Biological and Social Factors of Income Inequality

Adolfo Figueroa

Chapter Chapter 5 in The Quality of Society, Volume III, 2023, pp 101-143 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The degrees of economic inequality in capitalist societies are persistent. Nowhere can we find capitalist countries that have been able to reduce significantly and permanently its level of inequality. Declines are mostly marginal or only temporary. Inequality is a kind of iron law of capitalism. Historian Walter (Scheidel, The great leveler: Violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to twenty-first century, Princeton University Press, 2017) has[aut] Scheidel, W. shown that the persistence of inequality is a more general characteristic of human societies: In human history, since the Stone Age, significant changes in inequality have occurred rarely and only under violence, such as wars and revolutions; hence, civilization has developed but at the cost of economic inequality. Then question follows, why is inequality rooted in modern, democratic capitalist societies?

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-21072-3_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031210723

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-21072-3_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().