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The article comments on papers on national renewal presented by University of the Philippines professor Zeus Salazar and National Secretariat for Social Action research director John J. Carroll as part of the Philippine Sociological Society's "Social Issues '72" public lecture series. The basic issues set forth by the papers are the following. It is held that the existing inequality between the rich and the poor is an obstacle to development. National renewal requires no less than radical changes, apparently the kind which come the day after the revolution. But this may never happen or if it does, it certainly will be long in coming. It will not come as long as one continues holding seminars, discussion sessions, public lecture series, and the like It is highly doubtful that change will ever emerge from the elite sector of society, except as a result of organized pressure from the grassroots, or the masses. The underlying implication here is, bluntly put unless the poor, whose strength lies in their numbers, grab power, they will never have it. Carroll cites the Latin-American experience in land reform.

This article examines Erik Jörgen Hansen's paper concerning Danish educational equalization. He starts by discussing a certain specified goal, social equality in the field of education. He then deals with a number of obstacles which according to him prevent the realization of the desired goal in existing school systems. Finally he proposes certain measures to clear away the obstacles or minimize their importance. The goals discussed by Hansen is social equality in the field of education. What this means to him he discusses at some length and comes out with a number of definitions. One of these, consistent equality, he then tries to operationalize. This means in its general version that equality is reached when the educational system is so constructed, that it for all leads to a result that does not make it possible to find any useful criterion according to which individuals can be singled out in relation to the education obtained. In a more limited way this goal can be said to have been reached if the individuals in various categories, examples are social groups, geographical area, sex and others, on the average, regardless of category, reach a completely identical educational result.

Presents a paper on the relative occupational success of blacks and whites in the United States. How blacks get less in the job market; Goal of the paper to present the results of an extensive study of data on the employment of young men; Definition of occupations and measurings of earnings within occupations; Average wages rates of black and white males; Occupational success; The model for weighing the information; Comparison of blacks and whites with equal endowments; Comparison of random groups of blacks and whites; Comparisons with actual distributions; Projections to 1973; Discussion by the panel on the findings.

The article presents critical discussion of two papers by George Garvy and Edward F. Denison on the distribution of national income. According to the author Garvy has expressed some doubt as to the existence of a long-term trend of diminishing income inequality. Both manners have also stressed the very crucial choice of income definitions and the basic family unit used in measuring inequality statistically. Garvy has also suggested an interesting change in the income unit used to measure inequality. The usual per capita income measure may be useful from a welfare standpoint or in relation to consumer demand. Commenting on the paper by Denison, the author says that he has identified the ordinary business sector and then, within that division, distinguished several farm and non-farm ownership forms and property income sources. At the end of his paper, Denison introduced the government as tax collector and payer of transfer incomes. The author applaud his remarks on the effect of taxes and transfers and regret that the scope of his paper could not have been somehow extended to include more discussion of income redistribution.

This paper examines the empirical evidence for Adams' theory of inequity. Studies testing propositions concerning the effects of inequity on performance and on allocation of rewards, and concerning the determinants and the psychological state of inequity are analyzed. There seems to be initial support for the theory. Some methodological and theoretical issues relevant for further validating the theory are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marx and Weber devoted little space to the discussion of class, but the importance of that theme in their work is well known, The present paper contrasts the Marxian argument concerning the foundation of class in the organization of production with Weber's greater emphasis upon status-differences and organized collective action. The discussion distinguishes as Marx and Weber did between modern and pre-modern types of inequality and society. The paper does not attempt to go beyond a comparison between two classic writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the validity of the propositions that tile growth of political democracy has reduced social inequality, and that political democracy mediates much of the effect of the level of economic development on social equality. Social equality is defined empirically in terms of three variables: a measure of experience with social insurance programs; a measure of income inequality; and a social welfare index. The analysis of a cross-section of sixty western and third-world countries (1960) indicates that the effect of the level of economic development on each dependent variable is positive and curvilinear, but that the bivariate effects of political democracy on the latter are quite spurious, once the level of economic development is taken into account. Political democracy exerts no significant effects (additive or non-additive,) on social equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments on cross-national study of inequality. Although inequality on a national level is most often conceived in economic terms, it also has political and social dimensions, and its study can provide common ground for several social science disciplines. Despite this fact, sociologists have avoided doing research on inequality. Cross-national analysis of the determinants of inequality by sociologist Phillips Cutright may by regarded as one of the first empirical contributions by a sociologist to this area of study. Cutright's paper is an interesting and provocative piece of research, but it is open to criticism from several perspectives. One of these is the possibility of measurement error in the dependent variable; a second concerns the meaning of his index of inequality, derived from differences between the incomes of various sectors of the national economy; and a third concerns the validity of his measures for some of the independent variables in the study.

