contact with the wider world and an expedited mode of travel. For persons in an affluent, industrialized country, that doesn’t sound like much. Nyerere, an educated and honest man, rejected the idea that Tanzania should have a multiparty political system. The country’s sole newspaper echoed the ruling-party line. But Nyerere sought to create a version of African socialism, ujamaa, that would lift up the poorest and restrain the accumulation of wealth and power of the few. What today is newsworthy in African nations is often the opposite. Widespread, grinding poverty in Nigeria, smoldering embers of apartheid in South Africa, political suppression by Morocco’s monarchy, child labor in the diamond mines of the Central African Republic. There is much to know in

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these stories about the sources and supporting structures of inequality. There are other, hopeful stories as well. Student research into more positive efforts and accomplishment in Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, South America, and elsewhere provides an opportunity for students to gain an appreciation for others and societies far different from their own. It implicitly provides for a comparative understanding of social stratification in other societies where social class is more firmly buttressed by traditions of caste, or power is more nakedly exercised to maintain elite domination. It can open their eyes to a wider world, one of college education’s most important tasks. A few examples among the many research projects students could pursue give an idea of what is possible. Famine is usually not caused by a shortage of food. Rather, as Amartya Sen explained, it is a matter of distribution. During Ethiopia’s famine of 1983–85 that killed millions and held the world’s attention, the country continued to export foodstuffs. Elite domination of agricultural production denied food to millions of Ethiopia’s inhabitants. In other cases of famine, the culprit is war or violent conflict between armed adversaries, such as Somalia’s recurrent famines amid the contestation between the government and the rebel group Al-Shabaab. The famine in Yemen is not something that would have happened were it not the site of a vicious proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. “Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat” (Sen, 1999: 161). Global migration, by boat or by foot rather than by air travel, is how the world’s poor flee for their safety and security and strive for economic opportunity. At root is inequality – of power to be protected or protect oneself and one’s family, to engage in useful, productive and fairly compensated labor, to get a decent education and modern health care, to give one’s children a chance to do better. Studying any case of cross-national immigration will take students to both their home country and the circumstances of their reception by and assimilation into their new country. How inequality plays out in both locales is the lesson to be learned. Patriarchy, as much as social class, is an enormous barrier to gender equity. How are women in countries far away chafing under patriarchy? Looking at a single country can reveal the way women are seeking to change their lives by resisting and finding alternatives to what tradition offers. For example, micro-credit and other programs that empower women break down patriarchy with practical, structural changes (e.g., the source and amount of household income). Starting and running small businesses such as egg production and seamstress services can begin with a small amount of money that has been unavailable to women in the past. This is primarily a process of greater gender

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equity, but it ripples across the many ways the poor and powerless are changing their lives. Land reform usually means giving smallholders the ability to provide for themselves and begin engaging in market relations. Farming is what they know, but in many cases their skills and efforts have been controlled by those who own the land, with minimal compensation in return. Because it is so closely tied to political change, including revolutionary transformation, land reform is part of a nation’s political dynamic. How peasants have and continue to struggle to have land enough to provide for themselves is directly a question of longstanding inequalities, how they are maintained, and how they can change. Technologies, too, are not equally available, nor is their impact shared equitably. Depending on a student’s interests, almost any technology introduced or produced in a country can be instructive. For example, smartphones and solar panels to charge them both reduce isolation and provide a source of income for those who offer their use to others cheaply but profitably. When the Internet is available, an entire world opens up in the most remote town or homestead. The digital divide is real, and bridging it has real consequences. Health care can be provided remotely, but is it? Crimes can be responded to more quickly, and videos of misconduct by authorities can be evidential if there is the political will and material means to do this. It can change the life of the poor and others in cities, but even more so in neglected rural areas.

CAN THE COURSE AFFORD INDEPENDENT RESEARCH? There are many potential pitfalls in assigning a research project. Student research projects are time consuming and may be too much for instructors to handle. Supervising student research requires a great deal of one-on-one contact. Transforming an idea into a form that leads to a research project involves talking through a student’s vague ideas. Keeping students on task and checking on progress (and in group projects, making sure everyone is pulling their weight) requires attention and sometimes structured vigilance. Helping students change gears or shift their efforts when their original intentions hit a wall is only to be expected. Because there is usually no plan to share the results beyond the classroom, it should not be necessary to get clearance from the school’s Institutional Review Board for projects involving human subjects, but it is worth checking. The time and effort involved in gaining approval may make prohibitive their doing a project. Student safety must be a major concern; their projects can never put them in harm’s way. They may need some official authorization (e.g., a landlord’s or housing association’s consent to be knocking on doors).

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It may be ethically sufficient for them to announce to their subjects that theirs is a class project. If they need more than this (e.g., guarantees of anonymity or confidentiality), it’s part of an instructor’s responsibility to help them provide what is necessary. Is the project to be done in parallel to regular class assignments and expectations, or will it take a distinct portion of the term? Will there be time to share results and have in-class discussions? Is there time and effort available to carefully and critically read and provide feedback to a written final paper? Will in-class or video presentations be evaluated the way a research paper might be? Should a set of guidelines and evaluation criteria be provided? Will these channel the research in a direction that takes away the students’ initiative or willingness to take risks in pursuing their research interests? Today, college instruction is no longer a “paper chase” of lectures and student recall. This is, it’s fair to say, the way many academics learned. They were good at it and, as a consequence, were successful in higher education. Pedagogy today is a prisoner to the digital revolution of smartphones and earbuds, blogs and podcasts, YouTube videos and Google searches, to say nothing of AI chatbots. Learning is in many ways a beneficiary of new technologies about which students may be far more conversant and comfortable than their instructors. This is how they get information, and using it is how many of them believe they learn best. Instruction is required to collaborate with these new sources of information and learning. All of this and much more is a warning to instructors. Despite the immense value that can come from independent research, the answer to the above observations and questions may cause an instructor to hesitate or decide against it. Plan B might mean supervising independent study projects the following quarter or semester for those students who want to continue what they have been learning. A mantra regarding student research is that a small project done well is better than a more ambitious project that ends in confusion. It is up to the instructor to make the best arrangements to accomplish this. Carefully spelling out the parameters for student research projects, staying abreast of progress or maintaining a conversation about the ongoing project, and being keenly aware of signs that the work might not be original can prevent problems, but nothing guarantees the work will be authentic. Despite the temptation the Web and AI offer, it would be unfortunate to accede to it and decide not to give students this opportunity to learn.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS/KEY POINTS • Independent research projects – using existing sources or gathering new information – give students a chance to pursue interests touched on in the

