Therborn G - The killing fields of inequality

Table of Contents

Copyright Gran Therborn 2013

The right of Gran 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

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

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)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Figures

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

Landmarks of existential (in)equality, 19002012

Global income inequality, 18202000

Tables

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

Two societies of perfect equality of opportunity with different outcome structures

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

Inequality mechanisms and their interactive dynamics

Equality mechanisms

The power of income redistribution

Top incomes in the world, 19132005

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

Gender inequality in the world, 2011

Income inequality in countries of the world, 20052011

Inequality of income opportunity by the end of the twentieth century

Capital managed by the top 50 firms in the US securities industry, 19722004

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.

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.