What are some of the ways that social scientists explain the gap between rich and poor regions of the world?

- How is America Stratified today?

What is stratification?

Sociology Exam 2 Study Guide:  Chapter 7: Stratification  Paradox: Inequality is the result of abundance  What is stratification?  - Refers to the systematic inequalities between groups of people that arise as  intended or unintended consequences of social processes and relationships  Views of We also discuss several other topics like uo human physiology
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Inequality:  - In the mid 1700’s, Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that private property  created social inequality which ultimately leads to social conflict  - Social equality: a condition in which no differences in wealth power, prestige, or  status based on non-natural conventions exist  - Rousseau also agreed that there will always be natural inequality amongst  people by default  - Ferguson and Millar agreed with Rousseau, but they also argued that this is  good because it means that some people are getting ahead and creating assets  (a form of wealth that can be stored for the future)  o The free rider problem: the notion that when more than one person is  responsible for getting something done, the incentive is for everyone to  shirk responsibility and hope others will pull the extra weight - Thomas Malthus: viewed inequality favorably, but only as a mean for controlling  population growth. Though that a more equal distribution of resources would  increase the world’s population to unsustainable levels and ultimately bring  about mass starvation and conflict  - Dialectic: a two-directional relationship, following a pattern in which an original  statement or thesis is countered with an antithesis leading to a conclusion that  united the strengths of the original position and the counterarguments  - German Philosopher Georg Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: most social  relationships were based on a master-slave model  o Over time, society would have more and more free people and the master slave model would die out as the primary social relationship  o The master slave dialectic shows the interdependence of both the master  and the slave on each other. The slave is dependent on the master for  food, shelter and protection, whereas the master is dependent on the  slave, who performs duties for the master when asked until the master’s  survival  o The master would not be able to function without the slave  Standards of Equality: - Equality of Opportunity: the idea that everyone has an equal chance to achieve  wealth, social prestige, and power because the rules of the game, so to speak,  are the same for everyone – key to the arguments of the civil rights leaders in  the 1960’s  o Bourgeois society: a society of commerce (modern capitalist society, for  example) in which the maximization of profit is the primary business  incentive  - Equality of Condition: the idea that everyone should have an equal starting  point  - Equality of Outcome/Result: the idea that each player must end up with the  same amount regardless of the fairness of the game  Forms of Stratification:  - Estate System: a politically based system of stratification characterized by  limited social mobility  o Common in the Feudal Period in Europe, as well as the pre-Civil War period of the American South  - Caste System: a religion based system of stratification characterized by no  social mobility  o System based on hereditary notions of religious and theological purity and generally offers no prospects for social mobility  o Varna system in India- Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra (Dalits or  the untouchables)  o India- endogamous- marry within the same groups  o Social closure- little to no mobility within the caste ranks  o Sanskritization: when an entire caste leapfrogs over another and obtains a higher position in the hierarchy  - The class system: economically based system of stratification with somewhat  loose social mobility based on roles in the production process rather than  individual characteristics  o Economically based hierarchical system characterized by cohesive,  oppositional groups and somewhat loose social mobility  o For Marx, it boils down to two antagonist classes:   Proletariat: the working class   Bourgeoisie: the capitalist class   Contradictory class locations: the idea that people can occupy  locations in the class structure that fall between two ‘pure’ classes  o Max Weber believes that class is a group that has as its basis the common life chances or opportunities available to it in the marketplace  For Weber, property and lack of property are the basic categories for all class situations  - Status Hierarchy System: a system of stratification based on social prestigeo Status is defined, according to Weber, as what society thinks of thinks of  the lifestyle of the community that you belong to o Duncan Scale- 0 to 96, with 0 being the least prestigious and 96 the most  o Blau and Duncan believed that 5/6th of the people’s rating was based on  the status ratings and not the earnings (so professor would get the same  rating as the college president)  - Elite-Mass Dichotomy System: a system of stratification that has a governing  elite, a few leaders who broadly hold power in society  o Meritocracy: a society where status and mobility are based on individual  attributes, ability, and achievement o Mills argues in The Power Elite that there are 3 major institutional forces in modern American Society where power of decision making is centralized:   Economic Institutions: few giant companies holding economic power  Political Order: increasing concentration of power in the federal  government and away from the states and localities, leading to a  centralized executive establishment that affects the society   Military Order: the largest and most expensive feature of the  government  - How is America Stratified today?  