Monthly Archives: September 2010

Do Americans Want to Live in Sweden?

Posted on September 30, 2010 by

A couple of alert readers have sent me interesting “inequality in the news.” Ankur sent me this story from the NY Times Economix blog reporting results from the 2009 American Community Survey — not surprisingly, inequality reached a historic high … Continue reading →

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Find us on Facebook

Posted on September 29, 2010 by

You can become a fan of the Inequalities Blog on Facebook. Also don’t forget that you can subcribe to the blog or receive posts by email (see the options on the righthand panel).

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Wilkinson & Pickett: Are they right?

Posted on September 29, 2010 by

Rob de Vries (Imperial College London) finds reasons to be uncertain about The Spirit Level’s claims on inequality. In his earlier post discussing The Spirit Level, Ben said that we’d return to the subject of whether the books’ claims were … Continue reading →

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What the new UK opposition leader thinks about inequality

Posted on September 28, 2010 by

For those of you who don’t track the highs and lows of the UK Labour Party in as much detail as I do: they have a new leader called Ed Miliband, and he was talking about inequality in his first … Continue reading →

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Why progressives in Europe should learn to love high tuition fees

Posted on September 27, 2010 by

Timo Idema argues that graduates should pay for their own education – on fairness grounds. A recent report by the OECD finds that — on average, across OECD countries — a higher educated male’s gross earnings are 300,000 US dollars* … Continue reading →

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Colbert’s Immigration Plan: Don’t Eat Vegetables

Posted on September 26, 2010 by

“America’s farms are presently far too dependent on immigrant labor to pick our fruits and vegetables. Now, the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables, and if you look at the recent obesity statistics, you’ll … Continue reading →

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Are well-educated people kidding themselves that they’re left-wing?

Posted on September 25, 2010 by

My interest was stirred by a recent article on the BBC website that claimed that older, well-educated people pretend that they’re more left-wing than they actually are.  The right-wing quality newspaper The Daily Telegraph seemed to have fun with their headline, “Champagne … Continue reading →

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Why Can’t the United States be a European Health Care State?

Posted on September 24, 2010 by

If the United States health care system could be made to work like (gulp) the French health care system, it could cover everyone and put a little bit of money back into their pockets too. The principal American vice is not cruelty, but waste. Continue reading →

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Urban Institute’s Feature on Poverty

Posted on September 23, 2010 by

On Wednesday I put up a short post on the 2009 Census poverty estimates. I noticed that the Urban Institute has put up a feature on their own recent research related to measuring poverty, the consequences of poverty, and policies. … Continue reading →

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‘Statistical catfights’ on the effects of inequality

Posted on September 22, 2010 by

However hard we try to communicate our work, inequality research is often tucked away on the unread pages of newspapers – if it even gets that far. So it’s slightly shocking that a book presenting evidence that ‘more equal societies … Continue reading →

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