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course, and to develop a greater appreciation and application of the theories and facts they have been learning. Existing sources, such as newspapers and journal articles, public records, and the incredible amount of information on the Internet both makes research material more readily available and warrants caution about the misinformation that abounds. The GSS offers data students can work with, and they can also assemble their own data sets from public polling data and other sources. Students can be disabused of the idea that people know and can tell you why they do what they do, but talking to people is a good way to do research. Either a structured survey or informal interviewing, without too much attention to sampling, gets students involved in the research process. For students who want to do fieldwork as participants or observers, caution is required. Immersion in novel situations may require skills, time and attention, and close monitoring by the instructor. If pursued by students, keep it simple. Most research, other than strictly quantitative data analysis, involves a mixture of research strategies. Studying social inequality by researching a social movement will involve a combination of methods. Experiential learning, for example, recalling and recording instances of gender or racial discrimination during a stint of summer work or engaging in research while studying abroad are possibilities that extend past the social inequality course’s term. Independent student research offers almost limitless opportunities to learn about other countries and cultures, the impact of technology transfer, possibly extreme versions of what students recognize in milder form every day (e.g., patriarchy and racial superiority), and the way social inequality drives and manifests itself in the migration of people.

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Sherman, Rachel. 2019. Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence. Princeton University Press. Shorrocks, Anthony, James Davies, and Rodrigo Lluberas. 2022. “Global Wealth Report 2022.” https://​www​.credit​-suisse​.com/​about​-us/​en/​reports​-research/​global​ -wealth​-report​.html Silver, Nate. 2012. The Signal and the Noise. Penguin Press. Simmel, Georg. 1950. “The Stranger.” In Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 402–08. Free Press. Simmel, Georg. 1955. “The Web of Group Affiliations.” In George Simmel, Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliations, 127–95. Free Press. Simon, Scott. 2019. “History Behind the Highs and Lows of the Marginal Tax Rate. of the U.S.” Weekend Edition Saturday. https://​www​.npr​.org/​2019/​02/​02/​690916819/​ the​-history​-behind​-the​-highs​-and​-lows​-of​-the​-marginal​-tax​-rate. Singer, Natasha, and Jason Karaian. 2003. “Americans Flunked Privacy Test on Tracking.” New York Times, February 6: B1, B5. Skidmore, Thomas. 1992. “Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil,” Kellogg Institute Working Paper #173. Smith, Jennifer E., B. Natterson-Horowitz, and Michael E. Alfaro. 2021. “The Nature of Privilege: Intergenerational Wealth in Animal Societies.” Behavioral Ecology, 20(20): 1–6. Stack, Megan, K. 2023. “How Red States Are Attacking Families,” New York Times, February 19: SR8. Starr, Paul. 1982. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Basic Books. Stewart, Mathew. 2018. “The Birth of a New American Aristocracy.” The Atlantic, June: 48–63. Stinchcombe, Arthur. 1968. Constructing Social Theories. Harcourt, Brace & World. Thompson, E.P. 1963. Making of the English Working Class. Victor Gollancz Ltd. Tomasky, Michael. 2022. “Looming Questions for the Democrats.” New York Review, December 22: 33–36. Trimberger, Kay. 1978. Revolution from Above. Transaction Books. Turner, Ralph. 1961. “Modes of Social Ascent Through Education: Sponsored and Contest Mobility.” In A.H. Halsey, Jean Flout, and C. Arnold Anderson (eds.), Education, Economy, and Society, 121–39. Free Press. Valenti, Alexandre. 1999. “Coffee: A Sackful of Power.” Filmmaker’s Library, Fine Films, New York. Vance, J.D. 2016. Hillbilly Elegy. HarperCollins. Vargas-Silva, Carlos, and Madeleine Sumption. 2023. “Labour Market Effects of Immigration.” The Migration Observatory. https://​migrationobservatory​.ox​.ac​.uk/​ resources/​briefings/​the​-labour​-market​-effects​-of​-immigration Veblen, Thorstein. 1899. Theory of the Leisure Class. Floating Press. Vogel, Kenneth P., and Shane Goldmacher. 2022. “Complex $1.6 Billion Donation Enriches Conservative War Chest.” New York Times, August 23: A1, A11. Vonnegut, Kurt. 2017. Complete Stories (Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield, eds.). Seven Stones Press. Walker, Darren. 2020. “Are You Willing to Give Up Your Privilege?” New York Times, July 5: 4. Waters, Mary C. 1996. “Optional Ethnicities for Whites Only?” In Silvia Pedraza and Rubin G. Rumbaut (eds.), Origins and Destinies, 444–54. Wadsworth. Weber, Max. 1978. Selections in Translation (W.G. Runciman, ed.). Cambridge University Press.

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Williams, Christine L. 2006. Inside Toyland. University of California Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1978. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. University of Chicago Press. World Bank Group. 2022. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022. https://​www​.worldbank​ .org/​en/​publication/​poverty​-and​-shared​-prosperity Wright, Erik Olin. 1985. Classes. Verso. Young, Michael. 1958. Rise of the Meritocracy. Penguin Books. Zucman, Gabriel. 2016. “Wealth Inequality.” In Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report 2016. Stanford Center for Poverty and Inequality.

Appendix: a sample syllabus Teaching Social Inequality offers instructors choices for the many ways students can learn about and understand social inequality. There are, admittedly, lists upon lists of possible topics, illustrations, issues, and questions offered for inquiry and discussion. A course focused on social inequality could not possibly entertain more than a handful of them. A course in which social inequality is a critical part, such as those in gender studies and race and ethnic relations, can entertain even fewer. Teaching Social Inequality concentrates on what happens in the classroom and student-guided research. It is intentionally light on assigned readings. Instead, it offers things to talk about in class, ways of making this material and new material introduced by their instructor accessible, interesting, and even compelling for students. It recognizes that they have just come from class and will hurry off to lunch, another class, or a nap. The course syllabus offered here is a “start-from-scratch” syllabus that relies on students’ ability to access documents that their instructor has made available online. Limited time obviates assigning a research project in this course. Interested students can pursue their own research topic with the instructor’s guidance in a subsequent semester. Assignments include four short written papers that offer an opportunity for students to review for themselves what they are learning. For the instructor, they provide an assessment tool to gauge what is being learned and problems students may be having with the course. The course has 28 class meetings, including a midterm exam period and a final exam period not indicated on the syllabus. The syllabus is for a sociology upper-division social inequality course, modified from a course the author recently taught. The course prerequisite was one sociology class, and there was no statistics or research methods course requirement. It was taken by sociology majors and non-majors. In this syllabus students are not required to purchase a social inequality text but are assigned readings from David Grusky’s Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective (designated “Grusky” in the syllabus). Additional readings are from a variety of sources, including academic journals, popular magazines, research institute papers, newspapers, and sections from books. These readings, films, and audio tapes are accessed in an online course file. Most of these selections were edited by the instructor. 209