o Socioeconomic status: an individual’s position in a stratified social order  o Income: money received by a person for work, from transfers, or from ROI  o Wealth: a family or individuals net worth  o The Upper Class: a term for the economic elite  Historically, this term meant to not have to work   Estimated 1% of the population- 35% of the net worth economy, and 225 times more than the average American family median income  o The Middle Class: a term commonly used to describe those individuals  with non-manual jobs that pay significantly more than the poverty line though this a highly debated and expansive category, particularly in the  US, where broad swathes of the population fall here o The Poor- poverty line for a family of four annually was $23550. There is a  distinction between the working and non-working poor as well.  - Global Inequality: main reasons for rising income and wealth inequality in USA is globalization  o Tremendous global inequalities have emerged through the combinations  of colonialism and unequal development. What are some of the ways that  social scientists explain the gap between rich and poor regions of the  world?  - Social Reproduction versus Social Mobility o Social mobility: the movement between different positions within a system of social stratification in any given society o Structural mobility: mobility that is inevitable from changes in the  economy, such as the expansion of high tech jobs in the past 20 years  o Exchange Mobility: mobility in which, if we hold fixed the changing  distribution of jobs, individual trade jobs not one-to-one but in a way, that  ultimately balances out  o Status attainment model: approach that ranks individuals by  socioeconomic status, including income and educational attainment, and  seeks to specify the attributes characteristic of people who end up in more desirable occupations  Chapter 8: Gender  Paradox: The biological categories of sex strongly influence the social  dynamics of gender; however, the social categories of gender can  sometimes determine the biology of sex.  Chapter 9: Race  Paradox: Race as we know it has no deterministic, biological basis: all the  same, race is so powerful that it has life or death consequences The Myth of Race:  - Race can be defined as a group of people who share a set of characteristics usually physical ones- and are said to share a common bloodline  o Americans categorized themselves between 36-75 different races  - Racism is the belief that members of separate races possess different and  unequal  o Racist thinking is characterized by three key beliefs:   That humans are divided into distinct bloodlines and/or physical  types   That these bloodlines or physical traits are linked to distinct  cultures, behaviors, personalities, and intellectual abilities  That certain groups are superior to others  - Race is a social construct that changes over time, and across different  contexts The concepts of Race:  - Many historical efforts to explain race were biased due to ethnocentrism (the  judgement of other groups by one’s own standards of values) - Scientific Racism: nineteenth century theories of race that characterize a period  of feverish investigation into the origins, explanations, and classifications of  race  - In 1684, François Bernier proposed a new geography based on the body, from  facial lineaments to bodily configurations o Europe (excluding Lapland), South Asia, North Africa and America: people  who shared climate and complexions  o Africa proper: people who had thick lips, flat noses, black skin, and a  scanty beard  o Asia proper: people who had white skin, broad shoulders, flat faces, little  eyes, no beards  o Lapps (small traditional communities living around the northern regions of Finland and Russia): people who were ugly, squat, small, and animal-like  - Ethnocentrism: the belief that one’s own culture or group is superior to others  and the tendency to view all other cultures from the perspective of one’s own  - According to Comte de Buffon, scientific racism though to make sense for  people other than white Europeans – ethnocentrism  o In his scheme, anyone other white and European was a deviation from the norm  o Classified non-whites as abnormal, improper, and inferior  - Immanuel Kant- argued for a link between inner character and outside  physiognomy and further claimed that these individual markers were also  imprinted on an entire nation’s moral life  - Racial differences were still always believed to be the product of climatic  differences - Ontological Equality: the philosophical and religious notion that all people are  created equal  - Social Darwinism: the application of Darwinian ideas to society- namely, the  evolutionary ‘survival of the fittest’  - Eugenics is the science of genetic lines and the inheritable traits they pass on  from generation to generation o Eugenics claims that each race has a different/separate package of social and psychological traits transmitted through bloodlines  o Backers of eugenics claimed it can be bred into and out of the population  for positive and negative traits respectively  - Nativism: the movement to protect and preserve indigenous land or culture  from the allegedly dangerous and polluting effects of new immigrants  - One drop rule: the belief that one drop of black blood makes a person black, a  concept that evolved