world’s population; between them, this tiny group owns more than the other 99 percent put together (Oxfam 2015).3 These trends suggest that by 2014 the state of global inequality was serious enough that people who were typically on opposite sides of many issues took notice. Lagarde and Burawoy were both concerned about the impact of a changing global economy. Under Lagarde’s leadership, the IMF offered a mainstream view of the causes and solutions to the social inequality brought on by a changing global economy. Like Burawoy, many sociologists have long offered a critical assessment of this mainstream view, pointing instead to structural power relations. By 2014, growing global social inequality was so significant that both mainstream and critical groups identified global social inequality generally, and economic social inequality in particular, as a global social problem.
Examining the specific histories of nation-states fosters different angles of vision on global economic inequalities. For instance, if we look at what happens between countries, we see that global income inequality has been in decline since the mid-1970s, which is related to the economic growth in fast-developing countries such as India and China. However, if we look at what happens within countries, we see that absolute income inequality has increased dramatically in the same period (UNU 2016). Moreover, even though income inequality has increased since the mid-1970s/early 1980s in nearly all countries, there are important regional variations. According to the World Inequality Report (WIR) 2018, income inequality has increased exponentially in North America, China, India, and Russia, and moderately in Europe, while it has remained relatively stable, at extremely high levels, in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil. From a broad historical perspective, the report notes, “this increase in inequality marks the end of a postwar egalitarian regime which took different forms in these regions” (WIR 2018).
Using intersectionality as an analytic tool points to several important dimensions of growing global inequality. First, social inequality does not fall equally on women, children, people of color, differently abled people, transgendered people, undocumented populations, and indigenous groups. Rather than seeing people as a homogeneous, undifferentiated mass of individuals, intersectionality provides a framework for explaining how categories of race, class, gender, age, and citizenship status, among others, position people differently in the world. Some groups are especially vulnerable to changes in the global economy, whereas others benefit disproportionately from them. Intersectionality brings a framework of intersecting social inequalities to economic inequality as the measure of global social inequality.
By focusing on race, gender, age, and citizenship status, intersectionality shifts how we think about jobs, income, and wealth, all major indicators of economic inequality. For example, income differences that accompany labor market practices of hiring, job security, retirement benefits, health benefits, and pay scales do not fall equally across social groups. Black people, women, young people, rural residents, undocumented people, and differently abled people face barriers to finding well-paying, secure jobs with benefits. Many of these groups live in areas that have been hard hit by a changing global economy and environmental hazards. Factories have relocated, leaving few opportunities for those who cannot afford to move. Many people remain poor from one generation to the next because they cannot earn a decent wage that provides them with income security. Labor market discrimination that pushes some people into part-time jobs with low pay, irregular hours, and no benefits, or that renders them structurally unemployed, does not fall equally across social groups.
Similarly, intersectionality also fosters a rethinking of the concept of the wealth gap. Rather than seeing the wealth gap as unconnected to categories such as race, gender, age, and citizenship, an intersectional lens posits that differences in wealth reflect interlocking systems of power. The racialized structure of the wealth gap has been well documented in the US, where disparities between whites, blacks, and Latinos have reached record highs (Chang 2010; Pew Research Center 2011).4 Yet the wealth gap is not only racialized but also simultaneously gendered. The wealth gap is generally analyzed through an either/or lens, race or gender, but with noteworthy exceptions (see, e.g., Oliver and Shapiro 1995), less often through an intersectional both/and lens. Measuring economic inequality by means of data on households, rather than on individuals, helps document the wealth gap between racially differentiated households and sheds light on the situation of households headed by single women across races. Intersectional analyses demonstrate how the structure of the inequality gap is simultaneously racialized and gendered for women of color.5
Second, using intersectionality as an analytic tool complicates class-only explanations for global economic inequality. Both the neoclassical economics accepted in US venues and Marxist social thought more often found in European settings foreground class as the fundamental category for explaining economic inequality. Both of these class-only explanations treat race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and ethnicity as secondary add-ons, namely, as ways to describe the class system more accurately. Yet by suggesting that economic inequality can neither be assessed nor effectively addressed through class alone, intersectional analyses propose a more sophisticated map of social inequality that goes beyond class-only accounts. Feminist theorist Zillah Eisenstein (2014) argues that class and capitalism are inherently intersectional:
When civil rights activists speak about race they are told they need to think about class as well. When anti-racist feminists focus on the problems of gendered racism they are also told to include class. So … when formulating class inequality, one should have race and gender in view as well. Capital is intersectional. It always intersects with the bodies that produce the labor. Therefore, the accumulation of wealth is embedded in the racialized and engendered structures that enhance it. (Italics added)
Positing that contemporary configurations of global capital that fuel and sustain growing social inequalities are about class exploitation, racism, sexism, and other systems of power fosters a rethinking of the categories used to understand economic inequality. Intersectional frameworks that go beyond class reveal how race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, citizenship, and so on relate in complex and entangled ways to produce economic inequality.
Third, using intersectionality as an analytic tool reveals how differential public policies of nation-states contribute to reducing or aggravating growing global inequality. The post-World War II period was marked by the growth of social welfare states in some national contexts, and the absence of such states in others, and more recently the dismantling of social welfare states in yet others. There are many variations of states and policies – for example, public policies of countries in the former Soviet Union that pursued a different course toward social equality, or colonies that became countries – but here we focus on social democracy and neoliberalism as shorthand terms for much broader sets of ideas or philosophies that have had and seemingly will continue to have an important influence on the public policies of nation-states. These overarching intellectual frameworks of social democracy and neoliberalism inform the public policies of nation-states as well as understandings of each other. They also differ in important ways on their interpretations of social inequality.
Drawing on the tenets of social democracy, social welfare state policies strive to protect the interests of the public. As a philosophy, social democracy is grounded in the belief that democratic institutions flourish best when they see the protection of social welfare of all people as part of their mandate. In this sense, participatory democracy is a strong pillar of social democracy because it assumes that fostering both broad citizen participation and fair access to the decision-making processes of the social welfare state strengthens democratic institutions. Unemployment, poverty, racial and gender discrimination, homelessness, illiteracy, poor health, and similar social problems constitute threats to the public good when social problems such as these remain unaddressed. To confront these challenges, social welfare states aim to promote public well-being via various combinations of establishing regulatory agencies for electricity, water, and similar entities, investing in public infrastructure and basic services, and providing direct state services. For example, in the US, environmental safety and food security have long been the purview of the federal government in the belief that, in order to protect everyone, industrial polluters of water and air, as well as the meat-packing industry, require a fair yet vigilant regulatory