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It is the instructor’s prerogative to select a text, reader, or a collection of articles and essays. There are several texts that focus solely on one country (e.g., the US, Italy, or Japan). Some include a chapter on global inequality, while others, like Scott Sernau’s Social Inequality in a Global Age, offer illustrations of inequality from across the globe. A text equivalent to Harold Kerbo’s Social Stratification and Inequality has not been replaced. David Grusky and Jasmine Hill’s Inequality in the 21st Century and Grusky and Szelényi’s massive Inequality Reader have more than enough wide-ranging classical and contemporary readings, and there are many other readers to choose from. More topically, texts and readers on poverty, social mobility, race and ethnic relations, gender inequality, globalization, and inequalities of health care, policing, environmental vulnerability, and so forth can serve as the instructor’s preferred topics of emphasis. For introducing students to global wealth and income inequality, Branko Milanovic’s The Haves and the Have-Nots and Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality are hard to beat. A seasoned instructor may choose to use a wide selection of works for students to read, in this way acquainting students with many points of view, expressed by a range of voices. The questions following each day’s assigned readings, introduced in the syllabus with “Consider discussing,” are intended to encourage reading and consideration of the material prior to class discussion. This gives students both a way to assess their reading comprehension and a preview of the discussion that may be associated with what they have read. Of course, once in class, discussions can go far afield of these. Also up for discussion will be in-class material – a chart or graph, an audio file, portions of a feature-length film, a YouTube video, and so forth. A few of these are included in the syllabus as assignments. At this point in the 21st century, the availability of blogs, videos, and other formats that impart information addressing issues about social inequality are widely available. Some of these are excellent, while some are not. Many impart misinformation and selective facts or are constructed in such a way as to advance an agenda or bias. Caution and careful screening are required. In-class writing happens quite often, especially when discussion is not forthcoming. Students may be asked to write down a thought or observation, an interpretation or an objection, then read to the class what they have written. Because these are written on a scrap of paper, they can be collected, again helping the instructor assess student learning and giving another glimpse of the qualitative range of students in the course. The syllabus indicates short writing assignments, generally not more than two pages. These encourage students to read and think about the material and discussions. Their specificity to the assignments hopefully obviates the student’s use of written material available on the Web, including chatbots. What

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students write provides another assessment tool for the instructor. Their papers can – and probably should – be incorporated into class discussions, with the offer of student anonymity as an option. Table A1 Day 1

Social inequality: a sample syllabus How Can We Think About Social Inequality? Read before the first class to discuss the selection of Claude Fischer et al.’s Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (#4 in Grusky)

Day 2

Two Big Concepts in Thinking About Inequality Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” from Two Concepts of Liberty John Rawls, “The Veil of Ignorance,” from Theory of Justice Consider discussing: • Which of Berlin’s freedoms are you most comfortable with? • Where, within Berlin’s two ideas, is the idea of responsibility? • Have you ever worn something like Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”? Why? What happened? • What other “Big Concepts” are important in thinking about social inequality?

Day 3

Biological Approaches to Social Inequality Stephen Jay Gould, “Hereditarian Theory of IQ,” from The Mismeasure of Man M.W. Feldman and J. Riskin, “Why Biology is Not Destiny,” New York Review, April 21, 2022 Consider discussing: • How do biological, psychological, and social structural approaches differ? • What do you think motivated phrenology? Eugenics? What does scholarship say? • What can we learn from the non-human animal kingdom, or should we go there ?

Day 4

IQ and Psychological Approaches: The Bad and the Good Jill Lapore, “Why the Culture Wars Still Rage,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2022 Synopsis of Gordon Allport’s Contact Theory of Prejudice; class handout Consider discussing: • Have you taken a side in the culture wars Lapore talks about? • Why can equity be important even for those attributing social inequality to biology? • Allport’s Contact Hypothesis has several qualifiers. Which seems most important? • Think about and be ready to discuss situations you’ve been in that Allport’s ideas apply to

Day 5

Some Basic Concepts for Understanding Social Inequality Max Weber, “Class, Status and Party” (#18 in Grusky) Edwardo Bonilla-DeSilva, “The Essential Social Fact of Race” Omi and Winant, “Racial Formations” (#79 in Grusky) Consider discussing: • Do the concepts of class, status, and party take in all forms of social inequality? • What’s the difference between feeling and thinking about others and the way others are treated or positioned in social arrangements? How about yourself? • Is “the social construction of race” hard to get your head around? Why might it be?

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Day 6

Looking for Explanation in Theory Herbert Gans, “The Positive Functions of the Undeserving Poor,” American Journal of Sociology, September 1972 Karl Marx, “Classes in Capitalism and Pre-Capitalism,” pages 131–41 (#14 in Grusky) Consider discussing: • If a function can be considered a benefit, who, according to Gans, benefits from poverty? • What does Gans think could be a functional alternative to poverty? • Why, for Marx, is the evolution of social classes becoming a revolutionary force for social change?

Day 7

Don’t We All Believe in Merit? Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Red Baron,” New York Review, October 11, 2018 Mathew Stewart, “The Birth of a New American Aristocracy,” The Atlantic, June 2018 Consider discussing: • Why is Michael Young’s Rise of the Meritocracy sometimes called a dystopia? • What makes the group Stewart is describing a “new American aristocracy”? • Like the meritorious that Young talks about, how do Stewart’s aristocracy protect their privileged position?

First writing assignment Day 8

Wealth and Income in the United States and Beyond Emmanuel Saez, “Striking It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the US,” Pathways Magazine, Summer 2018 Atkinson et al., “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History” (#7 in Grusky) Eduardo Porter, “Inequality in America: The Data Are Sobering,” New York Times, July 31, 2013 E. Porter and Karl Russell, “It’s an Unequal World: It Doesn’t Have to Be,” New York Times, December 18, 2017 Consider discussing: • How has income distribution in the US changed in the past few decades? What does Saez attribute this to? • How does the gap between the very wealthy and others compare in countries around the world? • Despite being one of the most affluent countries in the world, why does the US stack up so poorly against other countries on several quality of life measures?

