Inequalities

Month: January 2011

  • U.K.higher education: Is the social mobility argument really settled?

    Last week Ben chipped in on U.K. higher education reform. I don’t know why he avoided it until now, but I might guess it was for much the same reason that I did. The same reason I was leery of joining in the demonstrations around the tuition fee rise. The protesters had many objections, but […]

  • Art and Inequality (Or, “How to Spend an Extra $69 million”)

    In 1920 the painter Amedeo Modigliani died at the age of 36, penniless, wracked by meningitis, and suffering from alcoholism. In 2009 his masterpiece, “Nude Sitting on a Divan,” was sold to a Turkish billionaire for $69 million at a Sotheby’s auction. The Modigliani joins a number of paintings sold in the last five years […]

  • How Did Americans Become Super-Sized? How Do We Get Skinny Again?

    There are countless proposals to reduce obesity in the United States, but causal links are difficult to establish. Fairly and effectively targeting low-income populations is an unresolved challenge. Turn on the television in the United States and you will quickly learn that many people are fat, and most would like to be skinnier. Contestants on […]

  • Inequality of time: can we measure it?

    Money can’t buy you a twenty-five hour day.  Indeed, there can be nothing more equal between people than time itself (ignoring differing life expectancy, of course). But the amount of time we each control does vary: for the single mother trying to hold down a full-time job while caring for her two kids and her […]

  • The right protest for the wrong reasons

    Having previously kept quiet about the sharp rise in student fees in England, I finally cracked and wrote this post over at the Sociological Imagination.  In short: I think the student march was the right protest for the wrong reasons

  • Bringing Home the Bacon, and Cooking it Too

    In the groundbreaking 1989 book “the Second Shift,” Arlie Hochschild makes the argument that the women’s movement helped to break down gender discrimination in the workplace, but did very little to address inequality in household domestic labor. The working women portrayed in her book are chronically burning the candle on both ends — working a […]

  • The strengths of conservative welfare regimes in reducing inequality

    In a guest post, Diederik Boertien argues that conservative welfare regimes might reduce inequality by being less complex and less risky – making it simpler to make good choices about the future. People differ in their abilities to exploit the opportunities that society offers them. Some people manage to get the best doctors, get their […]

  • Unfortunate, Unfair, Unjust

    I am looking forward to an exciting year at Inequalities, and if Ben’s and Brendan’s 2011 posts are any indication (and surely they are!), you should be too. I have been busy prepping for the Spring semester, but I wanted to comment on an interesting post by blogger and UNC Chapel-Hill economics professor Karl Smith.

  • Inequalities round-up: Jan 2011

    In-between a series of longer and more provocative articles, we can just about squeeze in the (roughly monthly) round-up of the latest inequalities research.  This edition: how people inherit jobs as well as money; the legacy of Black-White wealth disparities; rising income volatility around the world; the unfairness of the UK public spending cuts; and […]

  • Michael Vick and the Politics of the Second Chance

    If you don’t watch football – the kind with helmets, pads, and the oblong ball – you may ask “who is Michael Vick, and why should I care about him?” Besides being a contender for the Most Valuable Player and the quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles, a playoff team (the Eagles lost 16-21 to the […]