Inequality in Modern Societies: Causes, Consequences and Challenges
The theme of inequality has an unequalled prominence in social science. The discovery of the difference between social inequality and natural inequality underpinned the very emergence of the social and cultural sciences in the 18th century, and the on-goi
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The theme of inequality has an unequalled prominence in social science. The discovery of the difference between social inequality and natural inequality underpinned the very emergence of the social and cultural sciences in the 18th century, and the on-going intellectual effort to understand inequality remains at the heart of many of its projects. Indeed, the possibility of drawing a fixed line between naturally ineradicable differences and socially adjustable ones is growing increasingly suspect, in a world in which developments of medical science and bio-technology challenge what was previously considered as a matter of life’s lottery. This issue is rightly gaining attention as the ethical and philosophical analyses of these developments attempt to keep pace with them (cf. Fuller, this volume). In the twentieth century, the term “social inequality” fell out of use to be replaced by the term “social stratification”. Over the last couple of decades, however, the concept of social inequality has re-assumed its previous dominance. Evidence attests to the pronounced increase of inequality on national and global levels; wealth circulates into the hands of a tiny cosmopolitan elite while a large number of people around the world remain impoverished (Rehbein, 2015: 149). Not only is there sharpening inequality in income but the world and its societies are unequal in many additional dimensions: wealth (cf. Blair and Wallman, 2001; Stiglitz, 2015), health (Lynch, Smith, Kaplan and House, 2000), life expectancy (Wilson and Daly, 1997), infant mortality (Antonowsky and Bernstein, 1977), political participation (Armingeon and Schädel, 2015), capabilities (Sen, 1992) and education (e. g. Neckermann and Torche, 2014). The robustness and interconnectedness of new forms of inequality demand attention. Not only is inequality on the rise, but research on inequality is bur1
We would like to thank Scott McNall, Alexander Ruser, Walter Rothenberger and Dustin Voss for their valuable input to this introduction.
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016 A. Machin and N. Stehr (Eds.), Understanding Inequality: Social Costs and Benefits, zu | schriften der Zeppelin Universität, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-11663-7_1
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Amanda Machin and Nico Stehr
geoning too. Alongside economic analysis, sociological and political approaches have revealed the complexity of inequality and its various manifestations: gender, sex, race, disability have joined class as categories, causes and effects of inequality. Growing recognition of the intersection of different types of inequality with each other and with educational opportunities and environmental circumstance has made it difficult to study any particular factor in isolation or to apply a simplistic model of stratification or hierarchy. Economic inequality correlates with political inequality and this can aggravate inequality in terms of social status, access to education, environmental goods, protection from health hazards and citizenship rights. It is not possible to discern valid policies for tackling sharp
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