The Legitimacy of Economic Inequality

The Legitimacy of Economic Inequality

Author: Juan Carlos Castillo

Publisher: Universal-Publishers

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1599423766

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This research is an empirical study of the legitimacy of economic inequality with a focus on the case of Chile. Chile is an appealing case study in this regard because it has been one of the countries with the highest indexes of economic inequality over the past several decades. Theoretical perspectives based on the rational interest of the median voter have pointed out a negative association between high levels of inequality and legitimacy. Nevertheless, empirical evidence indicates that an unequal distribution of income is not necessarily challenged by the majority of a society, a phenomenon associated with the concept of legitimacy of economic inequality. Most empirical studies of this topic to date have considered social contexts that are not characterized by (comparatively) high levels of income inequality; thus, the impact of the level of inequality on its legitimacy remains largely unclear. The present study aimed at bridging this research gap, guided by the question: How do high levels of income inequality in a society influence the legitimacy of economic inequality? Using data obtained by comparative public opinion projects including the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and the International Social Justice Project (ISJP), this research considered individual preferences for occupational earnings inequality (the just earnings gap) as the main object of study. The central hypothesis was that individual preferences are strongly influenced by contextual standards such as the current income distribution, leading individuals of countries with high levels of inequality to have stronger average preferences for economic inequality (the so-called existential argument). Empirical evidence of legitimacy was related to two central dimensions based on David Beetham's multidimensional concept of legitimacy: (a) consensus regarding the inequality in the distribution of earnings in Chile and (b) the impact of the country level of income inequality on individual preferences for a larger just earnings gap. The empirical analysis provided partial evidence regarding the consensus about inequality in Chile, whereas in an international comparative framework, countries with higher levels of income inequality showed a stronger preference for a larger just earnings gap.


The Return of Inequality

The Return of Inequality

Author: Mike Savage

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 0674259645

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A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.


Income Inequality in Capitalist Democracies

Income Inequality in Capitalist Democracies

Author: Vicki L. Birchfield

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0271047461

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"Examines patterns of income inequality among 16 advanced democracies from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s and explains why some societies have a large and growing divide between the rich and the poor while others, facing similar global economic pressures, maintain more egalitarian income distributions"--Provided by publisher.


The Quality of Government

The Quality of Government

Author: Bo Rothstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-09

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0226729575

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The relationship between government, virtue, and wealth has held a special fascination since Aristotle, and the importance of each frames policy debates today in both developed and developing countries. While it’s clear that low-quality government institutions have tremendous negative effects on the health and wealth of societies, the criteria for good governance remain far from clear. In this pathbreaking book, leading political scientist Bo Rothstein provides a theoretical foundation for empirical analysis on the connection between the quality of government and important economic, political, and social outcomes. Focusing on the effects of government policies, he argues that unpredictable actions constitute a severe impediment to economic growth and development—and that a basic characteristic of quality government is impartiality in the exercise of power. This is borne out by cross-sectional analyses, experimental studies, and in-depth historical investigations. Timely and topical, The Quality of Government tackles such issues as political legitimacy, social capital, and corruption.


Analyzing Oppression

Analyzing Oppression

Author: Ann E. Cudd

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0195187431

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Analyzing Oppression presents a new, integrated theory of social oppression, which tackles the fundamental question that no theory of oppression has satisfactorily answered: if there is no natural hierarchy among humans, why are some cases of oppression so persistent? Cudd argues that the explanation lies in the coercive co-opting of the oppressed to join in their own oppression. This answer sets the stage for analysis throughout the book, as it explores the questions of how and why the oppressed join in their oppression. Cudd argues that oppression is an institutionally structured harm perpetrated on social groups by other groups using direct and indirect material, economic, and psychological force. Among the most important and insidious of the indirect forces is an economic force that operates through oppressed persons' own rational choices. This force constitutes the central feature of analysis, and the book argues that this force is especially insidious because it conceals the fact of oppression from the oppressed and from others who would be sympathetic to their plight. The oppressed come to believe that they suffer personal failings and this belief appears to absolve society from responsibility. While on Cudd's view oppression is grounded in material exploitation and physical deprivation, it cannot be long sustained without corresponding psychological forces. Cudd examines the direct and indirect psychological forces that generate and sustain oppression. She discusses strategies that groups have used to resist oppression and argues that all persons have a moral responsibility to resist in some way. In the concluding chapter Cudd proposes a concept of freedom that would be possible for humans in a world that is actively opposing oppression, arguing that freedom for each individual is only possible when we achieve freedom for all others.


America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality

America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality

Author: Clement Fatovic

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2014-12-04

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0700621733

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If, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers' arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued. Fatovic reveals a deep concern among the Founders--including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Noah Webster--about the impact of economic inequality on political freedom. America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality traces this concern through many important political debates in Congress and the broader polity that shaped the early Republic--debates over tax policies, public works, public welfare, and the debt from the Revolution. We see how Alexander Hamilton, so often characterized as a cold-hearted apologist for plutocrats, actually favored a more progressive system of taxation, along with various policies aimed at easing the economic hardship of specific groups. In Thomas Paine, frequently portrayed as an advocate of laissez-faire government, we find a champion of a comprehensive welfare state that would provide old-age pensions, public housing, and a host of other benefits as a matter of "right, not charity." Contrary to the picture drawn by so many of today's pundits and politicians, this book shows us how, for the first American statesmen, preventing or minimizing economic disparities was essential to the preservation of the new nation's freedom and practice of self-government.


