modern inequality essay

Rising inequality: A major issue of our time

Subscribe to global connection, zia qureshi zia qureshi senior fellow - global economy and development.

May 16, 2023

Income and wealth inequality has risen in many countries in recent decades. Rising inequality and related disparities and anxieties have been stoking social discontent and are a major driver of the increased political polarization and populist nationalism that are so evident today. An increasingly unequal society can weaken trust in public institutions and undermine democratic governance. Mounting global disparities can imperil geopolitical stability. Rising inequality has emerged as an important topic of political debate and a major public policy concern.

High and rising inequality

Current inequality levels are high. Contemporary global inequalities are close to the peak levels observed in the early 20th century, at the end of the prewar era (variously described as the Belle Époque or the Gilded Age) that saw sharp increases in global inequality.

Over the past four decades, there has been a broad trend of rising income inequality across countries. Income inequality has risen in most advanced economies and major emerging economies, which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s population and 85 percent of global GDP (Figure 1). The increase has been particularly large in the United States, among advanced economies, and in China, India, and Russia, among major emerging economies.

Figure 1. Inequality has risen in most advanced and major emerging economies Richest 10% income share, 1980-2020

Source: Author, using data from World Inequality Database . Note: Pre-tax national income. Some data points are extrapolated.

Beyond these groups of countries, the trend in the developing world at large has been more mixed, but many countries have seen increases in inequality. In regions such as Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, income inequality levels on average have been relatively more stable, but inequality was already at high levels in these regions—the highest in the world.

Wealth inequality within countries is typically much higher than income inequality. It has followed a rising trend across countries since around 1980, similar to income inequality. Higher wealth inequality feeds higher future income inequality through capital income and inheritance.

The increase in inequality has been especially marked at the top end of the income distribution, with the income share of the top 10 percent (and even more so that of the top 1 percent) rising sharply in many countries. This was so particularly up to the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Those in low- and middle-income groups have suffered a loss of income share, with those in the bottom 50 percent typically experiencing larger losses of income share. These trends in inequality have been associated with an erosion of the middle class and a decline in intergenerational mobility , especially in advanced economies experiencing larger increases in inequality and a greater polarization in income distribution.

While within-country inequality has been rising, inequality between countries (reflecting per capita income differences) has been falling in recent decades. Faster-growing emerging economies, especially the large ones such as China and India, have been narrowing the income gap with advanced economies. Global inequality—the sum of within-country and between-country inequality—has declined somewhat since around 2000, with the fall in between-country inequality more than offsetting the rise in within-country inequality. As within-country inequality has been rising, it now accounts for a much larger part of global inequality (about two-thirds in 2020, up from less than half in 1980). Looking ahead, how within-country inequality evolves will matter even more for global inequality.

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The interplay between the evolution of within-country inequality and between-country inequality, coupled with the differential growth performance of emerging and advanced economies, in recent decades presents an interesting picture of middle-class dynamics at the global level (as depicted by the well-known “ elephant curve ” of the incidence of global economic growth). It shows, for the period since 1980, a rising middle class in the emerging world and a squeezed middle class in rich countries. It also shows an increasing concentration of income at the very top of the income distribution globally.

Drivers of rising inequality

Shifting economic paradigms are altering distributional dynamics. Transformative technological change, led by digital technologies, has been reshaping markets, business models, and the nature of work in ways that can increase inequality within economies. While the specifics differ across countries, this has been happening broadly through three channels: more unequal distribution of labor income with rising wage inequality as technology shifts labor demand from routine low- to middle-level skills to new, higher-level skills; shift of income from labor to capital with increasing automation and a decoupling of wages from firm profitability; and more unequal distribution of capital income with rising market power and economic rents enjoyed by dominant firms in increasingly concentrated and winner-takes-all markets. These dynamics are more evident in advanced economies but could increasingly impact developing economies as the new technologies favoring capital and higher-level skills make deeper inroads there.

Globalization (international trade, offshoring) also has contributed to rising inequality within economies, especially in advanced economies by negatively affecting wages and jobs of lower-skilled workers in tradable sectors. These sectors increasingly extend beyond manufacturing as digital globalization expands the range of activities, including services, deliverable across borders.

In emerging economies, technology is reshaping how international trade affects national inequality. The new technologies, born in advanced economies, are shifting manufacturing and global value chains toward higher capital and skill intensity. Leading manufacturing firms located in emerging economies and engaged in exporting are adopting these technologies in order to be able to compete, diminishing employment generation and wage growth prospects for less-skilled workers from this higher-productivity segment of industry in economies whose factor endowments would warrant less capital- and skill-intensive technologies—and thus limiting the potential of international trade to reduce inequality within these economies by boosting demand for their more abundant factor endowment (less-skilled workers). Meanwhile, smaller firms that absorb most such workers in these economies remain engaged in low-productivity activities, many in the informal economy and in petty service sectors.

Globalization has been a force in recent decades for reducing inequality between economies by expanding export opportunities for emerging economies and spurring their economic growth. But globalization’s role in promoting international economic convergence faces new challenges as technological change alters production processes and trade patterns (more on this below).

Other broad trends in recent decades affecting the distribution of income and wealth include changes in institutional settings such as economic deregulation, increasing financialization of economies coupled with a high concentration of financial income and wealth, and erosion of labor market institutions such as minimum wage laws and collective bargaining. Moreover, the redistributive role of the state has been weakening with declining tax progressivity and with transfer programs facing the pressure of tighter fiscal constraints.

Role of public policy

Large and persistent increases in inequality within economies are not an inevitable consequence of forces such as technological change and globalization. Much depends on how public policy responds to the new dynamics that these forces generate. In the midst of these common forces of change, the rise in inequality has been uneven across countries. The difference lies largely in countries’ institutional and policy settings and how they have responded. In general, looking across countries, public policy has been behind the curve. It has been slow to rise to the new challenges to promote more inclusive outcomes from economic change.

Public policy to reduce inequality is often viewed narrowly in terms of redistribution―taxes and transfers. This is indeed an important element, especially in view of the erosion of the state’s redistributive role in recent decades. But there is a much broader policy agenda of “predistribution” that can make the growth process itself more inclusive and produce better market outcomes—by promoting wider access to new opportunities for firms and workers and enhancing their capabilities to adjust as market dynamics shift.

This latter agenda of reforms spans competition policy and regulatory frameworks to keep markets competitive and inclusive in the digital age; innovation ecosystems and technology policies to put innovation to work for broader groups of people; digital infrastructure and literacy to reduce the digital divide; education and (re)training programs to upskill and reskill workers while addressing inequalities in access to these programs; and labor market policies and social protection systems to enable workers to obtain a fair share of economic returns and to support them in times of transition. In many of these reform areas, the new dynamics that economies are facing call for fresh thinking and significant policy overhaul.

Outlook for inequality

Absent more responsive policies to combat inequality, the current high levels of inequality are likely to persist or even rise further. Artificial intelligence and related new waves of digital technologies and automation could increase inequality further within countries. Even as new technologies increase productivity and produce greater economic affluence, and new jobs and tasks emerge to replace those displaced and so prevent large technological unemployment, inequality could reach much higher levels. The economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced some of the inequality-increasing dynamics. Also, a high and increasing concentration of wealth can exacerbate income inequality in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

Technological change also poses new challenges to global economic convergence that has reduced inequality between countries in the past couple of decades. Faster growth in emerging economies led by export of manufactures has depended greatly on their comparative advantage in labor-intensive manufacturing based on large populations of low-skill, low-wage workers. This source of comparative advantage increasingly will erode as automation of low-skill work expands. Emerging economies face the challenge of recalibrating their growth models as technology disrupts traditional pathways to growth and development.

Emerging economies’ growth prospects also face other headwinds, including the scarring effects of the pandemic and global supply chain disruptions exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and an unsettled global geopolitical environment, which would hit the more trade-dependent economies harder. If growth in emerging economies falters, the decline in between-country inequality will slow, which could stall or even reverse the modest decline in global inequality observed since about 2000 if within-country inequality continues to mount.

Climate change is another factor that could worsen inequality within and between countries. Low-income groups and countries are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and have less capacity to cope with them.

Income and wealth inequality is elevated. In the absence of policies to counter recent trends, inequality could rise to still higher levels. High and rising inequality entails adverse economic, social, and political consequences. Policymakers must pay more attention to the changing distributional dynamics in the digital age and harness the forces of change for more inclusive prosperity. History tells us that large and unabated rises in inequality can end up badly.

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What does gender equality look like today?

Date: Wednesday, 6 October 2021

Progress towards gender equality is looking bleak. But it doesn’t need to.

A new global analysis of progress on gender equality and women’s rights shows women and girls remain disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with disproportionately high job and livelihood losses, education disruptions and increased burdens of unpaid care work. Women’s health services, poorly funded even before the pandemic, faced major disruptions, undermining women’s sexual and reproductive health. And despite women’s central role in responding to COVID-19, including as front-line health workers, they are still largely bypassed for leadership positions they deserve.

UN Women’s latest report, together with UN DESA, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2021 presents the latest data on gender equality across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The report highlights the progress made since 2015 but also the continued alarm over the COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate effect on women’s well-being and the threat it poses to future generations.

We’re breaking down some of the findings from the report, and calling for the action needed to accelerate progress.

The pandemic is making matters worse

One and a half years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people remains devastating and disproportionate. The combined impact of conflict, extreme weather events and COVID-19 has deprived women and girls of even basic needs such as food security. Without urgent action to stem rising poverty, hunger and inequality, especially in countries affected by conflict and other acute forms of crisis, millions will continue to suffer.

A global goal by global goal reality check:

Goal 1. Poverty

In 2021, extreme poverty is on the rise and progress towards its elimination has reversed. An estimated 435 million women and girls globally are living in extreme poverty.

And yet we can change this .

Over 150 million women and girls could emerge from poverty by 2030 if governments implement a comprehensive strategy to improve access to education and family planning, achieve equal wages and extend social transfers.

Goal 2. Zero hunger

The global gender gap in food security has risen dramatically during the pandemic, with more women and girls going hungry. Women’s food insecurity levels were 10 per cent higher than men’s in 2020, compared with 6 per cent higher in 2019.

This trend can be reversed , including by supporting women small-scale producers, who typically earn far less than men, through increased funding, training and land rights reforms.

Goal 3. Good health and well-being

Disruptions in essential health services due to COVID-19 are taking a tragic toll on women and girls. In the first year of the pandemic, there were an estimated 1.4 million additional unintended pregnancies in lower and middle-income countries.

We need to do better .

Response to the pandemic must include prioritizing sexual and reproductive health services, ensuring they continue to operate safely now and after the pandemic is long over. In addition, more support is needed to ensure life-saving personal protection equipment, tests, oxygen and especially vaccines are available in rich and poor countries alike as well as to vulnerable population within countries.

