A01=Ann Swidler
A01=Claude S. Fischer
A01=Kim Voss
A01=Martin Sanchez Jankowski
A01=Michael Hout
A01=Samuel R. Lucas
Achievement test
Affirmative action
African Americans
American Sociological Association
Americans
Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery
Author_Ann Swidler
Author_Claude S. Fischer
Author_Kim Voss
Author_Martin Sanchez Jankowski
Author_Michael Hout
Author_Samuel R. Lucas
Average Joe
Calculation
Category=JBFA
Category=JBS
Cognitive elite
Cognitive skill
Curriculum
Disadvantage
Dummy variable (statistics)
Economic growth
Economic inequality
Economist
Economy
Employment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Estimation
Ethnic group
Explanation
Family income
Head of Household
Household
Ideology
Income
Intelligence
Knights of Labor
Learning
Mexicans
Middle class
Minority group
Motivation
Of Education
Percentage
Percentile
Poverty
Poverty in the United States
Predictive validity
Psychologist
Psychology
Psychometrics
Public policy
Racial segregation
Regression analysis
Respondent
SAT
School
Sexism
Skill
Social class
Social environment
Social inequality
Social issue
Socioeconomic status
Sociology
Standard of living
Statistic
Statistics
Subsidy
Tax
Test (assessment)
Test score
The Bell Curve
Underclass
Unemployment
Urban sociology
Wealth
Welfare
Year
Product details
- ISBN 9780691028989
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 28 Jul 1996
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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As debate rages over the widening and destructive gap between the rich and the rest of Americans, Claude Fischer and his colleagues present a comprehensive new treatment of inequality in America. They challenge arguments that expanding inequality is the natural, perhaps necessary, accompaniment of economic growth. They refute the claims of the incendiary bestseller The Bell Curve (1994) through a clear, rigorous re-analysis of the very data its authors, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, used to contend that inherited differences in intelligence explain inequality. Inequality by Design offers a powerful alternative explanation, stressing that economic fortune depends more on social circumstances than on IQ, which is itself a product of society. More critical yet, patterns of inequality must be explained by looking beyond the attributes of individuals to the structure of society. Social policies set the "rules of the game" within which individual abilities and efforts matter. And recent policies have, on the whole, widened the gap between the rich and the rest of Americans since the 1970s.
Not only does the wealth of individuals' parents shape their chances for a good life, so do national policies ranging from labor laws to investments in education to tax deductions. The authors explore the ways that America--the most economically unequal society in the industrialized world--unevenly distributes rewards through regulation of the market, taxes, and government spending. It attacks the myth that inequality fosters economic growth, that reducing economic inequality requires enormous welfare expenditures, and that there is little we can do to alter the extent of inequality. It also attacks the injurious myth of innate racial inequality, presenting powerful evidence that racial differences in achievement are the consequences, not the causes, of social inequality. By refusing to blame inequality on an unchangeable human nature and an inexorable market--an excuse that leads to resignation and passivity--Inequality by Design shows how we can advance policies that widen opportunity for all.
All the authors are in the department of sociology at the Universoty of California, Berkeley. Claude S. Fisher's books include The Urban Experience and To Dwell among Friends; Michael Hout's
Following in Father's Footsteps; Martín Sánchez Jankowski's
City Bound and Islands in the Street; Samuel R. Luca's, a pending book on the effects of race and sex discrimination since 1940; Ann Swindler's,
Organization without Authority and Habitats of the Heart; and Kim Voss's,
The Making of American Exceptionalism.
