Social Reversibility as a Dimension of Inequality — Fallback, Institutional Memory, and a Measurement Agenda (Anthropie Working Paper No. 8)
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Anthropy is the hypothesis that social systems displace disorder rather than resolve it. Framework-and-agenda working paper (Anthropie Working Papers series, AWP-08; English edition of the French original, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21506320). Inequality is usually measured through levels and positions observed at a date (wealth, current income, credentials) and through trajectories (mobility); it is almost never measured through social reversibility — the capacity, assessed before a given attempt, to withstand its failure without a lasting closure of options. The paper defines reversibility as a conditional profile of recoverable options, articulates two functions (fallback capacity, readmission regime), separates the institutional tariff of failure, individual capacity, and access conditions, and states four pre-specified families of predictions — including a distinctive non-separability hypothesis between fallback and the institutional memory of failure, whose sign and shape depend on the circumventability of the readmission gate. Four French quasi-experimental settings are specified (the 2022 Lemoine Act, the 2013 removal of the 040 indicator, the Visale guarantee, non-take-up), with a data-access strategy and claim-by-claim refutation criteria.
Author: Lalut, Stéphane
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7170143098