Download or read book Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege written by Charles Hugh Smith and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inequality is rising globally, and rising inequality is destabilizing. A status quo of increasing inequality self-destructs. To avoid this fate, we must answer this question: Why is the gulf between the wealthy and everyone else widening so dramatically? The answer boils down to one word: privilege. What is privilege? There are many types of privilege, but they all share two characteristics: privilege delivers benefits, wealth and power that are unearned. Privilege is destabilizing for many reasons: the dead weight of privilege reduces productivity, generates perverse incentives and fuels social injustice. Innovation and competition are threats to privileged monopolies and are therefore suppressed. The only way to foster sustainable stability is to eradicate privilege. We have a moral imperative to eradicate privilege: privilege is immoral, as rising inequality is the only possible output of privilege. Privilege is exploitive, parasitic, predatory and destructive to the society and economy, and generates inequality by its very nature. Stripped to its essence, privilege is nothing but institutionalized racketeering. The only way to reverse rising inequality is to eradicate its source: privilege.
Download or read book Inequality written by Jonathan H. Turner and published by . This book was released on 1976-02 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Decline of Privilege written by Joseph A. Soares and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Book Award, 2000, Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association This book studies Oxford University’s transformation—and the political hazards for academics that ensued—when, after World War II, it changed from a private liberal-arts club with aristocratic pretensions into a state university heavily committed to the natural sciences, and with a middle-class consituency and a meritocratic ethos.
Download or read book Privilege Lost written by Jessi Streib and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are two narratives of the American class structure: one of a country with boundless opportunities for upward mobility and one of a rigid class system in which the rich stay rich while the poor stay poor. Each of these narratives holds some truth, but each overlooks another. In Privilege Lost, Jessi Streib traces the lives of over 100 youth born into the upper-middle-class. Following them for over ten years as they transition from teens to young adults, Streib examines who falls from the upper-middle-class, how, and why don't they see it coming. In doing so, she reveals the patterned ways that individuals' resources and identities push them onto mobility paths--and the complicated choices youth make between staying true to themselves and staying in their class position. Engaging and eye-opening, Privilege Lost brings to life the stories of the downwardly mobile and highlights what they reveal about class, privilege, and American family life.
Download or read book The Privileges of Wealth written by Robert Williams and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Privileges of Wealth investigates the impact of the rising concentration of wealth in the United States. It describes how households accumulate wealth along four pathways - household saving, appreciation of assets, family gifts and inheritances, and federal wealth policies – which operate as virtuous cycles for the rich and vicious circles for the poor. This book explains how these sources of wealth privilege are systemic features of our economy and the basis of rising disparities, particularly the racial wealth gap. The book offers a compelling case for how our current policies are undermining the American Dream for most Americans while fortifying a White plutocracy, with dire consequences.
Download or read book The Great Leveler written by Walter Scheidel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How only violence and catastrophes have consistently reduced inequality throughout world history Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world. Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The "Four Horsemen" of leveling—mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues—have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich. Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future. An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent—and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.
Download or read book When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People written by Dara Z. Strolovitch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-07-05 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States. From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do? In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.
Download or read book Privilege and Punishment written by Matthew Clair and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court—and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice. Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today’s criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.
Download or read book The Class Ceiling written by Friedman, Sam and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2020-01-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicians continually tell us that anyone can get ahead. But is that really true? This important best-selling book takes readers behind the closed doors of elite employers to reveal how class affects who gets to the top. Friedman and Laurison show that a powerful ‘class pay gap’ exists in Britain’s elite occupations. Even when those from working-class backgrounds make it into prestigious jobs, they earn, on average, 16% less than colleagues from privileged backgrounds. But why is this the case? . Drawing on 175 interviews across four case studies - television, accountancy, architecture, and acting – they explore the complex barriers facing the upwardly mobile. This is a rich, ambitious book that demands we take seriously not just the glass but also the class ceiling.