Day 9

The Demographics of Wealth and Income

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Patrick Sharkey, “Still Stuck in Place,” Pathways: Locked in Place, 2019 E. Badger and Q. Bui, “Detailed Maps Show How Neighborhoods Shape Children for Life,” New York Times, October 1, 2018 Watch a portion (to 23:30, but especially 16:45–23:30) of the PRB Webinar “Demography of Inequality Report” Consider discussing: • Do the maps of Seattle neighborhoods confirm or refute Sharkey’s discussion? • If you had infinite power to determine your life from birth, where would you want to be born? • How does urban poverty (and its causes) differ from rural poverty in the US? Day 10

Social Mobility and Life Chances Michael Hout, “Social Mobility,” in Pathways: State of the Union, 2019 Miles Corak, “Economic Mobility,” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2016 Annette Lareau, “Unequal Childhoods” (#116 in Grusky) Rachel Sherman, Selection from her article “Conflicted Cultivation.” Consider discussing: • What is the meaning of social mobility? • How has economic mobility in the US changed in the recent past? • Why is mobility especially important in a democratic society like the US? • Why do the parents interviewed by Sherman not want their children to feel entitled?

Day 11

The Many Whys of Growing Inequality in the US J. Scott and D. Leonard, “Shadow Lines that Still Divide” from Class Matters William Julius Wilson, “The Declining Significance of Race” (#89 in Grusky) Hacker and Pierson, “Winner-Take-All Politics” (#11 in Grusky) Jacob Hacker, Selection from The Great Risk Shift Consider discussing: • Why do Scott and Leonard call the class divisions in the US “shadow lines”? • Wilson was criticized for suggesting race is less important than social class as an influence on a person’s life chances. Why do you think this happened? • Hacker thinks growing inequality is by design. Whose design and how?

Day 12

Linking Wealth and Poverty Over Time David Grusky et al., “Executive Summary of Poverty and Inequality Report,” in Pathways Special Report, 2016 Listen to NPR’s “Taxing the Rich: Personal Income Tax History of the US” on Scott Simon (2019). Consider discussing: • There are lots of numbers here. Which seem most interesting to you? • Grusky’s article casts a dim shadow over the US. What is this shadow? • Why does the size of the income vs. poverty gap matter?

Day 13

Poverty in the US

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K. Edin and R. Kissane, “Poverty and the American Family: A Decade in Review” Edin, Nelson and Reed, “Low-Income Urban Fathers and the ‘Package Deal’ of Family Life” (#39 in Grusky) Consider discussing: • Return to Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.” Who is ascriptively disadvantaged? • Why is “family” difficult and why is family important for those in poverty? Day 14

Poverty in Comparative Perspective J. Gornick and M. Jantti, “Poverty” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2016 H. L. Shaefer et al., “Can Poverty in America be Compared to Conditions in the World’s Poorest Countries?”, American Journal of Medical Research, 2017 Amartya Sen, “From Income Inequality to Economic Inequality” (#29 in Grusky) Consider discussing: • What is the difference between absolute and relative poverty? Why does this matter? • What are the personal vs. societal consequences of poverty? • How do Sen’s ideas take us far afield of seeing poverty as only a matter of income?

Second writing assignment Day 15

The Social Construction of Race W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” from The Souls of Black Folk Martin Marger, “Ethnic Groups” and “Race,” pages 7–17 in Race and Ethnic Relations Consider discussing: • Du Bois originally wrote this in 1897. To whom is he writing it, and why? • Who is an ethnic group? Who is a race? Why does this distinction matter? • What do you think of dispensing with “ethnicity” and “race” and just talk about nationality group or global origin of persons?

Day 16

Racial-Ethnic Inequality I Linda Burton et al., “Poverty,” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2017 Thomas Shapiro, “Wealth,” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2017 William Julius Wilson, “Being Poor, Black and American.” (#40 in Grusky) Ta-Nehisi Coates, Portions of “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” Consider discussing: • Why does understanding poverty and wealth depend on an understanding of racism, past and present? • Ta-Nehisi Coates outlines the 1960s and 1970s war on poverty. Why did it fail to end poverty?

Day 17

Racial-Ethnic Inequality II Jay MacLeod, Selection from Ain’t No Makin’ It Sherrilyn Ifill, “When Diversity Matters,” New York Review, January 19, 2023 Consider discussing: • Describe the Hallway Hangers and their chances of “makin’” it. • Why are “affirmative action” and “diversity” politically explosive terms for some people? • Imagine a classroom devoid of diversity. What is missing?

Day 18

Structural Racism

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Devah Pager, “Mark of a Criminal Record” (#88 in Grusky) Bertrand and Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” (#86 in Grusky) Ta-Nehisi Coates, Portions of “The Case for Reparations” Consider discussing: • How did Pager do her research, and how does she tell her story with bar charts? • People sometimes unconsciously or unknowingly work within organizations that exhibit and/ or maintain racist practices. How is this shown in the readings? • Why is it so difficult to suggest that both persistent liabilities and correctives to a history of chattel slavery in the US should go beyond ending prejudice and discrimination? Day 19

Gender Inequality M. Anderson and P. Hill Collins, “Why Race, Class and Gender Matter” (#109 in Grusky) B. Ehrenreich and A. Hochschild, “Introduction,” in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy Paula England, “The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled” (#111 in Grusky) The Economist, “Behind Closed Doors,” September 29, 2018 Consider discussing: • What is intersectionality? Why does this matter for your own social location? • The 2022 World Cup showed us a picture of Qatar that is 90 percent immigrant laborers. How does this mirror what you are reading in Global Woman? • Given the #MeToo movement, do you think the gender revolution has stalled?

Day 20

Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation K. Parker et al., “Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues,” a Pew Research Center Report 2022 Megan Stack, “How Red States Are Attacking Families,” New York Times, February 19, 2023 Consider discussing: • The 1990s saw legislation and policies like “defense of marriage [between one man and one woman]” and “don’t ask, don’t tell [if you are gay or lesbian]” that are now gone. Why do you think this happened? • Trans people are a tiny minority, but issues surrounding their rights are a huge part of political messaging. Why do you think this is so? • Parental rights are being contested by legislation limiting choices for trans young people. Which side of the argument has the most to do with social inequality?

Third writing assignment Day 21

Global Income and Wealth Inequality Fisher and Smeading, “Income Inequality,” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2016 Gabriel Jucman, “Wealth Inequality,” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2016 Branko Milanovic, “Essay 1” from The Haves and the Have-Nots, pages 3–24 only. Consider discussing: • What does the distribution of global wealth look like? • Inequality between and within nations: what’s the difference? How are they connected? • What does it mean that, like a shrinking middle class in the US, there seems to be a shrinking middle class of nations?

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Day 22

Inequality in Historical and Comparative Perspective Thomas Piketty, “The Slow Decentralization of Power and Property,” from his A Brief History of Equality, pages 30–35 & 41–47. Amartya Sen, “Quality of Life: India vs. China,” New York Review, May 12, 2011 Consider discussing: • To what does Piketty attribute many, if not most, social movements in modern times? • How do China and India compare in terms of measures of inequality and its consequences? • Returning to Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” where would you rather live, China or India?

