Inequalities

Month: March 2011

  • The UK Budget: the end of National Insurance?

    Budget day is always a classic piece of British political theatre. The magic of the ‘red box’ held by the Chancellor, the routines and rituals at the Palace of Westminster, the near-impossibility of actually taking in this myriad of policy details at the time, followed by the scramble to figure out what they really mean over…

  • Give some bread back to the bakers

    One of the disturbing features of American income inequality is the rising disconnection between the wages of ordinary workers and the compensation of a small cadre of executives. Despite huge gains in productivity over the last three decades, median wages are actually lower than they were in the 1970s. Part of the answer seems to…

  • Changes to the Inequalities Blog

    Just a short post to say that the blog will now be updated on Tuesdays and Thursdays (rather than Mon/Wed/Fri) – as ever, you can keep track of us through Facebook and Twitter. We’ll also be gradually getting more active on Twitter over the coming months, so start following us if you want to keep…

  • Inequalities Interview: Ruth Lupton, LSE

    This is the first of an occasional series of posts where we ask inequalities researchers about what they want to achieve from academic research.  In this post, I speak to Ruth Lupton, a Senior Research Fellow in CASE at LSE.  Her work has focused on spatial inequalities, neighborhood renewal, and on schools and social justice.…

  • Over the Wire

    Dr David Parenti: We get the grant, we study the problem, we propose solutions. If they listen, they listen. If they don’t, it still makes for great research. What we publish on this is gonna get a lot of attention. Howard “Bunny” Colvin: From who? Dr David Parenti: From other researchers, academics. Colvin: Academics?! What,…

  • The big picture of inequality in Britain

    This is a cross-post of an article published on the LSE British Politics and Policy blog on the same day. Regular readers may notice that this builds on a number of previous posts on the site – and given that I’m presenting at the BSA postgrad Inequality conference on this in May, will doubtlessly link…

  • From Katrina to Japan: Social Inequality and Disasters

    A Welfare State in Need, is a Welfare State Indeed “There is no such thing as a natural disaster,” is the thought-provoking title of a book about Hurricane Katrina, but the point could apply to many recent tragedies, including the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan last week. Much of the recent news media…

  • Social cohesion, diversity, and poverty

    Whatever your views, there’s always a temptation to ruffle a few feathers among your peers. Among left-wingers in the UK, David Goodhart did just that in 2004: he argued that two cherished left-wing ideals were in conflict. In simple terms, ‘the Goodhardt hypothesis’ is that diversity undercuts support for the welfare state – partly because…

  • Not Your Father’s Racism

    In the United States there are two dominant narratives of race relations. One narrative focuses on racial progress, embodied by the election of Barack Obama, and sees us moving toward more racial harmony or even the vaunted “post-racial” moment. The other more pessimistic narrative focuses on the stagnation of racial progress over the last two…

  • The UK’s recession safety net: not as stingy as you thought

    UK unemployment benefits are known for being pretty stingy.  I’ve previously mentioned how they have fallen behind living standards since the early 1980s, and put us towards the bottom end of the OECD table of generosity. But there’s a problem in just looking at ‘unemployment benefits’ – we now increasingly rely on a complex array…