The Importance Of Inequality In Society

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Introduction “The main force pushing toward reduction in inequality has always been the diffusion of knowledge and the diffusion of education.” - Thomas Piketty (1971 - ) French Economist If one wonders whether there were ever any society in history exists in which the entire population lives among themselves equal in all possible standing, obviously the answer would be no. Inequality exists in each and every society in this world; the only differences from one society to another are the key variables adopted to stratify peoples within the society, the observable degree of disparities between the social layers or categories and how serious society members take the differences enough to make it apparent in their social activities. As sociology is a multifaceted field in which sociologists look at many different issues within society and delve into them trying to understand the cause as well as the effects entailed, stratification as one of the prominent issues in society is equally complicated matter to comprehend. Even though stratification itself generally refers to the position of a person in society’s hierarchy (Ballantine & Hammack, 2013), and as an occurrence it partially refers to the process of ranking individuals based on indicators such as wealth, power and prestige (IDOL, Chapter 4, n.d), each and every society however is individually influenced by their culture thus creating its own form of stratification. Two or more societies might be strikingly similar when