Download or read book Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt written by Paolo Verme and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt: Facts and Perceptions Across People, Time, and Space comprises four papers prepared in the framework of the Egypt inequality study financed by the World Bank. The first paper, by Sherine Al-Shawarby, reviews the studies on inequality in Egypt since the 1950s with the double objective of illustrating the importance attributed to inequality through time and of presenting and compare the main published statistics on inequality. The second paper, by Branko Milanovic, turns to the global and spatial dimensions of inequality. The Egyptian society remains deeply divided across space and in terms of welfare, and this study unveils some of the hidden features of this inequality. The third paper, by Paolo Verme, studies facts and perceptions of inequality during the 2000-2009 period, which preceded the Egyptian revolution. The fourth paper, by Sahar El Tawila, May Gadallah, and Enas Ali A.El-Majeed, assesses the state of poverty and inequality among the poorest villages of Egypt. The paper attempts to explain the level of inequality in an effort to disentangle those factors that derive from household abilities from those factors that derive from local opportunities. Inside Inequality in the Arab Republic of Egypt provides some initial elements that could explain the apparent mismatch between inequality measured with household surveys and inequality aversion measured by values surveys. This is a particularly important and timely topic to address in light of the unfolding developments in the Arab region. The book should be of interest to any observer of the political and economic evolution of the Arab region in the past few years and to poverty and inequality specialists interested in a deeper understanding of the distribution of incomes in Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. World Bank Studies are available individually or on standing order. The World Bank Studies series is also available online through the Open Knowledge Repository (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/) and the World Bank e-Library (www.worldbank.org/elibrary). Book jacket.
Download or read book The Power of Privilege written by Joseph A. Soares and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of why acceptance into America's most prestigious colleges remains beyond the reach of most students except those from high-income professional families.
Download or read book The Collapse of Complex Societies written by Joseph Tainter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.
Download or read book Privilege Power And Difference written by Allan G. Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Meritocracy Trap written by Daniel Markovits and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary new argument from eminent Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits attacking the false promise of meritocracy It is an axiom of American life that advantage should be earned through ability and effort. Even as the country divides itself at every turn, the meritocratic ideal – that social and economic rewards should follow achievement rather than breeding – reigns supreme. Both Democrats and Republicans insistently repeat meritocratic notions. Meritocracy cuts to the heart of who we are. It sustains the American dream. But what if, both up and down the social ladder, meritocracy is a sham? Today, meritocracy has become exactly what it was conceived to resist: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth and privilege across generations. Upward mobility has become a fantasy, and the embattled middle classes are now more likely to sink into the working poor than to rise into the professional elite. At the same time, meritocracy now ensnares even those who manage to claw their way to the top, requiring rich adults to work with crushing intensity, exploiting their expensive educations in order to extract a return. All this is not the result of deviations or retreats from meritocracy but rather stems directly from meritocracy’s successes. This is the radical argument that Daniel Markovits prosecutes with rare force. Markovits is well placed to expose the sham of meritocracy. Having spent his life at elite universities, he knows from the inside the corrosive system we are trapped within. Markovits also knows that, if we understand that meritocratic inequality produces near-universal harm, we can cure it. When The Meritocracy Trap reveals the inner workings of the meritocratic machine, it also illuminates the first steps outward, towards a new world that might once again afford dignity and prosperity to the American people.
Download or read book Is Inequality in America Irreversible written by Chuck Collins and published by Polity. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living in a time of extreme inequality: America’s three richest people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. Although most accept that this is grotesque, many politicians accept it as irreversible. In this book, leading US researcher and activist Chuck Collins succinctly diagnoses the drivers of rampant inequality, arguing that such disparities have their roots in 40 years of the powerful rigging the system in their favor. He proposes a far-reaching policy agenda, analyzes the barriers to progress, and shows how transformative local campaigns can become a national movement for change. This book is a powerful analysis of how the plutocracy sold us a toxic lie, and what we can do to reverse inequality.
Download or read book Inequality Class and Economics written by Eric Schutz and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the economic inequalities pervading every aspect of society - and then multiplied them to a staggering degree. In Inequality, Class, and Economics, Eric Schutz illuminates the pillars undergirding the monstrous polarities which define our times revealing them as the structures of power that constitute the foundations of the class system of today's capitalism. Employers' power is the linchpin of that system, but the power of professionals in all fields, the power exerted by some businesses over others, political power, and the power of cultural institutions - especially mass media and education - are also critical for the class system today. Each of these social power structures is examined closely and shown both to sustain, and to be sustained by, economic inequality. Employing both traditional and novel approaches to public policy, Inequality, Class, and Economics denounces economists' studied avoidance of the problem of class as a system of inequality based in unequal opportunity, and exhorts us to tackle the heart of the problem at long last."--Back cover.