from US laws forbidding miscegenation  - Miscegenation: the technical term for interracial marriage; literally meaning ‘a  mixing of kinds’; it is politically and historically charged- sociologists generally  prefer exogamy or out-marriage  - Plessy v Ferguson- DNA testing is used to determine people’s ancestry and racial makeup  - While more accurate than 19th century racial measurement, it still supports the  notion of fixed, biological racial differences  - Today, most scientists agree that racial categories are weak proxies for genetic  diversity and need to be phased out as biological variables  Racial Realities:  - Racialization: the formation of a new racial identity by drawing ideological  boundaries of difference around a formerly unnoticed group of people  Race vs Ethnicity  - race is imposed (usually based on physical difference), hierarchical, exclusive,  and unequal  - ethnicity: one’s ethnic quality or affiliation. It is voluntary, self-defined,  nonhierarchical, fluid and multiple, and based on cultural differences, not  physical ones per se  o an ethnic identity becomes racialized when it is subsumed under a forced  label, racial marker, or otherness  - symbolic ethnicity is ethnicity that is individualistic in nature and without real  social cost for the individual  Ethnic Groups in the USA:  - Native Americans  - African Americans  - Latinos  - Asian Americans  - Middle Eastern Americans  The importance of Being White:  - White privilege: societal privileges that benefit white people beyond what is  commonly experienced by non-white people under the same circumstances  Minority-Majority Group Relations:  - Straight line assimilation: Robert Park’s 1920’s universal and linear model for  how immigrants assimilate: they first arrive, then settle in, and achieve full  assimilation in a newly homogenous country  - Primordialism: Clifford Geertz’s term to explain the strength of ethnic ties  because they are fixed in deeply felt or primordial ties to one’s homeland  culture  - Pluralism: refers to the presence of numerous distinct groups co-existing in one  society o By 2050, whites will make up 47% of the US population  - Segregation: the legal or social practice of separating people based on their  race or ethnicity  o Segregation by law (de jure) was in place until 1954 supreme court case  Brown vs Board of Education o Despite being illegal for over 40 years, there is still ample evidence of  segregation (de facto) in American society today, particularly in schools,  housing, and prisons  - Anthony Marx noted concern over segregation that grew during world wat 2 as  America was caught in the embarrassing contradiction of espousing antiracist  rhetoric against its Nazi foes while upholding an egregiously racist doctrine at  home  Racial Conflict: final paradigm of race relations is conflict relations  - Genocide: the mass killing of a group of people based on racial, ethnic, or  religious traits  Group Responses to Domination:  - For ways groups respond to oppression:  o Withdrawal:  o Passing: passing, or blending in with the dominant group  o Acceptance: oppressed group feigns compliance and hides its true  feelings of resentment   Subaltern: a subordinate, oppressed group of people  o Resistance   Collective resistance: an organized effort to change a power  hierarchy on the part of a less-powerful group in a society  Prejudice, Discrimination and the New Racism - Prejudice: thoughts and feelings about an ethnic or racial group  - Discrimination: harmful or negative acts against people deemed inferior based  on their racial category, without regard to their individual merit  - One who holds prejudice and discriminates is an ACTIVE BIGOT – puts his  money where his mouth is – hard to come by these days  - All weather liberals are those who are neither prejudiced nor discriminate  - Most fall in the above two. However, a timid bigot is one who is prejudiced but  does not discriminate- a closet racist perhaps  - One does discriminate but isn’t prejudice is a fair weather liberal How Race Matters: The Case of Wealth  - A wealth gap exists between whites and minority groups in America that has  deep historical roots o 2008 Great Recession:  - Institutional Racism: refers to institutions and social dynamics which may seem  race-neutral but disadvantage minority groups  o Property in black neighborhoods doesn’t necessarily accrue same value as that in white neighborhoods The Future of Race: racial and ethnic diversity in USA will tend to increase. 2010  shows 134% increase in Americans who identify as multiracial (9 million people)  Chapter 10: Poverty  Paradox: How do we help the poor without creating perverse incentives that induce more poverty in the long run?  What is poverty?  - Poverty can be defined as a condition of economic deprivation that is severe  enough that the individual cannot live with dignity in his or her society  - Poverty is a highly-debated issue in American Politics  - At the core of the debate about poverty in America is the question of whether  poverty is the cause of social ills (such as crime, poor educational outcomes,  divorce, and so on) or whether it is their result  o In other words, is poverty a cause or an effect  - During a recession, poverty rates may be higher.  - Recession is a period of economic decline lasting half a year or more  The Culture of Poverty - Culture of poverty: the argument that poor people adopt certain practices that  differ from those of middle-class, ‘mainstream’ society to adapt and survive in  difficult economic circumstances  o Puts the blame on individuals  o It’s a circular argument- the poor are poor because they act in the ways  poor people do