Knowledge inequality
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Never before has such a wealth of information been so immediately accessible to so many and yet the filtering demands so high. Information truly is power; who possesses it and wields it most effectively has profound consequences for inequality and human welfare. Are some groups systematically advantaged across all areas of factual knowledge? Or is there a knowledge division of labor, in which some groups specialize in certain areas? Rather surprisingly, we have no systematic accounting of who knows what. My dissertation provides a comprehensive description of knowledge in the United States. To accomplish this, I compiled data on 513 factual knowledge questions from 48 nationally representative surveys fielded between the years 2005 and 2015. The first paper, presented in Chapter 2, explores overall trends in the general knowledge of United States adults in 16 different domains. People know the most about current events and the least about economics. Chapter 3 explores demographic patterns in differential knowledge attainment, providing concrete evidence on the size of knowledge disparities by gender. Social expectations and socialization shape the knowledge acquired by men and women, with dramatic consequences for inequality. Finally, my third paper presents my method BINCONT (the Binned INcome CONtinuous Treatment), which allows researchers to impute estimates of missing binned income data that approximate a continuous distribution. My dissertation analyzes the social ecosystem of knowledge. I investigate many domains of factual knowledge from religion to language to science to war. I evaluate men's and women's command over factual knowledge in a wide variety of domains. I describe the present state of factual knowledge, and I present gendered patterns of inequalities. Overall, the project contributes to the field of knowledge inequality.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | King, Molly M |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Correll, Shelley Joyce |
| Degree supervisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Correll, Shelley Joyce |
| Thesis advisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Burgard, Sarah Andrea |
| Thesis advisor | Freese, Jeremy |
| Thesis advisor | Jackson, Michelle Victoria |
| Degree committee member | Burgard, Sarah Andrea |
| Degree committee member | Freese, Jeremy |
| Degree committee member | Jackson, Michelle Victoria |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Molly M. King. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Molly McCarthy King
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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