ABSTRACT

Social stratifi cation is inevitable; indeed, there will always be leaders and followers, successful and not-so-successful entrepreneurs, differences in talents and skills, and differences in society’s rewards. Whether the inequality is great (as in the United States) or relatively small (as in the Scandinavian countries), policymakers are the ones responsible for crafting policies that determine the contours of the society’s stratifi cation system (Eitzen and Baca Zinn, 2006: 572-573). Addressing the issue of inequality, Claude Fischer and his colleagues make this related point:

The answer to the question of why societies vary in their structure of rewards is . . . political. . . . By loosening markets or regulating them, by providing services to all citizens or rationing them according to income, by subsidizing some groups more than others, societies, through their politics, build their ladders [the height and breadth of the rungs of the stratifi cation system]. To be sure, historical and external constraints deny full freedom of action, but a substantial freedom of action remains. . . . In a democracy, this means that the inequality that Americans have is, in signifi cant measure, the historical result of policy choices Americans-or, at least, Americans’ representatives-have made. In the United States, the result is a society that is distinctly unequal. Our ladder is, by the standards of affl uent democracies and even by the standards of recent American history, unusually extended and narrow-and becoming more so. (Fischer et al., 1996: 8)

In short, the level of inequality in the United States, which is greater than that found in other Western democracies, is by design (Fischer et al., 1996: 125).