Transcript Lesson 8-4: Global Stratification

Do 8-4 interactive 1
Per Capita
Sample Household:
Primary earner: $42,500
Secondary earner: $28,000
Dependent 1: no earnings
Dependent 2: no earnings
Global Stratification
High-Income Countries
•
Global stratification is the unequal distribution of
wealth, power, and resources among the countries
of the world.
•
Experts classify nations first and foremost according
to income, using categories such as “high-income,”
“upper-middle income,” “lower-middle income,” and
“lower income.”
•
High-income nations are modern, urban, and
industrialized, with modernized cities and welldeveloped science and technology.
•
With industrialization, society changes as a working
class of laborers develops along with a middle class
of business owners, creating a need for greater
literacy and formal education in areas such as
science.
Global Stratification
Middle-Income Countries
•
Slightly more than half of the countries in the world
(51 percent) are middle income, a level divided into
upper-middle income countries and lower-middle
income countries.
•
The income and living standards of middle-income
countries varies greatly, particularly since, as more
nations are elevated from low-income to middleincome status, middle-income countries are seeing
a larger share of the world’s poor.
•
It is exceedingly difficult to talk about the average
standard of living in middle-income countries since
large wealth gaps in these countries mean that
millions of the poor have become part of the
middle-income group of nations.
Global Stratification
Low-Income Countries
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When measuring poverty, experts turn to other
indicators, or gauges, the most useful of which are
human-development indicators.
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These indicators relate to the quality of life, such as
infant mortality rate, percentage of children
underweight, life expectancy, access to
contraception, literacy, gender equality, public
dollars spent on health per person, and access to
clean drinking water.
•
Structural functionalists maintain that some
countries are poverty-stricken because they failed
to modernize, sometimes because values of
traditional societies prevent the nations from
developing economically.
•
Other sociologists suggest that many poor nations
are poor because they are economically dominated
Chronic Poverty Map
Click here to view map
Do 8-4 Interactive 2