Goal 4. Quality education

A year and a half into the pandemic, schools remain partially or fully closed in 42 per cent of the world’s countries and territories. School closures spell lost opportunities for girls and an increased risk of violence, exploitation and early marriage .

Governments can do more to protect girls education .

Measures focused specifically on supporting girls returning to school are urgently needed, including measures focused on girls from marginalized communities who are most at risk.

Goal 5. Gender equality

The pandemic has tested and even reversed progress in expanding women’s rights and opportunities. Reports of violence against women and girls, a “shadow” pandemic to COVID-19, are increasing in many parts of the world. COVID-19 is also intensifying women’s workload at home, forcing many to leave the labour force altogether.

Building forward differently and better will hinge on placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

Goal 6. Clean water and sanitation

In 2018, nearly 2.3 billion people lived in water-stressed countries. Without safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and menstrual hygiene facilities, women and girls find it harder to lead safe, productive and healthy lives.

Change is possible .

Involve those most impacted in water management processes, including women. Women’s voices are often missing in water management processes. 

Goal 7. Affordable and clean energy

Increased demand for clean energy and low-carbon solutions is driving an unprecedented transformation of the energy sector. But women are being left out. Women hold only 32 per cent of renewable energy jobs.

We can do better .

Expose girls early on to STEM education, provide training and support to women entering the energy field, close the pay gap and increase women’s leadership in the energy sector.

Goal 8. Decent work and economic growth

The number of employed women declined by 54 million in 2020 and 45 million women left the labour market altogether. Women have suffered steeper job losses than men, along with increased unpaid care burdens at home.

We must do more to support women in the workforce .

Guarantee decent work for all, introduce labour laws/reforms, removing legal barriers for married women entering the workforce, support access to affordable/quality childcare.

Goal 9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure

The COVID-19 crisis has spurred striking achievements in medical research and innovation. Women’s contribution has been profound. But still only a little over a third of graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field are female.

We can take action today.

 Quotas mandating that a proportion of research grants are awarded to women-led teams or teams that include women is one concrete way to support women researchers. 

Goal 10. Reduced inequalities

Limited progress for women is being eroded by the pandemic. Women facing multiple forms of discrimination, including women and girls with disabilities, migrant women, women discriminated against because of their race/ethnicity are especially affected.

Commit to end racism and discrimination in all its forms, invest in inclusive, universal, gender responsive social protection systems that support all women. 

Goal 11. Sustainable cities and communities

Globally, more than 1 billion people live in informal settlements and slums. Women and girls, often overrepresented in these densely populated areas, suffer from lack of access to basic water and sanitation, health care and transportation.

The needs of urban poor women must be prioritized .

Increase the provision of durable and adequate housing and equitable access to land; included women in urban planning and development processes.

Goal 12. Sustainable consumption and production; Goal 13. Climate action; Goal 14. Life below water; and Goal 15. Life on land

Women activists, scientists and researchers are working hard to solve the climate crisis but often without the same platforms as men to share their knowledge and skills. Only 29 per cent of featured speakers at international ocean science conferences are women.

 And yet we can change this .

Ensure women activists, scientists and researchers have equal voice, representation and access to forums where these issues are being discussed and debated. 

Goal 16. Peace, justice and strong institutions

The lack of women in decision-making limits the reach and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency recovery efforts. In conflict-affected countries, 18.9 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women, much lower than the global average of 25.6 per cent.

This is unacceptable .

It's time for women to have an equal share of power and decision-making at all levels.

Goal 17. Global partnerships for the goals

There are just 9 years left to achieve the Global Goals by 2030, and gender equality cuts across all 17 of them. With COVID-19 slowing progress on women's rights, the time to act is now.

Looking ahead

As it stands today, only one indicator under the global goal for gender equality (SDG5) is ‘close to target’: proportion of seats held by women in local government. In other areas critical to women’s empowerment, equality in time spent on unpaid care and domestic work and decision making regarding sexual and reproductive health the world is far from target. Without a bold commitment to accelerate progress, the global community will fail to achieve gender equality. Building forward differently and better will require placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

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The Equality Conundrum

Michael and Angela have just turned fifty-five. They know two people who have died in the past few years—one from cancer, another in a car accident. It occurs to them that they should make a plan for their kids. They have some money in the bank. Suppose they were both killed in a plane crash—what would happen to it?

They have four children, who range in age from their late teens to their late twenties. Chloe, the oldest, is a math wiz with a coding job at Google; she hopes to start her own company soon. Will, who has a degree in social work, is paying off his student debt while working at a halfway house for recovering addicts. The twins, James and Alexis, are both in college. James, a perpetually stoned underachiever, is convinced that he can make it as a YouTuber. (He’s already been suspended twice, for on-campus pranks.) Alexis, who hopes to become a poet, has a congenital condition that could leave her blind by middle age.

At first, Michael and Angela plan to divide their money equally. Then they start to think about it. Chloe is on the fast track to remunerative Silicon Valley success; Will is burdened by debt in his quest to help the vulnerable. If James were to come into an inheritance, he’d likely grow even lazier, spending it on streetwear and edibles; Alexis, with her medical situation, might need help later in life. Maybe, Michael and Angela think, it doesn’t make sense to divide the money into equal portions after all. Something more sophisticated might be required. What matters to them is that their children flourish equally, and this might mean giving the kids unequal amounts—an unappealing prospect.

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved. Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations. Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.

In 2014, the Pew Research Center asked Americans to rank the “greatest dangers in the world.” A plurality put inequality first, ahead of “religious and ethnic hatred,” nuclear weapons, and environmental degradation. And yet people don’t agree about what, exactly, “equality” means. In the past year, for example, New York City residents have found themselves in a debate over the city’s élite public high schools, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Some ethnicities are vastly overrepresented at the schools, while others are dramatically underrepresented. What to do? One side argues that the city should guarantee procedural equality: it should insure that all students and families are equally informed about and encouraged to study for the entrance exam. The other side argues for a more direct, representation-based form of equality: it would jettison the exam, adopting a new admissions system designed to produce student bodies reflective of the city’s demography. Both groups pursue worthy egalitarian goals, but each approach runs against the other. Because people and their circumstances differ, there is, Dworkin writes, a trade-off between treating people equally and treating them “as equals.”

The complexities of egalitarianism are especially frustrating because inequalities are so easy to grasp. C.E.O.s, on average, make almost three hundred times what their employees make; billionaire donors shape our politics; automation favors owners over workers; urban economies grow while rural areas stagnate; the best health care goes to the richest. Across the political spectrum, we grieve the loss of what Alexis de Tocqueville called the “general equality of conditions,” which, with the grievous exception of slavery, once shaped American society. It’s not just about money. Tocqueville, writing in 1835, noted that our “ordinary practices of life” were egalitarian, too: we behaved as if there weren’t many differences among us. Today, there are “premiere” lines for popcorn at the movies and five tiers of Uber; we still struggle to address obvious inequalities of all kinds based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity. Inequality is everywhere, and unignorable. We’ve diagnosed the disease. Why can’t we agree on a cure?

In January of 2015, Jeremy Waldron, a political philosopher at New York University’s School of Law, delivered a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh on the fundamental nature of human equality. He began by provoking his audience. “Look around you,” he said, “and look at the differences between you.” The crowd included the old and the young, men and women, the beautiful and the ugly, the rich and the poor, the healthy and the infirm, the high-status and the low. In theory, Waldron said, the audience could contain “soldiers as well as civilians, fugitives and convicts as well as law-abiding citizens, homeless people as well as property owners”—even “bankrupts, infants, lunatics,” all with different legal rights.

In a book based on those lectures, “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Waldron points out that people are also marked by differences of skill, experience, creativity, and virtue. Given such consequential differences, he asks, in what sense are people “equal”? Waldron believes in our fundamental equality; as a philosopher, however, he wants to know why he believes in it.

According to the Declaration of Independence, it is “self-evident” that all men are created equal. But, from a certain perspective, it’s our inequality that’s self-evident. A decade ago, the writer Deborah Solomon asked Donald Trump what he thought of the idea that “all men are created equal.” “It’s not true,” Trump reportedly said. “Some people are born very smart. Some people are born not so smart. Some people are born very beautiful, and some people are not, so you can’t say they’re all created equal.” Trump acknowledged that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law but concluded that “All men are created equal” is “a very confusing phrase to a lot of people.” More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.

In Waldron’s view, though, it’s not a binary choice; it’s possible to see people as equal and unequal simultaneously. A society can sort its members into various categories—lawful and criminal, brilliant and not—while also allowing some principle of basic equality to circumscribe its judgments and, in some contexts, override them. Egalitarians like Dworkin and Waldron call this principle “deep equality.” It’s because of deep equality that even those people who acquire additional, justified worth through their actions—heroes, senators, pop stars—can still be considered fundamentally no better than anyone else. By the same token, Waldron says, deep equality insures that even the most heinous murderer can be seen as a member of the human race, “with all the worth and status that this implies.” Deep equality—among other principles—ought to tell us that it’s wrong to sequester the small children of migrants in squalid prisons, whatever their legal status. Waldron wants to find its source.

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In the course of his search, he explores centuries of intellectual history. Many thinkers, from Cicero to Locke, have argued that our ability to reason is what makes us equals. (But isn’t this ability itself unequally distributed?) Other thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, have cited our moral sense. (But doesn’t this restrict equality to the virtuous?) Some philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, have suggested that it’s our capacity to suffer that equalizes us. (But then, many animals suffer, too.) Others have nominated our capacity to love. (But what about selfish, hard-hearted people?) It would be helpful, on a practical level, if there were a well-defined basis for our deep equality. Such a basis might guide our thinking. If deep equality turned out to be based on our ability to suffer, for example, then Michael and Angela might feel better about giving their daughter Alexis, who risks blindness, more money than her siblings. But Waldron finds none of these arguments totally persuasive.

In various religious traditions, he observes, equality flows not just from broad assurances that we are all made in God’s image but from some sense that everyone is the protagonist in a saga of error, realization, and redemption: we’re equal because God cares about how things turn out for each of us. He notes that atheists, too, might locate our equality in the idea that we each have our own story. Waldron himself is taken by Hannah Arendt’s related concept of “natality,” the notion that what each of us share is having been born as a “newcomer,” entering into history with “the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting.” And yet Arendt herself was pessimistic about the quest for a proof of equality; in her view, the Holocaust had revealed that there was “nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” If that’s true, then equality may be not a self-evident fact about human beings but a human-made social construction that we must choose to put into practice.

In the end, Waldron concludes that there is no “small polished unitary soul-like substance” that makes us equal; there’s only a patchwork of arguments for our deep equality, collectively compelling but individually limited. Equality is a composite idea—a nexus of complementary and competing intuitions.

The blurry nature of equality makes it hard to solve egalitarian dilemmas from first principles. In each situation, we must feel our way forward, reconciling our conflicting intuitions about what “equal” means. Deep equality is still an important idea—it tells us, among other things, that discrimination and bigotry are wrong. But it isn’t, in itself, fine-grained enough to answer thorny questions about how a community should divide up what it has. To answer those questions, it must be augmented by other, narrower tenets.