The present paper began with an attempt to formalize the Davis-Moore functional theory of social stratification. It was found that the theory could be represented by a static model consisting of two algebraic equations with appropriate constraints on the functions. Then the tools of path analysis were used to evaluate the empirical adequacy of the Davis-Moore and Parsonian functional theories of social stratification as representations of cultural beliefs about stratification. Because of the likely presence of measurement and sampling errors, it was impossible to reject definitely either of the models. However, the estimated path coefficients were more consistent with the Parsonian theory than the Davis-Moore theory. This led to an inquiry into the conditions under which one model would be a better representation than the other. It was argued that the Davis-Moore scheme would provide a more accurate representation of cultural beliefs under conditions of high organizational interdependence whereas the Parsonian framework would give a better representation under conditions of low interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theory and research dealing with the consequences of rank inconsistency have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the portrayal of the disagreeable aspects of this situation and with the identification of relatively extreme reactions to it. The data reported above serve to counterbalance this emphasis by suggesting circumstances under which rank inconsistency may be accommodated to without a radical reaction and under which this inconsistency may even be downright palatable. First, the data showed one instance where the inconsistent individual's preoccupation with the area of endeavor in which he held his higher rank led him to be tolerant of his lower one. Secondly, we saw that three different kinds of rank inconsistency produced discontent with the lower rank only for respondents whose array of ranks was likely to be highly visible. It is hoped that the modifications of rank inconsistency theory suggested above will in the near future be subjected to a more ideal empirical test than was possible with the data employed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts both to ‘bring up to date’ the author's conception of social stratification as set forth in two previous general papers written in 1940 and 1953, and to broaden the field of consideration by giving special attention to the forces pressing toward equality in various respects, as well as the bases of inequality, The position taken is that the erosion of the legitimacy of the traditional bases of inequality has brought to a new level of prominence value-commitment to an essential equality of status of all members of modern societal communities. Inequalities, among units of societal structure which are essential in such fields as economic productivity, authority and power, and culturally based competence, must be justified in terms of their contribution to societal functioning. The balancing of the respects in which all members of the societal community and many of its collective subunits must be held to be equal with the imperatives of inequality constitutes one of the primary foci of the problem of integration in modern society. A few suggestions about the mechanisms by which this integrative process can operate are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Two experiments were designed and performed to test an explanatory conjecture stated in an earlier paper. The conjecture says that dissonance (or cognitive imbalance) will occur among overrewarded participants in groups if, and only if, the overrewarded person is receiving or expects to receive indications of disapproval concerning how rewards are distributed in the group from an authority figure or an equitably rewarded group member. The experiments reported here used a modified Berger situation. The results tend to disconfinn the conjecture as stated. Various explanations of the negative results are discussed. Some further theoretical arguments concerning the nature and consequences of inequity are presented. In spite of much experimental and other research, we do not possess much more trustworthy (replicable) information about equity processes than Homans did when he wrote Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. Some reasons for the empirical impasse are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes some of the results of an empirical study of the relationship between economic growth and the size distribution of income. The purpose is to examine hypotheses relating to changes in the income shares of different ordinal groups over periods of economic growth, and to clarify the meaning of the term increasing or decreasing equality. The paper does not refer to any single overall measure of inequality in order to produce a suggestion for the evaluation of variations in equality as a result of variations in income distribution.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some earlier efforts to measure the inequality of distribution within several different substantive contexts and to see how appropriate these different measures might be if they were applied to the distribution of "power potential" in the international system or any of its subsystems. We discuss several measures which we find would not be appropriate. We then present a measure which we-find better suited for the purpose and go on to compare it to earlier measures of inequality. Several of these turn out to be very similar to the one we present, even though they were originally devised for quite different purposes, such as measuring the degree of economic differentiation in a society. We conclude with a demonstration of the essential similarities among most of the measures discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of social reform in reducing the degree of inequality of opportunity in a capitalist society. The primary source of the data is a 1962 Current Population Survey, augmented by data from the National Opinion Research Center and other sources. The contribution of inequality of educational opportunity to the correlation between socioeconomic background and income is significant. By far the largest contribution, however, is the direct effect of socioeconomic background. Three immediate objectives of employers seem relevant to the formulation of job-adequacy criteria: the technical efficiency of the productive process, the maintenance of secure top-down control over production, and the legitimation of the authority structure and property relations of the enterprise. Differentiation occurs also within each level of schooling. The correspondence between the social relations of production and the social relations of childhood socialization itself is not, however, confined to schooling. There is strong evidence for a similar correspondence in the structure of family life. Thus criteria of worker adequacy reflect more than the employer's desire that workers be hardworking and capable. They reflect as well the need for acquiescence to the employer's monopolization of power. Yet the perpetuation of economic inequality does not originate with the family or the school, for the structure of home life and of education is but a reflection of the broader social structure.

