Income Inequality, Social Cohesion, and Class Relations: A Critique of Wilkinson's Neo-Durkheimian Research Program

Abstract

Research on social inequalities is going through a period of resurgence in public health and epidemiology. The main thrust of the program's empirical studies involves correlations between national mortality and morbidity rates and national measures of income inequality which are typically strong. Income inequality is an emergent property of populations, a social fact that cannot be attributed to any single person, as income inequality only emerges from relations among individuals. Income inequality can only be defined in relational terms—it is literally the income or share of income of an individual or group relative to another individual or group. Several sociological theories have been proposed to explain world social inequalities: imperialism, dependency theory, world-system theory, and globalization. Central to Marxian class analysis is the concept of exploitation that provides a social mechanism for explaining how income inequalities are generated.