"As they develop, national economies first become more unequal and then more equal. China, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and many more will eventually ‘catch up’ with western production and income standards, and will become as equal as today’s high-income and low-inequality countries. So the distribution of income between all the world’s people will become much more equal than it is today, thanks to the growth of global markets." If you are inclined to belief these and related propositions -- and the supporting body of globalization theory, modernization theory, neo-liberal economics, and the policy prescriptions known as the Washington Consensus -- you should read Unveiling Inequality. By taking the whole world rather than the national economy as the unit of analysis the book reaches conclusions about why some areas are prosperous and some poor, some fairly equal and others very unequal, which make the standard beliefs about these things seem about as plausible as the signs of the zodiac to astronomers.
-- Robert H. Wade, London School of Economics
Unveiling Inequality is an important book. For students and teachers, it provides a concise overview of the status of global inequality and the various accounts of and explanations for it. For scholars, the proposed integration of between- and within-country inequality offers a novel research agenda. The suggestion that citizenship is the basis for the new global hierarchy should be part of any policy debate on immigration.
-- Miguel Centeno, Princeton University
Presenting Unveiling Inequality…
Korzeniewicz and Moran at the
Universidade de Brasilia
Moran (introduced by John Torpey) at the Bildner Center, CUNY Graduate Center
SELECTED RECENT PAPERS
“Studying Long-Term Large-Scale Change: Concluding Reflections on the Relevant Unit of Analysis.”
Journal of World-Systems Research 15 (May, 2009): 115-123.
“World Inequality in the Twenty-First Century: Patterns and Tendencies” (with R.P. Korzeniewicz). Pp. 565-592 in George Ritzer (ed.)
The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
“The Dynamics of Collective Violence: Dissecting Food Riots in Contemporary Argentina” (with J. Auyero)
Social Forces 85 (March, 2007): 1341-1367.
“Statistical Inference and Patterns of Inequality in the Global North”
Social Forces 84 (March, 2006): 1799-1818.
“Statistical Inference for Measures of Inequality with a Cross-National Bootstrap Application”
Sociological Methods and Research 34 (February, 2006): 296-333.
“Theorizing the Relationship Between Inequality and Economic Growth” (with R.P. Korzeniewicz)
Theory and Society 34 (June, 2005): 277-316.
- Distinguished Article Award, Political Economy of the World-System Section, American Sociological Association (2006).
“The Sociology of Teaching Graduate Statistics”
Teaching Sociology 33 (July, 2005): 263-271.
“Kuznets’s Inverted U-Curve Hypothesis: The Rise, Demise, and Continued Relevance of a Socioeconomic Law”
Sociological Forum 20 (June, 2005): 209-243.
“Measuring National Income: A Critical Assessment” (with R.P. Korzeniewicz, A. Stach, and V. Patil)
Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (July, 2004): 535-585.
In Unveiling Inequality authors Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz and Timothy Patrick Moran present a comprehensive new framework that moves beyond national boundaries to analyze economic inequality and social mobility on a global scale and from a historical perspective. Inequality is best understood as a complex set of relational interactions that unfold globally over time. So the same institutional mechanisms that have historically reduced inequality within some nations have also often accentuated the selective exclusion of populations from poorer countries and enhanced a high-inequality equilibrium between nations. Korzeniewicz and Moran provide strong evidence that the nation where we are born is the single greatest determining factor of our life chances and prospects for upward social mobility. Too much sociological literature on inequality focuses on the experiences of people who live in wealthy nations, where even people considered “poor” have more opportunity for social mobility than the vast majority of individuals in nations perennially at the bottom of the wealth distribution scale. Unveiling Inequality represents a major paradigm shift in thinking about social inequality and a clarion call to reorient discussions of economic justice in world-historical global terms.
