Essays
-
A Social Psychological Approach to Racializing Wealth Inequality - Brown, Joey
Since the Civil Rights' movements of the 1960s, some Blacks have advanced socioeconomically, resulting in a flourishing Black middle‐class. The Black middle‐class has experienced upward mobility as measured by traditional indicators of education and income. Cultural narratives promoting colorblindness and stressing the rise of a postracial, meritocratic America uphold Black advancement as a symbol of success. However, a focus on racial wealth inequality complicates the narrative of Black success and tells a different story regarding the life chances of Black Americans, even those who are middle‐class. This essay explicates foundational research on the increasing visibility of the Black middle‐class and racial wealth inequality. Secondly, it discusses advances in research on race and wealth inequality as well as recent social psychological theory on social class that may be useful in thinking about mechanisms and consequences of racial wealth inequality. Finally, the essay raises some key issues and questions for social psychologists interested in racial wealth inequality. By no means exhaustive, the goal is to begin a conversation on how social psychologists can contribute to understanding racial wealth inequality. In particular, social psychological work may help us understand continuing racial wealth inequality by considering the role of financial socialization, addressing tensions between objective and subjective social class identification, and thinking about the role of self and identity in wealth creation, accumulation, and dissemination. -
Demography and Social Inequality - Fasang, Anette E.
Population processes, that is, fertility, migration, and mortality, are closely intertwined with social stratification and mobility from one generation to the next. There is some indication for an emerging trend toward a stronger integration of previously more separate research communities in demography and social stratification research. The author discusses three promising avenues for future research to generate new insights into the interplay between population processes and social inequality: (i) Demographic change and political processes, (ii) Long time horizons across the life course and multiple generations, and (iii) Implications of digitalization and technological change. -
Enduring Effects of Education - Curry, Matthew
Social scientists have found strong and persistent causal effects of education on various outcomes over the life course, even after using various methods to control for preexisting selection into educational treatments. Research suggests that educational attainment is an important causal factor in determining labor market outcomes, social status, physical and mental health, marriage and fertility, civic participation, and social attitudes. As education plays a central role in the causal processes of so many outcomes of interest, understanding the effects of education is a primary concern to social scientists. The effects of education are complex and vary across demographic groups, appearing greatest for marginal students. Furthermore, after controlling for individual educational attainment, aggregate levels of education can affect economic and noneconomic outcomes at both the aggregate and individual levels. Building on the literature on the effects of education, we suggest promising areas for future research, including assessing effect heterogeneity across individual and contextual characteristics; rigorously identifying and testing causal pathways and mechanisms that link education to associated outcomes; and attending to equilibrium effects, where aggregate levels of education may influence the relationship between individual education and a variety of individual outcomes. -
Impact of Limited Education on Employment Prospects in Advanced Economies - Solga, Heike
Employment and wage inequalities between educational groups in advanced economies have received much attention in economic and sociological research. Over the past 50 years, the labor market vulnerability of less‐educated workers has increased and will most probably continue to do so unless crucial interventions take place. Foundational research has identified multiple factors that contribute to rising educational disparities in employment prospects. It has focused in particular on demand‐side factors, such as skill supply–demand mismatches, changes in overall job structures, foreign trade, or institutional changes; however, most studies were based on supply‐side data. Cutting edge research has challenged some of these findings by studying recruitment processes, technological changes, and skill distributions, and by using a multidimensional concept of education. Nevertheless, the relative importance of the various factors has yet to be determined. Other key issues for future research involve including women in the analysis, explaining not only differences between educational groups but also differences within the group of less‐educated workers, and studying the impact of variation in competence‐qualification relationships on the employment prospects of less‐educated workers. Research of this nature will require more interdisciplinary cooperation between economists and sociologists and an increase in international comparative studies. Such research will enrich our understanding of how the barriers confronting less‐educated workers in the labor market can be overcome or removed. -
Intergenerational Mobility: A Cross‐National Comparison - Mazumder, Bhashkar
