The Social Life of Inequality: Why Unequal Countries Stay That Way

The Social Life of Inequality: Why Unequal Countries Stay That Way

Jonathan Mijs, Boston University and Erasmus University Rotterdam
OSC Scientific Seminar - 2nd July 2021
  • Image Kent E Roberts (via Shutterstock). Gate Housing Community at Venice FLImage Kent E Roberts (via Shutterstock). Gate Housing Community at Venice FL

OSC Scientific Seminar 2020-2021

Friday 2nd July 2021, 4:00 pm / 5:30 pm (Zoom videoconference)

The Social Life of Inequality: Why Unequal Countries Stay That Way

Jonathan Mijs

Boston University & Erasmus University Rotterdam

Jonathan MijsThis talk offers a diagnosis for the current political moment marking societies across the west, where historically high levels of inequality have been met with limited public consternation.
In fact, research suggests that residents of more economically unequal societies tend to be less worried about inequality than people in more egalitarian countries. Understanding why requires that we take a closer look at the “social life of inequality.”

How have decades of growing inequality shaped and reshaped the social landscape: our social networks, neighborhoods, schools and workplaces? I argue that inequality increases the distance between rich and poor, who increasingly live their lives in separate neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces and befriend, date, and marry people exclusively from within their own socio-economic circles.
This disconnect means that neither rich nor poor can see the full extent of inequality in their everyday life or appreciate the non-meritocratic causes of economic “success” and “failure.”

From this diagnosis follow four suggestions for the study of perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes about inequality:

(1) A need to firm up the theoretical grounds from which we start data collection, specifically our conceptualizations of belief formation and belief change;
(2) Widening the empirical scope to include case studies and comparative research on non-Western settings;
(3) More attention to how beliefs and processes of belief formation and belief change are socially situated, locally and in social interaction;
(4) Consideration of alternative methodologies to study belief formation in action.

Registration is mandatory to join the ZOOM meeting (the link will be sent one day before).

Jonathan Mijs is an Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
He held appointments as Lecturer on Sociology at Harvard University and Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics.

His UnEquality project investigates how people across the Atlantic make sense of inequality, and how their beliefs in turn fuel feelings of sympathy and solidarity with fellow citizens, inform their policy attitudes and motivate their political behavior.

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