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Studies are largely optimistic about the ability of standardized procedures to constrain decision-makers' biases and produce more equitable results across fields. However, work that embraces standardization as an equalizing force stands in contrast to research on standardization and street-level bureaucrats, which asserts that standardized procedures are not self-actuating and cannot be understood apart from the environments in which they are used. I examine how frontline workers vary in their approach to an actuarial-based tool intended to standardize judgments. In a highly controlled decision-making environment, child welfare workers whose racial and sex characteristics afford them higher status report subverting the tool; conversely, workers in the same position whose ascriptive characteristics yield them lower status in terms of race and sex describe following the rules. In an environment where the same tool is adopted only ceremonially, all workers experience decision-making as unconstrained, regardless of their ascriptive characteristics. This work fills gaps in knowledge about how social status and organizational context intersect to affect rule abidance. Examining these dynamic relationships advances understanding of how organizations reproduce inequality and the limits and potential for standardization to transform social hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I estimate the impact of unproductive activities on economic growth, labour productivity and income inequality in the United States from 1947 to 2011. Productive activities directly create value, while unproductive activities do not. I develop a new methodology to compute the growth of productive and unproductive activities in terms of flows of income and stocks of fixed assets using input-output matrices and national income accounts. A core feature of my methodology is the notion that the commodification of knowledge and information gives rise to 'information rents'. Information rents are, as I demonstrate, a determinant factor of growth and distribution. I find that unproductive activities have a net positive effect on economic growth and labour productivity, but at the price of increasing income inequality. Unproductive activities that rely on information rents, in particular, have increased income inequality and slowed down value-added growth despite their positive contribution to labour productivity. Information rents have drawn too much value from productive activities and benefitted the top income earners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasingly sophisticated antidiscrimination laws, discrimination and inequality have proved remarkably resilient. This prompts questions about the limits of law's ability to achieve social change. One way forward is to fashion new legal tools, which impose duties to promote or achieve equality, rather than focusing on individual rights against specific perpetrators. In the past decade in Britain, such fourth generation equality laws have been developed in a distinctive format, requiring the decision-maker to "have due regard" to equality, rather than taking action to achieve such objectives. This standard has triggered a spate of judicial review cases, particularly in response to austerity measures imposing deep budgetary cuts on disadvantaged groups. This Paper's aims are two-fold. The first is to examine the judicial approach to the due regard standard in the light of recent regulatory theory. Do courts consider the due regard standard as a signal for deference, or can it be understood as an example of "reflexive law," facilitating deliberative decision-making rather than imposing external standards likely to meet with resistance from the regulated body? The Paper concludes that courts have struggled to deal with the regulatory challenges presented by the "due regard" standard, wavering between appropriate and inappropriate intervention. The second aim is an analysis of whether a deliberative standard is appropriate in the equality context. The record of judicial review cases demonstrates that such a standard risks legitimating or simply reconfiguring existing inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic theory suggests that monopoly prices hurt consumers but benefit shareholders. But in a world where individuals or households can be both consumers and shareholders, the impact of market power on inequality depends in part on the relative distribution of consumption and corporate equity ownership across individuals or households. The paper calculates this distribution for the United States, using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Consumer Expenditure Survey, spanning nearly three decades from 1989 to 2016. In 2016, the top 20 per cent consumed approximately as much as the bottom 60 per cent, but had 15 times as much corporate equity. Because ownership is more skewed than consumption, increased mark-ups increase inequality. Moreover, over time, corporate equity has become even more skewed relative to consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stratification and inequality are among the most central concepts in sociology, and although related, they are fundamentally distinct: inequality refers to the extent to which resources are distributed unevenly across individuals or between population subgroups, whereas stratification refers to the extent to which population subgroups occupy distinct hierarchical layers within an overall resource distribution. Despite the centrality of stratification in theories of class structure, prior empirical studies have focused exclusively on measures of inequality, which do not accurately capture the degree of class stratification and suffer from a variety of methodological limitations. In this paper, we employ a novel rank-based index of stratification to measure the degree to which occupational classes inhabit distinct, non-overlapping, and hierarchically arranged layers in the distribution of personal market income. The stratification index is nonparametric, both scale and translation