The issue of the difference in income and the opportunities received for it has long been on the agenda in Russia, however, the crisis component of recent years has made it particularly acute. Statistics show that the 10% of the most financially successful people in the country receive 14.5 times more than the 10% at the very bottom of the wealth distribution pyramid. In Europe as a whole, this difference is 7 times, and in even more socially just Finland - 5.6 times.

According to Mikhail Tarasenko, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor and Social Policy, existing UN studies on this issue have shown that when the difference in income reaches 8 times, society ceases to be stable, and after 10, a revolutionary situation begins to mature in it. He considers it absolutely necessary to introduce a restriction that will bring the ratio of salaries to a more acceptable figure, at least in those organizations where the state has direct authority to do so.

According to Tarasenko, our minimum wage puts the country in one of the last places in this indicator, and even developing countries like Vietnam and Cambodia are higher than us. The level of the minimum wage in the Russian Federation is now approximately equal to 81.5 euros, while the same Germany offers its citizens to work for no less than 1473 euros. The latest figures from Rosstat point to an increase in the number of people whose incomes do not even reach the modest level of domestic living wage: in the 4th quarter of 2015, 19.2 million people “did not reach” the set bar of 9452 rubles, which is 3.1 million more than in 2014.

Analysts from the Swiss financial concern Credit Suisse confirm that Russia occupies a leading position in the world in terms of the difference in income between the rich and the poor. Swiss information suggests that 30-35% of the country's total national wealth belongs to only 100 richest people, in addition to whom there are another 97 thousand citizens with a fortune of more than a million dollars. According to Credit Suisse, this number will only increase, reaching 203 thousand people in 2019.

Another Swiss source, the newspaper Le Temps, notes that despite everything, the growth of wealth of one part of society does not lead to a proportional deterioration in the life of another. Indeed, 13.4% of the country's inhabitants receive income below the subsistence level, however, if you go back 12 years ago, this share was 29%. The author of the material, Emmanuel Grispan, believes that these figures can logically explain why, with such serious social inequality, Russian society still avoids critical consequences.

Worse, official statistics may not fully reflect the real state of affairs in society, because Rosstat reports do not include information on marginalized, degraded and other disadvantaged people, for example, those who do not have housing or live in problem families. The richest citizens, who do not descend from the pages of Forbes magazine, are also excluded from the calculation of average living standards in Russia. As some economists unofficially suggest, if hidden profits, proceeds from illegal business and corruption enrichment are taken into account in statistical calculations, real property differentiation can exceed 40-50 times.

Of course, this problem exists not only in our country. The Economic Forum in Davos, among the 50 most serious global risks, recognized it as one of the most serious, if not the most important threat to business, since such inequality leads to internal social instability. The normal development of any state in the presence of such a serious gap is impossible - it will not be possible to compose domestic market to ensure domestic demand for innovation. In order to reduce the distance between the poor and the rich to acceptable values, the international anti-poverty association Oxfam recommends a set of measures, including: a harmonious division of the tax burden, tax cuts on labor and consumption, serious investments in free healthcare and education, and the like. This should be done not by some individuals, but by the authorities on state level.

A serious source of the property gap between the poor and the rich in Russia is minimum size wages (minimum wage), indexed extremely rarely and does not take into account inflationary changes. But since it is officially recognized, it is he who is taken as a guideline by a solid layer of employers when establishing a wage scale for staff. As a result, 20% of employees Agriculture and education, as well as approximately the same number of market workers utilities and medical staff are paid less than the living wage for their work.

Director of the FBK Institute for Strategic Analysis Igor Nikolaev points to a serious share of responsibility in what is happening, lying on the shoulders of the state authorities. In his opinion, in a favorable period for the country of extremely high prices for hydrocarbons, they should have changed the distribution of super-incomes received so that the part of the population that reaches the poor in one way or another would become much higher. However, this was not done. The crisis worsens the catastrophically low level of corporate management efficiency. Until now, many highly paid executives do not perceive themselves otherwise than as temporarily occupying a profitable position, and see their mission in it as an opportunity to steal as much as possible, without caring about the consequences. Flat undifferentiated scale income tax completes the list of reasons that ultimately lead to such a huge income gap between the poor and the rich.

People have always dreamed of justice. Indignation at inequality was one of the most important driving forces in the history of the 20th century - without it, neither the Russian revolutions, nor the collapse of colonial empires, nor the rise of the middle class in developed countries. But has the world become fairer over the past century? And can we avoid deepening inequality in the 21st century?

