Inequality is not just a socio-cultural order, but a violation of human dignity itself. The facts speak for themselves. A London boy in Tottenham Green has seventeen fewer years to live than his contemporary in Chelsea or Kensington, while a Mancunian pensioner at sixty-five can expect her retirement to end nine years earlier than that of the ladies of Kensington and Chelsea of the same age.

Written with a strong commitment to social justice, Göran Therborn, in his comprehensive analysis of inequality does not shy away from the hard truths of inequality, both its scale and devastating effects, and the failure of his own discipline to adequately address it. ‘Among the fifty odd Research Committees of the International Sociological Association,’ he writes, ‘there is not one focused on inequality.’ The closest approximation is the one on ‘Social Stratification’, which ‘has mainly been interested in intergenerational social mobility’.

With admirable brevity, Therborn lays out the extent and potency of his three types of inequality (vital, existential and resource), their mechanisms of reproduction (distantiation, exclusion, exploitation and institutions of hierarchy) and the necessary steps for a more egalitarian future.

Therborn goes beyond a purely economic definition of inequality, laying out three analytically distinct but practically inter-related types of inequality. The first, vital inequality, relates to inequalities of health and death, between and within rich and poor countries. Although not necessarily a commonly recognised type of inequality, this can be easily measured though life expectancy and survival rates. The second, existential inequality, is less easy to measure, although still possible. This inequality restricts the freedom of action of certain categories of persons, such as women, and it means a denial of equal recognition and respect. The third concept, more familiar to most, involves the resources that actors have to draw upon, for example access to education, ‘social capital’ and rewards.

These primarily analytical tools come to life, and the extent to which they can be mutually reinforcing becomes clear, when set in the context of the processes that reproduce them. Take hierarchies of social status for instance. These create inequality through their unequal allocation of recognition and respect, the limitations they impose on the freedom to act and their impact on self-respect and confidence. The existential inequalities of these hierarchies, themselves intrinsically bound up with resource inequalities, in turn have serious psychosomatic consequences, which are later shown to have consequences for vital inequalities.

Therborn is particularly persuasive and insightful in his emphasis on the importance of the most intangible of the four processes – distantiation. This is defined as the extent of the gap between rich and poor in terms of income and various social indicators and, according to his analysis, is the main route to inequality today. The argument for its potency is particularly persuasive when Therborn underpins theory with examples of income gaps in the Anglophone world. Within the US, the richest 1% had an 8% share of total household income in 1980; by 2000, this had grown to 17%. Similarly, in Britain, the richest 1% received 6% of all income in 1980; by 2000, this was about 12.5%.

On why we should care about inequality, Therborn is impassioned and lucid. The force of his case is made by the scope of the reasons cited and the empirical base of his argument. Inequality exacerbates poverty and causes the poor to die decades earlier than the rich, the evolution of capitalist finance into a ‘huge global casino’ created the recent economic crisis and a spiral of unemployment, and growing social distance, diminishes social cohesion causing collective problems of crime and violence.

Yet, it is questionable whether Therborn goes far enough in emphasising the devastating effects of inequality. He frequently cites the vast mortality gap between the rich and poor in both developed and developing countries and between the global north and south, although to some extent underplays the effect of inequality on mortality of the population as a whole and of inequality on mortality all the way up the income distribution. Indeed, in almost every country there is a consistent gradient in health related to income (Wilkinson and Pickett, Reference Wilkinson and Pickett2010). This is not simply the difference between the poorest and the rest of society but a gradient that runs right across society from the top to the bottom; the rich do better than the middle who, in turn, do better than the poor. Moreover, the extremity of the problem itself may in fact be underestimated due to limitations of life expectancy data. Among the rich countries, life expectancy has one of the weakest relationships with inequality, because the vast bulk of deaths are in old age where they are less related to inequality – or at least to current inequality. Relationships are primarily with deaths of people at working ages and younger, which make up a smaller proportion of the life expectancy data.

However, there is scope for optimism. While prevailing inequality seems incontestable because of its scale and influence on societal interaction, Therborn suggests that reform is possible. Inequalities, Therborn writes, are social constructions and as such they can be deconstructed. Such a radical overhaul of society may seem like a distant possibility but Therborn suggests four mechanisms by which such visions can be achieved: approximation; inclusion; de-hierarchisation; and redistribution and rehabilitation. Therborn does, however, place a considerable emphasis on redistribution, and to this I would add a note of caution. While progressive taxation and more generous social security systems can decrease inequality, there are three weaknesses to such an approach. First, any progress on taxes and benefits can very easily be reversed by a new government; second, there is always a tendency for people to think that taxes are a kind of legalised theft – that the government is taking their money; and, third, while redistribution appears generally benign in terms of its impact on growth, in extreme cases there is some evidence that it may have direct negative effects on growth − lower net inequality, however, is robustly associated with faster and more durable growth (Ostry et al., Reference Ostry, Berg and Tsangarides2014). A much more fundamental approach to reducing inequality would be to reduce differences in people's incomes before tax. Wilkinson and Pickett (Reference Wilkinson and Pickett2010) find that some of the more equal societies gain their greater equality by redistribution, but others start out with smaller differences in pre-tax incomes.¹⁰ The social benefits of greater equality do not seem to depend on which method is used.

Nevertheless, in the context of such a wide-ranging portrait of inequality this is a small criticism. The book provides much food for thought for the reader; let's hope it also does so for the delegates at the 18th World Congress of the International Sociological Association to be held in Yokohama, Japan, this July. At least the theme – ‘Facing an Unequal World: Challenges for Global Sociology’ – intimates that this may be possible.