Day 23

Concepts and Processes of Contemporary Global Change John Isbister, “Explanations of Underdevelopment,” pages 32–59 in his Promises Not Kept Consider discussing: • The idea that the colonized world will “modernize” is questioned by Isbister. Why? • In Isbister’s analysis, dependency means what? Who is dependent on whom? • How is social change in poorer, colonized nations characterized in view of a power-conflict perspective?

Day 24

The Modern World System and Globalization Immanuel Wallerstein, “Class Conflict in the Capitalist World Economy” (#17 in Grusky) Harold Kerbo, “Characteristics of the World Stratification System,” pages 428–36 of Social Stratification and Inequality Joseph Stiglitz, “Globalism’s Discontents” (#131 in Grusky) Consider discussing: • What, according to Kerbo, powered Europe’s global expansion of capitalism? • Core, periphery, and semi-periphery: how do these terms help us to understand globalization? • Enthusiasm for globalization has waned. What problems has it created, according to Stiglitz?

Day 25

Racial Inequality in Comparative Perspective: Brazil Fecundo Alverado, “Income Inequality in Brazil,” Part 2.11 (pp. 145–50) of the World Inequality Report, 2018 Thomas Skidmore, Portions of “Discovering a Racial Problem in Brazil,” Kellogg Institute Working Paper #173, April 1992 Watch “Coffee: A Sackful of Power,” a comparison of Brazil’s and Costa Rica’s histories of sugar. Covers slavery, immigration, and rural-to-urban migration, wealth, industrialization, markets, and globalization Consider discussing: • How does Brazil compare to the US in terms of wealth and income inequality? • How did Brazil define the racial category of the persons whose parentage included both persons who were enslaved and White Europeans? • What is meant by “race” in Brazil today? • Brazil’s class inequality compares unfavorably to Costa Rica’s. Why the difference?

Fourth writing assignment Day 26

The State and Social Inequality: Comparative Perspectives

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John Schmidt, “Inequality as Policy” Gosta Esping-Andersen and John Myles, “The Welfare State and Redistribution” (#6 in Grusky) Karen Jusko, “Safety Net,” in Pathways: Poverty and Inequality Report, 2016 Consider discussing: • How have modern states responded variously to inequality? • How does the US compare to other affluent countries in terms of mitigating the worst features of poverty? • Most people in the US dislike the idea of “sharing the wealth,” as former President Obama suggested. Why do you think this is the case? Day 27

Confronting Growing Inequality James Heckman, “Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children” (#48 in Grusky) B. Western and J. Rosenfeld, “Union Norms and the Rise in US Wage Inequality” (#9 in Grusky) Consider discussing: • Why, from a strictly economic point of view, is it a good idea to invest in children? • Most Americans have a favorable opinion of labor unions but few belong. Why, and with what consequences for social inequality?

Day 28

Social Activism and Social Change Kenneth Andrews, “When Movements Stall,” New York Times, October 21, 2017 Geoff Mann, “Reversing the Freight Train,” London Review of Books, August 18, 2022 Ibram X. Kendi, “My Racist Introduction.” How to Be an Antiracist, pages 3–13. Consider discussing: • What is the difference between a series of protests and demonstrations and a social movement? • Why is a no-growth or slower-growth economy a radical solution to both an impending environmental disaster and growing global inequality? • Kendi counsels that people need to be not only non-racist but antiracist. How?

Index Blovotnik, Leonard 24 Blumberg, Michael 75 bottom billion 120 Bouie, Jamelle 23, 70 Bourdieu, Pierre 17, 27 Bradbury, Ray 49 Branson, Richard 80 Braverman, Harry 62 Breyer, Stephen 148 Brinton, Crane 173 Brookings Institution 160 Brown, Michael 174 Burke, Edmund 45

abortion 98, 174, 182 achievement motivation 19 Adelson, Sheldon 107 affirmative action 21–2, 90, 95, 164–5, 169 Affordable Care Act 152 African Development Bank 141 Allport, Gordon 20, 51–2 Al-Shabaab 197 Althusser, Louis 63 Alwin, Duane 159 America First 11, 179 American Enterprise Institute 160 anti-globalization movement 3, 179–81 see also deglobalization Arab Spring 171, 193 Argentina 196 Aristotle 45 arrest see police apprehension artificial intelligence (AI) 6, 55, 94, 142, 150, 187, 195, 199

capital punishment 98, 168 capitalism 45, 48, 52–3, 60, 62, 76, 78, 94, 115, 118, 126, 147, 179–82 cultural contradictions of 98–100 rentier 105 Carson, Rachel 57 Castile, Philando 174 celebrities 24, 80, 88, 104 Center for American Progress 160 Child Tax Credit 56, 111, 146 childcare 25, 140 Children’s Health Insurance Program 111, 152 China 45, 91, 95, 123, 125–6, 130 Christian nationalism 46, 109 Civil Rights Act 172 Civil Rights Movement 21, 33, 46, 51, 56–7, 60, 72, 82, 168, 171–3, 175, 193 Clark, Kenneth 18–19 Clark, Mamie 18–19 class see social class climate change 121–2, 135–6, 142, 173–4 Clinton, Bill 56, 85 Clinton, Hillary 138, 159 Cobb, Jonathan 190

Bakunin, Mikhail 33 Becker, Howard 9 Beijing Consensus 95, 125 Bell, Daniel 98–9 Beller, Emily 89 Bem, Sandra and Daryl 79 Berger, Peter 13 Berlin, Isaiah 33, 140 Beyoncé 80 Bezos, Jeff 26, 80, 105 billionaires 24, 43, 45, 69, 80, 102, 105–6, 116, 169 see also individuals biology and inequality 14 Black Census Project 175 Black Lives Matter 71, 169, 174–6, 193–4 Black Vison Collective 175 Blau, Peter M. 90, 164 218

