Mobility and Inequality: Frontiers of Research in Sociology and Economics

stand the deleterious impacts of capitalism, one need only to examine the characteristics of those who are killed or injured in the workplace; the characteristics of those who die or are maimed fighting to protect our nation; the characteristics of those that suffer from manmade environmental hazards. In each case, the more marginalized members of society (racial/ethnic minorities, women) are disproportionately represented among the dead or suffering. Chasin categorizes these types of violence as either organizational violence or structural violence. Organizational violence includes events that cause harm due to the direct, observable decisions made by those in power. Examples include the decision to go to war; the choice to engage in police brutality; or the calculus employed by an executive who decides it would be cheaper to face litigation than to remove a harmful product from store shelves. Structural violence becomes manifest only after years of neglectful policies and practices that reward or protect some segments of society but harm others. The lack of universal health care and the disparity in the quality of public education, both of which cause great personal suffering, are but two examples of structural violence. One of the more interesting incongruities that Chasin highlights time and again is the imbalance between the punitive nature of laws used to prosecute individuals and those statutes applied in corporate prosecutions. An individual who kills another might pay with her life, while the decisions made by executives to bring lethal products to market may receive a corporate fine with no individual level of culpability. Recent events, however, offer hope that this is beginning to change. For his role in costing thousands of employees their jobs and even more investors their life savings, former Enron CEO Kenneth Skilling was sentenced to more than 24 years of federal jail time. Consensus among experts and commentators is that the harshness of the sentence is that a strong message is being sent to his peers, and that it is going to be increasingly difficult for individuals to hide behind the corporate veil of impunity. Chasin’s critique of American capitalist society is seductive; however, it does beg the question of “if not a capitalist system, then what? ” China, which is clearly flirting with capitalism, but remains a communist country, has launched a major anti-corruption investigation that to date has resulted in the removal of more than 1,700 party officials. Apparently, two of the more egregious offenders are the past, as well as the current, communist party secretaries from Beijing. Protestors have taken to the streets in Budapest demanding the ouster of the socialist government after the Hungarian prime minister admitted to lying about the true economic conditions in the country in order to insure his re-election. The one-year anniversary of the destructive race riots that shook France and exposed the magnitude of class conflict and inequality in that country was marked with renewed violence. China, Hungary, and France are not bastions of liberal capitalism. If we are to accept that capitalism as solely responsible for violence in the U.S., how do we make sense of violence, corruption, and inequality in other countries? Is it precisely because each of these countries incorporates some elements of liberal capitalism that inequality emerges? These are important questions for anyone interested in truly understanding the full extent of inequality brought on by capitalism. By ignoring them, Chasin’s criticisms lose some of their bite.