Fragments of inequality : social, spatial, and evolutionary analyses of income distribution

Fragments of Inequality uses an interdisciplinary framework to answer the most fundamental questions on inequality and income distribution: What explains the level of income inequality in a given nation? Why do income inequality levels vary so greatly worldwide? What causes the level of income inequality to change? What explains the diversity of trends in income inequality change?

In this novel work, Sanjoy Chakravorty argues that social fragmentation and spatial fragmentation are the principal sources of income inequality and shows how these factors change and thereby effect changes in distributional patterns. But as Chakravorty demonstrates, intellectual approaches to the analysis of inequality are also quite fragmented-economists, sociologists, geographers and other social scientists tend to operate within their discipli nary boundaries and therefore provide incomplete explanations for this crit ically important, multidimensional issue. Fragments of Inequality is the first book-length attempt at a social theory of income distribution and the first attempt at an evolutionary approach to distributional analyses. It shifts the discourse from ahistorical linear to historicized punctuated equilibrium models, from individuals to groups, and from abstract to fragmented space in order to culminate in a fundamental shift from economic to social theories of inequality.