Originally published in 1983, The Changing Face of Inequality is the first systematic social history of a major American city undergoing industrialization. Zunz examines Detroit's evolution between 1880 and 1920 and discovers the ways in which ethnic and class relations profoundly altered its urban scene. Stunning in scope, this work makes a major contribution to our understanding of twentieth-century cities.

Rebecca M. Blank offers the first comprehensive analysis of an economic trend that has been reshaping the United States over the past three decades: rapidly rising income inequality. In clear language, she provides an overview of how and why the level and distribution of income and wealth has changed since 1979, sets this situation within its historical context, and investigates the forces that are driving it. Among other factors, Blank looks closely at changes within families, including women’s increasing participation in the work force. The book includes some surprising findings—for example, that per-person income has risen sharply among almost all social groups, even as income has become more unequally distributed. Looking toward the future, Blank suggests that while rising inequality will likely be with us for many decades to come, it is not an inevitable outcome. Her book considers what can be done to address this trend, and also explores the question: why should we be concerned about this phenomenon?

The world knows that there is a global crisis of inequality in pay. But what caused it? Where is it more and where less severe? What can be done? This book deploys new techniques and a new global data set to advance striking answers to these questions, answers that have eluded even the largest international research institutions such as the OECD and the World Bank. Chapters trace the U.S. wage structure back to 1920, the relationship of inequality and unemployment in Europe, and the relationships of inequality to economic growth, liberalization, financial crisis, state violence and industrial policy in more than fifty developing countries.

A pioneering book that takes us beyond economic debate to show how inequality is returning us to a past dominated by empires, dynastic elites, and ethnic divisions. The economic facts of inequality are clear. The rich have been pulling away from the rest of us for years, and the super-rich have been pulling away from the rich. More and more assets are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Mainstream economists say we need not worry; what matters is growth, not distribution. In The Return of Inequality, acclaimed sociologist Mike Savage pushes back, explaining inequality’s profound deleterious effects on the shape of societies. Savage shows how economic inequality aggravates cultural, social, and political conflicts, challenging the coherence of liberal democratic nation-states. Put simply, severe inequality returns us to the past. By fracturing social bonds and harnessing the democratic process to the strategies of a resurgent aristocracy of the wealthy, inequality revives political conditions we thought we had moved beyond: empires and dynastic elites, explosive ethnic division, and metropolitan dominance that consigns all but a few cities to irrelevance. Inequality, in short, threatens to return us to the very history we have been trying to escape since the Age of Revolution. Westerners have been slow to appreciate that inequality undermines the very foundations of liberal democracy: faith in progress and trust in the political community’s concern for all its members. Savage guides us through the ideas of leading theorists of inequality, including Marx, Bourdieu, and Piketty, revealing how inequality reimposes the burdens of the past. At once analytically rigorous and passionately argued, The Return of Inequality is a vital addition to one of our most important public debates.

Pia Nicoletta Blossfeld provides a long-term longitudinal analysis of the stepwise changes in transitions over the educational careers in East and West Germany using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). She examines how far reforms aimed to increase the permeability in the German educational system have changed the movements of children, adolescents and young adults in Germany since the last four decades. Her book contributes to the literature of educational sociology by studying the associations between various resources of family background and respondent’s educational histories until final educational attainment. A novelty of her book is the analysis of the role of intercohort changes in social background composition on final educational attainment.

There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences. The central questions addressed by this book, and the major research project GINI on which it is based, are: - Have inequalities in income, wealth and education increased over the past 30 years or so across the rich countries, and if so why? - What are the social, cultural and political impacts of increasing inequalities in income, wealth and education? - What are the implications for policy and for the future development of welfare states? In seeking to answer these questions, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on economics, sociology, and political science, and applies a common analytical framework to the experience of 30 advanced countries, namely all the EU member states except Cyprus and Malta, together with the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia and South Korea. It presents a description and analysis of the experience of each of these countries over the past three decades, together with an introduction, an overview of inequality trends, and a concluding chapter highlighting key findings and implications. These case-studies bring out the variety of country experiences and the importance of framing inequality trends in the institutional and policy context of each country if one is to adequately capture and understand the evolution of inequality and its impacts.

This book offers an up-to-the-moment assessment of the condition of the American family in an era of growing inequality.