invariant, and independent of the level of inequality. Based on this index, our results show that the US income distribution is highly stratified by occupational class and that the degree of class stratification increased substantially from 1980 to 2016. Moreover, we find that this trend is almost entirely due to growing stratification among aggregate occupational classes rather than among the disaggregate occupations nested within them. Finally, a set of counterfactual analyses indicate that the rise of occupational class stratification is driven by increases in the income returns to education, deunionization, and deindustrialization, although the relative importance of these factors varies by gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a relationship between family income inequality and income mobility across generations in the United States? As family income inequality rose in the United States, parental resources available for improving children's health, education, and care diverged. The amount and rate of divergence also varied across US states. Researchers and policy analysts have expressed concern that relatively high inequality might be accompanied by relatively low mobility, tightening the connection between individuals' incomes during childhood and adulthood. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and various government sources, this paper exploits state and cohort variation to estimate the relationship between inequality and mobility. Results provide very little support for the hypothesis that inequality shapes mobility in the United States. The inequality children experienced during youth had no robust association with their economic mobility as adults. Formal analysis reveals that offsetting effects could underlie this result. In theory, mobility-enhancing forces may counterbalance mobility-reducing effects. In practice, the results suggest that in the US context, the intergenerational transmission of income may not be very responsive to changes in inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper attempts to understand how 1968 as a transformative historical moment has influenced the discourses and identity constructions of community development in the United States. Using a post-structuralist discursive analytical framework, the paper examines the nature and structure of community development discourses as reproduced in the language and social practices of the militant wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, the early Black Power movement, Alinskyism and the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty. Rather than community development being constituted by radical democracy, this paper argues that community development is dominated by hierarchical and unequal ideas and practices which invest the professional subject with agency and construct local people as passive objects. The paper explores how the radical democratic practices have been silenced from 1968 onwards and as a result how contemporary community development discourses may be reproducing highly problematic ideas and practices which undermine rather than support community development's goal of achieving equality and social justice for marginalized groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we argue that government spending played a significant role in stimulating the wave of innovation that hit the U.S. economy in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, as well as the simultaneous increase in inequality and in education attainments. Since the late 1970s U.S. policymakers began targeting commercial innovations more directly and explicitly. We focus on the shift in the composition of public demand toward high-tech goods, which, by increasing the market-size of innovative firms, functions as a de facto innovation policy tool. We build a quality-ladders non-scale growth model with heterogeneous industries and endogenous supply of skills, and show that an increase in the technological content of public spending stimulates R&D, raises the wage of skilled workers, and, at the same time, stimulates human capital accumulation. A calibrated version of the model suggests that government policy explains between 12% and 15% of the observed increase in wage inequality in the period 1976-1991. (JEL: E62, J31, O33, O41) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents changing inequality in employer-provided fringe benefits in the United States using much more comprehensive data than previously available. Inequality growth in broader measures of compensation slightly exceeds wage inequality growth over the 1981–1997 period. Employer costs due to paid leave, pensions, and health insurance fell for low wage labor and rose for high wage labor over this period. The findings suggest income effects as a contributory factor in the relative decline of fringe benefits among low wage workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bequest patterns to children are important in intergenerational models of the distribution of income and wealth. Economies that feature primogeniture will have a greater degree of inequality than those featuring equal division. This paper presents evidence on estate division among children by sex, birth order, family size, estate size, and asset composition. The results presented here are preference-generated not tax-induced due to the tax characteristics within the sampling region. It is shown that equal sharing among children is the rule, a result that casts doubt upon the "altruist" model of inheritance as advanced by Becker and Tomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widening pay gap between corporate executives and rank-and-file workers has attracted much attention in the United States, but the sources of the pay gap have not been systematically examined. In this paper, I use a relative bargaining power approach to explore the sources of pay disparity between executives and nonexecutive employees in the United States. I argue that the bargaining power of labor affects executive compensation, nonexecutive compensation, and the executive-worker pay gap