One of the quotes that I noted as important in The Spirit Level was the following:
"Inequality increases the social distance between different groups of people, making us less willing to see them as "us" rather than "them". (62)
Social distance can be created in different ways: physically through patterns of urban development that segregate different areas of a city based on social class, or through gated communities or other modes of geographical segregation. But s... Read Full Story
Sherryl Kleinman and Martha Copp, Denying Social Harm: Students’ Resistance to Lessons About Inequality, Teaching Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 283 - 293.
Those of us who teach undergraduate courses in sociology know how hard it is to fight the pop psychology mixed with mass media culture, individualism and Weberian protestant ethic (people’s position in life reflects their moral worth) that passes for students’ critical analytical skills especially on the topic ... Read Full Story
Military coups in Latin America always awake bad memories. Military coups are NEVER good news and NEVER done in defense of democracy. But beyond that, here are two analyses of what happened in Honduras.
The first column, by Ismael Moreno, focuses on Honduran internal political dynamics
Honduras: behind the crisis | open Democracy News Analysis via kwout
The second one, by Anton Caragea focuses on Zelaya’s attempted reforms that generated opposition against him and examines the larger ... Read Full Story
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Syria amends honour killing law via kwout
So, things might suck marginally less but the whole cultural patriarchal background supportive of honorable murders remains.
Authored by SocProf. Hosted by Edublogs. Read Full Story
A while back, Joseph Kirschke wrote a series of articles on the global reconfiguration of the cocaine trafficking as global flow whose fluidity allows it to reorganize itself when conditions require.
In this three-part series, he depicts a trafficking that is responsive to fluctuations in supply (as the Colombian cartels lost their absolute control over the traffic), distribution (as the US tightened its policies) and demand (which is soaring in Europe). All these conditions created the need ... Read Full Story
As a follow-up on my book review of The Spirit Level, Bill Kerry, blogging over at The Equality Trust, has a blog post on their brand new FAQ. It is indeed great and handy. A sample:
Frequently Asked Questions | The Equality Trust via kwout
It’s a great teaching resource for those of us who have to deal with these automatic questions from our undergraduate students.
Authored by SocProf. Hosted by Edublogs. Read Full Story
Inequality is bad for us, individually and socially. So say Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (with extensive website).
Do you love scatterplots? I hope so because the book is chock full of them, establishing correlations between high levels social inequalities and high levels of a variety of social problems, from physical or mental health, to violence and incarceration, to teenage pregnancies.
Indeed, this book is data-... Read Full Story
Having defeated the Tamil Tigers, the government of Sri Lanka is left with hundreds of child soldiers to rehabilitate. For anyone who has read P.W. Singer’s book, Children At War, the stories will seem very familiar:
BBC NEWS | South Asia | Dark tales of Tamil ex-child soldiers via kwout
Go read the whole thing.
Authored by SocProf. Hosted by Edublogs. Read Full Story
It also produces a variety of other social problems, which I will explore in a longer post tomorrow. In the meantime, sociologist Goran Therborn distinguishes between three types of inequalities, all with deleterious effects (hat tip to Mike Buhl for this):
The Killing Fields of Inequality | CommonDreams.org via kwout
And then goes on to list four ways in which societies become unequal:
The Killing Fields of Inequality | CommonDreams.org via kwout
Which of these factors matter the most v... Read Full Story
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