Essential Workers and the Pandemic

In 1944 Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore set off a controversy in the study of social inequality by arguing that there are differences across occupations in terms of prestige and salary on the basis of scarcity. That is, positions that can be easily filled do not need to be well rewarded. It is those positions that require considerable training, they argued, that must have greater rewards if people are to be motivated to assume the burden and costs of acquiring the skills associated with them. The implication was that those on the higher end of the occupational ladder were functionally more important for society.

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