Individualism and Inequality

Individualism and Inequality PDF Author: Ralph Fevre
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1784716510
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A belief in individual self-determination powered the development of universal human rights and inspired social movements from anti-slavery to socialism and feminism. At the same time, every attempt to embed individualism in systems of education and employment has eventually led to increased social inequality. Across the globe individualism has been transformed from a revolutionary force into an explanation for increasingly unequal societies where dissent is largely silent. This book explores the possibility of rediscovering the original, transformative potential of individualism.

Individualism and Inequality

Individualism and Inequality PDF Author: Ralph Fevre
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1784716510
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A belief in individual self-determination powered the development of universal human rights and inspired social movements from anti-slavery to socialism and feminism. At the same time, every attempt to embed individualism in systems of education and employment has eventually led to increased social inequality. Across the globe individualism has been transformed from a revolutionary force into an explanation for increasingly unequal societies where dissent is largely silent. This book explores the possibility of rediscovering the original, transformative potential of individualism.

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality PDF Author: Lawrence M. Eppard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611462355
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequalityexplores and critiques the widespread perception in the United States that one’s success or failure in life is largely the result of personal choices and individual characteristics. As the authors show, the distinctively individualist ideology of American politics and culture shapes attitudes toward poverty and economic inequality in profound ways, fostering social policies that de-emphasize structural remedies. Drawing on a variety of unique methodologies, the book synthesizes data from large-scale surveys of the American population, and it features both conversations with academic experts and interviews with American citizens intimately familiar with the consequences of economic disadvantage. This mixture of approaches gives readers a fuller understanding of “skeptical altruism,” a concept the authors use to describe the American public’s hesitancy to adopt a more robust and structurally-oriented approach to solving the persistent problem of economic disadvantage.

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality PDF Author: Lawrence M. Eppard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611462364
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality, the authors argue that a culture of individualism in the U.S. limits the pressure politicians face to develop robust social policies. This individualism combines with racism and features of the political ...

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality

Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality PDF Author: Lawrence M. Eppard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781611462340
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
"In Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality, the authors argue that a culture of individualism in the U.S. limits the pressure politicians face to develop robust social policies. This individualism combines with racism and features of the political system to help perpetuate high levels of poverty and inequality"--

Awakening to Race

Awakening to Race PDF Author: Jack Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226817148
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.

Possessive Individualism

Possessive Individualism PDF Author: Daniel W. Bromley
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190062843
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Anxiety and alienation threaten modern democracies. Political anger runs rampant in the United States, Britain voted to leave the European Union, authoritarian governments control several European countries, and millions of desperate migrants are streaming north out of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Many people blame stagnant household incomes and economic inequality. However, Possessive Individualism argues that the origins of world disorder are in the failure of the Enlightenment to anticipate the acquisitive individual as a creature of global capitalism. Daniel Bromley provides a fundamental critique of contemporary capitalism to explain why the world now finds itself in widespread disorder. Capitalism's basic flaw, he argues, is "possessive individualism." Glorification of the rational individual motivated by acquisitiveness prevents the adoption of necessary government programs that would ease the economic burden on beleaguered households. Meanwhile, possessive individualism enables managerial capitalism-controlled by the "one percent"-to suppress wages and salaries, embrace automation, and move jobs overseas. Capitalism is no longer an engine of improved livelihoods and social hope. Drawing on evolutionary institutional economics and political theory this book offers two remedies to the crisis of modern capitalism. Escape from the crisis requires that the isolated acquisitive individual rediscovers a sense of loyalty to others-as neighbors, as colleagues, and as participants in the shared social process of living. Escape also requires that the private firm be reimagined as a public trust in which the economic well-being of employees becomes a central part of its purpose. In the absence of these dual transformations, capitalism as we know it cannot endure.

Inequality, Redistribution, and the Individualism-Collectivism Dimension of Culture

Inequality, Redistribution, and the Individualism-Collectivism Dimension of Culture PDF Author: Carola Binder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
This paper examines the relationship between culture and redistribution, focusing on the individualism-collectivism dimension of culture. Perhaps surprisingly, countries with more individualistic cultures have significantly greater income redistribution and lower levels of after-tax income inequality. This finding also holds when using instruments for individualism suggested by the literature on cross-cultural psychology, including historical pathogen prevalence and linguistic and genetic characteristics, to address reverse causality, and is driven by higher-income countries. In higher income countries, individualism is positively correlated with generalized trust and tolerance of outsiders and negatively correlated with belief in traditional gender roles. In contrast, in lower income countries, individualism is associated with a stronger emphasis on self-reliance and the benefits of competition.

Liberatory Practices for Learning

Liberatory Practices for Learning PDF Author: Julio Cammarota
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030566854
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This book promotes collaborative ways of knowing and group accountability in learning processes to counteract the damaging effects of neoliberal individualism prevalent in educational systems today. These neoliberalist hierarchies imposed through traditional, autocratic knowledge systems have driven much of the United States’ educational policies and reforms, including STEM, high stakes testing, individual-based accountability, hierarchical grading systems, and ability grouping tracks. The net effect of such policies and reforms is an education system that perpetuates social inequalities linked with race, class, gender, and sexuality. Instead, the author suggests that accountability pushes past individualism in education by highlighting democratic methods to produce a collective good as opposed to a narrow personal success. In this democratic model, participants contribute to the common goal of elevating the entire group. Drawing from a well of creative praxes, reflexivity, and spiritual engagement, contributors incorporate collective dreaming to envision alternate realities of learning and schooling and summon the spirit into action for change.

Being Unequal

Being Unequal PDF Author: Peter L. Callero
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538100576
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
We may think we control our own destinies, but who we are, how we think, what we feel, and how we act are shaped by multiple, intersecting identities that have different amounts of power and value in our society. Being Unequal explores how identity categories associated with race, class, gender, and sexuality help shape inequality. This concise and accessible book asks: How is identity experienced? How does identity help reproduce inequality? How does identity help resist inequality? What is the relationship between micro and macro inequality—in other words, how do our personal experiences shape larger social forces? Being Unequal argues that identities matter because they are a critical part of a complex social process in which everyday interactions contribute to larger systems of structural inequality. By recognizing the links between identity and inequality, Being Unequal also highlights the power of collective action to resist and oppose domination and exploitation. Filled with engaging real-world examples ranging from the social construction of momentary high school cliques to the emergence of momentous social movements, Being Unequal is a powerful introduction to social identities and the ways they shape our world.

Class War?

Class War? PDF Author: Benjamin I. Page
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226644561
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
Recent battles in Washington over how to fix America’s fiscal failures strengthened the widespread impression that economic issues sharply divide average citizens. Indeed, many commentators split Americans into two opposing groups: uncompromising supporters of unfettered free markets and advocates for government solutions to economic problems. But such dichotomies, Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs contend, ring false. In Class War? they present compelling evidence that most Americans favor free enterprise and practical government programs to distribute wealth more equitably. At every income level and in both major political parties, majorities embrace conservative egalitarianism—a philosophy that prizes individualism and self-reliance as well as public intervention to help Americans pursue these ideals on a level playing field. Drawing on hundreds of opinion studies spanning more than seventy years, including a new comprehensive survey, Page and Jacobs reveal that this worldview translates to broad support for policies aimed at narrowing the gap between rich and poor and creating genuine opportunity for all. They find, for example, that across economic, geographical, and ideological lines, most Americans support higher minimum wages, improved public education, wider access to universal health insurance coverage, and the use of tax dollars to fund these programs. In this surprising and heartening assessment, Page and Jacobs provide our new administration with a popular mandate to combat the economic inequity that plagues our nation.