Inequalities

Tag: cross-national research

  • The perception of inequality of opportunity – and the reality

    In a guest post, Paolo Brunori – an Assistant Professor at the University of Bari, and blogger at Lavoce – summarises his new paper on the perception of inequality of opportunity in Europe, recently published in the Review of Income and Wealth. When thousands of Egyptians gathered to protest in Tahrir Square in January 2011, many […]

  • U.S. Health Disadvantage is Not Inevitable

    Two major research studies in the last year compare health indicators in the United States with other major upper-income countries. Both exhaustively review government statistics and published articles. The first study, from the Institute of Medicine, draws on a panel of luminary demographers and epidemiologists to explore the causes of U.S. health disadvantage (editors Laudan […]

  • Educational Inequalities in Parents’ Time with Children

    In a guest post, Pablo Gracia looks at inequalities in how parents spend time with their children, using his own research on the UK and Spain – and then considers the likely causes, consequences, and what this might all mean for policy. When people think of inequality, words like money or income often come to their […]

  • Is ‘the paradox of redistribution’ dead?

    It has all the makings of a great academic fist-fight.* In a classic 1998 article, Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme wrote a hugely influential article called ‘the paradox of redistribution,’ which argued that a targeted benefit system ended up achieving redistribution than a more universal one (see here).  Now in 2013, three Belgian academics have […]

  • Social Progress – A League Table

    Strange though it is to say, but alternatives to GDP are becoming fashionable. This week saw the launch of a new measure of ‘social progress’ on which to rank countries – and perhaps surprisingly, Britain did really rather well, not just beating the USA but also Germany and Japan. As the Telegraph’s headline put it, ‘Britain […]

  • British and U.S. Inequality Over the Lifecourse: An Important New Report

    Ben and I both attended the Social Change Harvard-Manchester Initiative (SCHMi) summer institute in 2010, a joint program between the University of Manchester and Harvard. A core group of SCHMi researchers just released a report, authored by Rourke O’Brien (also of the SCHMi summer class of 2010), entitled Inequality, Instability, and Mobility in Family Life. […]

  • Converging Income Inequality in Brazil and the United States: Some Uncomfortable Realities

    Professor Fernando Luiz Lara from the University of Texas at Austin discusses the political and social dimensions of changing income inequality in Brazil and the United States. The US will become as unequal as Brazil.  And that bothers both societies. As we watch president Obama’s second inauguration is hard not to to notice that, once again, Latin […]

  • Microclass mobility (and its critics)

    A few weeks ago I blogged about the idea of looking at class inequality in terms of ‘microclasses’ – that is, instead of looking at ‘big class’ inequality (e.g.  professionals vs. manual workers), we look at ‘microclass’ inequality (e.g. welders vs. politicians). In this post I continue my tour of the microclass debates by looking at […]

  • The positive and negative consequences of the welfare state

    In a previous post, I argued that people had exaggerated the extent to which public support for the benefits system had fallen in Britain. Here, I want to look at another aspect of this that also came out recently – how far we think the benefits system causes negative consequences for the economy and society. […]

  • When the insecure are not the disadvantaged

    Amidst all the other excitements of the summertime, you might have missed a couple of significant papers by top scholars in top American journals. So just to mentally prepare you for the autumn – don’t worry, it’s not here yet! – I thought that over two posts, I’d cover two papers that seemed likely to […]