Egalitarianism, or equalitarianism, is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds on the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. Egalitarianism is the doctrine that all citizens of a state should be accorded exactly equal rights. Egalitarian doctrines have motivated many modern social movements and ideas, including the Enlightenment, feminism, civil rights, and international human rights.
In economics, the Gini coefficient, also known as the Gini index or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality within a nation or a social group. It was developed by statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini.
Distributive justice concerns the socially just allocation of resources, goods, opportunity in a society. It is concerned with how to allocate resources fairly among members of a society, taking into account factors such as wealth, income, and social status. Often contrasted with just process, which is concerned with the administration of law, distributive justice concentrates on outcomes. This subject has been given considerable attention in philosophy and the social sciences. Theorists have developed widely different conceptions of distributive justice. These have contributed to debates around the arrangement of social, political and economic institutions to promote the just distribution of benefits and burdens within a society. Most contemporary theories of distributive justice rest on the precondition of material scarcity. From that precondition arises the need for principles to resolve competing interest and claims concerning a just or at least morally preferable distribution of scarce resources.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist. He is a professor at Harvard University and author of works on urban sociology, race and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
There are wide varieties of economic inequality, most notably income inequality measured using the distribution of income and wealth inequality measured using the distribution of wealth. Besides economic inequality between countries or states, there are important types of economic inequality between different groups of people.
Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth, income, race, education, ethnicity, gender, occupation, social status, or derived power. As such, stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group, category, geographic region, or social unit.
Inequity aversion (IA) is the preference for fairness and resistance to incidental inequalities. The social sciences that study inequity aversion include sociology, economics, psychology, anthropology, and ethology. Researches on inequity aversion aim to explain behaviors that are not purely driven by self-interests but fairness considerations.
Health equity arises from access to the social determinants of health, specifically from wealth, power and prestige. Individuals who have consistently been deprived of these three determinants are significantly disadvantaged from health inequities, and face worse health outcomes than those who are able to access certain resources. It is not equity to simply provide every individual with the same resources; that would be equality. In order to achieve health equity, resources must be allocated based on an individual need-based principle.
Claus Offe is a political sociologist of Marxist orientation. He received his PhD from the University of Frankfurt and his Habilitation at the University of Konstanz. In Germany, he has held chairs for Political Science and Political Sociology at the Universities of Bielefeld (1975–1989) and Bremen (1989–1995), as well as at the Humboldt-University of Berlin (1995–2005). He has worked as fellow and visiting professor at the Institutes for Advanced Study in Stanford, Princeton, and the Australian National University as well as Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley and The New School University, New York. Once a student of Jürgen Habermas, the left-leaning German academic is counted among the second generation Frankfurt School. He currently teaches political sociology at a private university in Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance.
The social determinants of health (SDOH) are the economic and social conditions that influence individual and group differences in health status. They are the health promoting factors found in one's living and working conditions, rather than individual risk factors that influence the risk for a disease, or vulnerability to disease or injury. The distributions of social determinants are often shaped by public policies that reflect prevailing political ideologies of the area.
Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. It posses and creates a gender gap between individuals that limits the accessibility that women have within society. The differentiation preference of access of social goods in the society brought about by power, religion, kinship, prestige, race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, and class. Social inequality usually implies the lack of equality of outcome, but may alternatively be conceptualized in terms of the lack of equality of access to opportunity. This accompanies the way that inequality is presented throughout social economies and the rights that are skilled within this basis. The social rights include labor market, the source of income, health care, and freedom of speech, education, political representation, and participation.
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Michèle Lamont is a sociologist and is the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and a professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a contributor to the study of culture, inequality, racism and anti-racism, the sociology of morality, evaluation and higher education, and the study of cultural and social change. She is the recipient of international prizes, such as the Gutenberg Award and the prestigious Erasmus award, for her "devoted contribution to social science research into the relationship between knowledge, power, and diversity." She has received honorary degrees from five countries. and been elected to several national honorary scientific societies. She served as president of the American Sociological Association from 2016 to 2017.
White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society is a 2005 book arguing that racial discrimination is still evident on contemporary American society. The book draws on the fields of sociology, political science, economics, criminology, and legal studies. The authors argue that the inequalities which prevail in America today, especially with regard to wages, income, and access to housing and health care, are the effects of either cultural or individual failures.
Redistribution of income and wealth is the transfer of income and wealth from some individuals to others through a social mechanism such as taxation, welfare, public services, land reform, monetary policies, confiscation, divorce or tort law. The term typically refers to redistribution on an economy-wide basis rather than between selected individuals.
Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.
Social equality is a state of affairs in which all individuals within a specific society have equal rights, liberties, and status, possibly including civil rights, freedom of expression, autonomy, and equal access to certain public goods and social services. Social equality requires the absence of legally enforced social class or caste boundaries and the absence of discrimination motivated by an inalienable part of an individual's identity. For example, advocates of social equality believe in equality before the law for all individuals regardless of sex, gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion, convictions, opinions, health, or disability. Social equality is related to equal opportunity.
Lane Kenworthy is an American professor of sociology and political science. He has worked at the University of Arizona since 2004, being a full professor since 2007. He is known for his statistical and analytic work on the economic effects of income and wealth distribution. He currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
Jocelyn Viterna is an American academic. She is a professor of Sociology at Harvard University, and the author of a book about the role of women in the Salvadoran Civil War.
Patrick Heller is an American sociologist and the director of the development research program at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