Index

Cohen, Albert 138 Coleman, James 164 Collier, Paul 120 Collins, Randall 150 comparative approach 5, 28, 39, 76–7, 113, 117, 120, 127, 152, 197 concepts, in social sciences 65–7 conflict theory see power-conflict theory conformity, social 34 conservative thinking 48, 56, 58, 76, 98, 109, 147, 168–70, 178–9 contact hypothesis, Allport’s 20, 51–2 COVID-19 pandemic 3, 10–11, 17, 25, 36, 56, 92–3, 121, 126, 142, 146, 153, 190 cultural appropriation 71–3 Cutright, Phillips 9 Dahrendorf, Ralf 50, 62 Darwin, Charles 14–15, 52 data see quantitative material, statistics and statistical analysis Davis, Kingsley 56 Davis, Patti 40 de Beauvoir, Simone 56 death penalty 98, 168 Defense of Marriage Act 177 deglobalization movement 11 see also anti-globalization democracy 2, 44–7, 60, 74, 76–7, 94–5, 124–6 symbolic 99 development, international 129–30, 136 Dewey, John 195 digital divide 10, 151 digital technology 131, 149–52, 173, 199 see also artificial intelligence dignity 41, 64, 82, 182 Dinkins Effect 159 disability studies 7 discrimination and prejudice 4, 22, 51–2, 88, 116, 166, 172, 177–8, 190 discussion classroom 4–6, 14, 16–18, 21, 23, 26-7, 33, 38–40, 68–9, 73, 79, 95, 97–8, 118, 139, 149, 173 diversity 20–22, 48, 165 Domhoff, G. William 74 Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell 177 Du Bois, W.E.B 50, 54, 156 Duncan, Otis Dudley 90, 164

219

Durkheim, Émile 54, 87 dystopia 47–9 Earned Income Tax Credit 111, 143 economy growth of 145 political 146–7 educational attainment 42, 63, 90, 108, 157, 164 Ehrenreich, Barbara 137, 161 Eisenhower, Dwight 57 Eisenstadt, S.N. 56 Electoral Justice Project 175 Elephant curve 119, 130 el-Sisi, Abdel 171 Emmett Till Antilynching Act 172 Engels, Friedrich 53, 61, 185 enslavement see slavery equity and equality 19, 34–6, 41, 47 essential workers 10, 56 ethnocentrism 78 ethnographic research 190–92 eugenics 15–16, 19 evolution, teaching of 15, 50, 56 experiential learning 182, 191, 194–5 Fair Housing Act 172 Fair Labor Standards Act 148 fairness 32–3 famine 197 Faulkner, Willam 29 favelas 112 Federal Reserve 158 Feldman, M.W. 14, 28 feminism 57, 60–61, 69, 78, 153, 176 Ferrer, Francisco 195 fiction, inequality described in 46 field research 190–92 financialization 92 Fischer, Claude 19 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 105, 161 Floyd, George 25, 29, 73, 174 food banks 111, 195 Food Stamps see Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Foucault, Michel 16 Founding Fathers 45, 149 France 105, 119, 176 Frank, Thomas 99

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freedom 47, 76, 85, 93, 116, 140, 196 see also liberty functionalism 54–8, 65, 84 Gans, Herbert 58 Garner, Eric 174 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation 178 gay marriage see marriage equality Gellner, Ernest 130 gender 58, 78–9, 95, 123, 177 see also women; women’s studies male privilege 79–80 patriarchy 23, 41, 65, 69–70, 77–80, 116, 132, 173, 176–7, 197–8 Gender Development Index 123 gender orientation 23, 156 see also transgender rights General Social Survey 159, 187 Generation Z 89, 92 gentrification 109, 181, 186 Getty, John Paul Jr. 104 GI Bill 88 Giddens, Anthony 62–3, 68, 95 gig economy 92–3 Gini Index 126–7 Giriharadas, Anand 113 global inequality 115–33, 141–2 global warming see climate change globalization 3, 11, 78, 129–31, 137–8, 179–81 anti-globalization movement 3, 179–81 see also deglobalization Goffman, Erving 16 Goldberg, Michele 17 Goldin, Claudia 57, 156 Gould, Stephen Jay 15 Grauerholz, Liz 195 Gray, Freddie 174 Great Convergence 59, 66, 119, 156 Great Divergence 63, 119, 156 Great Recession 106, 126, 141, 147 Grusky, David 6, 209–10 gun control 76, 98, 118, 153 Gurr, Ted 81 Guttmacher Institute 160 Hale, Nathan 89

Hampden-Turner, Charles 33 Hands Up United 175 Harden, Kathryn 15, 28 Harrington, Michael 57 Harris, Marvin 78 health 1, 141, 152–3 COVID-19 pandemic 3, 10–11, 17, 25, 36, 56, 92–3, 121, 126, 142, 146, 153, 190 infant mortality 117, 127, 152 life expectancy 1, 84, 108, 117, 122, 125, 127–8, 134, 141, 152, 175, 191 maternal 117, 123, 128, 139–40, 152, 175 mental health 1, 15, 18, 25, 112 health care 25–6, 85, 108, 117, 140, 145, 152–3 Hemingway, Ernest 161 Heritage Foundation 160 Herrnstein, Richard 19 Hill, Jasmine 210 Hirschman, Albert 48, 168 historical approach 5, 28, 39, 52, 76, 173, 182 Hochschild, Arlie 95, 137, 161, 190–91 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 105 homelessness see unhoused persons homophobia 20, 23, 60, 65, 79, 173 Horowitz, Ruth 18–19 housing 25, 139 Houston, Charles 172 Hout, Michael 89 Human Development Index 122–3 Human Development Report 117–18, 122 human rights 45, 125, 129 Hunter, William 15 Identitarian movements 97, 169 identity 27–8, 64, 72–3, 178 class 96 Illich, Ivan 195 immigration 16 see also migration imperialism and neo-imperialism 5, 15, 27, 120–21, 129 incarceration 1, 118, 134 income inequality 9, 118–20, 127, 157 independent research 198–9

Index

India 128–9, 194 Indians, America see Native Americans individual differences 16, 34–5, 47–8, 87–8, 161 inequality see social inequality infant mortality 117, 127, 152 inflation 11, 91, 146 inheritance 1, 17, 104, 107, 168 institutional racism 29 Institutional Review Board (IRB) 198 International Monetary Fund 121 international students 132–3 interracial marriage 68, 70 intersectionality 2, 68, 71, 79, 87, 117, 177 interviewing 188–90 IQ 19, 27 Jackson, Tim 145 Japanese internment 68 Jay-Z 80 Jefferson, Atatiana 174 Jim Crow 16, 39, 77, 172, 175, 189 job security 92, 137, 150 Joe Friday 9 Johnson, Lyndon 21 just-in-time inventories 93 justice-as-fairness 32–3, 36 Kateb, George 47 Katz, Lawrence 156 Kendi, Ibram 175 Kenworthy, Lane 74 Kerbo, Harold 210 Keynes, John Maynard 48, 118 King, Martin Luther Jr. 30 Kipling, Rudyard 121 Klein, Ezra 58 Kropotkin, Peter 33 Krugman, Paul 107 Ku Klux Klan 40 Kuznets, Simon 118–19, 130 labor unions see trade unions Lakner, Christopher 119 land reform 198 Lapore, Jill 15 Lareau, Annette 138 learning and teaching 2, 132

