"Economic research on the efficient allocation of resources has a long history. Increasingly, attention has turned to inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes, and whether individuals or children are locked in their respective places in this distribution or whether mobility is possible. Research focuses not only on measuring inequality and mobility, but on understanding its historical, economic, and social determinants, and how policies might affect these distributions. This volume explores the latest developments in our understanding of income and wealth distribution and mobility. The first section addresses observed patterns of income inequality and shifts in compensation and fluidity that drive or reinforce income inequality. The next focuses on wealth inequality, including the difficulties of defining and measuring wealth. The third section presents new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the mechanisms that sustain these patterns. A fourth set of chapters studies the mitigation of inequality, including variations in intervention strategies across time and geography. Finally, issues related to using national accounting data in comparison with survey and microdata are examined. Lack of data, particularly wealth data at the individual or household level in most countries, presents a challenge. Momentum has been building to link multiple sources of survey, administrative and other data in order to mitigate measurement problems in single sources and to provide more comprehensive data on income and wealth"--
Oriented toward the introductory student, The Inequality Reader is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more alive, more accessible, and more relevant. Now more than ever, The Inequality Reader is the one-stop compendium of all the must-read pieces, simply the best available introduction to the stratifi cation canon.
Adapted in part from the "Opportunity in America" series of policy briefs, this volume focuses on social and economic mobility in the United States. Class or family background has a strong effect on individual success, the authors find. They examine the possible reasons for this relationship; how it has changed over the past century; and the role of the economy, the welfare system, and education in opening up opportunities for the less fortunate.
This paper analyzes the extent of income inequality from a global perspective, its drivers, and what to do about it. The drivers of inequality vary widely amongst countries, with some common drivers being the skill premium associated with technical change and globalization, weakening protection for labor, and lack of financial inclusion in developing countries. We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down. This suggests that policies need to be country specific but should focus on raising the income share of the poor, and ensuring there is no hollowing out of the middle class. To tackle inequality, financial inclusion is imperative in emerging and developing countries while in advanced economies, policies should focus on raising human capital and skills and making tax systems more progressive.
Does economic inequality in one generation lead to inequality of opportunity in the next? In From Parents to Children, an esteemed international group of scholars investigates this question using data from ten countries with differing levels of inequality. The book compares whether and how parents' resources transmit advantage to their children at different stages of development and sheds light on the structural differences among countries that may influence intergenerational mobility. How and why is economic mobility higher in some countries than in others? The contributors find that inequality in mobility-relevant skills emerges early in childhood in all of the countries studied. Bruce Bradbury and his coauthors focus on learning readiness among young children and show that as early as age five, large disparities in cognitive and other mobility-relevant skills develop between low- and high-income kids, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Such disparities may be mitigated by investments in early childhood education, as Christelle Dumas and Arnaud Lefranc demonstrate. They find that universal pre-school education in France lessens the negative effect of low parental SES and gives low-income children a greater shot at social mobility. Katherine Magnuson, Jane Waldfogel, and Elizabeth Washbrook find that income-based gaps in cognitive achievement in the United States and the United Kingdom widen as children reach adolescence. Robert Haveman and his coauthors show that the effect of parental income on test scores increases as children age; and in both the United States and Canada, having parents with a higher income betters the chances that a child will enroll in college. As economic inequality in the United States continues to rise, the national policy conversation will not only need to address the devastating effects of rising inequality in this generation but also the potential consequences of the decline in mobility from one generation to the next. Drawing on unparalleled international datasets, From Parents to Children provides an important first step.
Americans like to believe that theirs is the land of opportunity, but the hard facts are that children born into poor families in the United States tend to stay poor and children born into wealthy families generally stay rich. Other countries have shown more success at lessening the effects of inequality on mobility—possibly by making public investments in education, health, and family well-being that offset the private advantages of the wealthy. What can the United States learn from these other countries about how to provide children from disadvantaged backgrounds an equal chance in life? Making comparisons across ten countries, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting brings together a team of eminent international scholars to examine why advantage and disadvantage persist across generations. The book sheds light on how the social and economic mobility of children differs within and across countries and the impact private family resources, public policies, and social institutions may have on mobility. In what ways do parents pass advantage or disadvantage on to their children? Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting is an expansive exploration of the relationship between parental socioeconomic status and background and the outcomes of their grown children. The authors also address the impact of education and parental financial assistance on mobility. Contributors Miles Corak, Lori Curtis, and Shelley Phipps look at how family economic background influences the outcomes of adult children in the United States and Canada. They find that, despite many cultural similarities between the two countries, Canada has three times the rate of intergenerational mobility as the United States—possibly because Canada makes more public investments in its labor market, health care, and family programs. Jo Blanden and her colleagues explore a number of factors affecting how advantage is transmitted between parents and children in the United States and the United Kingdom, including education, occupation, marriage, and health. They find that despite the two nations having similar rates of intergenerational mobility and social inequality, lack of educational opportunity plays a greater role in limiting U.S. mobility, while the United Kingdom’s deeply rooted social class structure makes it difficult for the disadvantaged to transcend their circumstances. Jane Waldfogel and Elizabeth Washbrook examine cognitive and behavioral school readiness across income groups and find that pre-school age children in both the United States and Britain show substantial income-related gaps in school readiness—driven in part by poorly developed parenting skills among overburdened, low-income families. The authors suggest that the most encouraging policies focus on both school and home interventions, including such measures as increases in federal funding for Head Start programs in the United States, raising pre-school staff qualifications in Britain, and parenting programs in both countries. A significant step forward in the study of intergenerational mobility, Persistence, Privilege, and Parenting demonstrates that the transmission of advantage or disadvantage from one generation to the next varies widely from country to country. This striking finding is a particular cause for concern in the United States, where the persistence of disadvantage remains stubbornly high. But, it provides a reason to hope that by better understanding mobility across the generations abroad, we can find ways to do better at home.
The authors conducted a systematic empirical study of cross-sectional inequality in the U.S., integrating data from various surveys. The authors follow the mapping suggested by the household budget constraint from individual wages to individual earnings, to household earnings, to disposable income, and, ultimately, to consumption and wealth. They document a continuous and sizable increase in wage inequality over the sample period. Changes in the distribution of hours worked sharpen the rise in earnings inequality before 1982, but mitigate its increase thereafter. Taxes and transfers compress the level of income inequality, especially at the bottom of the distribution, but have little effect on the overall trend. Charts and tables. This is a print-on-demand publication; it is not an original.
In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.
Leading scholars examine the conflicting paradigms of affluence and destitution in the United States—as well as other free societies—and discuss the influence of education, race, and status on economic mobility. While recent catastrophic events in New Orleans and Haiti may have magnified issues of social inequity, leaders have debated over poverty and discrimination for decades. Are the poor disadvantaged by the institutions of society or by the choices they make? Through two insightful volumes, the author examines differing academic and political perspectives to help shed light on the causes of poverty and inequality; the role that gender, race, age, or sexual preference plays in determining opportunity; and the effectiveness of current social and economic policies in balancing the inequity among disparate groups. The Economics of Inequality, Poverty, and Discrimination in the 21st Century consists of 2 volumes containing 32 papers divided into 5 categories: measurement, inequality and mobility, institutions and choices, demographic groups and discrimination, and policy. The papers—written by economists, sociologists, philosophers and lawyers—deal with the extent of inequality in the United States and how it compares to other countries, and the newly emerging evidence on the relationship between inequality and mobility within a society.
