The Killing Fields of Inequality E-Book

Göran Therborn

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 263

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Inequality is not just about the size of our wallets. It is a socio-cultural order which, for most of us, reduces our capabilities to function as human beings, our health, our dignity, our sense of self, as well as our resources to act and participate in the world. This book shows that inequality is literally a killing field, with millions of people dying premature deaths because of it. These lethal effects of inequality operate not only in the poor world, but also, and increasingly, in rich countries, as Therborn demonstrates with data ranging from the US, the UK, Finland and elsewhere. Even when they survive inequality, millions of human lives are stunted by the humiliations and degradations of inequality linked to gender, race and ethnicity, and class.

But this book is about experiences of equalization too, highlighting moments and processes of equalization in different parts of the world – from India and other parts of Asia, from the Americas, as well as from Europe. South Africa illustrates the toughest challenges. The killing fields of inequality can be avoided: this book shows how.

Clear, succinct, wide-ranging in scope and empirical in its approach, this timely book by one of the world's leading social scientists will appeal to a wide readership.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Figures

Tables

Introduction

I: The Fields

1: Human, Nasty and Short: Life under Inequality

The Short Lives of the Unequalized

Stunted Lives

2: Behind the Doors of Exclusion

Sundering

Squandering

Political Dictat-Ship

II: Theory

3: Theoretical Cross-Draught

The Difference between Difference and Inequality

What Equality is Desirable?

Inequality and Poverty

Opportunity: Should ‘Losers’ Have Another Chance?

4: Three Kinds of (In)equality, and Their Production

Dimensions of Human Capability

Four Mechanisms of (In)Equality

III: History

5: Inequality and the Rise of Modernity

Three Master Narratives

6: A Historical Six-Pack: Three Inequalities in Global and National History

Vital Inequality

Existential Inequality

Resource Inequality

IV: Today's Unequal World

7: Current World Patterns and Dynamics of Inequalities

Unequal Developments among the Unequals

The World's Pattern of Income Inequality

Children's Opportunities: Inter-generational Income Relations

The Current Dynamics of Income Inequality – At the Top and at the Bottom

The Contraflow of Gender

8: Three Puzzles of Contemporary Inequalities

Why Have the Northern Welfare States Failed on Vital Inequality?

Why Has Existential Egalitarianism become so Successful?

Is There a Connection between Recent Inter-national Convergence and Intra-national Unequalization?

V: Possible Futures

9: Overcoming Inequality – Yesterday and Tomorrow

Moments of Equality

Forces of Equality

10: The Decisive Battlefields of Future (In)Equality

The Image of Inequality

The Three Key Institutions of Inequality

The Decisive Battle – For the Orientation of the Middle Classes

References

Index

Copyright © Göran Therborn 2013

The right of Göran Therborn to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6258-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6259-6 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7991-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7990-7 (mobi)

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Figures

1 Stylized income inequality curves of developed countries, mid-nineteenth to late twentieth centuries

2 Landmarks of existential (in)equality, 1900–2012

3 Global income inequality, 1820–2000

Tables

1 Murder regions of the world. Homicides per 100,000 population, circa 2010

2 Two societies of perfect equality of opportunity with different outcome structures

3 The roots, dynamics and interactions of the three kinds of inequality

4 Inequality mechanisms and their interactive dynamics

5 Equality mechanisms

6 The power of income redistribution

7 Top incomes in the world, 1913–2005

8 The loss of human well-being due to different kinds of inequality in 2011 in the regions of the world

9 Gender inequality in the world, 2011

10 Income inequality in countries of the world, 2005–2011

11 Inequality of income opportunity by the end of the twentieth century

12 Capital managed by the top 50 firms in the US securities industry, 1972–2004

Introduction

Inequality is a violation of human dignity; it is a denial of the possibility for everybody's human capabilities to develop. It takes many forms, and it has many effects: premature death, ill-health, humiliation, subjection, discrimination, exclusion from knowledge or from mainstream social life, poverty, powerlessness, stress, insecurity, anxiety, lack of self-confidence and of pride in oneself, and exclusion from opportunities and life-chances. Inequality, then, is not just about the size of wallets. It is a socio-cultural order, which (for most of us) reduces our capabilities to function as human beings, our health, our self-respect, our sense of self, as well as our resources to act and participate in this world.

Outside philosophy, where, thanks to the late John Rawls, there has since the early 1970s been a significant interest in it, there has been little scholarly attention to inequality as a general plague on human societies. After Ricardo in the early nineteenth century, there was a long precipitous decline of economic interest in distribution, from which there is significant recovery in recent times, but – understandably – mainly, if not exclusively, concerned with inequality of income and wealth. The works of Anthony Atkinson, Branko Milanovic, Thomas Piketty and others have vastly widened our horizon of empirical knowledge.

