The Evolution of Inequality

The Evolution of Inequality PDF Author: Manus I. Midlarsky
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741705
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book studies the structural inequalities between states as they evolve and influence the political process, analyzing various forms of political violence, the dissolution of states, and the sources of cooperation between states. The ultimate genesis of democracy is shown to be a consequence of the processes detailed in the book.

The Evolution of Inequality

The Evolution of Inequality PDF Author: Manus I. Midlarsky
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804741705
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book studies the structural inequalities between states as they evolve and influence the political process, analyzing various forms of political violence, the dissolution of states, and the sources of cooperation between states. The ultimate genesis of democracy is shown to be a consequence of the processes detailed in the book.

Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures

Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures PDF Author: Christopher D. Carroll
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022612665X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
Robust and reliable measures of consumer expenditures are essential for analyzing aggregate economic activity and for measuring differences in household circumstances. Many countries, including the United States, are embarking on ambitious projects to redesign surveys of consumer expenditures, with the goal of better capturing economic heterogeneity. This is an appropriate time to examine the way consumer expenditures are currently measured, and the challenges and opportunities that alternative approaches might present. Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures begins with a comprehensive review of current methodologies for collecting consumer expenditure data. Subsequent chapters highlight the range of different objectives that expenditure surveys may satisfy, compare the data available from consumer expenditure surveys with that available from other sources, and describe how the United States’s current survey practices compare with those in other nations.

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels

Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels PDF Author: Ian Morris
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175896
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
The best-selling author of Why the West Rules—for Now examines the evolution and future of human values Most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good, and that violence and wealth inequality are bad. But most people who lived during the 10,000 years before the nineteenth century thought just the opposite. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, biology, and history, Ian Morris explains why. Fundamental long-term changes in values, Morris argues, are driven by the most basic force of all: energy. Humans have found three main ways to get the energy they need—from foraging, farming, and fossil fuels. Each energy source sets strict limits on what kinds of societies can succeed, and each kind of society rewards specific values. But if our fossil-fuel world favors democratic, open societies, the ongoing revolution in energy capture means that our most cherished values are very likely to turn out not to be useful any more. Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels offers a compelling new argument about the evolution of human values, one that has far-reaching implications for how we understand the past—and for what might happen next. Originating as the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, the book includes challenging responses by classicist Richard Seaford, historian of China Jonathan Spence, philosopher Christine Korsgaard, and novelist Margaret Atwood.

Inequality and Evolution

Inequality and Evolution PDF Author: Charles L Ladner
Publisher: Xlibris Us
ISBN: 9781664144880
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In 1976, there were 38 countries, comprising nearly 50% of the world's population that self-identified as socialist states, yet by 1991, only one remained. In 1976, the annual GDP per capita of the 38 socialist countries (in inflation adjusted dollars) averaged approximately $5 thousand. By 1990 it had grown to about $8 thousand. During that same period, the GDP per capita, in comparable numbers, for the United States grew from $24 thousand to $36 thousand. The socialist countries never grew their per capita income to more than 22% of the United States. Even China, which today has an economy almost as large as the United States, never saw its per capita GDP grow beyond $2 thousand per year during the twenty-eight year period as a socialist state under Mao Zedong. But, after the death of Mao, China converted its economy to the capitalist model with spectacular success, lifting a billion people out of poverty and challenging the United States for worldwide economic supremacy-an outcome that would have been unthinkable under socialism. Why has capitalism proven to be such an extraordinary success and socialism such a miserable failure? Charles Ladner argues that the success or failure of economic systems can be traced to the degree to which such systems are congruent with the primal force of evolutionary natural selection. This is the most fundamental need of every living thing to survive and reproduce. He encapsulate these forces into the term: selfishness. Capitalism, he finds, is grounded in such selfishness or self-interest, and therefore is fully congruent with the biological needs which provide the aspirational motivation that cause capitalism at all times and in every place, to be successful. Socialism, on other hand, requires and cannot function without, authoritarian rule to suppress expressions of self-interest. Its operation at the level of the state, serves to frustrate the biological needs and thereby will always produce poverty and failure. The historical record, he says, categorically demonstrates this. Capitalism, however, has a fatal flaw, and that is its inability to restrain the expression of selfishness, which ultimately leads to such extremes of wealth and income inequality that the system can self-destruct. In the final chapters, Ladner offers possible remedies for the United States, which he believes is already in the very early stages of such self-destruction.

The Origins of Unfairness

The Origins of Unfairness PDF Author: Cailin O'Connor
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198789971
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In almost every human society some people get more and others get less. Why is inequity the rule in these societies? In The Origins of Unfairness, philosopher Cailin O'Connor firstly considers how groups are divided into social categories, like gender, race, and religion, to address this question. She uses the formal frameworks of game theory and evolutionary game theory to explore the cultural evolution of the conventions which piggyback on these seemingly irrelevant social categories. These frameworks elucidate a variety of topics from the innateness of gender differences, to collaboration in academia, to household bargaining, to minority disadvantage, to homophily. They help to show how inequity can emerge from simple processes of cultural change in groups with gender and racial categories, and under a wide array of situations. The process of learning conventions of coordination and resource division is such that some groups will tend to get more and others less. O'Connor offers solutions to such problems of coordination and resource division and also shows why we need to think of inequity as part of an ever evolving process. Surprisingly minimal conditions are needed to robustly produce phenomena related to inequity and, once inequity emerges in these models, it takes very little for it to persist indefinitely. Thus, those concerned with social justice must remain vigilant against the dynamic forces that push towards inequity.