The Politics of Inequality

The Politics of Inequality

Author: Michael Thompson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0231140746

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Since the early days of the American republic, political thinkers have maintained that a grossly unequal division of property, wealth, and power would lead to the erosion of democratic life. Yet over the past thirty-five years, neoconservatives and neoliberals alike have redrawn the tenets of American liberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in our current mainstream political discourse, in which the politics of economic inequality are rarely discussed. In this impassioned book, Michael J. Thompson reaches back into America's rich intellectual history to reclaim the politics of inequality from the distortion of recent American conservatism. He begins by tracing the development of the idea of economic inequality as it has been conceived by political thinkers throughout American history. Then he considers the change in ideas and values that have led to the acceptance and occasional legitimization of economic divisions. Thompson argues that American liberalism has made a profound departure from its original practice of egalitarian critique. It has all but abandoned its antihierarchical and antiaristocratic discourse. Only by resuscitating this tradition can democracy again become meaningful to Americans. The intellectuals who pioneered egalitarian thinking in America believed political and social relations should be free from all forms of domination, servitude, and dependency. They wished to expose the antidemocratic character of economic life under capitalism and hoped to prevent the kind of inequalities that compromise human dignity and freedom-the core principles of early American politics. In their wisdom is a much broader, more compelling view of democratic life and community than we have today, and with this book, Thompson eloquently and adamantly fights to recover this crucial strand of political thought. In this impassioned book, Michael J. Thompson reaches back into America's rich intellectual history to reclaim the politics of inequality from the distortion of recent American conservatism. He begins by tracing the development of the idea of economic inequality as it has been conceived by political thinkers throughout American history. Then he considers the change in ideas and values that have led to the acceptance and occasional legitimization of economic divisions. Thompson argues that American liberalism has made a profound departure from its original practice of egalitarian critique; it has all but abandoned its antihierarchical and antiaristocratic discourse. Only by resuscitating this tradition can democracy again become meaningful to Americans. The intellectuals who pioneered egalitarian thinking in America believed political and social relations should be free from all forms of domination, servitude, and dependency. They wished to expose the antidemocratic character of economic life under capitalism and hoped to prevent the kind of inequalities that compromise human dignity and freedom--the core principles of early American politics. In their wisdom is a much broader, more compelling view of democratic life and community than we have today, and with this book, Thompson eloquently and adamantly fights to recover this crucial strand of political thought.


Power Switch

Power Switch

Author: Paul O'Brien

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2020-11-27

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 1789047501

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"The bad news is that the world is in crisis; the good news is that transformative activism can overcome it. Will the more formal progressive institutions have the courage to go all in with that activism?" Ben Phillips, author of How to Fight Inequality Is it actually possible? ...that we might emerge from this pandemic with a peaceful global power switch from those who have too much to those who don't have enough? With billionaires able to decide the fate of nations, private corporations more powerful and less accountable than ever, and political autocrats around the world shaking our confidence in democratic institutions, power resides in all the wrong places. And so our world is in crisis. In such moments, activists find opportunities. Not to restore the pre-crises order, but to transform it. Paul O'Brien argues that progressive activists may never have a better opportunity to rewrite economic rules, systems and outcomes in favor of those who don't have enough. His book offers practical action steps for activists who want to drive a power switch that overcomes extreme inequalities in our world.


The Economic Other

The Economic Other

Author: Meghan Condon

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-08-13

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 022669190X

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Economic inequality is at a record high in the United States, but public demand for redistribution is not rising with it. Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky show that this paradox and other mysteries about class and US politics can be solved through a focus on social comparison. Powerful currents compete to propel attention up or down—toward the rich or the poor—pulling politics along in the wake. Through an astute blend of experiments, surveys, and descriptions people offer in their own words, The Economic Other reveals that when less-advantaged Americans compare with the rich, they become more accurate about their own status and want more from government. But American society is structured to prevent upward comparison. In an increasingly divided, anxious nation, opportunities to interact with the country’s richest are shrinking, and people prefer to compare to those below to feel secure. Even when comparison with the rich does occur, many lose confidence in their power to effect change. Laying bare how social comparisons drive political attitudes, The Economic Other is an essential look at the stubborn plight of inequality and the measures needed to solve it.


Why Does Inequality Matter?

Why Does Inequality Matter?

Author: Thomas Scanlon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0198812698

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Inequality is widely regarded as morally objectionable: T. M. Scanlon investigates why it matters to us. He considers the nature and importance of equality of opportunity, whether the pursuit of greater equality involves objectionable interference with individual liberty, and whether the rich can be said to deserve their greater rewards.