ABSTRACT
This chapter describes below four benign subnarratives that characterize some of the processes by which inequalities of opportunity come to be weakened. It focuses on the rise of income inequality and the various narratives it has generated only because this literature is especially well known and central to the field. The larger point that we seek to make is that, no matter the subfield, there appears to be much interest in developing narratives that explain why long-standing declines in inequality have slowed down, stalled altogether, or even reversed themselves. The chapter reviews and introduction around the revolutionary changes over the past half century in the types of narratives that sociologists and other social scientists have applied to make sense of trends in inequality. The narratives of the postwar period took on a strikingly benign form in which the dominant logics of history were understood as operating in the main to reduce inequality.
