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Monthly Archives: September 2011
There’s More to Poverty than the Cost of Living
This is the second post in a series of three focused on the measurement of U.S. poverty As I described in my last post, virtually nobody is very happy with the official poverty measure in the United States. Commentators on … Continue reading
Perceptions of inequalities in the world: food for thought
In a guest post Charlotte Cavaille reviews recent data on perceptions of inequality internationally, and amid some surprising findings finds both reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic… How did we do research before the internet?! Yesterday, I randomly bumped into a 2010 … Continue reading
Poverty in the Age of the Xbox
This is the first in a series of three posts that looks at the measurement and politics of poverty in the United States As I reported last week, the poverty rate in the United States in 2010 soared. Under the … Continue reading
Posted in Articles
Tagged food, material hardship, measurement, politics of inequality, poverty, standard of living
3 Comments
Making bad jobs better
At the very time when people are thankful to have any job, it seems a bit perverse to be talking about ‘good jobs’. But in a remarkably interesting one-day conference yesterday, I was convinced that this is exactly the time that we … Continue reading
A couple of quick corrections…
A reader of the blog brought to my attention two factual inaccuracies in Thursday’s post: 1. I erroneously stated that the poverty definition does not take account of some cash benefits. In fact, the official poverty definition does include Social … Continue reading
What Does it Mean to be Poor?
Dismal news. As was widely reported this week, the official poverty rate climbed again in 2010 to 15.1 percent – the highest level since 1994. The already inflated 2009 rate was 14.3 percent of individuals. The report also revealed that … Continue reading
Posted in Blog posts
Tagged economic downturn, food, material hardship, measurement, poverty, welfare payments
3 Comments
Unequal, competitive, and macho?
As international data gets more readily available, we see ever-more papers that look at the relationship of inequality with something new. Still, I was slightly taken aback to see a paper – in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), … Continue reading
Ugliness and the Judgmental Society
There’s an ugly truth: being attractive pays well, and being unnatractive is a major penalty in the job market. Those with physical appearances rated in the bottom earn on average $230,000 less over the lifetime than those with rated good … Continue reading
Get your sports team a tax lawyer
Looking at the behaviour of elite sportsmen is a favourite hobby of economists – aside from many economists being sports geeks (I’m not in a position to call names here…), there’s a wealth of publicly available data just waiting to … Continue reading