In this article the author argues that in an important sense the stability of the distribution of national income by type has indeed been maintained in quite striking degree, aside from cyclical movements. However, it is important to understand the sense in which this is so, and much of the paper is directed to this end. It is found in several studies that the move towards less dispersion in the size distribution of income has resulted in part from a relative reduction in the sources of income which are of disproportionate importance to upper income groups. The distribution of income by types is thus found in one context to contribute importantly to a very marked lessening of relative income differences while in another it can be viewed as substantially stable in the long run. This is due to the use of different income concepts and to consideration of separate sectors of the economy as against treatment of the economy as a whole. The author tries to indicate the significance of these differences.

This paper takes as its starting point the postulate that in most developed countries today, a diminution of the current inequality of income distribution is something that should be welcomed. There are important differences of opinion about the reasons for regarding inequality as excessive, when it gets beyond a certain point, about the speed at which it is desirable that inequality should diminish, and about the earnestness with which one should insist upon the significance of the obvious distinction between diminishing inequality and establishing equality. An examination of these differences is, however, for the most part not necessary for the purposes of the present discussion, which is designed primarily to bring out the significance of the contrast between the two main approaches commonly used in elaborating techniques for the diminution of inequality. Nevertheless, the decision to place the greater emphasis on one or other of these approaches is a matter of considerable practical importance and is likely, moreover, to reflect still more profound differences in economic and social philosophy. The causes which have produced the current pattern of income distribution are complex.

