Suchergebnisse

A review essay on a book by Glenn Firebaugh, The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 2003). Adapted from the source document.

It is by now well known that significant and growing economic inequality is a central feature of the U.S. economy, as previous articles in Monthly Review have shown. However, the same is also the case for much of the rest of the world. Inequality arises in other countries for reasons similar to those in the United States, but each nation has its own history, along with widely divergent economic and political structures. Here we will look first at the most recent data on global inequality, and then at its causes and consequences.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

"The globalization of trade, investment, and finance continues apace. Many have benefited from this, but deep inequalities persist. This book argues that the interconnections established by globalization make possible a critique of its inequality. For those who take seriously human dignity, equality is a basic presumption of social institutions"--Provided by publisher

Global inequality has been little analyzed by sociologists despite their claim to be the scienti?c experts most in charge of the study of human inequalities and social strati?cation. Most undergraduate courses on social inequalities study race, class and gender without ever acknowledging that the greatest inequalities are between those individuals and households that live in developed versus less developed societies. The amount of international inequality has vastly outweighed within country inequalities since at least the 1870s when a wave of economic globalization under the Pax Britannica increased average wages in the core while leaving most of the periphery and the semiperiphery at subsistence levels. Increasing inequality was one of the most important consequences of nineteenth century globalization, and this fact is pregnant with importance for those who seek to understand what the consequences of twentieth century globalization may be. Resistance to global capitalism and attacks on symbols of power are likely to increase, just as they did in the decades following the great expansion of trade and investment in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Research into the causes of increasing inequalities is thus extremely important for social scientists, policy makers and global citizens who need to understand how the world-system works in order to change it.

Inequality is currently gaining considerable attention in academic, policy, and media circles. From Thomas Piketty to Robert Putnam, there is no shortage of economic, sociological, or political analyses. But what does anthropology, with its focus on the qualitative character of relationships between people, have to offer? Drawing on current scholarship and illustrative ethnographic case studies, McGill argues that anthropology is particularly well suited to interrogating global inequality, not just within nations, but across nations as well. Brief, accessibly written, and peppered with vivid ethnographic examples that bring contemporary research to life, Global Inequality is an introduction to the topic from a unique and important perspective

AbstractIn this paper I shall argue that much of the existing global inequality is unjust, and that this injustice is not only because reducing inequality could serve the important goal of poverty reduction. I reject arguments of John Rawls and Thomas Nagel that limit the importance of distributive egalitarianism to states. I argue in contrast that a commitment to respect for human dignity has egalitarian distributive implications for the global economy. Injustice in the existing institutional order provides reasons for reforming the global institutional structure to reduce inequality. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents evidence for a common global pattern in the movement of inequality in national structures of pay, over the years 1963 to 1999. We find a worldwide pattern of declining inequality from 1971 until 1980, followed by a long and sharp period of increasing inequality from 1981 through the end of the century. The existence of a global pattern suggests that the study of inequality, long associated with the disparate effects of technology, trade in local or national labor markets and with national policy choices, would be better treated as a branch of a global macroeconomics, associated with the breakdown of Bretton Woods in 1971-73 and with the onset of the global debt crisis in 1981-82. The work is based on data sets developed by the University of Texas Inequality Project. [Copyright 2007 The Society for Policy Modeling; published by Elsevier Inc.]