The Creation of Inequality

The Creation of Inequality PDF Author: Kent Flannery
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
Flannery and Marcus demonstrate that the rise of inequality was not simply the result of population increase, food surplus, or the accumulation of valuables but resulted from conscious manipulation of the unique social logic that lies at the core of every human group. Reversing the social logic can reverse inequality, they argue, without violence.

The Evolution of World Inequality in Well-being

The Evolution of World Inequality in Well-being PDF Author: Koen Decancq
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Inequality

Inequality PDF Author: Harold Lewis Longaker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780997961706
Category : Globalization
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The concept of equality has two edges. The first, equality under the law or equality of treatment, is a tenet of many modern liberal societies. Opposite treatment is the second edge, outcome, where inequality, not equality, is often the reality. An example is the huge disparity in the wealth of nations, with some achieving a per capita GDP in excess of $40,000, while others remain below $2,000-a twenty-fold difference. At the intersection of equality's two edges exists a belief in the psychic unity of humankind, a dogma of the social sciences. Their argument is that we were all the same when we started our migration out of Africa some 50,000 years ago and that, excluding trivial physiological changes, we have not changed significantly since. Psychologically, we are now as we were then. With this belief in hand, the social sciences have concluded that any differences observed in outcomes between people cannot be due to biology but rather must be due to other factors, such as the environment or types of governance. Going a step further, they insist that people are not to blame for their differential outcomes, and, in fact, stating any such sentiment is forbidden. Racist is the pejorative term often used for those expressing such opinions. INEQUALITY disagrees. It posits that the paradigm of psyche equality of humanity is false, and developing a Darwinian-based model supporting this argument is this book's raison d'ètre. Answering the question of why some nations are rich while others remain poor provides context, and this is the base question INEQUALITY addresses. It does so, but not with the usual mono-disciplined approach of comparative history, economics, environmental determinism, or other. It uniquely uses the binding thread of Darwinian Theory to stitch together bits and pieces from a broad variety of disciplines to form the whole, explanatory cloth. In doing so, it creates a holistic model of human evolution. Pointedly, the model explains how, over the past thousand years or so, differences in economic acumen between populations have arisen, accounting for much of the disparity in economic outcomes we observe today. The starting point for the model is Clark's observation in A Farewell to Alms that wealthy English testators in preindustrial England had more surviving progeny than poorer persons did. This is the classic definition of biological fitness and suggests that wealth is biologically adaptive, making it a factor in Darwinian fitness. Importantly, as Darwinian Theory predicts that fitness-enhancing, heritable traits should increase in populations, this leads to the prediction that, for certain ways of making a living or particular evolutionary environments, heritable traits promoting wealth generation will increase in populations. These traits include hard work, intelligence, and delayed gratification, among others. Humans are uniquely clever and, with our ability to form distinct cultures, have created over the recent past millennia a variety of evolutionary environments. Some forged urban centers, while others remained rural and agrarian. Some froze their tribal ways, and others adopted the modern state and its institutions. With these cultural differences and others, natural selection operating on traits promoting wealth has, over many generations, resulted in populations with differing refinements in economic acumen. Some do very well in the modern economic world; others do not. The social sciences empirically describe how we are different, but as their respective paradigms lack the foundation of modern evolutionary theory, they are unable to explain why; they can only speak to how. INEQUALITY combines the empiricism of the social sciences with Darwinian Theory to explain why we are different, and with knowledge of why, we can predict. Toward its end, INEQUALITY uses its model to examine eight major populations and finds that its model is consistent with what we observe.

Origins of Inequality in Human Societies

Origins of Inequality in Human Societies PDF Author: Bernd Baldus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317205960
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Since the beginning of social life human societies have faced the problem how to distribute the results of collaborative activities among the participants. The solutions they found ranged from egalitarian to unequal but caused more dissension and conflict than just about any other social structure in human history. Social inequality also dominated the agenda of the new field of sociology in the 19th century. The theories developed during that time still inform academic and public debates, and inequality continues to be the subject of much current controversy. Origins of Inequality begins with a critical assessment of classical explanations of inequality in the social sciences and the political and economic environment in which they arose. The book then offers a new theory of the evolution of distributive structures in human societies. It examines the interaction of chance, intent and unforeseen consequences in the emergence of social inequality, traces its irregular historical path in different societies, and analyses processes of social control which consolidated inequality even when it was costly or harmful for most participants. Because the evolution of distributive structures is an open process, the book also explores issues of distributive justice and options for greater equality in modern societies. Along with its focus on social inequality the book covers topics in cultural evolution, social and economic history and social theory. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students of sociology, economics and anthropology – in particular sociological theory and social inequality.

On the Evolution of Income Inequality in the United States: A Reprint from the “Economic Quarterly”

On the Evolution of Income Inequality in the United States: A Reprint from the “Economic Quarterly” PDF Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
ISBN: 1437909418
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description