McVeigh, Rory, William Carbonaro, Chang Liu and Kenadi Silcox. 2025. Politics and Privilege: How the Status Wars Sustain Inequality: Columbia University Press.
In the United States, the bottom 50 percent of households hold only 1 percent of the nation’s wealth. Scholars and commentators have long viewed democracy as the antidote to economic inequality, but US electoral politics bears little resemblance to a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. What makes extreme disparities of wealth and income so persistent, and why has the political process failed to address the problem?
Lobao, Linda M and Gregory Hooks. 2025. Rethinking Spatial Inequality: Edward Elgar Publishing.
This illuminating book offers a new perspective on social science inquiry into the spatial dimensions of societal well-being; addressing the key question of who gets what, and where.
Leading scholars Linda M. Lobao and Gregory Hooks adopt an organizing framework that speaks to the concept of spatial inequality, how it forms a lens on societal disparities, and how it gives rise to work with underlying commonalities across different social science disciplines. With this scaffolding, the authors consider spatial inequality across spatial scales, places, and populations, including the subnational scale, so often missing in inequality research. Illustrative cases center on poverty, public service provision and austerity policies, environmental justice, and war and conflict. The book concludes by advancing an integrative social science agenda to guide future emancipatory research on inequality.
Kenworthy, Lane. 2025. Is Inequality the Problem?: Oxford University Press.
Increasing economic inequality is now one of the most studied subjects in the social sciences. The general view is that while its increase represents a bad social outcome in and of itself, its negative impact extends into numerous other realms of social life: declines in living standards for those in the lower deciles of the income ladder, worse health outcomes, reductions in happiness, and less opportunity for most.
In Is Inequality the Problem?, Lane Kenworthy draws from a vast trove of research on the rich democracies to argue that while inequality is normatively a problem and we should therefore work to reduce it, the evidence from wealthier countries does not show that income inequality has contributed much at all to the other social ills it is associated with, like poor health outcomes. The effects vary from society to society, but typically the key contributors to negative trends like this one are factors other than inequality. Instead of trying to improve living standards, democracy, opportunity, health, and happiness indirectly via reduction in income inequality or wealth inequality, policy makers are more likely to make progress by pursuing these goals directly.
Duina, Francesco and Luca Storti, eds. 2025. The Social Acceptance of Inequality: On the Logics of a More Unequal World: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 12/12/2025 (https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197814499.001.0001).
The world has staggering levels of inequality. Most people worry about this. Some, however, accept or even approve of those inequalities. Why? The Social Acceptance of Inequality offers the first comprehensive analysis of the logics people use in support of economic inequalities. Turning to case studies from across the globe, it examines four primary logics. Market and economic logics see people accept and even approve of economic inequalities because of the positive material outcomes for societies with which they are purportedly associated. Moral logics see people thinking of inequalities as fair according to “higher” or ethical principles, such as meritocracy. When relying on cultural and institutional logics, people view economic inequalities as consistent with established or emerging outlooks, policies, or organizational arrangements. Using group and ethnic logics, people justify inequalities on the basis of hierarchical distinctions between “superior” and “inferior” collectivities. These logics do not exist in isolation: They often interact with each other and inevitably function in particular political, economic, and cultural contexts. With contributors from across the world and the social sciences, evidence comes from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Attention goes not only to those in positions of privilege but also to those in vulnerable positions who, despite their conditions, look favorably on inequalities. With original analyses employing a wealth of methodological approaches, The Social Acceptance of Inequality offers a compelling investigation of the logics of acceptance, their variations and intersections, and how we may move toward a less unequal world.
As accelerating inequality careens into plutocracy, and America tilts toward autocracy, Karl Polanyi and Thomas Piketty have become key resources for understanding the link between the social exclusions of capitalism and democracy in crisis. This and its companion article (Somers 2022a) explore each of these thinkers and put them into dialogue to generate the outlines of a democratic political economy that I dub a predistributive democracy. Deconstructing capitalism’s moral economy of market justice, building on legal and economic institutionalism, and advocating a movement of countervailing power against escalating commodification and dedemocratization are central components of the project. The first article focused on Polanyi’s contribution to a predistributive democracy. This one engages Piketty’s work as it evolves from a bent toward economic naturalism to a robust institutionalism and an agenda for a participatory democratic socialism. Neither Polanyi nor Piketty is a legal theorist, yet both thinkers are indispensable to the new Law and Political Economy (LPE) project and the movement for a predistributive democracy.