There is no consensus in the scientific community on these issues, but a recent study World Bank shows unambiguously that global inequality is shrinking.

Rich man, poor man...

Supporters of the left (in the sense of socialist) ideas are usually sure that the gap between the rich and the poor is deepening, acquiring simply catastrophic proportions. "We live in a society where inequality is striking, and in many cases becomes more and more screaming," the famous Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, who visited Moscow, convinced me.

There was nothing to cover - it is obvious that in Russia, in comparison with the USSR, the property stratification increased many times over. It is enough to compare Brezhnev's car park with Abramovich's yacht park or the apartments of Soviet functionaries with the palaces of current officials and top managers. In 2012, the incomes of the richest 10% and the poorest 10% of Russians differed by 17 times, and in Soviet times by 4 times.

Post-Soviet Russia is a special case, but Western leftists have been talking about increasing inequality since the time of Karl Marx, who predicted that capital would accumulate at one end of society and poverty at the other. It is easy for a rich man and his heirs to become even richer: capital brings much more profit than any labor, and a poor family cannot make initial capital - labor costs too little. Therefore, the gap between the rich and the poor will only widen.

Anomalous 20th century

All the statistics of the century before last confirmed this logic. But the 20th century spoiled it: revolutions and world wars reversed the trend towards increasing inequality. Giant fortunes were lost, colonialism collapsed, the trade union movement and the redistribution of taxes in favor of the working class intensified in the countries of the West, and most importantly, the world entered a phase of rapid economic growth in the face of a shortage of workers and a technological breakthrough. As a result, in developed countries, the poorest segments of the population have emerged from poverty.

1.1 billion people on the planet have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990. "Extreme poverty" is defined as incomes of less than $1.9 a day per person

But, according to one of the most famous contemporary followers of Marx, economist Tom Piketty, this was only a "temporal anomaly": since the 1970s, capitalism has returned to its "normal" development, when the average wealth of the richest is growing much faster than world economy generally.

The increase in economic inequality in recent decades has not been very noticeable, because the average standard of living has also risen. But statistics confirm many of Piketty's findings. For example, the middle class in the United States is indeed blurring - a recent study by the Pew Research Center sociological center recorded that for the first time in the post-war period in the United States, citizens with average incomes made up less than half of the population - 49.7%, although back in 1971 they were 61%.

We are 99%!

Now the 62 richest people on the planet have the same assets as the entire poorest half of the population. And if we take 1% the richest people, their fortune is approximately equal to the total wealth of the remaining 99%. "We are 99%!" - Do you remember the most popular slogan "occupying", the main Western protest movement of recent years? This is exactly what he is talking about, and the main reason for the protest is indignation at inequality.

In his bestselling book Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty argues that the Western world is returning to "ancestral capitalism" - a society with a closed class structure, in which a lot of capital can be obtained only through inheritance or marriage. It is an oligarchic society in which a few families control most of the wealth. Is this really our future?

How life has changed

Before judging the future, let's take another look at how inequality has changed over the course of the 20th century. Let's just look not at the amount of money, but at what you can buy with this money, because equality is, first of all, equality of opportunity.

Have we become, for example, "more equal" to eat? At the beginning of the last century, these same 99% of the population could afford meat only on holidays, and often they were simply starving. Today we eat better than the kings of past eras: we buy fruits from warm countries or seafood, located thousands of kilometers away from us. The rich prefer expensive farm shops and "organic" food - the same by and large. Even in Soviet society, the gap between the nomenklatura, which lived on shortages, and the people who dreamed of sausage was much larger.

767 million people are still in extreme poverty. More than half of them live in Africa south of the Sahara, another third - in South Asia.

Has inequality in access to education increased? At the beginning of the last century, higher education was a huge value that only a few could afford. Now this is the norm, not to mention secondary education and universal literacy. Moreover, right now a real revolution is taking place in this area: online education allows billions of people to listen to lectures at the best universities in the world - there would be a desire.

What about access to healthcare? This is where the inequality clearly should have increased: modern medicine is an expensive service. But no, statistics show the opposite: the difference in infant mortality or in total life expectancy is only decreasing all the time.

Perhaps the inequality of people before the law has increased? Nothing of the kind: women have received voting rights, gays have ceased to be imprisoned, racial and national segregation is being successfully fought, even the rights of children are being protected.

