Monthly Archives: September 2011

There’s More to Poverty than the Cost of Living

Posted on September 30, 2011 by

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 →

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Perceptions of inequalities in the world: food for thought

Posted on September 27, 2011 by

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 →

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Poverty in the Age of the Xbox

Posted on September 22, 2011 by

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 →

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Making bad jobs better

Posted on September 21, 2011 by

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 →

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A couple of quick corrections…

Posted on September 17, 2011 by

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 →

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What Does it Mean to be Poor?

Posted on September 15, 2011 by

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 →

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Unequal, competitive, and macho?

Posted on September 13, 2011 by

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 →

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Ugliness and the Judgmental Society

Posted on September 8, 2011 by

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 →

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Get your sports team a tax lawyer

Posted on September 6, 2011 by

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 →

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