ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that from a global perspective, there are indeed tradeoffs: the same institutional mechanisms through which inequality historically has been reduced within some nations often have accentuated the selective exclusion of populations from poorer countries, thereby increasing inequality between nations. One of the most deeply ingrained assumptions in the social sciences is that inequality and stratification across the world are shaped primarily by forces operating within nations. Producing a better account of global stratification and world inequality to identify the patterns of mobility requires a different (world-historical) approach to the collection and interpretation of social-scientific data. To make a historical parallel, it would be as if the people were to assume that a study of individual trajectories in the French or British nobility in the fifteenth century served to represent the overall character of social stratification and mobility at the time.