and that this effect is moderated by the characteristics of the chief executive officers (CEOs) who implement organizational policies. An analysis of 185 US firms provides evidence that labor's bargaining power reduces the pay gap between executives and nonexecutive employees. This effect is mainly through the unions' impact on executive compensation. The results also suggest that labor's effect of narrowing the gap becomes weaker when the CEO has a finance background or when the CEO was recruited from outside the company rather than being promoted from within. These findings shed new light on our understanding of the linkage between firm-level dynamics and the rise in income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on inequality in the legal profession underemphasizes the macro-level factors that structure legal work. This paper introduces two measures that characterize local legal labor markets. The index of gender dissimilarity is the proportion of women required to move into the private law firm sector from the public sector to create gender balance. The index of hierarchical market structure is defined by a concentration of elite law graduates, highly leveraged law firms, lucrative billings, and corporate clients. Women's salaries increase more rapidly than men's in these markets, yet men continue to out-earn women. Furthermore, HLM models indicate that in labor markets with greater gender dissimilarity, women's wages are significantly depressed. We explain this in terms of mechanisms of opportunity hoarding and exploitation (Tilly 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of landownership adversely affected the emergence of human-capital promoting institutions ( e.g. public schooling), and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries. The prediction of the theory regarding the adverse effect of the concentration of landownership on education expenditure is established empirically based on evidence from the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abuse of human subjects has always been, and continues to be, a problem in the United States. In spite of regulation to protect subjects, the exploitation of disenfranchised groups and the reproduction of social inequalities are entrenched in the American research enterprise. This paper argues that current approaches to protecting subjects are insufficient because they prioritize individualized responses to structural problems. What is not often acknowledged or accounted for is that the worst cases of abuse to subjects occur because of unethical treatment of groups, not individuals. Solutions are proposed to make regulation more responsive to these concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wealth inequality is among tile most extreme forms of stratification in the United States, and upward wealth mobility is not common. Yet mobility is possible, and this paper takes advantage of trends among a unique group to explore the processes that generate mobility. I show that non-Hispanic whites raised in Roman Catholic families have been upwardly mobile in the wealth distribution in recent decades, and I find that unique fertility, marriage and education patterns contributed to this change. I also show that Catholic values related to work and money contributed to relatively high saving and portfolio behavior that facilitated mobility. The results provide important insight into the process by which childhood experiences shape adult well-being, particularly adult wealth ownership. The findings also contribute to understanding of social inequality by identifying important behaviors and processes that facilitate mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The falling cost of international business travel and communication motivates highly-skilled workers who live in developed countries to spend more of their time co-operating with less-skilled workers in developing countries. This tends to narrow the gap between developed and developing countries in the wages of less-skilled workers, but to widen the wage gap within developed countries between highly-skilled and less-skilled workers. The paper formalizes this mechanism and tests it on data for the United States and developing countries. The two effects on wage inequalities of greater co-operation of highly-skilled workers with workers in developing countries both seem quantitatively important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Alaska Native citizenship, civil rights, land, and sovereignty in territorial Alaska from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination. I argue that during this key shift in Indian policy, territorial and federal ofcials, lawmakers, and corporate interests wielded the rhetoric of citizenship, equal rights, and "reverse discrimination" as tools of dispossession against Alaska Native land and sovereignty rights. I show how Alaska Natives challenged non-native assumptions that equal U.S. citizenship and native rights to land, sovereignty, and economic self-determination were mutually exclusive. Instead, Alaska Natives advanced a vision of citizenship in which their rights as native people and ownership of the land guaranteed their rights as citizens to participate fully in the social, political, and economic life of the territory and the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The paper reports a study from a research program designed to examine the effects of social resources on the status attainment process. Social resources are defined as the wealth, status, power, as well as social ties, of those persons who are directly or indirectly linked to the individual. We propose that access to and use of social resources through one's network provide an essential transition between family background and education on the one hand, and the socioeconomic status achievement on the other. The study focuses on the social resources individuals used in seeking first and last jobs. By identifying the occupational status of the personal contact used, it was possible to assess the relative contributions of family background (e.g., father's educational