SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND CULTURAL POLICY
Over the past 30 years, the world has witnessed an increase in social inequality on an unprecedented scale, heading back towards early 19th-century levels of inequality. According to an OECD report (2014), the gap between the haves and the have-nots is now at the same level as it was in the 1820s. The return to 19th-century relations of inequality is also reflected in the trend that today's elites predominantly inherit their wealth rather than work for it (Piketty, 2013, Milanović, 2016). Furthermore, unlike the efforts made during the mid-20th century to decrease the importance of ascribed statuses, there is a clear tendency to return to relations in which categorical inequalities (in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, and gender) have a systematic bearing on distributional relations of inequality (Tilly, 1998; Brubaker, 2015; Savage 2021). All this is amplified by the important new generators of inequality, such as the digital divide (DiMaggio et al, 2001; Hargittai, 2002; Van Deursen and Helsper, 2015; Ragnedda, 2017).
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