The same thing happens in other areas as well. Piketty prophesies "generic capitalism", but meanwhile it has never been so easy to get rich as it is now - simply by organizing a startup that people need, without any initial capital. There have never been such reliable social elevators, allowing a capable person of any background to become a manager or official. The ability to travel and choose a place of residence has also always been a privilege of the elite, meanwhile, two-thirds of the inhabitants of today's Moscow were not born in it.

End of poverty

It turns out that, according to statistics, wealth is concentrated in the hands of the elite and inequality is growing, but in reality everything is different?

No, the statistics will also change if we take into account not only Western countries, but the whole world, most of which lives much more modestly than you and me, but much better than their parents. Recently, the World Bank published a report on the results of a study of global wealth inequality. The conclusion is quite clear: inequality has been declining for many decades.

80% of the extremely poor live in rural areas

Yes, the incomes of the wealthy are growing faster than the economy as a whole. But the incomes of the poorest part of the population are growing even faster. Inequality is reduced primarily due to unprecedented progress in the fight against poverty, from which more than a billion people have escaped over the past quarter century.

For example, in India in 2009-2010 alone, the number of poor people who survive on less than $1.9 a day fell by one and a half times. In China, yesterday's semi-impoverished rural population is massively moving into the category of well-to-do city dwellers, the middle class. And only in these two states more people live than in the entire Western world. However, according to the World Bank, inequality continues to decline in most developed countries.

What's next?

So inequality is decreasing. In the long run, this is easy to see, but in the short run, the opposite trend may prevail - as in the United States and Russia.

Inequality, however, is not always evil, it is an important driving force community development. The idea of ​​equality lies at the heart of all social utopias, but when they were tried to be realized, every time it turned out that complete equality is worse than any inequality. Pitirim Sorokin, a prominent sociologist of Russian origin, argued that the level of economic inequality fluctuates around the optimal value, too much deviation from which in any direction is fraught with catastrophes.

Apparently, the peak of inequality falls on the agrarian stage of the development of society, on one pole of which there is an all-powerful monarch and a brilliant aristocracy, and on the other - disenfranchised slaves and serfs.

Does progress threaten equality? Perhaps. And it is connected, according to many experts, with the growing technological gap between countries. Some states create new technologies and grow rich. Others do menial work for them, the demand for which will fall as production is automated. And still others cannot take advantage of the fruits of progress at all. A similar gap may also arise within the country - between the future-oriented center and the periphery, living out its days in the cozy world of traditions.

And yet in information society, judging by current trends, inequality will decrease. According to well-known economist Jeremy Rifkin and other ideologues of the sharing economy (from the English share - to share), the development of the Internet and smart automated services will launch the transition from an economy based on the extraction of surplus value to an economy of cooperation and the exchange of benefits.

This is the basis of the new sociality, which is replacing the atomization of society: people will take more care of each other and together equip the life of their community. And an economy based on social principles will be aimed not so much at increasing profits as at improving the quality of our lives.

Against the backdrop of the ongoing crisis, Russians are rapidly losing their accumulated assets, and social stratification in the country is increasing. According to official forecasts, the well-being of the population will be restored only in 2018 - at the same time when the authorities will seriously start thinking about raising the retirement age and taxes. Lenta.ru looked into the causes of growing poverty in Russia.

20 million over the line

Over the year - from mid-2015 to mid-2016 - the well-being of Russians fell by 14.4 percent at once. Within 12 months, household assets dropped from $12,086 to $10,344. This is the study of the Global Wealth Report of the Swiss financial corporation Credit Suisse.

The bank recalls that the Russians rapidly grew rich in the early 2000s. Thanks to high oil prices in 2000-2007, the well-being of citizens increased eightfold. In 2007, growth slowed down and became uneven, then it stopped completely and turned into a fall.

Analysts of the financial organization also recorded an increase in the social gap between the wealthy and the poor. In Russia, 89 percent of the total wealth is controlled by 10 percent of households. This is one of the highest rates in the world. For comparison: in the US it is 78 percent, in China - 73 percent.

However, the Credit Suisse report may not take into account some features Russian economy. Foreign researchers do not always take into account the role of real estate in the country. Often the poor live in expensive apartments located in prestigious areas of large cities. Selling real estate and improving the lives of many Russians is hindered by a sacred attitude to square meters (it was formed over decades of Soviet power) - an apartment for such people is not potential capital, but the purpose of existence. We should not forget about the low social mobility of the population, which also makes it difficult to get rid of overly expensive real estate.