The communities that have the easiest time doing that tend to have some clearly defined, shared purpose. Sprinters competing in a hundred-metre dash have varied endowments and train in different conditions; from a certain perspective, those differences make every race unfair. (How can you compete with someone who has better genes?) But runners form an egalitarian community with a common goal—finding out who’s fastest—and so they have invented rules and procedures (qualifying heats, drug bans) that allow them to consider a race valid as long as no one jumps the gun. By embracing an agreed-upon theory of equality before the race, the sprinters can find collective meaning in the ranked inequalities that emerge when it ends. A hospital, similarly, might find an egalitarian way to do the necessary work of giving some patients priority over others, perhaps by adopting a theory of equality that ignores certain kinds of differences (some patients are rich, others poor) while acknowledging others (some patients are in urgent trouble, others less so). What matters, above all, is that the scheme makes sense to those involved.

Because maintaining such agreements takes constant work, egalitarian communities are always in danger of disintegrating. Nevertheless, the egalitarian landscape is dotted with islands of agreement: communes, co-ops, and well-organized competitions in which a shared theory of equality is used for some practical purpose. An individual family might divide up its chores by agreeing on a theory of equality that balances quick, unpleasant tasks, such as bathroom-cleaning, with slower, more enjoyable ones, such as dog-walking. This sort of artisanal egalitarianism is comparatively easy to arrange. Mass-producing it is what’s hard. A whole society can’t get together in a room to hash things out. Instead, consensus must coalesce slowly around broad egalitarian principles.

No principle is perfect; each contains hidden dangers that emerge with time. Many people, in contemplating the division of goods, invoke the principle of necessity: the idea that our first priority should be the equal fulfillment of fundamental needs. The hidden danger here becomes apparent once we go past a certain point of subsistence. When Fyodor Dostoyevsky went to military school, he wrote home to ask his land-owning but cash-strapped father, Mikhail Andreevich, for new boots and other furnishings, arguing that, without them, he would be ostracized. Mikhail Andreevich recognized his son’s changed needs and granted his request; he died soon afterward, under mysterious circumstances, and Dostoyevsky came to believe that he had been murdered by the serfs he had overworked. The episode, which helped inspire “The Brothers Karamazov,” also illustrates a core problem that bedevils egalitarianism—what philosophers call “the problem of expensive tastes.”

The problem—what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another—is familiar to anyone who’s argued with a foodie spouse or roommate about the grocery bill. It applies not just to material goods but to societal ones. To an environmentalist, protecting the spotted owl is a necessity; to a logger who stands to lose his job, it’s a luxury. The problem is so insistent that a whole body of political philosophy—“prioritarianism”—is devoted to the challenge of sorting people with needs from people with wants. It’s difficult in part because the line shifts as the years pass. Medical procedures that seem optional today become necessities tomorrow; educational attainments that were once unusual, such as college degrees, become increasingly indispensable with time. In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, four economists evaluated the success of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. They found that, judging by a modernized version of the definition of “poverty” which Johnson used, the poverty rate in America fell from 19.5 per cent in 1963 to 2.3 per cent in 2017. Still, they note in their paper, “expectations for minimum living standards evolve.” Today, taking advantage of the social safety net that the War on Poverty put in place—food stamps, Medicaid, and so on—is itself a sign of poverty. A new, more robust safety net—free college, Medicare for All—becomes, for some, an egalitarian necessity.

Some thinkers try to tame the problem of expensive tastes by asking what a “normal” or “typical” person might find necessary. But it’s easy to define “typical” too narrowly, letting unfair assumptions influence our judgments. In an influential 1999 article called “What Is the Point of Equality?,” the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson pointed out an odd feature of our social contract: if you’re fired from your job, unemployment benefits help keep you afloat, while if you stop working to have a child you must deal with the loss of income yourself. This contradiction, she writes, reveals an assumption that “the desire to procreate is just another expensive taste”; it reflects, she argues, the sexist presumption that “atomistic egoism and self-sufficiency” are the human norm. The word “necessity” suggests the idea of a bare minimum. In fact, it sets a high bar. Clearing it may require rethinking how society functions.

Perhaps because necessity is so demanding, our egalitarian commitments tend to rest on a different principle: luck. The philosopher Richard Arneson explained the idea a couple of decades ago: “Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it.” Anderson, in an influential coinage, calls this outlook “luck egalitarianism.”

Instead of dividing things up by asking what people need, a luck-egalitarian system tries to equalize the distribution of misfortune. If you’re born on the wrong side of the tracks, or if your house is destroyed in an unpredictable natural disaster, luck egalitarianism suggests that you deserve help. If you screw up—by squandering your savings, launching a failed business, and so on—you’re on your own. It’s to luck egalitarianism that we owe the metaphors of the “level playing field” and the “social safety net.” The first equalizes the bad luck we’re born with; the second, the bad luck that finds us as adults.

As Americans, we are charged with recognizing two conflicting values: individualism and egalitarianism. By smoothing out the unlucky differences while accepting those for which people are responsible, luck egalitarianism promises to help us be individualists and egalitarians simultaneously. But, as Anderson and others have argued, doing this is harder than it sounds. One problem, Anderson writes, is that luck egalitarianism condescends to those it helps: by seeing them as hapless victims of circumstance, it denies them the “equal respect” they’re due as citizens of a democracy. (It’s perhaps for this reason that the people who might benefit from the extension of government programs so often vote against them.)

Another problem, which the political theorist Yascha Mounk explores in “The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State,” is that the distinction between choice and luck is hard to sustain. If you sleep in instead of coming to work every day and then get fired, you’re clearly making bad choices. But what if you’re born into a family with an income just north of the poverty line, then drop out of high school to get a dead-end job? In all likelihood, you’ve suffered from bad luck and made bad choices. Suppose you turn down a place at your state university to take a job at the auto plant where your parents work, and the plant then closes. The closing of the plant was out of your control, but the decision to work there rather than go to college was yours to make. If you’d acquired more skills, would you be more employable? Or would the forces of globalization that led to the closure of the plant have narrowed your job prospects no matter your training? You might lie awake night after night mulling such questions without settling on answers; it’s absurd, Mounk writes, to expect “a real-world state bureaucracy to answer such intricate hypothetical questions about millions of citizens.”

The distinction between choice and luck, he argues, is a matter not of fact but of perspective. Explanations of human behavior have traditionally been divided into two groups: those which focus on the forces that push us around and those which emphasize how, as individuals, we can choose to resist them. The same phenomenon can be viewed from either side of the so-called structure-agency distinction. For most of the twentieth century, Mounk writes, criminologists looked at crime from a structural perspective: they urged politicians to fight it by reducing poverty—its root cause. Later, however, they changed tack: they began examining the motivations of individual criminals and asking how potential wrongdoers, as “agents,” might be dissuaded from committing crimes. The criminologists weren’t repudiating their prior insights about poverty, Mounk says; they were just looking at crime from a different perspective. The agent-based perspective was more useful to police officers, who couldn’t lift a neighborhood out of poverty but could change the way they patrolled it.

Mounk thinks that most people understand, intuitively, that the distinction between structure and agency is—like the distinction between “nature” and “nurture”—an artifact of explanation, not a part of reality. All explanations are limited, we know, and tell only part of the story. This, he writes, is why we are so ambivalent about luck egalitarianism and the politicians who see the world through its lens. Conservatives, hoping to constrain the size of the welfare state, overstate how much control people have over their lives; liberals, hoping to expand it, overstate our powerlessness. But both positions are unconvincing. “While voters are receptive to the idea that it is deeply unjust for some public schools to have better funding than others, they balk when they are told that students who do well in school are merely lucky,” Mounk writes. “And while they recognize that the explanation for the stagnating living standards of average people lies in larger structural transformations of the world economy, they are skeptical when they are told that the choices of specific individuals don’t play any role in determining their particular economic fate.”

There’s a problem with finding problems with egalitarianism. The head fights the gut; complexities can’t drown out the moral law within. Reading Waldron, Anderson, Mounk, and other thinkers on egalitarianism, I found myself remembering a time that started when I was eleven or twelve years old. My parents were divorced and rarely spoke; I went to three middle schools in three years, one bad, one middling, one good. The bad school was near my mother’s house, where we lived in the basement, having rented out the main floor. The good school was in a wealthy suburb. I attended it by claiming to live at the address of a family friend who had a small apartment, above a commercial space, on its edge. (So-called enrollment fraud is common across the country, especially in places where rich and poor school districts border each other.)

For a while, I took the bus home to the apartment, hanging out there until late in the evening. When this arrangement grew untenable, my mother devised a plan. She’d struck up a conversation with a cabdriver and taken his card; she called him and asked if, for a flat monthly fee, he’d pick me up at school each day and drop me at my father’s house, a short drive away. There weren’t many fares at two-thirty in the afternoon in the Maryland suburbs, and he said yes.

Peter, the cabdriver, began picking me up from a hidden spot past the soccer fields, under some trees. He was from West Africa, with an accent I sometimes struggled with. We talked about his home town, his girlfriend, the books I was reading—Stephen King, for the most part—in which he sweetly expressed an interest. Eventually, two of my friends, who were also picked up after school, discovered my secret spot and joined me there. As Peter and I drove away, everyone waved.

One day, Peter was agitated when he arrived. “I have to make a detour, O.K.?” he said. “Don’t tell your mom.” He didn’t wave to my friends, and we took a left instead of a right, eventually entering a neighborhood of small, unkempt row houses. As we drove, Peter told me how the taxi business worked. He didn’t own his cab; he rented it from the cab company, in a rent-to-own arrangement. If he missed his monthly payment, the company took the cab back. The payment was extremely high. “I drive and I drive and I drive,” he said. “But I can’t make it. I can’t make it!” As we pulled up in front of his cousin’s house, he sobbed. I watched from the back seat as he returned to the cab, weeping, with borrowed cash in his hand.

I wasn’t a sheltered kid; I knew about economic hardship. A few times that year, my mother had fallen behind on our bills, and our power had been cut off; we’d showered and eaten dinner in the dark. She’d hidden her despair, but Peter had shared his. For him, the bottom could fall out faster and more completely. More than a decade later, in a Dickensian coincidence, Peter, who was still driving cabs, picked my father up from the airport and gave him a business card. Peter started driving him, too; that year, on a trip with my dad and his family, Peter and I were reunited, to our great delight. But not long afterward he died. He suffered from diabetes and hypertension, and had no health insurance; he went too long before seeking treatment for an infection in his toe. It got into his bloodstream, and he died of septic shock.

Injustice isn’t cerebral. Peter and I were two equal people on the same earth. What’s so complicated about that?