and occupational statuses), education, and social resources (source status) to the explained variation of achieved occupational statuses. Data from a representative sample of males, 20-64, who were then or had been in the civilian labor force in a tri-city area of Northeastern United States confirmed the important and independent effect of social resources on occupational achievement. Potential shift toward a theory of social stratification and mobility with a focus on the use and manipulation of resources from one's social network is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of the intergenerational mobility regimes observed in Italy and the United States in the middle of the 1980s. First, I propose a theoretical model that accounts for mobility propensities in terms of underlying generative mechanisms. This model is then operationalized, translated into a hybrid log-linear model for frequencies, and fitted to the pertinent mobility tables to verify whether (a) the observed data offer evidence in favour of the existence of the hypothesized mechanisms; and (b) cross- sex and/or cross-national dissimilarities in the action of such mechanisms do exist. The analysis shows that (a) all the hypothesized mechanisms contribute to generating the observed mobility regimes; (b) general resources and the objective desirability of classes account for most of the variation in mobility propensities observed in the two countries under study; (c) in both countries, men and women are characterized by the same mobility regime, except that women are less likely to inherit their father's business; (d) compared with the United States, Italy is characterized by a substantially higher degree of class inequality in terms of mobility chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a paucity of cross-national studies of earnings inequality. This is unfortunate, since the ways that individual characteristics and work structures influence earnings are likely to be heavily dependent on the institutional frameworks of different countries. This paper investigates how work structures affect the earnings of labor force members in the United States and Norway. Our analysis-based on data collected as part of the cross-national `Class Structure and Class Consciousness' project-suggests that both structural and individual variables are needed to account for the generation of economic inequality. Moreover, while some work structures affect earnings similarly in the two countries, there are notable differences. For example, our results suggest that earnings are more standardized in Norway, as wage gains made by organized workers `spill over' to those in unorganized sectors. In particular, union membership is less strongly related to earnings among Norwegian as compared to U.S. men; and there are greater differences in earnings among occupational groups for men in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does exposure to economic inequality undermine belief in the American dream? Scholarship has long argued that the availability of meritocratic ideologies like the American dream inoculates people against exposure to inequality by leading them to rationalize unequal outcomes by viewing wealth as due to hard work and poverty as due to indolence. The existence of inequality where the "have-nots" are working poor, however, could serve to undermine such a process because their employment status casts them as "deserving poor" and limits the applicability of agency-based explanations for poverty. Across two experiments embedded in national surveys, exposure to inequality alone did not cause significant reductions in belief in the American dream; however, exposure to inequality where the have-nots were working poor significantly reduced belief in the American dream. Moderation and mediation analyses indicate these effects were most pronounced among lower-income Americans and indirectly heightened support for government reduction of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report findings from a conjoint experiment where respondents indicated what they viewed as an appropriate sentence for a series of hypothetical individuals convicted of federal crimes. The experiment signaled the race of the defendant by using distinctively "Black" and "white" names, allowing us to assess whether Americans are more punitive toward purportedly Black defendants. We also consider whether signals of the defendant's race condition the effects of the crime and various defendant characteristics. Surprisingly, the direct effect of our signal of defendants' purported race is null. We present evidence that this null finding is a product of offsetting tendencies: respondents who view persistent racial inequalities as the product of both past and ongoing institutional factors prescribed lengthier sentences for white defendants; those who discount these explanations prescribed lengthier sentences for Black defendants. 1 We find only scattered evidence that the signal of defendants' race moderates the effects of other characteristics of the crime and defendant. Our approach and findings not only offer insights into how racial attitudes shape perceptions regarding what constitutes just punishment for crimes in the contemporary United States, but also demonstrate a novel approach to studying this domain and point to an array of promising avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how U.S. President Thomas Jefferson's views on gender and nationalism were formed. Jefferson's social views were greatly influenced by the time he spent abroad, specifically in France where he praised the French for their social nature and manners. Jefferson was also quick to acknowledge that it would be the U.S. that would experience the highest form of enlightened society. He believed that European mores could have a negative impact on people and institutions in the U.S. The author discusses how Jefferson's belief that women belonged in the domestic sphere separated his views from those of Europeans and how Jefferson believed this would contribute to the U.S.'s superiority over European nations.