In this paper the author adds some further empirical tests of his theory of income distribution. This theory (cf. this Review, Series 16, Number 3, September 1970, p. 221 ff) sees income distribution as the distribution of prices of production factors, especially labour, of different quality and prices as the effect of demand and supply factors. The quality of labour is represented only by the number of years of schooling. Its supply is described by the actual numbers of people having each of the possible years of schooling; this frequency distribution can be characterized by its average and by some measure of its dispersion or by one of its deciles (in particular the highest) expressed in terms of its median. The demand for the various qualities of labour can be supposed to be reflected by (i) total demand for commodities, but (ii) more accurately by the percentage of third-level educated people used in and weighted by the size of the four main sectors of production: agriculture, manufacturing, trade and transport, and other services. Extensive material collected and reworked by Professors B. R. Chiswick for the U.S.A. and Canada and T. P. Schultz and L. S. Burns with H. E. Frech III for the Netherlands is used in cross-section tests to explain variations in income distribution in the states of the U.S.A. and the provinces of Canada and the Netherlands. The results can be found in the tables. While further increase and smaller dispersion in years of schooling, according to some of the findings presented, would only moderately reduce the degree of inequality in the U.S.A. and Canada, more result seems to possible according to other findings, including those for the Netherlands. In the latter category the second demand index mentioned above has been used. This paper is one of several devoted in various ways to the testing of the same theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both political discussions and scientific literature the income distribution has come to occupy a central position for the consideration of social welfare and economic equalization. It has been assumed that an individual's income reflects his consumption opportunities and therefore his standard of living or economic welfare. The thesis of this paper is, however, that there are reasons for being quite pessimistic about drawing meaningful conclusions from income distribution data. As illustrated by the use of Swedish data, the distribution of income gives an extremely incomplete picture of the distribution of consumption for a wide variety of definitional and statistical reasons. The distribution of consumption, furthermore, cannot be transformed into a corresponding distribution of welfare, since there is no well defined concept of welfare. The treatment of public consumption in empirical analysis of the distribution of welfare also raises problems. The paper closes with the presentation of the conceptual basis for an alternative to the traditional method of analyzing the distribution of income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analytical framework is proposed for the systematic study of occupations in their social environments. This paper explores the ways in which occupations influence and are influenced by specific social contexts, taking into account both subjective and factual elements of the environment. Drawing upon past research on social stratification and current social developments, the framework is systematically illustrated, with emphasis on the dynamic nature of the connective relationships between occupations and publics. Neglected areas of research and theory are derived using the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been almost twenty years since Davis and Moore published their famed theory of stratification. During this period, the discussions which it has engendered have been numerous and highly instructive. It is now time to address ourselves to problems which concern the testability of the theory and its experimental validity. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of one of the basic issues raised by Davis and Moore. A major proposition of their theory argues that in the final analysis, social stratification arises in a society because of differential rewards for performance in the social positions therein. These rewards can be of several types. For our purposes, two are of major importance: symbolic and economic rewards, hereafter referred to as "prestige" and "reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparative study of three Pentecostal sects, two in Chile and one in Brazil. Opposing the traditional class system in which they rank low, the Pentecostal sects seek to shape their own structure after an egalitarian model in which all criteria of conventional ranking as practiced by the wider society are rejected. In reality, however, compromise with authoritarian principles seems rather common. Comparison of the three cases shows that the closer a sect comes to the egalitarian model the more its leaders feel the need to validate their authority by seeking supernatural sanctions for their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains in its first part an attempt at showing that certain important results of Alfred C. Kinsey's investigations can throw new light upon the problem of equality for woman and upon the relations of woman to war. The second part tries to demonstrate that the suppression of woman is not an expression of a striving for power in the man, but is his attempt at solving a difficult special sexual problem, the problem that he in the lasting sexual relation in the last half of life, is the sexually weaker. The third part points to the fact that woman is involved in the mechanism leading to war and that she therefore has responsibility in connection with war. It is explained why it is so important that woman learn to see the difference between the men's society and the secret male society.[SUP1] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information regarding social immobility and inequality measurement. Starting from the probably best instrument devised up to now to analyze a mobility table from this point of view, i.e. Yasuda's Y, the article shows that the given index in the article could be considered as a particular element of a family of indices. In this family, a particularly important other member is X, which have been called an index of inequality. An illustrative example shows that X and Y may lead to different conclusions on the meaning of a mobility table or of a set of mobility tables. At a more general level, the present paper shows that the idea of a best mobility measure is probably a false and also dangerous idea. The problem is rather to make explicit the implicit ideas or assumptions used in the construction of any index. The article ignores the numerous methodological difficulties raised by a table. In general, intergenerational mobility tables are drawn from reports of a sample of sons on the occupation of their father. This procedure leads of course to all kinds of biases. In particular, the differential fertility of the social. classes will introduce a bias in the occupational distribution of the group of "fathers."

This article focuses on an interesting and important concept of inequality and, it would seem, one indicated by conventional thinking on this subject. But in view of the aspects just mentioned, exclusive preoccupation with inequality in this sense might lead to a rather one-sided view of what is really of concerns the people. The second kind of inequality would diverge from the first as a result of direct taxes and subsidies and also certain other factors, particularly monopoly profits and exploitation. To put the matter in somewhat different terms, what is in question here seems essentially to be a valuation problem-a-problem of how to value, for purposes of measuring inequality, the different commodities entering into "real" income. The author talks about the procedure of valuing the different commodities in accord with their market prices or, assuming a relatively effective market, their relative utilities. The author refers in his paper to the large question of the effect of taxation and other measures for the equalization of income or incentives.

