Eric A. Schutz - Inequality and Power: The Economics of Class

This book is about the causes and consequences of economic inequality in the advanced market economies of today. It is commonplace that in market systems people choose their own individual economic destinies, but of course the choices people make are importantly determined by the alternatives available to them: economic disparity arises mainly from unequal opportunity. Yet this merely begs the question; from whence do the vast existing inequalities of opportunity arise? This book theorizes power and social class as the real crux of economic inequality.

Most of mainstream economics studiously eschews questions involving social power, preferring to focus instead on individual choice subject to constraint in contexts of well-functioning markets. Yet both extra-market power structures and power structures arising from within the market system itself are unavoidably characteristic of real-world market-based economies. The normal working of labor and financial markets engenders an inherent wealth-favoring bias in the distribution of opportunities for occupational choice. That bias is greatly compounded by the economic, social, political and cultural power structures that constitute the class system. Those power structures work to distribute economic benefit to class elites, and are in turn undergirded by the disparities of wealth they thus help engender.

Inequality and Power offers an economic analysis of the power structures constituting that class system: employers power over employees; the power of certain businesses over others; professionals power over their clients and other employees; cultural power in the media and education systems; and political power in democratic government. Schutz argues that a class analysis of the trend of increasing economic inequality today is superior to the mainstream economic analysis of that trend. After considering what is wrong with power-based inequality in term of criteria of distributive justice and economic functionality, the book concludes with an outline of various possible correctives.

This book should be of interest to students and researchers in economics, sociology, political science and philosophy, as well as anyone interested in theories of social class.

Eric A. Schutz is a Professor of Economics at Rollins College, USA.

1 Equilibrium Versus

Understanding

Towards the rehumanization of

economics within social theory

Mark Addleson

2 Evolution, Order and

Complexity

Edited by Elias L. Khalil and

Kenneth E. Boulding

3 Interactions in Political

Economy

Malvern after ten years

Edited by Steven Pressman

4 The End of Economics

Michael Perelman

5 Probability in Economics

Omar F. Hamouda and

Robin Rowley

6 Capital Controversy, Post

Keynesian Economics and the

History of Economics

Essays in honour of

Geoff Harcourt, volume one

Edited by Philip Arestis,

Gabriel Palma and

Malcolm Sawyer

7 Markets, Unemployment and

Economic Policy

Essays in honour of

Geoff Harcourt, volume two

Edited by Philip Arestis,

Gabriel Palma and

Malcolm Sawyer

8 Social Economy

The logic of capitalist

development

Clark Everling

9 New Keynesian Economics/Post

Keynesian Alternatives

Edited by Roy J. Rotheim

10 The Representative Agent in

Macroeconomics

James E. Hartley

11 Borderlands of Economics

Essays in honour of

Daniel R. Fusfeld

Edited by Nahid Aslanbeigui and

Young Back Choi

12 Value, Distribution and Capital

Essays in honour of

Pierangelo Garegnani

Edited by Gary Mongiovi and

Fabio Petri

13 The Economics of Science

Methodology and epistemology as

if economics really mattered

James R. Wible

14 Competitiveness, Localised

Learning and Regional

Development

Specialisation and prosperity in

small open economies

Peter Maskell, Heikki Eskelinen,

Ingjaldur Hannibalsson,

Anders Malmberg and Eirik Vatne

15 Labour Market Theory

A constructive reassessment

Ben J. Fine

16 Women and European

Employment

Jill Rubery, Mark Smith,

Colette Fagan and

Damian Grimshaw

17 Explorations in Economic

Methodology

From Lakatos to empirical

philosophy of science

Roger Backhouse

18 Subjectivity in Political

Economy

Essays on wanting and choosing

David P. Levine

19 The Political Economy of

Middle East Peace

The impact of competing trade

agendas

Edited by J.W. Wright, Jnr

20 The Active Consumer

Novelty and surprise in consumer

choice

Edited by Marina Bianchi

21 Subjectivism and Economic

Analysis

Essays in memory of

Ludwig Lachmann

Edited by Roger Koppl and

Gary Mongiovi

22 Themes in Post-Keynesian

Economics

Essays in honour of

Geoff Harcourt, volume three

Edited by Claudio Sardoni and

Peter Kriesler

23 The Dynamics of Technological

Knowledge

Cristiano Antonelli

24 The Political Economy of Diet,

Health and Food Policy

Ben J. Fine

25 The End of Finance

Capital market inflation, financial

derivatives and pension fund

capitalism

Jan Toporowski

26 Political Economy and the New

Capitalism

Edited by Jan Toporowski

27 Growth Theory

A philosophical perspective

Patricia Northover

28 The Political Economy of the

Small Firm

Edited by Charlie Dannreuther

29 Hahn and Economic

Methodology

Edited by Thomas Boylan and

Paschal F. OGorman

30 Gender, Growth and Trade

The miracle economies of the

postwar years

David Kucera

31 Normative Political Economy

Subjective freedom, the market

and the state

David Levine

32 Economist with a Public Purpose

Essays in honour of

John Kenneth Galbraith

Edited by Michael Keaney

33 Involuntary Unemployment

The elusive quest for a theory

Michel De Vroey

34 The Fundamental Institutions of

Capitalism

Ernesto Screpanti

35 Transcending Transaction

The search for self-generating

markets

Alan Shipman

36 Power in Business and the State

An historical analysis of its

concentration

Frank Bealey

37 Editing Economics

Essays in honour of Mark Perlman

Edited by Hank Lim,

Ungsuh K. Park and

Geoff Harcourt

38 Money, Macroeconomics and

Keynes

Essays in honour of Victoria

Chick, volume one

Edited by Philip Arestis,

Meghnad Desai and Sheila Dow

39 Methodology, Microeconomics

and Keynes

Essays in honour of

Victoria Chick, volume two

Edited by Philip Arestis,

Meghnad Desai and Sheila Dow

40 Market Drive and Governance

Reexamining the rules for

economic and commercial contest

Ralf Boscheck

41 The Value of Marx

Political economy for

contemporary capitalism

Alfredo Saad-Filho

42 Issues in Positive Political

Economy

S. Mansoob Murshed

43 The Enigma of Globalisation

A journey to a new stage of

capitalism

Robert Went

44 The Market

Equilibrium, stability, mythology

S.N. Afriat

45 The Political Economy of Rule

Evasion and Policy Reform

Jim Leitzel

46 Unpaid Work and the Economy