Focuses on the appearance of Richard Moore, a former slave and Union veteran before a Republican-controlled committee of Tennessee Assembly to testify against the whipping of masked men. Presentation of pistol and voter registration certificate; Identification of the entire gang; Assessment of civic equality law.

Previous studies generally assume that barriers to internet access are largely passive. That is, exclusion from the Internet is a consequence of poorly resourced individuals, communities, and institutions. This study complicates that assumption by focusing on the active policing and gatekeeping of internet access. Specifically, we estimate the causal effect of free Wi-Fi at chain restaurants on quality-of-life crime reporting by leveraging a staggered difference-in-differences design which compares geo-located crime reports near chain restaurants in Chicago before and after those restaurants introduced free Wi-Fi. We find that free Wi-Fi led to a substantive and significant increase in quality-of-life policing when restaurants were located in wealthier and Whiter areas, but not in other areas. Our findings suggest that internet access itself may be actively policed by social institutions, in our case, national chain restaurants and the police, to protect access for some at the expense of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study distributional preferences in larger "societies". We conduct experiments via Mechanical Turk, in which subjects choose between two income distributions, each with seven (or more) individuals, with hypothetical incomes that aim to approximate the actual distribution of income in the United States. In contrast to prior work, our design allows us to flexibly capture the particular distributional concerns of subjects. Consistent with standard maximin (Rawlsian) preferences, subjects select distributions in which the bottom individual's income is higher (but show little regard for lower incomes above the bottom ranking). In contrast to standard models, however, we find that subjects select distributions that lower the top individual's income, but not other high incomes. Finally, we provide evidence of "locally competitive" preferences—in most experimental sessions, subjects select distributions that lower the income of the individual directly above them, whereas the income of the individual two positions above has little effect on subjects' decisions. Our findings suggest that theories of inequality aversion should be adapted to account for individuals' aversion to "topmost" and "local" disadvantageous inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs about American late capitalism as the convenience and comfort of an air-conditioned environment in a possible climate-changed future. Topics include signifier of change in a post-energy-transition future in which will be hotter and electricity expensive; and Air conditioning for an appropriate symbol of elided global inequality that ground critiques of the totalizing conception of human agency that is causing climate change in the environmental humanities.