The paper presents comments of the author on the article "The Alternative Before Us," by Harry G. Johnson. The author heartily concurs with nearly everything in Johnson's thoughtful paper that hears upon current problems of providing equity in education. However, the author cannot quite concur in his description of the history of education in the U.S. and Europe. Differences were more basic than Johnson allows. Native as well as foreign-born Americans typically believed that a child should and could rise above the station of his parents and that the most effective route was to obtain more education than his parents had. School attendance requirements were lax; but vast members of students chose to remain in school after departure was legally permitted. Parents demanded expansion of facilities to accommodate them. In Europe, in contrast, the vast majority lacked faith in economic and social advancement through education. Much of the inequality stems from higher education, but this does not mean that a program to equalize public expenditures for investment in youth should be limited to higher education.

The article highlights the contribution of Louis Wirth in the field of sociology specially the related to the African-Americans and other minorities in the U.S. The article further reports the current discussion of the undermining of sociology by the "military-industrial complex" bent on the maintenance of its privileged position to the detriment of the emerging minorities, notably the African-Americans with the inference that sociology has thereby surrendered its capacity to tell the truth. When Louis Wirth came to University of Chicago, Illinois, he was already antagonistic toward religion and the sort of commerce engendered by an unbridled capitalism. He was captivated by its largely pro-Russian political climate. Under the influence of Albion Small, he saw in sociology the possibility of bringing to fruition a Marxist-Leninist version of social equality. Though his prevailing skepticism ultimately rejected such a solution, the commitment to sociology as a mechanism for action as well as generalization was born in this environment and continued to his death. His major volume, "The Ghetto" in 1928 and the paper for which he is best known, "Urbanism as a Way of Life," 1964 are also given.

The highly skewed distributions of productivity among scientists can be partly explained by a process of accumulative advantage. Because of feedback through recognition and resources, highly productive scientists maintain or increase their productivity, while scientists who produce very little produce even less later on. A major implication of accumulative advantage is that the distribution of productivity becomes increasingly unequal as a cohort of scientists ages. Cross-sectional survey data support this hypothesis for chemists, physicists, and mathematicians, who mow strong linear increases in inequality with increasing career age. This increase is highly associated with a changing distribution of time went on research. Another implication of accumulative advantage is also corroborated: the association among productivity, resources and esteem increases as career age increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The special character of the intertemporal theory of production arises from more detailed specifications of technology, permitting more precise characterization of producer behavior. The most important specialization of technology results from introduction of capital as a factor of production. Although the central concepts of capital theory-capital assets, capital services, and investment are inessential to the development of the intertemporal theory of production, they provide additional structure that permits a much more detailed analysis of producer behavior. The present paper is not written with the intention of stemming this tide, which surely represents a wholesome reaction and response to current problems. It is grounded, however, in the strong feeling and insistent recollection of one participant observer that the intellectual enthusiasm for development in the fifties and early sixties reflected elements of real hopefulness that were then actually present in many developing countries. What was not correctly perceived was the precarious and transitory nature of that early hopeful and even exuberant phase.

The article focuses on the inequality of educational opportunity and its implication on social heritage. The article points out that there has been an indisputable reduction in the inequality of educational opportunity after World War II, along with a tremendous educational development. Educational equality has increased, slowly but steadily, in most Western industrial societies in the last decades. Educational equality is also the distribution of educational attainment in a population. The rate of increase of the number of university students is higher than the rate of increase of the number of high school students. Within a given socio-occupational category income is a monotonically increasing function of education. People of higher socio-occupational position are better-educated people. According to the article, an increase in educational development does not necessarily result in a decrease in economic inequality. It may be responsible for an increase in economic inequality, even in the case where the educational system is becoming more equalitarian.

The problem considered in this paper is how to combine estimators of the common mean from two samples corresponding to normal populations with different unknown variances. Attention is confined to the case where it is known that the variance of one specific population exceeds that of the other. Three classes of unbiased estimators are presented, one of which is based on a preliminary test of significance regarding the ratio of the population variances. The gain achieved by utilizing the knowledge that the ratio of variances exceeds one is investigated by comparing the efficiencies of these estimators with an estimator presented by Graybill and Deal [1] in which no restriction on the ratio of variances is present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implications for the distribution of wealth and income of alternative assumptions about savings, reproduction, inheritance policies, and labor homogeneity are investigated in the context of a neoclassical growth model. The paper isolates the different economic forces which tend to make the distribution of wealth in the long run equalitarian and those which tend to make wealth unevenly distributed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents comments to the article "Schooling and Inequality From Generation to Generation," by Samuel Bowles. Economists have long argued that family background — the author eschew the term "social class" because its meaning is obscure and because its recent use in economics has impeded clear thinking is an important determinant of preschool training, schooling, on-the-job training and other investments in what is now called "human capital.'' Bowles argues that the importance of family background has been underestimated in previous empirical studies, partly because measures of only a few of the possibly relevant dimensions of background have been available. Part of the effect of the omitted dimensions is either lost or picked up by nonbackground variables such as education. This argument, however, also can be made for every other variable. No complete empirical counterpart of any variable is ever available. To maintain the objectivity, one must adopt a skeptical attitude until evidence is provided.