221

see also class discussion case studies 132 critical thinking skills 8, 39–41, 131, 157, 187 student preparation 7–8, 156, 191 writing exercises 31, 86 legacy preference 88 legislation see policy and legislation, inequality Leigh, Mike 97 LGBTQ+ rights 57, 60–61, 116, 132, 168, 170, 177–9, 182 marriage equality 22, 61, 68, 169, 177 right to adopt 22, 61 transgender rights 76, 169, 178, 188 liberty, positive and negative 33–4, 47, 140 Liebow, Elliot 161 life expectancy 1, 84, 108, 117, 122, 125, 127–8, 134, 141, 152, 175, 191 Lippman, Walter 47 Lipset, S.M. 56 living standards 35, 46, 62, 95, 126, 145 Locke, John 53, 61 Lorenze Curve 126 lynchings 172 Machalek, Richard 16 MacLeod, Jay 89 male privilege 79–80 Mandeville, Bernard 45 Mannheim, Karl 9, 54 mansplaining 79 Mao Zedong 130 March for Our Lives 81 Margo, Robert 57 marriage equality 22, 61, 68, 169, 177 Marshall, Thurgood 172 Marx, Karl and Marxist theory 43, 47, 50, 52–4, 61–4, 94, 96, 185 Massive Resistance campaign 46, 172 maternal health 117, 123, 128, 139–40, 152, 175 Mayer, Jane 74 McCartney, Paul 24 McClelland, David 19 Medicaid 108, 143, 152 Medicare 143, 152 mental health 1, 15, 18, 25, 112

222

Teaching social inequality

meritocracy 1, 19, 41–4 Merton, Robert 22, 54, 56, 189–90 #MeToo movement 80, 176–7 middle class see social class middle-range theories 54, 68, 81 migration 11, 16, 87, 89–90, 135–7, 170, 197 economic 136 Milanovic, Banko 119, 122, 210 Miliband, Ralph 63 Millennials 89, 92 Millennium Development Goals, UN 123 Mills, C. Wright 58, 61 minimum wage 148 Mississippi 166 mixed research methods 192–4 mobility, social 41–2, 44, 58, 80, 84–101, 104, 127, 136, 149, 166, 170 in and out of poverty 110–11 structural 91 tables 90 Montesquieu 50 Moore, Barrington 94, 125–6, 173 More, Thomas 47 Morris, William 47 Movement for Black Lives 173–6 Mugabe, Robert 124 Musk, Elon 24, 80, 102 Myers–Briggs Type Indicator 19 Nader, Ralph 57 National Health Service 113, 152 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act 148 nationalism Christian 46, 109 economic 11, 115, 179 ethnic 125, 130 Native Americans 72, 172 nativism 46, 98, 109, 138, 142, 173, 179 natural resources, global 121, 142 nature versus nurture 14 negative freedom 33 newspapers and magazines 160, 186 Nichols, Tyre 174 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47 NIMBYism 139, 181 non-humans 16–18 Noonan, Peggy 107

Norquist, Grover 169 Nyerere, Julius 196 Obama, Barack 34, 147, 193 Obamacare 152 obesity 153 Occupy Wall Street 44, 81, 106–7, 171 optional ethnicities 72 Ortega, Daniel 124 Orwell, George 46–7, 49, 98 Page, Larry 24 Pager, David 158 Palestine 196 Panama Papers 106 panel studies 161–2, 187 Parenti, Michael 76 Parkin, Frank 62 Parsons, Talcott 54 patriarchy 23, 41, 65, 69–70, 77–80, 116, 132, 173, 176–7, 197–8 Paules, Greta Foff 190 Paycheck Protection Program 56 Pennsylvania Stand Up 175 Pew Charitable Trusts 159–60, 178 phrenology 14–15 Piketty, Thomas 96, 119, 125, 147, 168, 210 Planetary Pressure Index 122 Plato 44–5 police apprehension 1, 4, 134, 173, 175 police brutality 174–5 murder of George Floyd 25, 29, 73, 174 policy and legislation, inequality 31–6, 39, 43, 45, 111–13, 118–19, 142–4, 147–8, 152, 172, 177–8 to reduce prejudice 20–21, 74 political power 74–7, 107 polls see public polling pollution 121–2, 137, 142 Pomeranz, Kenneth 63, 121 population growth and inequality 128–9 populism, nativist 46, 97, 138 Poulantzas, Nicos 62 poverty 3, 11, 15, 18, 26, 30, 58, 60, 102–3, 109–13, 123, 126–9, 138, 141–3, 145, 161, 169 power in the law 148–9

Index

power, inequality as 67–83, 120–22, 124–6, 151, 153–4 asymmetrical 125 power-conflict theory 54, 59–65, 84, 113 precariat 92–4 prejudice 20–23, 72 see also discrimination privacy 150–51 progress, idea of 53 protests against inequality see social movements Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 33 Proxmire, William 166 psychology of inequality 18–19 public polling 25, 70, 89–90, 104, 158–60, 177, 188 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) 123–4, 127 Putin, Vladimir 125 QAnon 51 quality of life 117–18, 128 quantitative material 2, 8–9, 90, 118, 156–67 queer studies 7 race 50, 52, 58, 60, 65, 73, 88, 95, 110, 134, 158, 177 see also racism affirmative action 21–2, 90, 95, 164–5, 169 Black Lives Matter 71, 169, 174–6, 193–4 Civil Rights Movement 21, 33, 46, 51, 56–7, 60, 72, 82, 168, 171–3, 175, 193 interracial marriage 68, 70 Movement for Black Lives 173–6 social reality of 27–8, 175 talking about 28–30 white privilege 29, 73, 79–80, 156 racism 7, 15, 18–20, 22–3, 25, 29, 50–51, 57, 65, 88, 147, 157, 172–3 institutional 29 Jim Crow 16, 39, 77, 172, 175, 189 Ku Klux Klan 40 murder of George Floyd 25, 29, 73, 174