“The main asset of the population in our country is housing. Now the crisis, and the housing market is very sluggish. There are fewer transactions. In this regard, the prices that are in the statistics, let's say, are not entirely accurate. Statistically, the inequality is caused by the huge difference in housing prices between Moscow and other cities. People living in a one-room apartment in the capital are five times richer than those who occupy a similar area in the provinces,” commented Alexandra Burdyak, senior researcher at the Institute for Social Analysis and Forecasting of the RANEPA under the President of Russia.

In addition, one of the reasons for the decline in the quality of life in Russia, Credit Suisse calls the devaluation of the ruble. In 2007, the American currency was worth 25 rubles, nine years later - already 64 rubles. “The sharp drop in the level of well-being was affected by the change in the exchange rate of the ruble, because at Credit Suisse everyone counts in dollars. In other countries, the exchange rate does not change as much as the exchange rate of the ruble in the last year or two,” Alexandra Burdyak continued.

According to the study, the total amount of assets owned by Russians is a trillion dollars. It is not clear how the prices for residential real estate, which is the main property of the vast majority of Russians, were calculated. Calculations based on official statistics show a completely different picture. For 2015, according to the Ministry of Construction, housing stock countries amounted to more than 3.4 billion square meters, and the average market cost of one meter is 36 thousand rubles. Multiplying these figures and dividing by the average dollar exchange rate, we get the total value of residential real estate at the disposal of Russians at the level of about 1.8 trillion dollars. To this we add deposits in banks ($360 billion). Finally, there are investments in securities, mutual funds, foreign real estate and other property abroad. All this adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars more. The Boston Consulting Group, for example, estimates the volume of Russian assets at $1.4 trillion.

But no matter how Credit Suisse came to its conclusions, one thing is clear: the public is losing money and the gap between rich and poor is growing.

In this case, the situation will worsen. According to the Accounts Chamber, by 2019, 20.5 million people will be below the poverty line in Russia. That is 1.4 million more people than in 2015.

Affairs of the Heart

The fact that the devaluation of the ruble has become one of the reasons for the sharp decline in the standard of living, on November 22, and presidential adviser Sergei Glazyev. The academician, who actively criticizes the financial and economic bloc of the government, this time again went over the work of the monetary authorities.

“No other country in the world has ever seen such records, so that the volatility of the national currency was so high. It is twice the nearest to us Turkey in this indicator. Devaluation - we also set records, including among oil-producing countries,” Glazyev said.

In general, he compared the state of the Russian economy with. The press secretary of the head of state, Dmitry Peskov, once again stated that this is the personal position of Sergei Glazyev.

Alcohol and taxes

“I completely agree with the Credit Suisse data and even think that they are somewhat embellishing. We have not one tenth, but three percent of the people who own most of the Russian economy. And the reason is the colossal difference in income, ”said Nikolai Kolomeytsev, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs, in an interview with Lenta.ru.

He recalled that earlier proposals were submitted to the State Duma to limit the income of owners and managers of state-owned enterprises. The bill did not pass. “In general, 12 Russian state-owned companies have huge, state-guaranteed loans, but do not have motivated management. Not a single Western company would tolerate top management living so curly," he said.

According to Kolomeitsev, there are several ways to defeat social stratification. First, it is necessary to switch to progressive taxation. Secondly, it is necessary to restore the state monopoly on the production of alcohol.

“Both in tsarist Russia and in Soviet Russia there was a monopoly on the production of alcohol. This ruled out the possibility of poisoning and brought large incomes. It is necessary to restore state control over the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol, if taken under state control, should provide four trillion additional rubles to the budget. progressive scale- another five trillion,” he calculated.

But a simple redistribution of budget funds can hardly solve the problem of poverty and stratification. It is solved thanks to the stable economic growth. There are achievements in this regard. The economy is gradually moving away from shocks and adapting. GDP growth is expected in 2017. Ministry of Labor that by 2018 the level of income of Russians will return to the pre-crisis level. On the other hand, in 2018 the government will actively begin to discuss the issues of raising the retirement age and the tax burden - the implementation of these measures may negate the restoration of the population's well-being.

To cook soup, you need to know how to cook. How about giving charity? It turns out that this is a whole science. Give it to the first beggar you meet or take it to your relatives? Should all beggars be given equally? Or maybe it’s better for someone to refuse a donation? Much has been written about this, but, alas, in order to read all this, one must first learn to understand the language of theologians. The Greek bishop, who lived at the end of the 17th century, was a supporter of preaching in the vernacular, so his advice was understandable to people then, and will be understandable now.