The article presents an analysis of the differences between public and private goods. Public goods and private goods stand at opposite poles with respect to substitutability. Specifically, the necessary conditions involve restrictions upon the pattern of alternative uses of the joint good, which are completely absent in the polar case of public goods and are of an entirely different nature from those of purely private goods. The plan of the article is to pay attention upon those goods whose alternative uses correspond to alternative distributions of total output among individual members of the community. This case is of special interest since it relates to the traditional question of externality in consumption. The conditions of optimality are then compared with those conditions, which would prevail in a market economy marked by the absence of government intervention. A pricing scheme based upon taxes and subsidies, which will bring these two sets of conditions into equality, is developed.

The article presents information on inequality of opportunity for higher education in American society. With occupational selection, training and certification carried out mainly through the schools, and particularly in post-secondary institutions, life chances will not be equal until opportunities for advanced education are equal. The extent to which opportunities for higher education are contingent on characteristics of social origin that are not relevant to leaning--most notably sex, socio- economic origins, race and ethnic background--is a matter of great importance to the study of social stratification and a pressing problem to a society that stresses equality of opportunity as a national goal. A research has been conducted to study this problem. The research is based on a longitudinal study of approximately 9,000 randomly selected Wisconsin high school students who have been successfully followed since they were high school seniors in 1957. The article first summarizes the findings of this research, then discusses some of the results of the efforts to elucidate the complex relationships between socioeconomic background and educational attainment and finally considers their policy implications.

This article focuses on functional alternatives to social inequality. Functional explanations of cultural universals, whether given in terms of survival or adjustment, run into difficulty over alternatives. Survival explanations typically assume that any society must, in order to survive, attain certain states which are its "functional prerequisites." It is then assumed or shown that a particular cultural item tends to bring about one or more of these prerequisites. From these propositions, it is sometimes deduced that any surviving society will necessarily possess the particular item. If it can be shown, however, that the item has a functional alternative capable of fulfilling the same prerequisite, this explanation becomes insufficient. On the other hand, adjustive explanations suppose that failure to attain some state of affairs gives rise to dissatisfaction among members of the society and that a given item which reduces that dissatisfaction will tend to persist. A functional alternative, in this case some other item which would also reduce the dissatisfaction, would tend to remove the reinforcement by which the original item was explained.

The ubiquity and the antiquity of such inequality has given rise to the assumption that there must be something both inevitable and positively functional about such social arrangements. Clearly, the truth or falsity of such an assumption is a strategic question for any general theory of social organization. It is therefore most curious that the basic premises and implications of the assumption have only been most casually explored by American sociologists. The key term here is "functionally important." The functionalist theory of social organization is by no means clear and explicit about this term. The minimum common referent is to something known as the "survival value" of a social structure. This concept immediately involves a number of perplexing questions. Among these are: (a) the issue of minimum vs. maximum survival, and the possible empirical referents which can be given to those terms; (b) whether such a proposition is a useless tautology since any status quo at any given moment is nothing more and nothing less than everything present in the status quo.

