Content area
Full Text
We examine the determinants of inequality in the distribution of family income in approximately 3,100 counties of the United States in 1970, 1980, and 1990. Such a study provides a "window" on global trends in social inequality during the period, which spans the tail end of the Kuznets curve and the more recent upswing in income inequality. Results from random-effects regression models that control for unmeasured heterogeneity among states reveal the continued importance of the Kuznetsian pattern of declining inequality with economic development, a positive effect of urbanization on inequality, a declining positive impact of sector dualism, an increasing positive effect of educational heterogeneity, and a persistent effect of racial dualism. Several variables associated with the recent upswing in inequality have significant effects: female labor-force participation (negative), femaleheaded households (positive), percent of the population over age 65 (changes from positive to negative over the period), manufacturing employment (negative), and unemployment (ambiguous). We also discuss methods of estimating the Gini coefficient for income inequality at the county level and measures of sector (farm/nonfarm) dualism, racial (Black/White) dualism, and educational heterogeneity.
The evolution of social inequality in the course of human history is a central topic of stratification research (Lenski [1966] 1984). While most sociologists view social inequality as multidimensional, involving power and prestige as well as income, inequality in the distribution of income is a tangible and measurable aspect of inequality. Two major trends in inequality have characterized industrial and developing societies in the twentieth century: the Kuznets curve and the Great U-Turn. Kuznets (1953, [1955] 1965) noted that income inequality has an inverted-U shaped relationship with economic development. Using data for a handful of industrial societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he showed that income inequality initially increased with industrial development, peaked and leveled off, then declined with further development, with the exact timing of the decline differing somewhat across societies. In the United States, inequality peaked in the late 1800s and did not begin declining until the late 1920s. Lampman (1962) found that, in the United States, a strikingly similar curve depicts the evolution of inequality in the distribution of wealth, as distinct from income, with the gap in the share of wealth between rich and poor also declining sharply between the...