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Two - Competing concepts of class: implications and applications for community development
- Edited by Mae Shaw, Marjorie Mayo, Goldsmiths, University of London
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- Book:
- Class, Inequality and Community Development
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 06 September 2016, pp 23-38
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Summary
Introduction: class and community
The growth of social and economic inequality is the hallmark of our era. It is not only evident in the economic gulf between the Global North and the Global South; as has now been endlessly documented, income inequality is also growing within countries. Perhaps most surprisingly, since our theories of the development of the welfare state predicted otherwise, inequality is also growing – and rapidly – within the rich capitalist countries with the most advanced welfare states. The nations that are leading the trend are the United States and the United Kingdom.
Sociologists, social policy experts and economists have been describing social inequalities for a long time, sometimes merely reporting income or wealth disparities, or taking a Weberian approach that groups people according to their various resources, including not only their income and wealth but also their skills, assets, political influence and social status. Members of a class share common ‘life chances’, which locate them within a social structure of inequality. Markets in capitalist systems distribute life chances according to the resources individuals bring to bear; thus, the varying forms that resources take and the different levels of skills and other assets that individuals possess account for differences in the probability that an individual or group will procure goods, gain position in life and find inner satisfaction (Weber, 1964, p.424). In other words, inequality begets inequality.
The resulting metrics are familiar. Income and wealth inequality data are reported, as are associated measures of inequalities in education and housing and health and happiness, and also inequality in political influence. The evidence is overwhelming: we live in stratified societies, and that stratification is increasing. The slogan of the Occupy movement, ‘We are the 99%, they are the 1%!’, may not have been precisely accurate; but it was close enough, which is why it resonated as it did.
These measures of class stratification tell us a lot about our societies. It is obviously illuminating to know just how many people are rich or poor or in between, and just how rich or poor they are, and it also serves in the design and evaluation of public policies.
six - Crisis, convulsion and the welfare state
- Zoë Irving, University of York, Menno Fenger, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
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- Book:
- Social Policy in Times of Austerity
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 11 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 September 2015, pp 143-170
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Summary
Publics are recurrently told by their leaders that they must tighten their belts, settle for less, forget their personal needs, their private dreams, for the greater good. The reasons given for this call for austerity are various. War made necessary by foreign aggressors, pestilence visited upon us by higher powers, or maybe merely crop failure. We the people must sacrifice for the greater good. But the call for sacrifice, for austerity, often obscures a strategy for extraction by those who have more from those who have less.
Not so long ago, there was reason to believe that at least in the wealthier nations of the world, poverty and the extreme inequality to which it is related were becoming problems of the past (Marshall, 1950). An important reason for this confidence was the steady expansion of government policies that regulated market actors, largely to limit externalities, and also to offset market-generated income inequalities through redistribution in the form of taxation and subsidies. Recent developments, most dating from before the financial meltdown that began in 2007, but escalating since, have badly shaken that confidence.
The bifurcated welfare state
In a large number of the rich countries that were earlier the pioneers in creating the welfare state, social spending is under attack. In Europe, the financial crisis, originating in manipulation and chicanery in the US housing market and spreading to Europe through the international financial markets, has now morphed into a banker and business led push for austerity, meaning cutbacks in welfare state spending and in wages (Blyth, 2013; Irwin, 2013; Streeck, 2014). This is not only happening in beleaguered Greece and Spain, but in the United States and the United Kingdom, and less dramatically in the other settler countries spawned by the British Empire (Huber and Stephens, 2005). Moreover, the emergence of campaigns for austerity elsewhere in Europe suggests the trend could spread to other rich nations that were once heralded as welfare state leaders, with consequences of increased poverty and inequality (see Figure 6.1).
Neoliberalism, an effort to unfetter capitalism from the constraints imposed by the inroads of democratic politics, has been advancing for more than three decades (Harvey, 2005). It is not hard to assess what it has wrought. Public policies in the lead neoliberal nations have been transformed. Business regulations, including regulations intended to improve workplace safety, reduce environmental hazards, and protect consumers, have been rolled back.