CECILIA L. RIDGEWAY: Well, everybody, welcome to our third and last plenary of these meetings. One that I've been looking forward to throughout the meetings, one that I hope that will be exceptionally exciting. My name is Cecilia Ridgeway. I'm the President of this year's ASA. And this plenary is on how inequality in the US is changing. We all know it's changing but exactly what are the patterns, how does it work out and not only how are these patterns -- I mean what are the patterns but also, remember one of the themes is for us to think about multi-dimensional inequality and how it works together. So we have speakers that will look at how and give us ideas about how patterns are changing and not changing with regard to class and we're going to have David Grusky from Stanford University who's going to talk to us about how class is changing then we're going to have Paula England from New York University who's going to talk to us about how patterns of gender inequality are changing or not changing. And then our third speaker, Tomas Jimenez, also from Stanford University -- sorry folks -- hitting my colleagues, but they're so great. Tomas Jimenez who's going to talk to us about racial inequality and how patterns of racial inequality are changing and not changing in this contemporary turbulence that we've experienced recently. And then finally, with the hardest job of all, we have Robert Mare of UCLA who's going to take on the hideous task of trying to see whether there are any common themes as if -- in the way these different types of inequalities are changing. Are they telling us some -- can we see some bigger and more general mechanisms and maybe yes, maybe no. I mean we don't want to just make them up, right? We want to see whether these things in fact are quite different or in some -- or in some ways have some things in common. So he's going to take on that task. Well, let's get right to it. Let's have our first speaker who will be David Grusky. He's going to talk to us about class inequality. DAVID B. GRUSKY: Well, thanks very much for that -- for that introduction. It's a -- it's a pleasure to be here. I want to cast back to the early 1980s, just to get you into that mindset, think Ronald Reagan, think the beginning of the end of the Cold War and most important for our purposes, the liberal theory of inequality was reigning supreme. For those of you who aren't familiar with that theory, let me -- let me layout its main tenets as I see it. First off the claim is that intrinsic to the modern condition was quite considerable equality of condition with the argument there being that various types of equalizing institutions most notably unions had the effect of bringing about some amount of equality of condition. Secondly, it's not just that there is increasing equality of condition but secondarily, an increasing equality of opportunity. And here, the main institutional reform of interest was the rise of mass education. Thirdly, the claim was that part and partial of the modern condition was a reduction in descriptive inequalities particularly those of gender and race. And here the prime institutional innovation was the rise of bureaucratic forms of organization. They were seen as doing away with at least the more overt forms of discrimination. And then finally, by virtue of this rising equality of condition, the claim was that some of those interclass conflicts that were so prevalent in the early part of the 20th century would start to wither away and likewise, there would be growing class of modernization with respect to class behaviors, attitudes, and interests. So what to make of this narrative? Well, first off, it's really benign, right? It relies on the happy coincidence between what many of us would want to happen and what we thought was
actually happening. It's a Pollyannaish narrative, if you will. And secondarily, it was a dominant narrative of that time. For those of us who are involved in monitoring trends and inequality, we would refer back time and again to this narrative. It was the touch-stone narrative. It was the narrative to which we would refer our results and try to make sense of them. What I want to do is take on today's situation in which there's all manner of disconfirming evidence, evidence that simply is not in line with the predictions of the liberal theory of inequality. And yet, despite a lot of disconfirming evidence, despite a lot of anomalies, we don't have, I would contend, a substitute narrative in play. And I want to claim here that the theory of marketization which I'll try to develop in very primitive form today, that that theory might well play the role of a substitute narrative. Before I get to that narrative, let me first move quickly through some of the disconfirming evidence to which I alluded. Let's start off with income inequality. And here we have a very famous graph, one of the most famous perhaps in social science, from Emmanuel Saez, that examines the share of total income that goes to the top 10%. And we see that in the early 20th century at the very end of the first Gilded Age, almost 50% of total income went to that top 10%. But then we had a market crash, we had a depression and we had all sorts of equalizing institutions most notably the rise of unions, and we had this great equality of condition. That was then. This is now. We see now an extraordinary takeoff in income inequality of the sort that really no social scientist predicted, one of our great failures. What about social mobility? The liberal theory says that it should increase principally with the rise of mass education and indeed, there's lots of evidence to suggest that's just the case. Here's a paper by Pablo Mitnik, Esra Cumberworth, and myself, which shows that that holds at least for daughters, there's a decline in the association between class origins and class destinations. And that's just what the liberal theory would predict. That was then. This is now. Although the evidence is just tentative, there's -- there are some hints to the effect that professional managerial reproduction is increasing and that's not consistent with the liberal theory. It suggests that we have a second grade U-turn. There's a U-turn with respect to inequality of condition and now, there's reason to believe that there might be a great U-turn with respect to inequalities of opportunity. What about various types of description, in particular, gender description? Paula will talk about this much more but I just want to hint at it here. The claim with respect to the liberal theory is that it should decline, that overt discrimination against women should recede as bureaucracies take hold. And indeed, up until the early 2000s, everything seemed just swell. That was then. This is now. We see a stalling out of that historic decline. What about black and white description? Again, this is the domain of Tomas. I want to talk about it only briefly. But if you look at work by James Heckman and in particular the high school completion rate, you see that for whites, the top line, things are slowly improving, that completion rate is moving from about 82 to 85. And for blacks, there seems to be a convergence, all is going well, the liberally theory holds. But now, we see a stalled convergence. So, that gives you a taste. It's a whirlwind tour but it gives you a taste of some of the anomalies that we want to try to make sense of. Now, what went wrong with the liberal theory? Well, a lot did, but let me just give you one key problem as I see it with that theory and it has to be rectified. According to Parsons and others, why we should be so optimistic about the future? Is that those sorts of activities that were once
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