Economists' use of the term "equality" in reference to a distribution of incomes has historically been in the sense of a consensus for some statistical characteristic(s) of the distribution rather than a firm concept of equality. Of course such a concept rests on appropriate welfare assumptions about income and its distribution, assumptions which, for the most part, have been left implicit (and unknown) in discussions of income equality in the literature. Our purpose in this paper is dual: first, we wish to discover an unambiguous, welfare-related equality measure. This we accomplish through suitable assumptions on a social welfare function. What is produced is an "index" of equality which describes the performance of a given distribution relative to the maximum welfare derivable from the total income it represents. The measure thus depends functionally on the welfare attributes of income, something which in reality we know little about. This impasse leads us to inquire into the sensitivity of the index over specifications of the welfare function, which is done by comparing equality ranks for the states of the United States for 1960 under various functional forms and among curves within a given form. As an interesting secondary issue, the performance of traditional equality measures is tested relative to the welfare-oriented index to discover implications about their welfare content. It is found that the equality index is, in certain ranges for the welfare function, insensitive to its specification. The findings lead directly to conclusions concerning traditional equality measures, their usefulness in correctly accounting for equality differences among alternative income distributions and, concomitantly, their implicit welfare inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a celebrated article [1], Kenneth Arrow extended the classical theorems of optimization to cover the possibility of optima occurring at corners (and edges) and at points of saturation. The Arrow extension was effected by reviewing existing theory from the viewpoint of convex set theory.
In another celebrated contribution [7], Kuhn and Tucker pointed out that corner solutions and saturation points can be handled by more familiar Lagrangian methods if the objective, and constraint functions are differentiable and if a particular constrain qualification is satisfied. The Kuhn-Tucker achievement raises the question of the extent to which classical comparative statics methods can be similarly extended. In the corner solution context Katzner [6, 98-104] has suggested a comparative statics procedure involving prior partitioning of the commodity and budget spaces in the neoclassical model of consumer behavior. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that classical comparative statics methods can be extended to cover many cases of corner solutions and points of saturation without prior partitioning. In Section II we develop the second order conditions required for this demonstration. In Section III we illustrate the extended classical method by applying it to the model of consumer choice. In a celebrated article [1], Kenneth Arrow extended the classical theorems of optimization to cover the possibility of optima occurring at corners (and edges) and at points of saturation. The Arrow extension was effected by reviewing existing theory from the viewpoint of convex set theory.
In another celebrated contribution [7], Kuhn and Tucker pointed out that corner solutions and saturation points can be handled by more familiar Lagrangian methods if the objective, and constraint functions are differentiable and if a particular constrain qualification is satisfied. The Kuhn-Tucker achievement raises the question of the extent to which classical comparative statics... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents some new theoretical considerations concerning the determination of personal income. It is well known that the distribution of income follows the asymptotic law of Pareto. As to the non-asymptotic part of F(u), it is quite irregular and sometimes multimodal, but can easily be represented by a mixture of simpler distributions. As a matter of fact, when one plots the distributions relative to sufficiently narrowly defined "occupations," one obtains a set of simple unimodal curves, for which skewness and average income tend to increase simultaneously. Then one encounters several different categories of income that have a markedly skewed distribution but still have a very small probability of attaining high values. Such categories have been quite successfully fitted by the log normal distribution, and it is well known that this law has been rationalized by considering the logarithm of income as being the sum of very many components, such that even the largest of them contributes very little to the total.

In this paper educational careers are conceptualized as a function of the educational structure and a set of individual characteristics that comprise an individual's educational potential. Social inequality of education is defined in terms of the relationship between social origin and educational potential. Using this definition, it is shown that despite a marked increase in the number of students attaining higher education in Denmark, no change occurred in the social inequality of education. The relationship between social origin and educational potential is inferred by applying a stochastic process model in which the educational potential is assumed to govern the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the theory of status value and the behavior of individuals regarding inequities in rewards distribution. The theory of distributive justice is concerned with the way in which socially valued rewards, such as salaries, promotions, or special privileges, get allocated to members of a social system. The two basic notions are that, individuals have what they regard as legitimate expectations about how rewards should be allocated, and if such expectations are violated there is both strain and pressures for social change. In considering injustice or inequity, the idea of relative deprivation has played a key role. That is, feelings of dissatisfaction and associated pressures for change depend not on the absolute level of reward received but on the relationship between rewards received and rewards expected. A theory of status value is a theory of the honorific significance of rewards and of attributes possessed by social actors and social objects. In the theory of status value, imbalanced status situations develop strains and pressures for change, while balanced status situations are stable. It is not supposed that empirically observed balanced situations never change, nor even that empirically observed imbalanced situations always change, because status balance is never the only factor in empirically observed social situations.