The gap between intuition and argument—between outrage and the best response to that outrage—is the subject of Robert Tsai’s “Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation.” Tsai, a law professor at American University, places great weight on the intuition that we are “one another’s equals”—and yet, he writes, it’s inevitable that, “in a diverse democracy, people will disagree about what equality means.” Hashing out questions of equality, he concludes, can be so fraught, so confusing, that the wisest course is sometimes to circumvent them. Inequality can be resisted, and equality pursued, by other, less tangled means.

Tsai, a constitutional litigator, is intimately familiar with how arguments about equality have unfolded in the courts. Often, he writes, the moral magnetism of equality backfires. To crusade for it is to be on the side of justice, and so there is no choice but to accuse those obstructing it of being racists, misogynists, élitists, or oppressors. Tsai tells the story of City of Cleburne, Texas v. Cleburne Living Center, Inc., a Supreme Court case from 1985. A private company proposed opening a group home for thirteen intellectually disabled residents in the small city of Cleburne; it was thwarted by a local ordinance that required a permit for the opening of facilities for the “feeble-minded.” City officials opposed to the home cited a variety of concerns: the preservation of the neighborhood’s “serenity,” the danger to nearby elderly people, the possibility that bullies from a nearby junior high school would torment their new neighbors. Advocates for it pointed out that the ordinance’s origins lay in the country’s eugenicist past. (In 1927, a Supreme Court decision permitted the sterilization of the intellectually disabled “for the protection and health of the state.”)

When the case reached the Supreme Court, the arguments against the ordinance were mostly framed in terms of equality. Some people likened it to an apartheid law: it was no different, they argued, from a rule barring the construction of hospitals for people of a particular religion or ethnicity. The Reagan Administration, defending the law, argued that, since the disabled did have “distinctive needs and abilities,” treating them differently need not reflect “invidious and derogatory aims.” The table was set for an intractable egalitarian debate. A morally charged yet abstract question had been raised about the place of intellectual disabilities within a society committed to equality; the answer would concretely affect millions of disabled people. And that discussion, in turn, had been connected to the accusation that those who objected to the home were closed-minded bigots—a charge sure to rally many of their fellow-citizens to their defense. The likelihood of the Court coming to a universally convincing conclusion seemed remote.

In the end, Tsai writes, the Justices decided to avoid thinking in terms of equality. Instead, they applied the “rule of reason,” asking whether the citizens’ concerns had any rational basis, and concluding that they did not. By taking this approach, the Court avoided entirely the question of whether the citizens who objected to the home were motivated by bigotry; it also skirted the Waldronesque question of what it might mean to treat intellectually disabled people equally. And yet, Tsai writes, the Court still created a basically egalitarian outcome, and “placed discriminatory action based on damaging cultural stereotypes off-limits.”

The Court used the same approach in other equality-enhancing decisions. In United States v. Virginia, from 1996, a female high-school student filed a complaint against the Virginia Military Institute (the so-called West Point of the South), which excluded women. The arguments on her behalf, which leaned heavily on equality, soon got bogged down in the question of what it might mean for the Institute to treat male and female cadets equally. Instead of weighing in on that issue, the Court ruled that there was no rational basis for denying women admission.

These cases and many others, Tsai believes, show that it’s often more practical to pursue “equality by other means” than to sail into the crosscurrents of egalitarian debate. Reasonableness, or rationality, is one test to which we can subject inegalitarian systems or rules. One can also ask whether they are fair, whether their specific consequences are cruel, whether all relevant voices have been heard. Answering these questions isn’t always easy, but it’s easier than generating consensus about what “equal” means. We make more progress, Tsai argues, when we “shift the focus of moral outrage.”

Language itself may be misleading us. Appalled by inequality, our minds turn immediately to its opposite. Sidestepping that impulse, as Tsai advocates, requires giving up a satisfying rhetorical clarity, but it may bring us closer to our moral common sense. The philosopher David Schmidtz explains why in a 2006 book titled “Elements of Justice.” Schmidtz begins by asking us to contemplate what makes a neighborhood a good place to live: a thriving community might have a grocery store, a fire station, a library, a playground. Similarly, a system of justice must have a few different structures to be livable. It’s easy to imagine justice as a unitary thing—a single, imposing building, a Supreme Court. But it’s more like a collection of buildings, each with its own function.

In the neighborhood of justice, Schmidtz identifies four structures: equality, desert, reciprocity, and need. We consult these in different contexts, to solve different kinds of problems. Citizens are owed equality before the law. Workers, by contrast, should be compensated differently, depending on what they have accomplished. In relationships with our partners, we favor reciprocity. In trying to do right by our children, we ask what they need. (Michael and Angela, in considering their will, might focus on necessity more than the other concepts: instead of asking “What do they deserve?” or “What have they done for us lately?,” they might ask, “What do our kids need?”) None of these principles are capacious enough to serve in every situation; in fact, they are often in tension with one another. And they can be used inappropriately. No one wants a merit-based marriage. A workplace that operates by reciprocity is a dysfunctional one.

In real life, therefore, we amble around the neighborhood of justice. A coach doesn’t run her team on egalitarian principles alone; to win, she must field the best players more often. But she doesn’t run a ruthless meritocracy, either. On a good team, players get the help they need, they assist one another reciprocally, they’re rewarded for their individual accomplishments, and they are treated similarly enough that they feel connected in a common enterprise.

The frustrations and complexities of egalitarianism reflect the hidden complexity of equality. It looks simple and self-evident, as though one could proclaim it into existence. But achieving it requires a willingness to recognize, and to shift among, many different conceptions of what’s right—a kind of moral egalitarianism. Even equality itself, as an ideal, is insufficient. No one version of the good can rule the rest. ♦

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Human Rights and the Age of Inequality

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Men, masculinity and the persistent nature of gender inequality

Understanding the persistent nature of gender inequality requires an examination of men and women, masculinity and femininity. Too often, when we talk of gender, we talk of women; when we think of race, we think of people of color. The dominant groups—those who hold most power in society, such as men and white people—often go unexamined and unanalyzed. 

When it comes to sexual assault, we focus on women to understand its ramifications and solutions. While it is undoubtedly important to focus on women's experiences, because men are most frequently the perpetrators and women the victims of sexual assault, we need to turn our focus to men. This is why we begin our “Breaking the Culture of Sexual Assault” series with a focus on masculinity. To advance discussions about sexual violence, we ask: What role do men play in both perpetuating and halting sexual violence? What are the norms or expectations we have of men that encourage certain behaviors and penalize others? How can men work together, and in tandem with women, to create a more peaceful and just world?

Scholarly research has found that the expectations we have of men are as narrow as they are clear. Men are expected to be leaders, tough, physically strong, dominant, unemotional and assertive, to name a few. This is a limited set of expectations that allow for little deviation. Boys learn from an early age that non-masculine or “feminine” qualities are undesirable in them. These expectations are taught not only from their parents, but also through socialization in schools and media. To be sure, women are also held to restrictive standards of femininity, but men are penalized more than women for violating gender expectations.

According to “Breaking the Culture” symposium speaker Dr. Jackson Katz, these dominant characteristics of masculinity go hand and hand with violence, sexual aggression and sexual assault. When men are taught that dominance and aggression are valued, an extreme manifestation of that is what he calls “gender based violence,” or men committing violence against women. It also means that when men commit such violence, it is largely unremarkable, given its alignment with dominant values and expectations of men. While masculinity standards vary by race and class, they are all versions of these dominant expectations.

Our second symposium speaker, USC professor Dr. Michael Messner, examines how men organize to stop violence against women. He found that over the last forty years, men who are feminists have organized both with women feminists and in all-male feminist groups, to confront and change these standards of masculinity. Messner has interviewed men across the country in a diverse range of communities educating other men. These men are teaching each other to feel more comfortable deviating from standards of masculinity and demonstrating how to stop gender-based violence in their relationships, through activism and through galvanizing other men in their communities. 

The equally important yet different approaches to understanding masculinity by Katz and Messner reflect our emphasis on not only understanding the problems perpetuated by masculinity, but also on how many men are leading the way in creating change. We can only break the culture of sexual assault if both women and men are change agents.

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Gender Inequality Essay

500+ words essay on gender inequality.

For many years, the dominant gender has been men while women were the minority. It was mostly because men earned the money and women looked after the house and children. Similarly, they didn’t have any rights as well. However, as time passed by, things started changing slowly. Nonetheless, they are far from perfect. Gender inequality remains a serious issue in today’s time. Thus, this gender inequality essay will highlight its impact and how we can fight against it.

  About Gender Inequality Essay

Gender inequality refers to the unequal and biased treatment of individuals on the basis of their gender. This inequality happens because of socially constructed gender roles. It happens when an individual of a specific gender is given different or disadvantageous treatment in comparison to a person of the other gender in the same circumstance.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Impact of Gender Inequality

The biggest problem we’re facing is that a lot of people still see gender inequality as a women’s issue. However, by gender, we refer to all genders including male, female, transgender and others.

When we empower all genders especially the marginalized ones, they can lead their lives freely. Moreover, gender inequality results in not letting people speak their minds. Ultimately, it hampers their future and compromises it.

History is proof that fighting gender inequality has resulted in stable and safe societies. Due to gender inequality, we have a gender pay gap. Similarly, it also exposes certain genders to violence and discrimination.

In addition, they also get objectified and receive socioeconomic inequality. All of this ultimately results in severe anxiety, depression and even low self-esteem. Therefore, we must all recognize that gender inequality harms genders of all kinds. We must work collectively to stop these long-lasting consequences and this gender inequality essay will tell you how.

How to Fight Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is an old-age issue that won’t resolve within a few days. Similarly, achieving the goal of equality is also not going to be an easy one. We must start by breaking it down and allow it time to go away.

Firstly, we must focus on eradicating this problem through education. In other words, we must teach our young ones to counter gender stereotypes from their childhood.

Similarly, it is essential to ensure that they hold on to the very same beliefs till they turn old. We must show them how sports are not gender-biased.

Further, we must promote equality in the fields of labour. For instance, some people believe that women cannot do certain jobs like men. However, that is not the case. We can also get celebrities on board to promote and implant the idea of equality in people’s brains.

All in all, humanity needs men and women to continue. Thus, inequality will get us nowhere. To conclude the gender inequality essay, we need to get rid of the old-age traditions and mentality. We must teach everyone, especially the boys all about equality and respect. It requires quite a lot of work but it is possible. We can work together and achieve equal respect and opportunities for all genders alike.

FAQ of Gender Inequality Essay

Question 1: What is gender inequality?

Answer 1: Gender inequality refers to the unequal and biased treatment of individuals on the basis of their gender. This inequality happens because of socially constructed gender roles. It happens when an individual of a specific gender is given different or disadvantageous treatment in comparison to a person of the other gender in the same circumstance.

Question 2: How does gender inequality impact us?

Answer 2:  The gender inequality essay tells us that gender inequality impacts us badly. It takes away opportunities from deserving people. Moreover, it results in discriminatory behaviour towards people of a certain gender. Finally, it also puts people of a certain gender in dangerous situations.

