Oriented toward the introductory student, The Inequality Reader is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more alive, more accessible, and more relevant. Now more than ever, The Inequality Reader is the one-stop compendium of all the must-read pieces, simply the best available introduction to the stratifi cation canon.

Oriented toward the introductory student, " The Inequality Reader" is the essential textbook for today's undergraduate courses. The editors, David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelenyi, have assembled the most important classic and contemporary readings about how poverty and inequality are generated and how they might be reduced. With thirty new readings, the second edition provides new materials on anti-poverty policies as well as new qualitative readings that make the scholarship more alive, more accessible, and more relevant. Now more than ever, The Inequality Reader is the one-stop compendium of all the must-read pieces, simply the best available introduction to the stratifi cation canon.

Social mobility is a classic topic in sociology, and Hungary presents an interesting case study for a number of reasons. The communist regime that took power after World War II had the proclaimed goal of eliminating the abusive inequalities of the old regime and creating an egalitarian society; it accordingly introduced numerous measures intended to favor the advancement of people with working-class backgrounds.
That to some extent these policies worked cannot be disputed, but over time did they simply replace one privileged class with another? What happened during the communist reform era of the late 1970's and 1980's, when Hungary went much further along the path of decentralizing the economy than any other Eastern bloc country? What happened in the postcommunist era? And what difference did such age-old liabilities as being Jewish or female make?
There is as much scholarly debate over how to address these questions in an intellectually rigorous way as there is over the answers to them. This study aims to contribute to the debate by analyzing random samples of both elites and the general population and by carrying out comparisons across presocialist, socialist, and postsocialist society. Its main methodological goal is to explore the implications of carefully distinguishing between the effects of socialist reform on the distribution of inequality from its effects on the underlying rules by which inequality is allocated.