This paper examines the arguments presented by the Roman Catholic Bishops in their 1993 Pastoral Resolution, Comprehensive Health Care Reform: Protecting Human Life, Promoting Human Dignity, Pursuing the Common Good, concerning health care reform. Focusing on the meaning of equality in health care and traditional Roman Catholic doctrine, it is argued that the Bishops fail to grasp the force of the differences among persons, the value of the market, and traditional scholastic arguments concerning obligatory and extraordinary health care. To attempt to equalize the distribution of health care would be ruinous. A more traditional understanding of Christian thought reveals an acceptance of inequality in health care distribution and a bias against using the secular state to coerce a solution to such concerns for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An estimator of inequality in lifetime incomes is derived. It can be computed for a population from the distribution of incomes in one year. As a result, the estimates are as easily calculated as measurements of annual inequality, but can be used as measurements of lifetime inequality. Estimates from this measure and two others have been computed for selected years since 1947. The results are compared by their implications for the level and trend of inequality in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eviction transforms landlords into plaintiffs and tenants into defendants, reframing expansive histories of housing trouble into legal problems. Researchers note high rates of default judgments against tenants, a majority of tenants without attorneys, and a disconnect between the ways that landlords and tenants understand cases. This study reveals the micro-foundations of case outcomes by explaining causes and consequences of "interpretive disjuncture." How does interpretive disjuncture shape case trajectories and outcomes as housing trouble transforms into an eviction lawsuit? Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in tenants' rights clinics in Los Angeles County, I follow tenants' cases back to their roots and explain how both everyday and institutional challenges shape tenants' interpretive processes as they navigate eviction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars of racial inequality have investigated the transformation of racial ideologies in the post-Civil Rights Era, comparatively little research has been done on a corresponding transformation in racial advocacy organizing. Using an original dataset, I introduce racially conservative organizations, provide a history of their growth from 1960 to 2000, and estimate their formation in metropolitan areas over three decades to better specify the factors that led to their emergence. Measures of organizational strength, stability, and growth reveal that racially conservative organizations thrived relative to white extremist organizations in the second half of the 20th century, alongside the de-legitimation of explicit racism and rise of color-blind racism. The multivariate analysis indicates that metropolitan areas with increased political opportunities witnessed a greater likelihood of organizational formation among racial conservatives. In the 1970s, threats to dominant group interests emboldened racial conservatives and incited mobilization. However, in later decades, these conditions weakened dominant group interests in a way that deterred collective action. Racially conservative organizations are more likely to form in contexts that provide them with legitimacy to mobilize around racially sensitive issues. The findings challenge past research that conflates racial conservatism and white extremism and assumes that they share the same determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on how public history organizations are handling the twin pandemics of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 and racial inequality in the United States (U.S.). Three roundtable discussions were held, which included participation by professor Ricia Anne Chansky, forensic anthropologist Anna N. Dhody, archivist Meredith Evans, curators Peter Leibhold, Alexandra Lord, Amanda L. Mahoney, Louise E. Shaw, Sam Vong, and director of the Texas After Violence Project Gabriel Solis.

The article offers information on how public history organizations are handling the twin pandemics of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 and racial inequality in the United States (U.S.). Three roundtable discussions were held, which included participation by professor Ricia Anne Chansky, forensic anthropologist Anna N. Dhody, archivist Meredith Evans, curators Peter Leibhold, Alexandra Lord, Amanda L. Mahoney, Louise E. Shaw, Sam Vong, and director of the Texas After Violence Project Gabriel Solis.

The article discusses social services leadership's role in addressing the social challenges that African American women face in the U.S., including in ending anti-black racism and addressing black women's marginality in the social work profession. The inequality that African American women face in the social services profession, including in social work education, is discussed.