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The great wealth wave

The tide has turned – evidence shows ordinary citizens in the western world are now richer and more equal than ever before.

by Daniel Waldenström   + BIO

Recent decades have seen private wealth multiply around the Western world, making us richer than ever before. A hasty glance at the soaring number of billionaires – some doubling as international celebrities – prompts the question: are we also living in a time of unparalleled wealth inequality? Influential scholars have argued that indeed we are. Their narrative of a new gilded age paints wealth as an instrument of power and inequality. The 19th-century era with low taxes and minimal market regulation allowed for unchecked capital accumulation and then, in the 20th century, the two world wars and progressive taxation policies diminished the fortunes of the wealthy and reduced wealth gaps. Since 1980, the orthodoxy continues, a wave of market-friendly policies reversed this equalising historical trend, boosting capital values and sending wealth inequality back towards historic highs.

The trouble with the powerful new orthodoxy that tries to explain the history of wealth is that it doesn’t fully square with reality. New research studies, and more careful inspection of the previous historical data, paint a picture where the main catalysts for wealth equalisation are neither the devastations of war nor progressive tax regimes. War and progressive taxation have had influence, but they cannot count as the main forces that led to wealth inequality falling dramatically over the past century. The real influences are instead the expansion from below of asset ownership among everyday citizens, constituted by the rise of homeownership and pension savings. This popular ownership movement was made possible by institutional changes, most important democracy, and followed suit by educational reforms and labour laws, and the technological advancements lifting everyone’s income. As a result, workers became more productive and better paid, which allowed them to get mortgages to purchase their own homes; homeownership rates soared in the West from the middle of the century. As standards of living improved, life spans increased so that people started saving for retirement, accumulating another important popular asset.

Today, the populations of Europe and the United States are substantially richer in terms of real purchasing-power wealth than ever before. We define wealth as the value of all assets, such as homes, bank deposits, stocks and pension funds, less all debts, mainly mortgages. When counting wealth among all adults, data show that its value has increased more than threefold since 1980, and nearly 10 times over the past century. Since much of this wealth growth has occurred in the types of assets that ordinary people hold – homes and pension savings – wealth has also become more equally distributed over time. Wealth inequality has decreased dramatically over the past century and, despite the recent years’ emergence of super-rich entrepreneurs, wealth concentration has remained at its historically low levels in Europe and has increased mainly in the US.

Among scholars in economics and economic history, a new narrative is just beginning to emerge, one that accentuates this massive rise of middle-class ownership and its implications for society’s total capital stock and its distribution. Capitalism, it seems, did not result in boundless inequality, even after the liberalisations of the 1980s and corporate growth in the globalised era. The key to progress, measured as a combination of wealth growth and falling or sustained inequality, has been political and institutional change that enabled citizens to become educated, better paid, and to amass wealth through housing and pension savings.

I n his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Thomas Piketty examined the long-run evolution of capital and wealth inequality since industrialisation in a few Western economies. The book quickly received wide acclaim among both academics and policymakers, and it even became a worldwide bestseller.

Piketty’s narrative outlined wealth accumulation and concentration as following a U-shaped pattern over the past century. At the time of the outbreak of the First World War, wealth levels and inequality peaked as a result of an unregulated capitalism, low taxation or democratic influence. During the 20th century, wartime capital destruction and postwar progressive taxes slashed wealth among the rich and equalised ownership. Since 1980, however, goes Piketty’s narrative, neoliberal policies have boosted capital values and wealth inequality towards historic levels.

Immediately after publication, Capital generated fierce debate among economists, focused primarily on the book’s theoretical underpinnings. For example, Piketty had sketched a couple of ‘fundamental laws’ of capitalism, defining the economic importance of aggregate wealth. The first law stated that the share of capital income in total income (the other share coming from labour) is a function of how much capital there is in the economy and its rate of return to capital owners. The second law stated that the amount of capital in the economy, measured as its share in total output, is determined by the balance between saving to accumulate capital and income growth. While these laws were actually fairly uncontroversial relationships, almost definitions, they laid out a mechanistic view of inequality trends that attracted considerable attention and scrutiny among Piketty’s fellow theoretical economists.

My work arrives at a striking new conclusion for the history of wealth and inequality in the West

However, what the academic debate cared less about was the empirical side of the analysis. Almost nothing was said about the historical data and the empirical conclusions underlying the claims about U-shaped patterns and main driving forces. The void in critical scrutiny exposed a widespread disinterest among mainstream economists in history and the fine-grained aspects of source materials, measurement and institutional contexts.

In recent years, a new strand of historical wealth inequality research has emerged from universities around the world. It offers a more nuanced empirical picture, including new data and revised evidence, pointing to different results and interpretations. In Piketty’s book, most of the analysis centred on the historical experiences of France, and then there was additional evidence presented for the United Kingdom and Germany (together making up Europe) and the US. Newer work reexamines and extends the historical wealth accumulation and inequality trends. Some of these contributions also revise the earlier data series, such as those analysing Germany and the UK. Other studies expand the empirical base by incorporating previously unexplored countries, such as Spain and Sweden. A number of ongoing research projects into the history of wealth distribution examine more new countries, including Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada. Their findings will soon be added to this historical wealth database.

My work with new data, published in my book Richer and More Equal (2024), arrives at a new conclusion for the history of wealth and inequality in the West. The new results are striking. Data show that we are both richer and more equal today than we were in the past. An accumulation of housing wealth and pension savings among workers in the middle classes emerges as the main factor producing greater equality: today, three-fourths of all private assets are either homes or long-term pension and insurance savings.

U nderlying the change in personal wealth formation over the 20th century are a number of political and economic developments. The democratisation of the Western world began with the extension of universal suffrage during the 1910s. This movement initiated a process of reforming the educational system, to extend basic schooling to the population and facilitating access to higher education. New labour laws improved working life by restricting the working hours per day, allowing unions to be active. Better training and nicer workplaces raised worker productivity and earnings, creating opportunity for working- and middle-class households to purchase their own homes. The improved living standards also led to longer lives. Between the 1940s and today, life expectancy at birth increased by almost 20 years in Western countries, most of which were spent in retirement. Pension systems started evolving during the postwar era, both as public-sector unfunded systems based on promises about a future income, and as private-sector funded systems where individual pension funds were accumulated as part of people’s long-term saving.

At the core of the new findings are three empirical observations.

The first is that the populations in Western countries are richer today than ever before in history. By rich, again, I mean having a high level of average wealth in the adult population. Why this measure of riches captures relevant aspects of welfare is because higher wealth permits a lot of good things in life. It allows for higher consumption, more savings and larger investment for future prosperity. It also promises better insurance against unforeseen events. Figure 1 below illustrates the growth in the average real per-capita wealth in a selection of Western countries over the past 130 years. It is dramatic. During the first half of the past century, the average wealth in the Western population hovered at a stable level. Since the end of the Second World War, asset values started to increase, doubling the level in only a couple of decades. From 1950 to 2020, average wealth in the West increased sevenfold.

Over the past 130 years, a monumental shift in wealth composition has taken place

A fact to notice specifically is how wealth has grown each single postwar decade up to the present day. For several reasons, this consistency of growth is a marvel. It affirms the robustness of the result: we are wealthier today than in history, and this fact does not depend on the choice of start or end date but holds regardless of the time period considered. The steady increase in wealth is not confined to investment-driven growth in Europe’s early postwar decades. Neither does it hinge on the market liberalisations of the 1980s and ’90s. However, it is notable how the lifting of regulations and the historically high taxes since the 1980s are indeed associated with the highest pace of value-creation that the Western world has ever experienced.

Figure 1: rising real average wealth in the Western world. Note: wealth is expressed in real terms, meaning that it is adjusted for the rise in consumer prices and thus expresses change in purchasing power. The line is an unweighted mean of the average wealth in the adult population in six countries (France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US) expressed in constant 2022 US dollars. Source: Waldenström (2024, Chapter 2)

A second fact coming out of the historical evidence is that wealth in the aggregate has changed in its appearance. The composition of assets people hold tells us about the economic structure of society and what functions wealth plays in the population. For example, whether most assets are tied to the agricultural economy or to industrial activities signifies the degree of economic modernisation in the historical analysis. The importance of ordinary people’s assets in the aggregate signifies the degree to which workers take part in the value-creation processes of the market economy. Figure 2 below displays the division across asset classes in the aggregate portfolio since the end of the 19th century. It is evident that, over the past 130 years, a monumental shift in wealth composition has taken place. A century ago, wealth comprised primarily agricultural land and industrial capital. Today, the majority of personal wealth is tied up in housing and pension funds.

Figure 2: the aggregate composition of assets: from elite wealth to people’s wealth . Note: unweighted average of six countries (France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US). Source: Waldenström (2024, Chapter 3)

The transformation of wealth composition has strong distributional implications. Individual ownership data, often called microdata, show how ownership structures across wealth distribution bear a pattern of who owns what. Historically, the rich held agricultural estates and shares in industrial corporations. This is especially true over the long term of history, but it remains so now too. In contrast, the working population acquires wealth in their homes and long-term savings in pension funds. Homeownership rates today range from 50 to 80 per cent. Labor-force participation rates are even higher. In substance, this tells us that housing and work-related pension funds are assets that dominate the ownership of ordinary people in the lower and middle classes, which in turn links the relative aggregate importance of housing and pension funds for wealth inequality.

L ooking closer at the relationship between the share of a country’s citizens who own their homes and the level of wealth inequality, the distributional pattern becomes evident. Figure 3 below plots countries according to their homeownership rates and wealth inequality, as measured by the common Gini coefficient that ranges from 0 (no inequality) to 1 (one individual owns everything), using recent wealth and homeownership surveys. Countries with higher levels of homeownership have lower wealth inequality. The straight line in the figure has a negative slope, which suggests that raising the homeownership rate by 10 points leads to an expected reduction in wealth inequality by 0.04 Gini points. As an example, France has a lower homeownership than Italy ( 60 per cent compared with 70 per cent), and a higher wealth inequality (0.67 versus Italy’s 0.61).

Figure 3: homeownership and wealth inequality in Europe and the US. Source: Waldenström (2024, Chapter 6)

The historical shift in the nature of wealth, from being elite-centric to more democratic, can thus be expected to have profound implications for the distribution of wealth. Figure 4 below presents the most recent data from European countries and the US. They reveal in graphical form how wealth inequality has decreased substantially over the past century. The wealthiest percentile once held around 60 per cent of all wealth. The share ranged from 50 per cent of wealth in the US and Germany to 70 per cent in the UK.

