Risk and Contemporary Inequality

From climate change to systemic financial risk and crises, socially produced risks are currently having a fundamental impact on contemporary life chances, with the future impacts of climate change expected to only further amplify these effects.  Moreover, contrary to earlier understandings of the impacts of these risks as egalitarian and threats to “our common future”, these risks are being distributed in highly unequal ways. Nevertheless, despite both the significance and the inequality of their consequences, existing frameworks of inequality, ranging from class analysis to the new economics of economic inequality revitalized by Atkinson and Piketty et al., have not yet integrated the impacts of socially produced inequalities. This paper highlights the importance of some of the key ways in which these approaches are risk-blind and then proceeds to suggest some possible ways of moving forward to redress this lacunae.  In particular, by redeveloping Beck’s theory of risk society to develop a political economy of risk it is argued that contemporary socially produced risk is becoming a key source of contemporary inequality and that integrating the impact of the distribution of risks into existing studies of inequality can contribute to the development of a more adequate analysis of the evolving nature of power and inequality in contemporary society.