What Causes Social Inequality?

In Power and Inequality: A Comparative Introduction, Gregg Olsen examines three “Nordic” countries—Finland, Norway and Sweden—and three “Anglo” countries—Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States—through the lens of social inequality. Readers with an allergy to footnotes or definitions or statistics should be warned from the start: this book is not an easy, or a superficial, read. Major parts of it articulate the different dimensions of social inequality—for example, as well as inequalities of income and wealth, there are those of access to education, health care and housing. Olsen also discusses the values by which one might judge inequality and assesses the theoretical frameworks within which it can be analyzed. But although Olsen has a large agenda, in the end it is a fairly clear one. He argues that one can really only understand one’s own society by comparing it with others, that the Nordic countries have substantially less...