Most wealth today is in homes and pensions, assets predominantly of low- and middle-wealth households

Since the first half of the 20th century, the tide has turned. A great wealth equalisation took place throughout the Western world. From the 1920s to the 1970s, wealth concentration fell steadily. In the 1970s, wealth equalisation stopped, but then Europe and the US follow separate paths. In Europe, top wealth shares stabilise at historically low levels, perhaps with a slight increasing tendency. As of 2010, the richest 1 per cent in society holds a share of total wealth at around 20 per cent in Europe. That is roughly one-third of its share of national wealth from a century earlier. Countries like the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Finland have top percentile shares of around 16-18 per cent. A bit higher are countries like Spain, Denmark, Norway and Sweden with top shares at around 21-24 per cent. Germany has an even higher share, around 27 per cent, and Switzerland’s richest percentile group owns about 30 per cent of all wealth.

This stability of post-1970 top wealth shares may seem contradictory when contrasted with the large increases in aggregate wealth values over recent decades. However, it is consistent with most of the asset ownership patterns documented above, with most of wealth today being in housing and pensions, assets predominantly held by low- and middle-wealth households.

The US wealth concentration experience is somewhat different. Wealth inequality in the beginning of the 20th century was somewhat lower in the US than in most European countries, perhaps reflecting being a younger nation with less established elite structures. The equalisation trend also happened in the US, but it was less pronounced than in Europe. Today, US wealth concentration is currently much higher than in Europe. This situation, as the figure below shows, is the result of several years of steady increase. In historical perspective, however, even the current US level of wealth inequality is lower than it was before the Second World War, and it pales in comparison with the extreme levels of wealth concentration that the people of Europe experienced 100 years ago.

Figure 4: the great wealth equalisation over the 20th century. Source: Waldenström (2024, Chapter 5)

H ow can we account for these historical trends showing a steady growth in average household wealth and, at the same time, wealth inequality falling to historically low levels, where it has remained in Europe but has risen lately in the US? One approach is to break down the top wealth shares into the accumulation of wealth in the top and bottom groups of the distribution. In other words, we decompose the change in top wealth shares by documenting the changes in absolute wealth holdings in the numerator and denominator of the top wealth-share ratio. Figure 5 below shows these numbers, and they are striking.

During no historical time period during the past century did the wealth amounts of the rich fall on average. The falling wealth concentration from 1910 to 1980 was instead the result of wealth accumulating faster in the middle classes than in the top. Since 1950, wealth holdings have actually grown in the entire population. Between 1950 and 1980, it grew faster among the lower groups in the wealth distribution, explaining the continued equalisation. After 1980, wealth has instead grown faster in the top percentile than in the lower classes, which accounts for the halt of the long equalisation trend and a slight upward trend in the top wealth share, driven by the US development, whereas the European countries remained at its historically low levels.

Figure 5: Western wealth growth: the middle class vs the rich. The graph shows a six-country average (France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, the US) of the average annual growth rate of real (inflation-adjusted) net wealth per adult individual in the top 1 per cent and the lower 90 per cent of the wealth distribution during three time periods. Source: Waldenström (2024, Chapter 6)

Looking at the specific factors that could account for these trends in wealth growth and wealth inequality, there are some that match the evidence better than others. According to the orthodox narrative, the main explanation was the shocks to capital during the world wars and postwar capital taxes, all of which are believed to have created equality through lowering the top of the wealth distribution. In this telling, the physical capital destruction in wars reduced the fortunes of the rich, and the immediate postwar hikes in capital taxes and market regulations, such as price controls and capital market restrictions, prevented the entrepreneurs from rebuilding their wealth.

Wealth and inheritance taxes reached almost confiscatory levels in the early 1970s

However, the thesis has some issues. One is that the evidence shows little difference between belligerent and non-belligerent countries. During both wars, the wealth share of the top 1 per cent fell equally in belligerent countries like France and the UK as in non-belligerent Sweden. Including the immediate postwar years, which were heavily influenced by wartime turbulence, does not change this pattern. Germany’s data from the wars is less clear, but it appears that the country experienced larger losses than others, reducing top wealth shares. Spain, which stayed out of both world wars but fought a civil war in the 1930s, saw the wealth share of the richest 1 per cent remain virtually unchanged between 1936 and 1939, according to preliminary estimates. Looking at the US, top wealth shares fell during both wars.

Analysing instead the changes in absolute wealth held by the rich and by the rest reinforces the conclusion that wars were not a devastating moment for capital owners. In fact, the fortunes of the elite did not shrink significantly, except in France during the First World War and seemingly in Germany during both wars. In other cases, the capital values of the rich remained almost constant, and the wealth equalisation observed can be attributed to growing ownership among groups below the top tier.

Progressive tax policies after the Second World War offer another potential explanation for the wealth-equalisation trend. Capital taxation increased rapidly between the 1950s and the 1980s in most Western countries. Wealth and inheritance taxes reached almost confiscatory levels in the early 1970s, and this coincided with stagnating business activities, few startups, slowed economic growth, and an exodus of prominent entrepreneurs from high- to low-tax countries. Few studies have been able to analyse systematically the extent to which these taxes prevented the rise of new large fortunes, but studies of later periods suggest that there are good grounds to believe they did.

A general problem for the factors above – which focus on shocks to the capital of the rich and thus lowering the top of wealth distribution as the primus motor behind the great wealth equalisation of the 20th century – is that the evidence presented in Figure 5 above shows that it was instead the lifting of the bottom of the distribution that accounted for the equalisation. Let us therefore shift focus and examine the two main channels through which this happened: the accumulation of homeownership and saving for retirement.

At the turn of the 20th century, owning a decent home and saving for retirement were luxuries enjoyed by only a select few – maybe a couple of tens of millions in Western countries. Today, the once-elusive dreams of home ownership and pensions have become a reality for several hundreds of millions of people. Homeownership rates went from 20-40 per cent in the first half of the former century to 50-80 per cent in the modern era. Retirement savings also increased in the postwar period, reflecting the longer life spans that came with the general improvement of living standards. Funded pensions and other insurance savings comprised 5-10 per cent of household portfolios around 1950, but this share increased to 20-40 per cent in the 2000s.

The most crucial equalisation resulted from expanded wealth ownership among ordinary citizens

History demonstrates that the significant wealth equalisation over the past century was primarily driven by a massive increase in homeownership and retirement savings. But what initiated this accumulation of assets by households? The most comprehensive evidence highlights the role of political changes and economic developments that explicitly included new groups in the productive market economy. Firstly, the 1910s and ’20s witnessed a broad wave of political democratisation, extending universal suffrage to the Western world. Following this regime shift, a series of reforms transformed the economic reality for the masses. Educational attainment was expanded, and higher education became accessible to broader segments of society. New labour laws improved workers’ rights, making workplaces safer and reducing working hours. These changes enhanced workers’ productivity and real incomes. Simultaneously, the financial system evolved by offering better services to this new constituency of potential customers, including cheaper loans, savings plans, mutual funds and other financial services.

Thus, the primary drivers behind the great wealth equalisation of the 20th century were not wars or the redistributive effects of capital taxation. While these factors had some impact, the most crucial equalisation resulted from expanded wealth ownership among ordinary citizens, particularly through homeownership and pension savings, and the institutional shifts that enabled the accumulation of these assets.

A general lesson from history is that wealth accumulation is a positive, welfare-enhancing force in free-market economies. It is closely linked to the growth of successful businesses, which leads to new jobs, higher incomes and more tax revenue for the public sector. Various historical, social and economic factors have contributed to the rise of wealth accumulation in the middle class, with homeownership and pension savings being the primary ones.

As a closing remark, it should be recognised that the story of wealth equalisation is not one of unmitigated success. There are still significant disparities in wealth within and among nations, generating instability and injustice. Over the past years, wealth concentration has increased in some countries, most notably in the US. The extent to which this is due to productive entrepreneurship generating products, jobs, incomes and taxes, or to forces that exclude groups from acquiring personal wealth causing tensions and erosive developments in society, is a question that needs to be studied more. However, at this point it is still vital to acknowledge the progress toward greater equality that has been made in our past and understand how it has happened. Only then can we be in a stronger position to lay the foundation for further advancements in our quest for a more just and prosperous world.

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5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

Gender equality – which becomes reality when all genders are treated fairly and allowed equal opportunities –  is a complicated human rights issue for every country in the world. Recent statistics are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 108 years to achieve gender parity . The biggest gaps are found in political empowerment and economics. Also, there are currently just six countries that give women and men equal legal work rights. Generally, women are only given ¾ of the rights given to men. To learn more about how gender equality is measured, how it affects both women and men, and what can be done, here are five essays making a fair point.

Take a free course on Gender Equality offered by top universities!

“Countries With Less Gender Equity Have More Women In STEM — Huh?” – Adam Mastroianni and Dakota McCoy

This essay from two Harvard PhD candidates (Mastroianni in psychology and McCoy in biology) takes a closer look at a recent study that showed that in countries with lower gender equity, more women are in STEM. The study’s researchers suggested that this is because women are actually especially interested in STEM fields, and because they are given more choice in Western countries, they go with different careers. Mastroianni and McCoy disagree.

They argue the research actually shows that cultural attitudes and discrimination are impacting women’s interests, and that bias and discrimination is present even in countries with better gender equality. The problem may lie in the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks factors like wage disparity and government representation. To learn why there’s more women in STEM from countries with less gender equality, a more nuanced and complex approach is needed.

“Men’s health is better, too, in countries with more gender equality” – Liz Plank

When it comes to discussions about gender equality, it isn’t uncommon for someone in the room to say, “What about the men?” Achieving gender equality has been difficult because of the underlying belief that giving women more rights and freedom somehow takes rights away from men. The reality, however, is that gender equality is good for everyone. In Liz Plank’s essay, which is an adaption from her book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, she explores how in Iceland, the #1 ranked country for gender equality, men live longer. Plank lays out the research for why this is, revealing that men who hold “traditional” ideas about masculinity are more likely to die by suicide and suffer worse health. Anxiety about being the only financial provider plays a big role in this, so in countries where women are allowed education and equal earning power, men don’t shoulder the burden alone.

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist with Vox, where she works as a senior producer and political correspondent. In 2015, Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30” in the Media category. She’s focused on feminist issues throughout her career.

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

Some of the most visible examples of gender inequality and discrimination comes from “Me Too” stories. Women are coming forward in huge numbers relating how they’ve been harassed and abused by men who have power over them. Most of the time, established systems protect these men from accountability. In this article from Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker staff writer, we get a look at what’s happening in China.

The essay opens with a story from a PhD student inspired by the United States’ Me Too movement to open up about her experience with an academic adviser. Her story led to more accusations against the adviser, and he was eventually dismissed. This is a rare victory, because as Fan says, China employs a more rigid system of patriarchy and hierarchy. There aren’t clear definitions or laws surrounding sexual harassment. Activists are charting unfamiliar territory, which this essay explores.

“Men built this system. No wonder gender equality remains as far off as ever.” – Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Freelance journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan (whose book The New Normal is scheduled for a May 2020 release) is discouraged that gender equality is so many years away. She argues that it’s because the global system of power at its core is broken.  Even when women are in power, which is proportionally rare on a global scale, they deal with a system built by the patriarchy. O’Hagan’s essay lays out ideas for how to fix what’s fundamentally flawed, so gender equality can become a reality.

