Inequalities

Month: September 2012

  • Paul Gregg: new ideas for disability, employment and welfare reform

    While cuts to benefits and services will affect most people in the UK, disabled people have arguably been ‘the hardest hit’ – but while this makes the newspapers on a regular basis, academics have been slower to try and piece together what has been happening. So with the fantastic Ruth Patrick, we organised a one-day event in Leeds last…

  • Are the criteria for social equality different for children?

    “Equality of What?” has been a central question in political philosophy following Rawls. According to Gerald Cohen, the question asks “what metric [should egalitarians] use to establish the extent to which their ideal is realized in a given society.” Many answers were given to this questions by Rawls, Dworkin, Sen, and others. I want to…

  • Romney’s Tirade against the Bottom Half Does Not Represent American Values

    I was going to blog about some new education research, but that can wait. I feel compelled, instead, to write about Mitt Romney’s closed-door comments about government dependency, which were leaked by Mother Jones yesterday. Here’s what Romney told a group of donors: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the…

  • The Gravity of Health Disparities

    This is my first post on Inequalities, and I thank Brendan and Ben for inviting me in, and Paul for months of great blogging, to be continued here. To introduce myself, I will try to convey something about the gravity — or perhaps ‘mass’ — of social inequalities relating to health. I won’t try to convince…

  • Is Solidarity a “Moral Epiphenomenon”?

    There is a theory in the Philosophy of Mind called epiphenomenalism. Roughly, the view is that mental states—beliefs, desires, sensations, etc.—are real, but that they do no real causal work. The idea is that while mental states are not mere fictions of our unscientific way of looking at the world, they are also not capable of…

  • Do people overestimate the levels of benefits?

    For a couple of years now, I’ve had a poster on the wall of my office that shows the amount that different benefits in the UK are worth. When people notice it they’re often surprised by the headline levels of different benefits (e.g. the £71 per week for Jobseeker’s Allowance), wondering how on earth people…

  • Why is the Romney Campaign Lying about Welfare?

    Mudslinging and downright distortion are now an integral part of the presidential race, but one recent advertisement from the Romney campaign stands out. The ad slams Obama for allegedly changing the work requirements that were set under the 1996 welfare reform law. The tagline of the ad is, “under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to…