Archpriest Alexy GOSTEV, rector of the church of St. Nicholas in Aksinino, discusses how to bridge the social gap between the haves and the have-nots parishioners.

Why not only the unchurched, but also the Orthodox family is experiencing a crisis today, and why education should be encouraged in a Christian family, said at the first meeting of the Patriarchal Commission on Family and Motherhood Protection, held on April 6, member of the Commission, Rector of the Orthodox St. Tikhon Humanitarian University, Archpriest Vladimir Vorobyov

How an Orthodox director saved his orphanage on the shore of Issyk-Kul from Wahhabis, cosmonaut Tereshkova saved five orphans, and an entrepreneur quit his business and bought a former monastery

At the festival of Orthodox media "Faith and Word" not only registered mass media, but also blogs were discussed. The topic was formulated as "new media or interest clubs?", but the discussion took a slightly different direction: there is a tool that needs to be learned to use. The experts spoke about the ratings in LiveJournal and the collection of funds for charity in the network.

We are used to the fact that help comes by itself only in case of great trouble. What if life is an emergency? In the Smolensk region, as an experiment, a new position was introduced - a social commissioner. He does not wait for people to ask for help, he himself is looking for those who need it.

We have voluntary assistants in hospitals - this is still a rarity, it is somehow not accepted and they are sometimes looked askance at (maybe because it has always been believed that for a Soviet person everything MUST be done by the state?). But in Europe, America, Canada, Australia, they no longer surprise anyone. People there are much more actively involved in the life of their village, town, district. Helping volunteers to hospitals (and not only) is very common. It is an honor to be a volunteer, there is special training for them, not everyone is hired to work in a hospital. There are quite a lot of volunteer organizations in the world, they are very different and have existed for a long time. And in the organization of volunteer work, they have a lot to learn

"Prison should give labor and specialty"
How can assistance to places of detention be organized? What should a prison or a colony be like for a person to really get an opportunity here to improve his life? With these questions, we turned to the Acting Chairman of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate for Cooperation with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies, Archpriest Dimitri Smirnov.

The incident involving Maria Alyokhina, accused in the Pussy Riot case, in the Danilovtsy Orthodox Volunteer Movement raised the issue of responsibility for the actions of their volunteers, including former ones, before Orthodox volunteer organizations. Bishop Panteleimon of Smolensk and Vyazemsky, Bishop of Smolensk and Vyazemsky, comments on the situation.

Today, only 15 volunteers work at the disaster relief headquarters, the city is in an extremely distressed situation, in a word, helpers are needed. About how church volunteers work in the Krasnodar Territory, our small photo report

NA correspondent and experienced sister of mercy Irina SECHINA has been working at the Headquarters for Assistance to Victims at the Church of the Archangel Michael in Krymsk since July 9th. Especially for the National Assembly, she sums up the results of those first days when the fresh wounds of the tragedy did not allow the introduction of a rigid framework of order.

Correspondents of Miloserdia.ru, having visited the scene of the events, talk about how assistance is arranged to the victims in Krymsk (report from the site Miloserdiye.ru, which is temporarily unavailable due to power outages in the data center of the Masterhost hosting provider)

More recently, the concept of a new law on volunteers was published online, containing a number of provisions, such as the introduction of mandatory registration of volunteers and the mandatory conclusion of written contracts between volunteers and volunteer organizations. These proposals immediately provoked a flurry of criticism: Why? This is what we asked the employees of volunteer organizations

Not far from the estate of Tyutchev in Muranovo near Moscow, a park was laid out in memory of the hostage children who died during the Beslan tragedy. Other memorials are being created: in honor of the participants in the Afghan and Chechen wars and in honor of priests killed in peacetime. The rector and parishioners of the manor church are working on them, and on the eve of September 1, local schoolchildren held a community work day in the park. PHOTO GALLERY

Social inequality seems to be a relic of the past and should go into oblivion, but the modern reality is such that in one form or another, stratification in society is present today, and this gives rise to a sense of injustice among those people who have been affected by social inequality.

Social inequality - what is it?

Social class inequality has existed since ancient times of human evolution. History different countries serves as clear evidence of what the oppression and enslavement of people leads to - these are rebellions, food riots, wars and revolutions. But this experience, written in blood, teaches nothing. Yes, now it has taken on softer, more veiled forms. What is the expression of social inequality and what does it represent today?

