ISC 205-01 (A Minerva Course)
Inequality:  Economic and Social Perspectives

Teresa Meade and Eshragh Motahar/Fall 2015

       

Midterm Examination Guidelines

Wednesday, October 7, 2015, Olin 115

For each lecture/class session we will give you a list of up to 5 study questions.  For the midterm we will pick 2 questions from each lecture's set of study questions.  You choose one question from each of those 2 questions per lecture and answer it in 3-4 sentences.  Thus, you will answer a total of 8 questions, one corresponding to each lecture.  Your answers must demonstrate that:  (a) you have attended all classes, and (b) you have read the required readings.  In addition, you need to make sure that your answers address at least one of the fundamental overarching questions of this course.  That is, (a) how is inequality constructed?  (b) how is it perpetuated? and (c) what are its effects?

Please note that all required readings, and PowerPoint presentations (when available) have been, and will continue to be posted to the course's website.

Here are the study questions as of this date.  Please check this site frequently.  It will be updated as new study questions become available.

Professor Motahar (Lecture on September 9)

  1. What are some of the characteristics of economic inequality in the United States since the end of the Second World War?  How has economic inequality evolved since then?

  2. What do we mean by “patrimonial capitalism”?

  3. What are some of Thomas Piketty's contributions to the study of inequality?

  4. David Cay Johnston presents a picture of prosperity from the end of World War II until the early 1970s.  He then documents rising inequality and concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent, presenting figures that add to Professor Motahar’s evidence.  Why does Johnston suggest this has happened?

Professor Sargent (Lecture on September 14)

  1.  How was the Late Feudal Economy different from the Early Feudal Economy?

  2. What was the Ciompi Revolt and what does it tell us about inequality in Renaissance Florence?

  3. What were the main characteristics of the Early Capitalist Economy in the Netherlands?

  4. What were the chief colonial outposts of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the Dutch West India Company (WIC)?

  5. Who was Jan Pieterszoon Coen and how did he ensure the dominance of the VOC in the Spice Islands?

Professor Doyle (Lecture on September 16)

  1. How does Jane Austen structure Sense and Sensibility so that she is participating in the debate between Burke and Paine about primogeniture and the landed aristocracy?  What are her contributions to the debate?

  2. How does Jane Austen structure Sense and Sensibility so that she is participating in the conversation between Mary Wollstonecraft and Hester Chapone about the proper education of women?  What are her contributions to this conversation?

  3. How does Jane Austen structure Sense and Sensibility to show the inequality produced by the British system of inheritance (specifically, the practices of primogeniture and entail)?   What solution, if any, does she suggest or imply?

  4. How does Jane Austen use Sense and Sensibility to show the female internalization of patriarchal gender norms?   What solution, if any, does she suggest or imply?

  5. What resemblance is there between Jane Austen’s attitude in Sense and Sensibility about the inequality caused by inherited wealth and Honoré de Balzac’s attitude in Père Goriot, as described by Thomas Piketty in the initial assigned course reading (“Vautrin’s Lesson”)?  What is the main difference in their emphasis?

Professor O’Keeffe (Lecture on September 21)

  1. Public education spending is currently $3,000 less per student in Schenectady than in Niskayuna. What factors have contributed to this disparity? What are the likely future impacts on the children growing up in the two communities?

  2. Why are child poverty rates in Schenectady so much higher than the overall poverty rate in Schenectady?

  3. What factors have contributed to the growing concentration of high poverty neighborhoods in Schenectady (and nationally)? What public policies and private behaviors have prevented families in poverty from moving to suburbs like Niskayuna?

  4. How has the changing nature and location of General Electric business operations contributed to the disparity between the two school districts?

  5. Contrast the attitudes of people in this area have historically acted in response to inequities in distribution of ownership of factors of production (land, labor, capital) compared to attitudes towards inequality in distribution of a key factor of production in modern times (human capital).

Professor Aslakson (Lecture on September 23)

Drawing on the material from the lecture and, especially utilizing evidence from the letters and documents presented in the talk, answer the following:

  1. How was inequality constructed by slavery in the United States and how was it perpetuated after the end of slavery?

  2. What role did slavery play in the construction of inequality in the United States?

  3. Explain the importance of slavery in the sugar plantations of the New World in the construction and perpetuation of inequality?

  4. Describe the role of cotton in the construction and perpetuation of inequality in the United States?

Professor Grandin (Lecture on September 28)

  1. How did slavery contribute to the advancement of medical knowledge?  What did Grandin mean that slave ships were “floating laboratories” and a site for the study of disease?

  2. How did slaves contribute to the eradication of small pox and the diagnosis of other maladies?

  3. Discuss how the buying and selling of slaves and the expansion of slavery was “the flywheel on which America’s market revolution turned.”

  4. The quote from W.E.B. DuBois juxtaposes the emergence of modern civilization to slavery.  Explain its meaning.

  5. Why did slavers seek to limit the Muslims among the cargo of slaves brought to the Americas?  Where they fully successful?

Professor Cotter (Lecture on September 30)

  1. Paula England claims that the gender revolution is uneven, asymmetric and stalled. What does she mean by this? What evidence
    was presented, either in the reading or lecture for each of these?

  2. What are the class differences in the trends in occupational segregation? What is the significance of this? What are the possible explanations?

  3. What factors explain the gender gap in earnings? What (if any) sorts of solutions would these suggest?

  4. How can we use the notions of age, period and cohort changes to make sense of trends and patterns in inequality? Why does it matter what kind of period (cyclical or secular, temporary or permanent) change is taking place?

  5. Amy Wharton suggests both cultural and institutional sources for the stalling of the gender revolution. What are these and how could they be useful for understanding the stall?

Professor Coontz (Lecture on October 5)

  1. In what sense does the high rate of child poverty in America highlight a basic feature of the U.S. market-based system of care?

  2. Coontz argues that the reasons for poverty and its social effects in low-income communities is not racial, as Moynihan and others have argued.  Instead poverty and its attendant problems are a product of racism.  Explain.

  3. Coontz suggested that the gender revolution, especially as regards roles within the family, is still unfolding.  She used the example of two tectonic plates colliding and shifting. What do the plates represent and what is happening?

  4. Cotter argued that the gender revolution is stalled, but Coontz suggested that it is still unfolding.   Explain the argument for each position?

  

 

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Last revised:  Wednesday, October 07, 2015