EC: Fischer & Voss "Inequality by Design"

Fischer and Voss’s “Inequality by Design” provides a structural perspective that solidifies many of the concepts that we’ve studied earlier. Their main argument asserts that American policy choices have shaped inequality through “invisible” programs that benefit the rich and middle class, regulation of the labor market, and public investments in higher education. Within their argument, they make several claims that we have been considering throughout our course and which are useful to evaluate. First, they claim that “young are parents more susceptible to poverty, and their poverty make their children poor.” We have encountered this before in Beller and Hout’s “Intergenerational Social Mobility,” which reveals the “persistence” of class from one generation to another. Next, they discuss how “American adults are more unequal in both wealth and income than people in any other industrial society,” which they later provide reason for by explaining the suburbanization effects (especially for African Americans) which we have seen in Oliver & Shapiro, Patillo, and Wacquant & Wilson. It truly is interesting to observe how each of these author’s findings intersect and collide with each other to illuminate the structural factors that have contributed to class (and racial) divisions in income and wealth. Furthermore, while discussing redistribution policies for the poor, they find that “each program was targeted to a specific need and requires would-be clients to meet exacting qualification.” This means that the qualifications for policy programs to aid the poor are so specific and often seen as unappealing to claim oneself as, and therefore, many low-income citizens are unable to take advantage of these policies. Finally, their last invisible policy that they consider is about health. Their finding that “Adults in the poorest 5th of the population have more than three times the number of health conditions that limit their activities (including work) as those in the top half of the income distribution,” parallels nicely with the discussions that we’ve been having about Carpiano’s, Link’s, & Phelan’s “Social Inequality and Health” and the Frontline video presented in class. Through these, we see a vicious cycle where low-income workers do not have enough money to secure their health. Then, when they must take time off work because of low health, this affects their income and cyclically affects their ability to access good health. Ultimately, Fischer and Voss provide useful insight into the structural conditions that affect and increase our class inequality.