223

systemic 7, 23, 25, 29, 52, 65, 67, 173 rational thinking 38 Rawls, John 32, 36, 117 Reagan, Ronald 40 Reeves, Richard 44, 107 religion 28, 38, 41, 46, 77, 79, 98, 129–30, 169–71, 178 reproductive health 76, 128 abortion 98, 174, 182 research see also student research methodology 158 organizations 160 Respect for Marriage Act 177 revolution 61–2, 113, 125 Ricardo, David 53, 61 Rice, Tamir 174 Riskin, Jessica 14, 28 Rockefeller, John D. 113 Rollins, Jerry 124 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 33, 48 Rowling, J.K. 24 Saez, Emmanuel 105 same-sex marriage see marriage equality sampling 185, 189 Sanders, Bernie 105 Schulberg, Budd 17 Schumpeter, Joseph 50, 54 Scott, Jacqueline 159 Scott, James 130 Scott, MacKenzie 24 Seid, Barre 75 Sen, Amartya 117, 128, 197 Sennett, Richard 190 Sernau, Scott 210 Settembrino, Marc 195 sexism 60, 69, 77–80, 116, 132, 176 Shaefer, H. 118 Shapiro, Josh 140 Sherman, Rachel 107 Silver, Nate 159 Simmel, George 68–9 Skocpol, Theda 173 slavery 16, 120–21, 149, 175 slums 112, 115 Smelser, Neil 56 Smith, Adam 53, 61 social activism 182

224

Teaching social inequality

social change and inequality 53, 61–2, 113, 129–30, 178–9 social/cultural capital 44, 87–8, 138–9 social class 2, 23, 58, 73, 76, 79, 90, 119, 145, 173, 177 see also meritocracy class culture 96–8 middle 108–9, 125 middle in China 125, 128 and power 62–5, 69–71 resentment 109 respectable working 108–9 and stratification 95–6, 99–100 social inequality 1–23 big questions about 31–7 challenges in teaching 24–30 choices for courses 5–6 consequences of 134–44 differences versus 13 global inequality 115–33, 141–2 ideas about 38–49 non-humans 16–18 paying for 140–41 as power 67–83 psychology of 18–19 quantitative material 2, 156–67 responding to 168–83 sample syllabus 209–17 stratification 8, 13–23, 25–8, 43, 63, 80, 84–101, 107, 112 structure of 13–23 student research on 184–200 theories of 50–66 trends in 145–55 wealth and poverty see poverty; wealth social influencers 35 social media 151 social mobility see mobility, social social movements 3, 6, 60–61, 80–82, 168–83, 192–4 anti-globalization movement 3, 179–81 Arab Spring 171–93 Black Lives Matter 71, 169, 174–6, 193–4 Civil Rights Movement 21, 33, 46, 51, 56–7, 60, 72, 82, 168, 171–3, 175, 193 March for Our Lives 81

#MeToo 80, 176–7 Movement for Black Lives 173–6 Occupy Wall Street 44, 81, 106–7, 171 student activism in 113, 181–3 Yellow Vests 46, 193 social safety net 110–12 see also policy and legislation social sciences 50–52, 162 Social Security 25, 56, 76, 99, 110–11, 113, 143 socialization 138–40 sociobiology 16–17 soft power 129 Sorokin, Pitirim 54 Soros, George 109 Soviet Union (USSR) see Russia Spencer, Herbert 17, 52 Stanford University Center on Poverty and Inequality 6 Starr, Paul 153 statistics and statistical analysis 2–3, 24, 29, 41, 87, 126–7, 161–6, 187 status 69–71, 116, 173, 178, 180 privilege 71–3 Stewart, Mathew 44, 107 Stewart, Potter 62 Steyer, Tom 75 Stinchcombe, Arthur 63 Stonewall Inn 56 stratification 8, 13–23, 25–8, 43, 63, 80, 84–101, 107, 112, 181 geography and 139–40 structuration 95 student research 184–200 study abroad 195–6 Sumner, William Graham 17, 52 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program 111, 143 Supplemental Security Income 111, 152 Supplementary Poverty Measure 111 surveys 161, 188–9 systemic racism 7, 23, 25, 29, 52, 65, 67, 173 Szelényi, Szonja 6, 210 Taft–Hartley Act 148 Tan, Amy 89 taxation 1, 57, 75–6, 104–7, 113, 118–19, 143, 146–7, 154, 182

Index

Taylor, Breonna 174 technological change 94, 149–52, 198 technology driven unemployment 150 and privacy 151 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families 56 textbooks 5–6 theories of inequality 50–66 concepts 65–6 functionalism 54–8, 65, 84 introducing student to 52–4 power-conflict theory 54, 59–65, 84 theory in social sciences 50–52 Thompson, E.P. 62 Three Point Strategy 175 Tilly, Charles 168, 173 tiny biographies 86 Title IX 79 trade unions 6, 39, 57, 91, 93, 146, 148–9, 166, 186 transgender rights 76, 169, 178, 188 trends 85–6 Trimberger, Kay 124 Trump, Donald 104–5, 138, 159, 171, 174 Tumin, Melvin 56, 58 Turner, Ralph 58 Twain, Mark 90 Twitter 102 unemployment 10, 18, 111, 134, 142, 146–7 unhoused persons 1–2, 24–5, 31, 43, 103, 110, 112, 143, 184 United Nations 117–18, 122–3, 158, 180 universal basic income 143 US Supreme Court 21, 148–9, 177 Brown v. Board of Education 19, 172 Citizens United 74 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization 174 Loving v. Virginia 68 Obergefell v. Hodges 68 Plessy v. Ferguson 172 Students for Fair Admissions 22 utopia 47–9

225

Vance, J.D. 180 Veblen, Thorstein 17, 50, 54 veil of ignorance, Rawls’s 31 Vietnam/Indochina War 60 Vonnegut, Kurt 35 Voting Rights Act 172 Walker, Darren 182 Walton, Alice 24 Walton, Jim 24 Walton, Rob 24 Warren, Elizabeth 25 Waters, Mary 72 wealth 9, 24–6, 30, 63, 70, 74–5, 102–3, 105–7, 109, 126, 169 see also individuals billionaires 24, 70, 75, 99, 104–5, 116, 169 growth of global 116, 118–20 inheritance of 104 visualizing 5, 102 Wealth Report, Credit Suisse 120, 126 Webb, James 102 Weber, Max 54, 63–4, 67, 69, 73, 80–81, 116, 124, 179 white privilege 29, 73, 79–80, 156 Wilson, August 97 Wilson, William Julius 65 Winfrey, Oprah 80 women 69, 77–9, 85, 153 see also gender feminism 57, 60–61, 69, 78, 153, 176 maternal health 117, 123, 128, 139–40, 152, 175 #MeToo movement 80, 176–7 pay equality/equity 35, 176 single mothers 112 women’s studies 7, 28, 177 World Bank 115, 122, 126, 141, 158 World Development Report 122 World Inequality Database 119, 122, 132 World Wealth and Income Database 127 Wright, Erik Olin 50, 62–3, 96 xenophobia 46, 109, 142 Yeats, William Butler 60 Young, Michael 43–4

226

Zamyatin, Yevgeny 49 Zuckerberg, Mark 24, 151

Teaching social inequality

Zucman, Gabriel 105