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Rising inequality is one of our most pressing social concerns. And it is not simply that some are advantaged while others are not, but that structures of inequality are self-reinforcing and cumulative; they become durable. The societal arrangements that in the past have produced more equal economic outcomes and social opportunities – such as expanded mass education, access to social citizenship and its benefits, and wealth redistribution – have often been attenuated and supplanted by processes that are instead inequality-inducing. This issue of Dædalus draws on a wide range of expertise to better understand and examine how economic conditions are linked, across time and levels of analysis, to other social, psychological, political, and cultural processes that can either counteract or reinforce durable inequalities.
Inequality Generation & Persistence as Multidimensional Processes: An Interdisciplinary Agenda
The Rise of Opportunity Markets: How Did It Happen & What Can We Do?
We describe the rise of “opportunity markets” that allow well-off parents to buy opportunity for their children. Although parents cannot directly buy a middle-class outcome for their children, they can buy opportunity indirectly through advantaged access to the schools, neighborhoods, and information that create merit and raise the probability of a middle-class outcome. The rise of opportunity markets happened so gradually that the country has seemingly forgotten that opportunity was not always sold on the market. If the United States were to recommit to equalizing opportunities, this could be pursued by dismantling opportunity markets, by providing low-income parents with the means to participate in them, or by allocating educational opportunities via separate competitions among parents of similar means. The latter approach, which we focus upon here, would not require mobilizing support for a massive re-distributive project.
The Difficulties of Combating Inequality in Time
Scholars have argued that disadvantaged groups face an impossible choice in their efforts to win policies capable of diminishing inequality: whether to emphasize their sameness to or difference from the advantaged group. We analyze three cases from the 1980s and 1990s in which reformers sought to avoid that dilemma and assert groups’ sameness and difference in novel ways: in U.S. policy on biomedical research, in the European Union’s initiatives on gender equality, and in Canadian law on Indigenous rights. In each case, however, the reforms adopted ultimately reproduced the sameness/difference dilemma rather than transcended it.
Political Inequality, “Real” Public Preferences, Historical Comparisons & Axes of Disadvantage
The essays in this issue of Dædalus raise fascinating and urgent questions about inequality, time, and interdisciplinary research. They lead me to ask further questions about the public’s commitment to reducing inequality, the importance of political power in explaining and reducing social and economic inequities, and the possible incommensurability of activists’ and policy-makers’ vantage points or job descriptions.
New Angles on Inequality
The trenchant essays in this volume pose two critical questions with respect to inequality: First, what explains the eruption of nationalist, xenophobic, and far-right politics and the ability of extremists to gain a toehold in the political arena that is greater than at any time since World War II? Second, how did the social distance between the haves and have-not harden into geographic separation that makes it increasingly difficult for those attempting to secure jobs, housing, and mobility-ensuring schools to break through? The answers are insightful and unsettling, particularly when the conversation turns to an action agenda. Every move in the direction of alternatives is fraught because the histories that brought each group of victims to occupy their uncomfortable niche in the stratification order excludes some who should be included or ignores a difference that matters in favor of principles of equal treatment.
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