Social inequality is the division or differentiation of people into classes, societies or groups, according to their position in society, which involves unequal use of opportunities, life's benefits and rights. If we imagine social inequality schematically in the form of a ladder, then on its lowest steps there will be the oppressed, the poor, and at the top the oppressors and those who have power and money in their hands. This is the main sign of the stratification of society into the poor and the rich. There are other indicators of social inequality.

Causes of social inequality

What are the causes of social inequality? Economists see the root cause in unequal treatment of property and the distribution of wealth in general. R. Michels (German sociologist) saw the reason in endowing great privileges and the powers of the apparatus of power, which was chosen by the people themselves. The reasons for the emergence of social inequality, according to the French sociologist E. Durkheim:

1. Encouragement of people who bring the greatest benefit to society, the best in their field.
2. The unique personal qualities and talents of a person that distinguish him from the general society.

Types of social inequality

Forms of social inequality are different, so there are several classifications. Types of social inequality according to physiological characteristics:

• age - applies to all people in certain age intervals, this can be seen when applying for a job, young people are not hired due to lack of experience, older people with their vast experience are replaced by young people who are more promising from the point of view of their superiors;
• social sexual inequality - here you can consider such a phenomenon as expressed in the fact that there are few women holding responsible positions participating in economic life countries, a woman is given the role of “behind her husband”;
• social ethnic inequality - small ethnic groups, those that are not included in the concept of "white race" are largely oppressed because of such phenomena as xenophobia and racism.

Social inequality due to status in society:

• lack/presence of wealth;
• proximity to power.

Manifestation of social inequality

The main signs of social inequality are observed in such a phenomenon as the division of labor. Human activities are diverse and each person is endowed with some talents and skills, abilities to grow. In this case, social inequality manifests itself as the giving of privileges to those who are more talented and promising for society. The stratification of society or stratification (from the word "strata" - a geological layer) is the building of a hierarchical ladder, division into classes, and if earlier it was slaves and slave owners, feudal lords and servants, then at the present stage it is a division into:

• top class;
• middle class;
• low-income (socially vulnerable);
• below the poverty line.

Consequences of social inequality

Social inequality and poverty, generated by the fact that only the elite can use the main resources of the planet, gives rise to conflicts and wars among the population. The consequences develop gradually and are expressed in the slow development of many countries, which leads to the fact that progress in the economy is also slowing down, democracy as a system is losing its positions, tension, discontent, psychological pressure and social disharmony are growing in society. According to the UN, half of the world's resources are owned by 1% of the so-called top elite (world domination).

Pros of social inequality

Social inequality in society as a phenomenon does not carry only negative properties, if we consider social inequality from the positive side, then we can note important things, looking at which the thought arises that everything “has a place to be under the Sun”. The advantages of social inequality for a person:

• an incentive to become the best in your field, to show your abilities and talents to the maximum;
• motivation for those who want ;
• ordering in the economic sphere, those who have capital produce resources, in contrast to those who do not have capital and are only able to feed themselves and their families.

Examples of social inequality in history

Examples of social inequality or stratification systems:

1. Slavery- an extreme degree of enslavement, the original form of social inequality known since antiquity.
2. castes. A type of social stratification that has developed since antiquity, when social inequality was determined by caste, a child, being born from birth, belonged to a certain caste. In India, it was believed that the birth of a person in one or another caste depends on his deeds in a past life. There are 4 castes in total: the highest - Brahmins, Kshatriyas - warriors, Vaishyas - merchants, merchants, Shudras - peasants (the lowest caste).
3. Estates. The upper classes - the nobility and the clergy had the legal right to transfer property by inheritance. Unprivileged class - artisans, peasants.

Modern forms of social inequality

Social inequality in modern society an inherent property, so the social theory of functionalism considers the bundle in a positive way. American sociologist B. Barber divided modern views social stratification based on 6 criteria:

1. prestige of the profession.
2. The presence of power.
3. Wealth and income.
4. Religious affiliation.
5. Education, knowledge.
6. Belonging to one or another ethnic group, nation.

Social inequality in the world

The problem of social inequality is that racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are generated. The most revealing criterion of social inequality throughout the world is the different income of the population. Factors affecting social stratification around the world remain the same as many years ago:

• way of life- urban or rural, a well-known fact that in the villages wages are lower than in the city, and conditions are often worse, and there is more work;
• social roles(mother, father, teacher, official) - determine the status, prestige, the presence of power, property;
• division of labor- physical and intellectual work are paid differently.