Ideas include investing in welfare; reducing gender-based violence (which is mostly men committing violence against women); and strengthening trade unions and improving work conditions. With a system that’s not designed to put women down, the world can finally achieve gender equality.

“Invisibility of Race in Gender Pay Gap Discussions” – Bonnie Chu

The gender pay gap has been a pressing issue for many years in the United States, but most discussions miss the factor of race. In this concise essay, Senior Contributor Bonnie Chu examines the reality, writing that within the gender pay gap, there’s other gaps when it comes to black, Native American, and Latina women. Asian-American women, on the other hand, are paid 85 cents for every dollar. This data is extremely important and should be present in discussions about the gender pay gap. It reminds us that when it comes to gender equality, there’s other factors at play, like racism.

Bonnie Chu is a gender equality advocate and a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. She’s the founder and CEO of Lensational, which empowers women through photography, and the Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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• Black Americans Have a Clear Vision for Reducing Racism but Little Hope It Will Happen

Many say key U.S. institutions should be rebuilt to ensure fair treatment

Table of contents.

• Black Americans see little improvement in their lives despite increased national attention to racial issues
• Few Black adults expect equality for Black people in the U.S.
• Black adults say racism and police brutality are extremely big problems for Black people in the U.S.
• Personal experiences with discrimination are widespread among Black Americans
• 2. Black Americans’ views on political strategies, leadership and allyship for achieving equality
• The legacy of slavery affects Black Americans today
• Most Black adults agree the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid
• The types of repayment Black adults think would be most helpful
• Responsibility for reparations and the likelihood repayment will occur
• Black adults say the criminal justice system needs to be completely rebuilt
• Black adults say political, economic and health care systems need major changes to ensure fair treatment
• Most Black adults say funding for police departments should stay the same or increase
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Supplemental tables
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand the nuances among Black people on issues of racial inequality and social change in the United States. This in-depth survey explores differences among Black Americans in their views on the social status of the Black population in the U.S.; their assessments of racial inequality; their visions for institutional and social change; and their outlook on the chances that these improvements will be made. The analysis is the latest in the Center’s series of in-depth surveys of public opinion among Black Americans (read the first, “ Faith Among Black Americans ” and “ Race Is Central to Identity for Black Americans and Affects How They Connect With Each Other ”).

The online survey of 3,912 Black U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021. Black U.S. adults include those who are single-race, non-Hispanic Black Americans; multiracial non-Hispanic Black Americans; and adults who indicate they are Black and Hispanic. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses.

Recruiting panelists by phone or mail ensures that nearly all U.S. Black adults have a chance of selection. This gives us confidence that any sample can represent the whole population (see our Methods 101 explainer on random sampling). Here are the questions used for the survey of Black adults, along with its responses and methodology .

The terms “Black Americans,” “Black people” and “Black adults” are used interchangeably throughout this report to refer to U.S. adults who self-identify as Black, either alone or in combination with other races or Hispanic identity.

Throughout this report, “Black, non-Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as single-race Black and say they have no Hispanic background. “Black Hispanic” respondents are those who identify as Black and say they have Hispanic background. We use the terms “Black Hispanic” and “Hispanic Black” interchangeably. “Multiracial” respondents are those who indicate two or more racial backgrounds (one of which is Black) and say they are not Hispanic.

Respondents were asked a question about how important being Black was to how they think about themselves. In this report, we use the term “being Black” when referencing responses to this question.

In this report, “immigrant” refers to people who were not U.S. citizens at birth – in other words, those born outside the U.S., Puerto Rico or other U.S. territories to parents who were not U.S. citizens. We use the terms “immigrant,” “born abroad” and “foreign-born” interchangeably.

Throughout this report, “Democrats and Democratic leaners” and just “Democrats” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Democratic Party or who are independent or some other party but lean toward the Democratic Party. “Republicans and Republican leaners” and just “Republicans” both refer to respondents who identify politically with the Republican Party or are independent or some other party but lean toward the Republican Party.

Respondents were asked a question about their voter registration status. In this report, respondents are considered registered to vote if they self-report being absolutely certain they are registered at their current address. Respondents are considered not registered to vote if they report not being registered or express uncertainty about their registration.

To create the upper-, middle- and lower-income tiers, respondents’ 2020 family incomes were adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and household size. Respondents were then placed into income tiers: “Middle income” is defined as two-thirds to double the median annual income for the entire survey sample. “Lower income” falls below that range, and “upper income” lies above it. For more information about how the income tiers were created, read the methodology .

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd and the national protests, debate and political promises that ensued, 65% of Black Americans say the increased national attention on racial inequality has not led to changes that improved their lives. 1 And 44% say equality for Black people in the United States is not likely to be achieved, according to newly released findings from an October 2021 survey of Black Americans by Pew Research Center.

This is somewhat of a reversal in views from September 2020, when half of Black adults said the increased national focus on issues of race would lead to major policy changes to address racial inequality in the country and 56% expected changes that would make their lives better.

At the same time, many Black Americans are concerned about racial discrimination and its impact. Roughly eight-in-ten say they have personally experienced discrimination because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and most also say discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead (68%).  

Even so, Black Americans have a clear vision for how to achieve change when it comes to racial inequality. This includes support for significant reforms to or complete overhauls of several U.S. institutions to ensure fair treatment, particularly the criminal justice system; political engagement, primarily in the form of voting; support for Black businesses to advance Black communities; and reparations in the forms of educational, business and homeownership assistance. Yet alongside their assessments of inequality and ideas about progress exists pessimism about whether U.S. society and its institutions will change in ways that would reduce racism.

These findings emerge from an extensive Pew Research Center survey of 3,912 Black Americans conducted online Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey explores how Black Americans assess their position in U.S. society and their ideas about social change. Overall, Black Americans are clear on what they think the problems are facing the country and how to remedy them. However, they are skeptical that meaningful changes will take place in their lifetime.

Black Americans see racism in our laws as a big problem and discrimination as a roadblock to progress

Black adults were asked in the survey to assess the current nature of racism in the United States and whether structural or individual sources of this racism are a bigger problem for Black people. About half of Black adults (52%) say racism in our laws is a bigger problem than racism by individual people, while four-in-ten (43%) say acts of racism committed by individual people is the bigger problem. Only 3% of Black adults say that Black people do not experience discrimination in the U.S. today.

In assessing the magnitude of problems that they face, the majority of Black Americans say racism (63%), police brutality (60%) and economic inequality (54%) are extremely or very big problems for Black people living in the U.S. Slightly smaller shares say the same about the affordability of health care (47%), limitations on voting (46%), and the quality of K-12 schools (40%).

Aside from their critiques of U.S. institutions, Black adults also feel the impact of racial inequality personally. Most Black adults say they occasionally or frequently experience unfair treatment because of their race or ethnicity (79%), and two-thirds (68%) cite racial discrimination as the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead today.

Black Americans’ views on reducing racial inequality

Black Americans are clear on the challenges they face because of racism. They are also clear on the solutions. These range from overhauls of policing practices and the criminal justice system to civic engagement and reparations to descendants of people enslaved in the United States.

Changing U.S. institutions such as policing, courts and prison systems

About nine-in-ten Black adults say multiple aspects of the criminal justice system need some kind of change (minor, major or a complete overhaul) to ensure fair treatment, with nearly all saying so about policing (95%), the courts and judicial process (95%), and the prison system (94%).

Roughly half of Black adults say policing (49%), the courts and judicial process (48%), and the prison system (54%) need to be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly. Smaller shares say the same about the political system (42%), the economic system (37%) and the health care system (34%), according to the October survey.

While Black Americans are in favor of significant changes to policing, most want spending on police departments in their communities to stay the same (39%) or increase (35%). A little more than one-in-five (23%) think spending on police departments in their area should be decreased.

Black adults who favor decreases in police spending are most likely to name medical, mental health and social services (40%) as the top priority for those reappropriated funds. Smaller shares say K-12 schools (25%), roads, water systems and other infrastructure (12%), and reducing taxes (13%) should be the top priority.

Voting and ‘buying Black’ viewed as important strategies for Black community advancement

Black Americans also have clear views on the types of political and civic engagement they believe will move Black communities forward. About six-in-ten Black adults say voting (63%) and supporting Black businesses or “buying Black” (58%) are extremely or very effective strategies for moving Black people toward equality in the U.S. Smaller though still significant shares say the same about volunteering with organizations dedicated to Black equality (48%), protesting (42%) and contacting elected officials (40%).

Black adults were also asked about the effectiveness of Black economic and political independence in moving them toward equality. About four-in-ten (39%) say Black ownership of all businesses in Black neighborhoods would be an extremely or very effective strategy for moving toward racial equality, while roughly three-in-ten (31%) say the same about establishing a national Black political party. And about a quarter of Black adults (27%) say having Black neighborhoods governed entirely by Black elected officials would be extremely or very effective in moving Black people toward equality.

Most Black Americans support repayment for slavery

Discussions about atonement for slavery predate the founding of the United States. As early as 1672 , Quaker abolitionists advocated for enslaved people to be paid for their labor once they were free. And in recent years, some U.S. cities and institutions have implemented reparations policies to do just that.

Most Black Americans say the legacy of slavery affects the position of Black people in the U.S. either a great deal (55%) or a fair amount (30%), according to the survey. And roughly three-quarters (77%) say descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way.

Black adults who say descendants of the enslaved should be repaid support doing so in different ways. About eight-in-ten say repayment in the forms of educational scholarships (80%), financial assistance for starting or improving a business (77%), and financial assistance for buying or remodeling a home (76%) would be extremely or very helpful. A slightly smaller share (69%) say cash payments would be extremely or very helpful forms of repayment for the descendants of enslaved people.

Where the responsibility for repayment lies is also clear for Black Americans. Among those who say the descendants of enslaved people should be repaid, 81% say the U.S. federal government should have all or most of the responsibility for repayment. About three-quarters (76%) say businesses and banks that profited from slavery should bear all or most of the responsibility for repayment. And roughly six-in-ten say the same about colleges and universities that benefited from slavery (63%) and descendants of families who engaged in the slave trade (60%).

Black Americans are skeptical change will happen

Even though Black Americans’ visions for social change are clear, very few expect them to be implemented. Overall, 44% of Black adults say equality for Black people in the U.S. is a little or not at all likely. A little over a third (38%) say it is somewhat likely and only 13% say it is extremely or very likely.

They also do not think specific institutions will change. Two-thirds of Black adults say changes to the prison system (67%) and the courts and judicial process (65%) that would ensure fair treatment for Black people are a little or not at all likely in their lifetime. About six-in-ten (58%) say the same about policing. Only about one-in-ten say changes to policing (13%), the courts and judicial process (12%), and the prison system (11%) are extremely or very likely.

This pessimism is not only about the criminal justice system. The majority of Black adults say the political (63%), economic (62%) and health care (51%) systems are also unlikely to change in their lifetime.