We study the causes of "nutritional inequality": why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. We then estimate a structural model of grocery demand, using a new instrument exploiting the combination of grocery retail chains' differing presence across geographic markets with their differing comparative advantages across product groups. Counterfactual simulations show that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%, while the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the argument that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial attitudes are multidimensional, and the corresponding picture we get from survey data on racial attitudes is complex. Tracing the results of major national surveys that provide trends over at least 10 years, and with at least three time points (primarily the General Social Survey and the National Election Studies), this article reveals that complexity. Some survey questions show dramatic changes in support of racial equality, while others reveal stagnation or even increasing negativity or disinterest. The article also describes the differences between whites and blacks in patterns and trends. Although compared to some issues, the survey record on racial attitudes is robust and lengthy, we draw attention to important ways in which it is uneven. We conclude by highlighting areas for future research that focus on improved survey measures that will capture more fully the complexity of contemporary public opinion on racial matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We advance current knowledge of school punishment by examining (1) the prevalence of exclusionary discipline in elementary school, (2) racial disparities in exclusionary discipline in elementary school, and (3) the association between exclusionary discipline and aggressive behavior in elementary school. Using child and parent reports from the Fragile Families Study, we estimate that more than one in ten children born between 1998 and 2000 in large US cities were suspended or expelled by age nine, when most were in third grade. We also find extreme racial disparity; about 40 percent of non-Hispanic black boys were suspended or expelled, compared to 8 percent of non-Hispanic white or other-race boys. Disparities are largely due to differences in children's school and home environments rather than to behavior problems. Next, consistent with social stress and strain theories, we find suspension or expulsion associated with increased aggressive behavior in elementary school. This association does not vary by race but is robust to a rich set of covariates, within-individual fixed effects, and matching methods. In conjunction with what we find for racial disparities, our results imply that school discipline policies relying heavily on exclusionary punishment may be fostering childhood inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We combine insights from the sociological and psychological traditions of social psychology to examine how status inequality may affect group performance. Specifically, we examine how synergy, that is, performance gains produced through group interaction, is realized in ethnically diverse groups. Research suggests that diverse work groups struggle to capitalize on the strengths of all group members, and in turn, achieve synergy less frequently than homogeneous groups. We examine how an intervention in the status generalizing process affects group members' influence—and how this affects synergistic gains (n = 50). We study these processes over a three-week period of time. In groups that received an intervention in the status generalizing process (experimental condition), racial hierarchy is decreased in weeks 1 and 3—but inequality remained in baseline groups. Additionally, in week 3, experimental groups achieved synergy more than baseline groups and did not perform worse than baseline groups on any task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using evidence from confidential Census data on US law offices, we study the extent to decreases in coordination costs are responsible increases in earnings inequality among lawyers. We show that inequality increased substantially between 1977 and 1992, and that partner-associate ratios changed in ways consistent with the hypothesis that coordination costs fell during this period. We then propose a "hierarchical production function" and estimate its parameters in each period. We find that coordination costs fell over time, so that hiring one's first associate leveraged a partner's skill by about 30% more in 1992 than 1977. We find also that changes in lawyers' hierarchical organization account for about two-third of the increase in earnings inequality among lawyers in the upper tail, but much less of the increase between lawyers in the upper tail and other lawyers. New organizational efficiencies potentially explain increases in inequality among lawyers, especially among the highest earners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research that included an engaged participant component, this article seeks to build a critical theory of technology adoption in urban communities. While the high cost of broadband Internet is undeniably an obstacle to adoption, we argue that solving the problem of cost is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the digital divide. To this end, the article contends that a community's relationship to communication technology-and their ability to see it as a political and cultural tool that can be utilized not just instrumentally, but more broadly as a way to fight poverty, inequality, and other forms of oppression-is a substantial factor leading to what we call emancipatory adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article analyses Tarunabh Khaitan’s attempt in his recent book, A Theory of Discrimination Law, to identify the central purpose and justification of discrimination law. Khaitan sets out to determine the key features of discrimination law through rigorous comparative analysis, and to locate a solid normative foundation for its provisions. He concludes that discrimination law is structured around an ‘obsession’ with combating group disadvantage, ie relative forms of disadvantage between different groups whose membership is defined by morally irrelevant or valuable personal characteristics such as gender, race and disability. He goes on to make a strongly argued liberal (as distinct from an egalitarian) case as to why discrimination law is justified in seeking to minimise the negative impact on individual liberty of group disadvantage. Certain aspects of his analysis fail to capture the full complexity of discrimination law and the moral concerns which underpin its functioning. However, in general, Khaitan’s arguments make an invaluable contribution to the diffuse theoretical literature on discrimination law, and are bound to become a major point of reference in conceptual debates about this highly significant area of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We contribute to the literature on positional goods and subjective well-being by providing new evidence on the following questions: Is the effect of income on subjective well-being mainly relative or absolute? Does the intensity of social comparison condition the effect of income on well-being? Does the reference group for comparison condition this effect? We present results from the Social Status, Consumption, and Happiness Survey, a national survey of Americans conducted in 2012. The findings suggest that the more highly individuals rate their income relative to others, the happier they are; that individuals who find it important to compare their income to that of others are less happy; and that the reference group that is salient for comparison conditions the association between income and well-being. We situate these findings in the literatures on the dynamics of inequality, social comparison, and well-being [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the limitations and strengths of the discordant twin-pair design used by T. Fujiwara and I. Kawachi in their study "Is education causally related to better health? A twin fixed effects study in the United States," published in the 2009 issue. It notes the dramatic limitation of the statistical power in the fixed-effects analyses and the resulting highly imprecise estimates. It also discusses the inconsistency of the few available twin studies on social inequality in health.

