Author Archives: Guest Blogger

Tax breaks for useful jobs

A new paper says that the income tax rate in socially useful jobs should be lower than in socially useless ones – here, regular guest-poster Charlotte Cavaille gives this argument a once-over, as part of a pair of posts on tax. With … Continue reading

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The Oregon Health Study and the Medicalization of Health Policy

Daniel Goldberg considers the polarizing debate about the recently published results from the Oregon Health Study on public insurance — and argues that we may be missing the point. According to the website, the Oregon Health Study “is the first … Continue reading

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Justifying ‘Never-Working Families’?

In a recent post, Lindsey Macmillan showed that “The ‘never working’ family may be an easier sound bite but it is not representative of the true situation”. Here she responds to yet another attempt to make these claims – except this … Continue reading

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Converging Income Inequality in Brazil and the United States: Some Uncomfortable Realities

Professor Fernando Luiz Lara from the University of Texas at Austin discusses the political and social dimensions of changing income inequality in Brazil and the United States. The US will become as unequal as Brazil.  And that bothers both societies. As we … Continue reading

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The red rag of health incentives

In this guest post, Harald Schmidt from the University of Pennsylvania takes apart the media furore about a proposal  (at least as reported) to cut payments to unhealthy benefit claimants if they didn’t go to the gym – using the insights gained … Continue reading

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‘The State of Welfare’ on the BBC: a missed opportunity

In a guest post from Declan Gaffney – re-posted from his personal blog L’Art Social – he picks apart a repeated false claim about what we know about benefit fraud, in the midst of an otherwise welcome BBC report.  This is perhaps our last … Continue reading

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Class Inequality in Austerity Britain

In this guest post, Steven Roberts summarises his new book (co-edited with Will Atkinson and Mike Savage), ‘Class Inequality in Austerity Britain‘, and presents a vision of the political role of Sociology in the 21st century.   Not that it has … Continue reading

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Rising inequalities in bereavement and funeral benefits

Bereavement is one of the most common risks that we all have to face – each year about 220,000 people in Britain lose a partner (see p3 of this report), it is claimed 24,000 children lose a parent, and there are … Continue reading

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Why more equal societies have more stable economies

In this guest post, the writer/researcher and author of ‘The Cost of Inequality’ Stewart Lansley looks at the link between equality and economic stability – building on Rob de Vries’ earlier two posts on the blog. According to current economic orthodoxy, … Continue reading

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Where do we go from here?

In this final report on the Attitudes to Wealth and Economic Inequality in the UK event run by Cumberland Lodge, Charlotte Cavaille asks ‘where do we go from here on attitudes to redistribution?’  From the two previous posts, the following picture emerges: the UK has become … Continue reading

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