Who ends up where, and why it persists.
10 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Down with Meritocracy
Michael Young · 2001
The sociologist who coined 'meritocracy' as a satirical warning in 1958 revisits the term after New Labour adopted it as a positive goal, and argues…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
B. Seebohm Rowntree · 1901
Surveys every working-class household in York and establishes that most poverty was caused by wages too low to sustain physical efficiency rather…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy
Robert Michels · 1911
Argues from the case of European socialist parties that any large organisation, however democratic its aims, inevitably concentrates power in a small…
+5 more at this level
11 works
Michael Young
The sociologist who coined 'meritocracy' as a satirical warning in 1958 revisits the term after New Labour adopted it as a positive goal, and argues a society that tells losers they deserved to lose is crueller than one that never promised merit would be rewarded.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez & Gabriel Zucman
Compiles a single global dataset of income and wealth shares and argues that within-country inequality has risen almost everywhere since 1980 even as between-country inequality has fallen, leaving the world overall about as unequal as at the height of Western imperialism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026B. Seebohm Rowntree
Surveys every working-class household in York and establishes that most poverty was caused by wages too low to sustain physical efficiency rather than by idleness or drink, and that families cycle in and out of it over a lifetime.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Piketty
Summarises the book's central claim that when the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy, wealth concentrates faster than output grows, and answers critics on measurement and historical scope.
link checked 17 Sept 2026OECD
Finds that it would take four to five generations for a child born into a low-income family in most OECD countries to reach the average income, and argues that this 'sticky floor' undermines the meritocratic promise that effort determines outcomes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Michels
Argues from the case of European socialist parties that any large organisation, however democratic its aims, inevitably concentrates power in a small leadership -- the 'iron law of oligarchy' -- because running an organisation itself requires skills and access most members never acquire.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Max Weber
Splits stratification into three independent dimensions -- economic class, social status and political power -- arguing against Marx that a group's standing in the market does not determine its prestige or its capacity to act politically.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Pitirim A. Sorokin
Introduces vertical and horizontal mobility as the basic categories for describing how individuals and groups move between social strata, and argues every stratified society has channels -- the army, the church, the school -- that regulate how much movement it allows.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert W. Hodge, Paul M. Siegel & Peter H. Rossi
Compares occupational prestige rankings across four decades and finds the relative standing of occupations is remarkably stable even through the Depression and postwar boom, arguing prestige reflects a durable structural order rather than shifting public opinion.
Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline & Emmanuel Saez
Maps intergenerational income mobility across US commuting zones and shows a child's chances of rising out of poverty depend heavily on where they grow up, correlating with local segregation, inequality, school quality, social capital and family structure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner & Danny Yagan
Tracks tax records for entire college cohorts and shows that some mid-tier public colleges move low-income students into the top income quintile at far higher rates than elite private colleges do, isolating college choice as a lever on mobility separate from being admitted to a prestigious name.
link checked 17 Sept 2026