Inequalities

Month: October 2011

  • Is Income Inequality Exaggerated?

    The premise of Occupy Wall Street is simple: American society is becoming more unequal as a privileged minority takes control of an increasingly larger share of wealth and power. As I mentioned in my post last week, not all scholars agree with this assessment. Robert J. Gordon at Northwestern University in a 2009 NBER paper […]

  • Inheritance and inequality in the UK: counterintuitive findings

    Last Friday my old centre at LSE, CASE, launched a new multi-funder programme looking at the effects of the cuts in the UK 2007-2014 – snappily titled ‘Social Policy in a Cold Climate‘. I think of this as one of the core tasks of academics; as Ruth Lupton put it in an interview with Inequalities […]

  • The Top 1% in the News

    Occupy Wall Street has moderately heightened interest in the rising gap between the top one percent of income earners and the bottom ninety-nine percent. (It’s important to not get carried away on this point… compare this and this chart from google trends, the top panel shows google searches and the bottom shows news coverage). With […]

  • Welfare conditionality and disabled people: a democratic deficit

    In a guest post, Jenny Morris explains piece-by-piece why the dominant all-party UK story on incapacity is wrong.  The piece was originally posted on her blog, jennymorrisnet.blogspot.com. This is the start of a renewed focus on disability issues on the Inequalities blog over the next 12 months. “The over-arching objective of conditionality is to influence […]

  • How the Other Half Eats

    Folks, today you can find my blog post “How the Other Half Eats” on one of my favorite food blogs theeatenpath.com. I make the argument that Occupy Wall Street is opening the door to a national conversation about inequalities in our food production system. Give it a read and give me your thoughts!

  • Why erotic capital still matters

    [This is the second half of a piece Saving Erotic Capital From Itself that I began last week] “Good looks don’t matter” “Nonsense, that’s just something ugly people tell their children” So says The Simpsons, as ever capturing the way of the world (h/tWill Self). Given the problems I identified in the first part of the […]

  • Getting on the Bus with Material Hardship

    This is the third post in a series of three on the measurement of poverty in the U.S. Hunger takes this bus, too. 1 in 6 Americans struggle with hunger. This attention-grabbing sign began appearing on buses around Boston and other major American cities last year. The sign, and accompanying television and print advertisements, is […]

  • Saving ‘erotic capital’ from itself

    It’s not hard to guess why it got so many column inches.  The sociological concept of ‘erotic capital’?  A book by an academic that calls itself ‘Honey Money’, a title adapted from a saying of Jakarta prostitutes?  An evidence-based claim that prostitution and surrogacy should be completely legalised?  And an argument that it is ‘patriarchy’ […]