Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology and incoming Director of the Program on Inequality at Stanford University. His recent books include Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (Stanford 2004) and Mobility and Inequality (Stanford 2005). Ravi Kanbur is T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

POVERTY AND INEQUALITY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Contributors.....................................................................................................................................ixPreface and Acknowledgments......................................................................................................................xiCHAPTER ONE Introduction: The Conceptual Foundations of Poverty and Inequality Measurement David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur.....................1CHAPTER TWO Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty Amartya Sen..................................................................................30CHAPTER THREE Poverty and Human Functioning: Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements Martha C. Nussbaum.......................................47CHAPTER FOUR From Income to Endowments: The Difficult Task of Expanding the Income Poverty Paradigm Franois Bourguignon........................76CHAPTER FIVE Social Theory and the Concept "Underclass" William Julius Wilson..................................................................103CHAPTER SIX Race, Class, and Markets: Social Policy in the 21st Century Douglas S. Massey......................................................117CHAPTER SEVEN Dependency and Social Debt Martha Albertson Fineman..............................................................................133Notes............................................................................................................................................153References.......................................................................................................................................165Index............................................................................................................................................181

Chapter One

David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur

There is a growing consensus among academics, policy makers, and even politicians that poverty and inequality should no longer be treated as soft social issues that can safely be subordinated to more important and fundamental interests in maximizing total economic output. This newfound concern with poverty and inequality, which dates back to at least the early 1990s (see Atkinson 1997), may be attributed to such factors as (1) the dramatic increase in economic inequality in many countries over the last quarter century, (2) the rise of a "global village" in which spectacular regional disparities in the standard of living have become more widely visible and hence increasingly difficult to ignore, (3) a growing commitment to a conception of human entitlements that includes the right to seek or secure employment and thereby be spared extreme deprivation, (4) an emerging concern that poverty and inequality may have negative macro-level effects on terrorism (cf. Krueger and Maleckov 2003), total economic production (e.g., Bertola 2000), and ethnic unrest (e.g., Olzak forthcoming), and (5) a growing awareness of the negative individual-level effects of poverty on health, political participation, and a host of other life conditions. Although the growth of anti-inequality sentiment thus rests in part on an increased awareness of just how unequal and poverty-stricken the world is, it may also be attributed to an ever-evolving and accreting list of human rights (i.e., the "normative" account) as well as a growing appreciation of the negative externalities of inequality and poverty (i.e., a "consequentialist" account).

In what ways has the newfound concern with poverty and inequality manifested itself? This concern is, we would argue, principally revealed in the form of grassroots political mobilization on various anti-poverty platforms as well as a growing acceptance of and commitment to anti-poverty and anti-inequality initiatives among elite opinion leaders and their organizations (e.g., Millenium Development Goals). By contrast, academic research on issues of inequality and poverty has not flourished to quite the same extent, and the modest takeoff in such scholarship that is under way has focused disproportionately on matters of description and the methodological intricacies of measurement rather than more fundamental conceptual issues that, as we see it, must now be taken on (see Srinivasan 2004). The present book therefore provides an unabashedly academic approach to poverty and inequality reduction that proceeds from the radical assumption that more in the way of careful reflection and conceptual ground clearing might serve us well.

We emphasize conceptual issues not out of some intrinsic fascination with theory (although we confess to that as well) but because we think that pressing problems of policy cannot be adequately addressed without first making conceptual advances. The need for new conceptual work is especially apparent, we think, on three distinct but related fronts (see Kakwani 2004; Reddy 2004):

Defining the dimensions: Simple though it may seem, an important starting point is to develop and justify a list of valued resources that define the "inequality space," a list that presumably goes well beyond income (or wealth) alone. As many of our contributors note, there is a growing consensus that the income distribution cannot by itself satisfactorily capture the structure of poverty and inequality, yet much work remains in developing an elaborated list of endowments (e.g., schooling), investments (e.g., work experience), and living conditions (e.g., neighborhood attributes) that does suffice to describe this structure. Characterizing multidimensional space: Secondarily, new methods must be developed to measure inequality and poverty within the context of this multidimensional space, a task that is complicated because a great many parameters may be required to adequately characterize such a space. Moreover, given that various social groups (e.g., classes, ethnic groups, genders) exist within this space and constrain patterns of interaction, researchers must develop models that recognize that these groups can give rise to distinctive preferences (e.g., a "culture of poverty") that in turn affect how individuals react to poverty and inequality. Remediation in a multidimensional world: The third and final conceptual challenge is that of devising new approaches to remediation that remain viable under this more expansive definition of poverty and inequality. This task, which is arguably even more daunting than the foregoing two, requires targeting those aspects of inequality and poverty (e.g., residential segregation) that are causal with respect to many outcomes and hence likely to bring about cascades of change. On each of these three fronts, important advances have recently been made, and obviously we do not intend to minimize such advances. We wish merely to identify these three research fronts as especially deserving of continuing attention. In hopes of spurring such a commitment, we have invited six leading scholars of inequality and poverty to lay out these three conceptual challenges in more detail, to identify other challenges that should be the focus of future scholarship, and to outline possible solutions to them.

The chapters of our book address to varying degrees the three themes identified above. The first contribution, authored by Amartya Sen, lays out the case for a...