Black Americans’ vision for social change includes reparations. However, much like their pessimism about institutional change, very few think they will see reparations in their lifetime. Among Black adults who say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid, 82% say reparations for slavery are unlikely to occur in their lifetime. About one-in-ten (11%) say repayment is somewhat likely, while only 7% say repayment is extremely or very likely to happen in their lifetime.

Black Democrats, Republicans differ on assessments of inequality and visions for social change

Party affiliation is one key point of difference among Black Americans in their assessments of racial inequality and their visions for social change. Black Republicans and Republican leaners are more likely than Black Democrats and Democratic leaners to focus on the acts of individuals. For example, when summarizing the nature of racism against Black people in the U.S., the majority of Black Republicans (59%) say racist acts committed by individual people is a bigger problem for Black people than racism in our laws. Black Democrats (41%) are less likely to hold this view.

Black Republicans (45%) are also more likely than Black Democrats (21%) to say that Black people who cannot get ahead in the U.S. are mostly responsible for their own condition. And while similar shares of Black Republicans (79%) and Democrats (80%) say they experience racial discrimination on a regular basis, Republicans (64%) are more likely than Democrats (36%) to say that most Black people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.

On the other hand, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to focus on the impact that racial inequality has on Black Americans. Seven-in-ten Black Democrats (73%) say racial discrimination is the main reason many Black people cannot get ahead in the U.S, while about four-in-ten Black Republicans (44%) say the same. And Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say racism (67% vs. 46%) and police brutality (65% vs. 44%) are extremely big problems for Black people today.

Black Democrats are also more critical of U.S. institutions than Black Republicans are. For example, Black Democrats are more likely than Black Republicans to say the prison system (57% vs. 35%), policing (52% vs. 29%) and the courts and judicial process (50% vs. 35%) should be completely rebuilt for Black people to be treated fairly.

While the share of Black Democrats who want to see large-scale changes to the criminal justice system exceeds that of Black Republicans, they share similar views on police funding. Four-in-ten each of Black Democrats and Black Republicans say funding for police departments in their communities should remain the same, while around a third of each partisan coalition (36% and 37%, respectively) says funding should increase. Only about one-in-four Black Democrats (24%) and one-in-five Black Republicans (21%) say funding for police departments in their communities should decrease.

Among the survey’s other findings:

Black adults differ by age in their views on political strategies. Black adults ages 65 and older (77%) are most likely to say voting is an extremely or very effective strategy for moving Black people toward equality. They are significantly more likely than Black adults ages 18 to 29 (48%) and 30 to 49 (60%) to say this. Black adults 65 and older (48%) are also more likely than those ages 30 to 49 (38%) and 50 to 64 (42%) to say protesting is an extremely or very effective strategy. Roughly four-in-ten Black adults ages 18 to 29 say this (44%).

Gender plays a role in how Black adults view policing. Though majorities of Black women (65%) and men (56%) say police brutality is an extremely big problem for Black people living in the U.S. today, Black women are more likely than Black men to hold this view. When it comes to criminal justice, Black women (56%) and men (51%) are about equally likely to share the view that the prison system should be completely rebuilt to ensure fair treatment of Black people. However, Black women (52%) are slightly more likely than Black men (45%) to say this about policing. On the matter of police funding, Black women (39%) are slightly more likely than Black men (31%) to say police funding in their communities should be increased. On the other hand, Black men are more likely than Black women to prefer that funding stay the same (44% vs. 36%). Smaller shares of both Black men (23%) and women (22%) would like to see police funding decreased.

Income impacts Black adults’ views on reparations. Roughly eight-in-ten Black adults with lower (78%), middle (77%) and upper incomes (79%) say the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should receive reparations. Among those who support reparations, Black adults with upper and middle incomes (both 84%) are more likely than those with lower incomes (75%) to say educational scholarships would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment. However, of those who support reparations, Black adults with lower (72%) and middle incomes (68%) are more likely than those with higher incomes (57%) to say cash payments would be an extremely or very helpful form of repayment for slavery.

• Black adults in the September 2020 survey only include those who say their race is Black alone and are non-Hispanic. The same is true only for the questions of improvements to Black people’s lives and equality in the United States in the October 2021 survey. Throughout the rest of this report, Black adults include those who say their race is Black alone and non-Hispanic; those who say their race is Black and at least one other race and non-Hispanic; or Black and Hispanic, unless otherwise noted. ↩

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29/12/23 UPDATE: Terrorism added in National 5 section; Advanced Higher content updated; revision strategy suggestions published.

Please note: Since August 2019, we have taught 'Crime and the Law in the UK' at Higher. Therefore, this page will no longer be updated.

Social Inequality in the UK

Social Inequality in the UK is 'Part A' of Section 2 in the exam paper. You use your knowledge & understanding of socio-economic issues in the UK to answer one question. The topics studied are detailed in the Course Assessment Specification (CAS), which is outlined below. Use the contents table below to click to relevant headings.

Course Assessment Specification (CAS)

In the social inequality context, candidates focus on the impact of social inequality on any relevant group.

reasons why income and wealth inequality exists

reasons why health inequalities exist

effect of inequality on a group or groups in society

individualist and collectivist debate

effectiveness of measures taken to tackle inequalities, including government measures

PowerPoint presentation

Class resources and materials

The documents in the section below were given out in class and are intended to support your revision.

Find the Answer

Universal credit, causes of poverty, essay questions.

The questions below are common essay questions, drawn from either past papers or made up to provide examples, based on the CAS at the top of this page. The essay answers below may be completed or provide you with the skeleton necessary to create a comprehensive response in the exam. 

Collectivism-Individualism

Kindly shared by Mr Beattie at Vale of Leven Academy.

Lifestyle choices

General essay revision, government responses to health inequalities.

This part essay template looks at the success and failure of the sugar tax and minimum unit pricing to address health inequalities. The essay responds to the following question: 'Government policies have failed to reduce health inequalities. Discuss. (20 marks).'

Effectiveness of tackling social inequalities

This part essay template looks at the success and failure of the NHS and wider health services in addressing social inequalities in the UK. The essay responds to the following question: 'Evaluate the effectiveness of the health services in tackling social inequality. (12 marks).'

Theories of the welfare state

This part essay, part plan looks at the different theoretical perspectives of the welfare state. It addresses the following question: 'Health and welfare provision should be the responsibility of the government. Discuss. (20 marks).'

Pension Reforms and Inequality in Germany: Micro-Modelling

Germany, like many other countries, has undergone a series of pension reforms since the 1980s which generally decreased benefit generosity and increased the retirement age due to demographic pressures. This paper investigates whether these reforms have increased income and wealth inequality among retirees. In order to answer this question, we employed counterfactual simulations in which we predict how the income and social security wealth distributions would have developed if these reforms had not taken place, compared to the actual development of the income and social security wealth distributions. Our analysis reveals that the pension reforms has led to an increase in inequality in terms of social security wealth between the 1990s and 2000s and decreased inequality thereafter. The decrease in inequality is mainly driven by social assistance as it represents a lower bound for benefit size and thus mitigates the effect of benefit-reducing reforms for lower income groups. We further divided the total effect of the pension reforms into two components. The first component is the mechanical effect, which keeps retirement probabilities constant and only considers changes in benefit calculation. The second component is the behavioral effect, which describes how SSW differs because of altered retirement probabilities. Our findings indicate that in the German context the behavioral effect is statistically significant but economically small.

This paper uses data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), data for years 1984-2020, SOEP-Core v37, EU Edition, 2022, doi:10.5684/soep.core.v37eu. This paper is part of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s International Social Security (ISS) project. This phase of the ISS Project is supported by the Sloan Foundation (G-2019-12578), the National Institute on Aging (grants P01 AG012810 and P30-AG012810) and by the U.S. Social Security Administration through grant #5-RRC08098400-10 to the National Bureau of Economic Research as part of the SSA Retirement Research Consortium. The findings and conclusions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Sloan Foundation, SSA, any agency of the Federal Government, or NBER. The authors thank the other members of the ISS Project for important methodological contributions, as well as Nicola Simonetti and Frederik Fetzer for their excellent research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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Racism and Inequality in Society Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Race has been a serving system of shaping individual and collective identities and influencing social relations. The notion justifies the superiority of specific social groups, perpetuating systemic inequalities and injustices. For many centuries, authorities used the diversity as a tool of segregation, making economical and political profit. Race is a social construct influenced by historical, economic, and political variables rather than a biological truth.

The idea of race as a social construct is examined in the first episode of the documentary series “The Power of an Illusion.” The movie shows that the idea of race is not biological but rather socially formed and influenced by political, economic, and historical circumstances (Kanopy: Stream Classic Cinema, Indie Film and Top Documentaries). In my social science lectures, I did not see any new angles at which race can be analyzed, since I have previously studied this issue deeply.

I focused on the political and historical reasons that influenced the development of racial classifications was instructive. To reveal the essence of racism, it is necessary to show how the idea of race was created to humiliate particular groups of people (Omi and Winant 118). After that, I would present how race classifies people according to their physical features. The Omi and Winant reading explores the concept of racial formation. The authors argue that race is not an objective category, but a social construct shaped by historical and political factors. They discuss how racial categories are formed through the intersection of biological, cultural, and historical factors and how they are reproduced through social institutions and practices (Omi and Winant 114). The video and the reading both emphasize the role of power relations in shaping racial categories and the importance of understanding race as a dynamic and changing concept.

In conclusion, to understand how racism and inequality function in society, it is essential to understand race as a social construct. The film and Omi and Winant’s reading offer insightful perspectives on how race has been introduced as a tool of discrimination. Admitting that race is only a cultural phenomenon, one can guarantee a more equal society that gives space to multiplicity and true personal freedom.

Works Cited

“ Kanopy: Stream Classic Cinema, Indie Film and Top Documentaries .” Kanopy , Web.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States . Routledge, 2014.

• Anti-Racism: Marginalization and Exclusion in Healthcare
• The 13th Documentary Film on Police Brutality
• How Inequality Is Reproduced in Everyday Life?
• Racism in Movies: Stereotypes and Prejudices
• Diversity of Social Groups: Multiplicity of Social Groupings
• The "Killing the Black Body" Book by Dorothy Roberts
• The Racial Inequality Problem and Its Relevance
• James Weldon Johnson's "The Red Summer" Term
• The Issue of Racism in the United States
• Realities of Racial Inequality and Injustice in the United States
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 15). Racism and Inequality in Society. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racism-and-inequality-in-society/

"Racism and Inequality in Society." IvyPanda , 15 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/racism-and-inequality-in-society/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Racism and Inequality in Society'. 15 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Racism and Inequality in Society." February 15, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racism-and-inequality-in-society/.

1. IvyPanda . "Racism and Inequality in Society." February 15, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racism-and-inequality-in-society/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Racism and Inequality in Society." February 15, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/racism-and-inequality-in-society/.

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