A goal in many societies is to ensure that individuals have the same opportunities for success irrespective of their circumstances at birth. While equality of opportunity is an elusive concept to measure, social science researchers have developed measures of intergenerational mobility to serve as a rough barometer. Presumably, societies in which where there is a high likelihood that families can improve their relative socioeconomic standing over generations are likely to be ones characterized by more widespread opportunity. In recent decades, a large and growing body of research that has used a variety of approaches to study intergenerational mobility with respect to income, education, and occupation has emerged. At this stage, the requisite data to conduct this kind of analysis is not available for all countries. Nevertheless, a few key patterns of results have emerged. First, intergenerational mobility appears to be most rapid in Nordic countries. Second, the United States and by some measures the United Kingdom appear to have lower rates of intergenerational mobility than other industrialized countries. Third, intergenerational mobility seems to be lower in developing countries, particularly those in Latin America. These conclusions are still tentative and may be revised as new and better data and more creative methods arise in future research. -
Political Inequality - Manza, Jeff
In the classical model of democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public, making public policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or otherwise, has ever fully realized this principle of political equality. The focus of this essay is an examination of research on how economic inequalities impact democratic politics. The question has become especially pressing as economic inequality has risen, in some countries quite dramatically, in recent decades. Political inequality may refer to either differential inputs into policymaking processes, in which some actors have more influence than others, or it can refer to policy outputs, in particular those which encourage or sustain income and wealth inequality. In this essay, I review four contemporary theories of political inequality (elite and oligarchic models, power resources theories, globalization models, and participatory inequality models). Each throws light on some aspects of political inequality, but none provides a completely satisfactory account. I conclude with some suggestions for future directions for research. -
Public Opinion, the 1%, and Income Redistribution - Weakliem, David L.
Because of the skewed distribution of income and wealth, a majority of people could make significant financial gains by redistribution from the affluent minority. However, redistribution of this kind is not particularly popular. Moreover, the rapid increase in top salaries since the 1970s has not provoked a strong reaction from the public. This essay considers the paradox of public opinion on redistribution. There are many hypotheses, but until recently there has not been much empirical research. However, recent work on opinions about salaries suggests that most people have quite egalitarian standards of fairness, in which corporate executives would receive only a few times as much as average workers. At the same time, there is often a good deal of support for measures that make taxes less progressive, notably as the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. That is, people seem to think that high salaries are unfair, but do not necessarily support government efforts to move toward a “fair” distribution. The essay discusses some ways to reconcile this apparent contradiction. Two of the most promising are a lack of trust in government and moral objections to redistribution. However, we must also consider the possibility that the pattern of opinions is in some sense irrational: the challenge is to specify a theory of irrationality to make positive predictions. Finally, the essay discusses the availability of data on public opinion, and identifies two major needs: historical and comparative data. -
The Role of Social Mechanisms in the Formation of Social Inequalities - Diewald, Martin
Despite lacking a commonly shared definition, social mechanisms have recently received considerable attention in sociology. Social inequality research has been a trailblazer in providing examples of how social mechanism can further, theoretically and methodologically, progress. Two different understandings of social mechanisms are reflected in the literature. One refers to theoretical and methodological precision when describing the causal chains that lead from specific antecedents to specific outcomes. The other is a program designed to articulate a complete taxonomy of a limited number of mechanisms as abstract ideas to explain social inequalities. I discuss both approaches how they can fruitfully refer to each other. In the final section, I discuss social mechanisms in the view of a new challenge to social inequality research, that is, a growing interdisciplinary interest in gene–environment interference. By superseding the old and fruitless nature‐versus‐nurture debate, new fields of social inquiry emerge, but pose also the question what it can add to a better understanding of inequality‐generating social mechanisms. As I will show, the inclusion of genetic information in social science explanations does not threaten sociology as a discipline, but will potentially enrich both the currently proposed mechanistic approaches in social inequality research. -
The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and Social Inequalities - Faist, Thomas
The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labor and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces; because of the cross‐border diffusion of norms; and because there are implications of migration for social inequalities within national states. In earlier periods class differences dominated political conflicts, and while class has always been crisscrossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language; it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened over the past decades.