In the tumultuous war years of 1861 to 1865, enslaved men, women, and children across the United States emancipated themselves. Nearly 180,000 African American men, including thousands of former slaves, joined the Union Army to fight for their freedom and for the nation. Historians tell the story of these brave men as one of glory. Indeed, it was glorious. Despite unequal pay and racist officers, black men fought valiantly and earned their freedom. However, this history does not capture the whole story. Experiencing freedom for the first time, many black soldiers discovered the discipline and racism of the army reminiscent of bondage and reacted angrily. Sometimes they rebelled as runaways had during enslavement-- they ran. They deserted the army and its injustices to forge a freedom worth living. The army captured many African Americans deserters, though, and tried them in the courts-martial. White officers enforced enlistment contracts in the courts-martial, imposing boundaries on freedom. Capturing another angle of emancipation in the army, the trials of freedom explored here recast service as a limiting--not liberating--experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study conducts a nationwide, locally comparative analysis of the extent to which natural hazards contribute to residential mobility in the United States and how this influence varies for racial and ethnic minorities. Analyses combine census data on households with data from thousands of recorded natural hazards during the late 1990s. Findings affirm that natural hazards are common throughout the country; that associated property damage correlates positively with increases in residential mobility for all groups; that these increases are particularly noticeable among racial and ethnic minorities because of preexisting inequalities in mobility; and that areas with more costly damage tend to pull as well as push migrants, especially Latinos and Asians. Implications for existing theory, methods, and policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In John Rawls's theory, the role of the principles of justice is to regulate the basic structure of society--its major social, political and economic institutions-- and to specify the fair terms of cooperation for free and equal persons. Some have interpreted Rawls as excluding contract law, and perhaps the private law as a whole, from the basic structure. However, this interpretation of Rawls is untenable, given the motivations for his emphasis on the basic structure and the highly inclusive characterisations he gives of it. Yet if he includes private law within the basic structure, he seems committed to holding that its design and operations should be regulated by his two principles of justice, which govern the distribution of basic liberties, economic resources and opportunities. This would leave it unclear whether there was any room for values other than distributive values to inform the design of private law. Leaving no role for other values might be unproblematic if distributive justice were a master normative category with equal regulative authority over all basic social institutions. But we should not assume that this 'distributivist paradigm' gives the best interpretation either of private law or of the fair terms of cooperation for a society of free and equal people. We need to think further about how non-distributive values may inform the principles of justice that regulate the institutional structure of society. And we need to ask how much of law, whether public or private, is regulated solely by principles of justice that focus on the distribution of basic liberties, economic resources and opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because homeownership continues to be a key mechanism underlying racial inequality in America, recent developments that led to the foreclosure crisis bring to the forefront issues concerning minority homeowners' ability to sustain ownership. This article uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine racial differences in the likelihood of homeownership exit over the last four decades. We find that black homeowners are at a significantly higher risk of transitioning to renter status than are white homeowners, even after accounting for life-course, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics, and the selection into homeownership. Most importantly, we show that the racial gap in ownership exit has widened substantially over time, especially among owners who purchased their homes in the 1990s or later. These findings are consistent with arguments that the nature of racial stratification in U.S. housing markets has shifted over time from overt market exclusion to market exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]