Classical sociology had no focus on inequality, and in the American decades of post-World War II sociology, it took at least until the mid-1960s (Lenski 1966) before inequality became a mainstream concern. Even then, Gerhard Lenski's book on Power and Privilege is subtitled ‘A Theory of Social Stratification’. In the earlier handbook literature (Lazarsfeld and Rosenberg 1955; Lipset and Smelser 1961) it is completely absent (true, the second deals with distribution of ‘prestige’). Only from Smelser (1988) on is inequality officiously awarded a legitimate place in sociological investigations. Among the fifty-odd Research Committees of the International Sociological Association, there is no one focused on inequality. The nearest Ersatz is RC 28 on ‘Social Stratification’, a strange concept, imported from geology into sociology by a great, conservative Russian sociologist who emigrated to the US, Pitirim Sorokin (1927). In Sorokin's tradition, the Committee has mainly been interested in inter-generational social mobility, more popularly known as ‘inequality of opportunity’, a field in which impressive technical skills have been developed and deployed.1

More than a discipline, sociology is a vast field of many different pursuits, by different methods, so on most facets of inequality there is some sociological research. However, so far, there has been no attempt, in any social science discipline, to put a spotlight on the multidimensionality of inequality and its nefarious consequences. The general theoretical discussion has been carried from philosophy to the social sciences by the economist Amartya Sen, and the broadest empirical discussion has been opened by epidemiologists – by Michael Marmot (2004) and Richard Wilkinson (1996, 2005; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).

This abdication by sociology, the least bounded and the most generous of the social sciences, may now be ending. The International Sociological Association has decided to devote its next World Congress, in Yokohama in 2014, to inequality.

Citizens have been more impatient. In 2011 inequality was present, red-hot, in the streets: in the Mediterranean opposition to unequal austerity; in the Arab rebellions against unequal freedom and opportunity; in the Chilean student (and middle-class-supported) rejection of unequal higher education; in the Occupy movements of the US, the UK and other places, against the rule of the 1 per cent. Inequality even became a theme of the corporate Alpine leisure of the World Economic Forum at Davos.

This book's effort, which continues previous ones (e.g. Therborn 2006), has some distinctive features among the currently growing literature on inequality. It is resolutely multidimensional in its approach to in­equality, focusing on health/mortality, on existential degrees of freedom, dignity and respect, as well as on resources of income, wealth, education and power. Secondly, it uses a historical global perspective, trying to grasp, comprehend and explain global as well as intra-national developments over modern time. Thirdly, it tries to spell out the various mechanisms through which inequalities are produced. Fourthly, it pulls out mechanisms of equalization, and attempts to grasp historical moments, processes and policies of equalization. Increasing inequality is not inevitable. Finally, it offers an agenda for overcoming, or at least reducing, inequalities.

In-equality, as I shall elaborate somewhat below, is a normative concept, denoting the absence, the lack, of something – i.e., of equality. This normativity had better be recognized and reflected upon from the outset. But stated as a premise of concern, assessing its actual prevalence, identifying its causal mechanisms, and spelling out its social consequences are all procedures subject to possible scholarly falsification.

This book has two main aims: to convince students and academic colleagues of the necessity of a multi­dimensional and global approach to inequality; and, above all, to raise concern about existing multiple kinds of inequality, and to promote commitment to equalization among my fellow citizens of the world.

Ljungbyholm, Sweden

Göran Therborn

University of Cambridge

Note

1 A valuable insiders' self-appraisal of the Committee's achievements over fifty-five years is given by Hout and DiPrete (2006).

I

The Fields

You have probably heard and read quite a lot about inequality in these years of financial crisis, but how much have you discerned about kinds of inequality other than those of income and wealth? About inequalities of health, lifespan and death, for instance? About how the unequal life situations of parents are affecting the bodies and the minds of their children? And how much have you noticed about various processes of equalization currently going on in some parts of this world? What opportunities have you had to look under the cover of ‘globalization’, at how and to what extent the processes of distribution in different areas of the planet are interconnected and interacting? If you don't agree with the current state of inequality, what institutions have to be changed first of all? What social forces can you hope for, and join if you should want?

Theorization about inequality made great advances in the decades preceding the current economic crisis, above all in the disciplines of social philosophy and of medicine and epidemiology – advances which have not yet been absorbed into mainstream social science or into general public discourse. Crucial theoretical questions are still left unanswered, not seriously reflected upon. What is wrong with inequality? Why do we resent the economic inequality of some, and admire that of others – of sports and entertainment stars, for example? What is the difference between inequality and difference? What kind of equality should contemporary democratic and libertarian egalitarians strive for? What are the social mechanisms through which inequality – and equality – are produced?

The question marks above, and other, related ones, have motivated me to add this contribution to the ongoing debate. While paying due attention to Mammon and his devotees – as well as my respect to his economic analysts – I am arguing that the violations of human capabilities which inequality constitutes require a much broader empirical and a much deeper theoretical approach than the existing offers.

Let us begin by looking at the fields of current experience.

1

Human, Nasty and Short: Life under Inequality

The Short Lives of the Unequalized

Inequality kills. Between 1990 and 2008, life expectancy for White American men without a college degree fell by three years, and White low-educated women had their lives shortened by more than five years (Olshansky et al. 2012: exhibit 2). Only AIDS in southern Africa and the restoration of capitalism in Russia have had a more lethal impact than the US social polarization in the boom years of Clinton and Bush. African Americans have shorter lives than White Americans, but here the gap has actually narrowed in the last two decades – after an early twentieth-century widening – between 1990 and 2009 (National Vital Statistics Reports 60:3, 2011, table 8). Inequalities of race and education together – Blacks with less than twelve years of education vs Whites with more than sixteen – cut the lives of the disadvantaged by twelve years in 2008 (Olshansky et al. 2012: 1805). That is the same as the national difference between the USA and Bolivia ( 2012: table 1).