Volume 27, Number 4 · March 20, 1980
Creating American Inequality
By Andrew Hacker
Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic Success in America
by Christopher Jencks and others
Basic Books, 397 pp., $17.50
Rules and Racial Equality
by Edwin Dorn
Yale University Press, 158 pp., $14.00
Small Futures
by Richard H. de Lone
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 258 pp., $12.95
The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification
by Randall Collins
Academic Press, 222 pp., $13.50
Current Population Reports, Series P-60 No. 120: Money Income and Poverty Status of Families and Persons in the United States
Bureau of the Census
USGPO, 39 pp., $2.00
When asked, 'Are people equal?' we usually answer, 'No.' For many on the right, innate differences attest to inequality. To many who see themselves as on the left, people are unequal because of the way they have been treated by society. The right sees inequality mainly as internal, as fixed in the human condition. Those on the more liberal side tend to view inequality largely as external, and amenable to remedy. Thus the right feels efforts toward equality can come to no good end. Leveling is inimical to nature and bound to be oppressive. The left would change the ways society is organized and believes such reforms would work.
Review, 7375 words
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