SOC 100A Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Great Compression, Economic Inequality, Workforce Productivity
31 Dec 2018
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Social divisions: "the ways in which, either as individuals or members of social groupings, we construct social differences among ourselves as white or black, young or old cool or geek, and so on" (bilton et al. Social inequality: "the uneven distribution of wealth and power in society. Such distribution is patterned according to the division of definite groups and classifications, including class, gender, ethnicity and race " (holmes et al. Also referred to as social stratification and social hierarchy. This week we look particularly at socio-economic inequalities associated with social class . Economic inequality has been rising rapidly in australia since the 1990"s. Early settler-capitalists in the wool industry became extremely wealthy (relative to gdp) and in those terms would have a greater share of national wealth than australia"s richest billionaires today (leigh 2013). After federation, particularly in the post-world war 2 boom (apart from a brief "wool price spike" 1950) inequality declined until the early-1980s (leigh & atkinson 2006).
