Inequalities

Tag: disparities

  • Did Labour’s social policies fail or succeed 1997-2010?

    It’s impossible to begin telling a story without knowing the ending. So after 13 years in office (1997-2010), it is only now possible to write the story of New Labour’s social policy record – what they aimed to do, what they spent, and what it achieved – and this is just what a team of…

  • 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…

  • Don’t Hire Smokers?

    Dueling perspective articles in this month’s New England Journal debate whether it is ethical for employers to refuse to hire smokers. Health care employers (including the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which is owned by my employer and the employer of most of the authors) have led the way with these hiring bans. Harald Schmidt,…

  • Solving the High School Graduation Puzzle

    Going back at least as far as the landmark 1966 Coleman Report, social scientists and policymakers have debated how much educational achievement gaps reflect the influence of families and social norms on the one hand, and differences in the quality of schools in disadvantaged areas, on the other hand. As Richard Murnane describes in a…

  • Class Inequality in Austerity Britain

    In this guest post, Steven Roberts summarises his new book (co-edited with Will Atkinson and Mike Savage), ‘Class Inequality in Austerity Britain‘, and presents a vision of the political role of Sociology in the 21st century.   Not that it has gone unnoticed, but it is worth starting this blog by reminding ourselves that the coalition…

  • Life Expectancy in the U.S. is Getting Shorter for the Least Educated

    The late 20th century brought landmark public health movements to the United States, like the control of tobacco, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of heart disease and cancer. Life expectancy surged overall, but today the lower educated are still stuck in a different era. From a new paper in Health Affairs (behind a paywall):…

  • Unemployment Disparities in Three Pictures

    Any way you look at it, the unemployment numbers released this week are good news for American workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the economy added 243,000 new jobs (at least after applying seasonal adjustments), and the official unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent. The official unemployment rate is an important indicator, but…

  • Doctors as Agents of Public Health Promotion

    In Britain, the NHS Future Forum issued a report calling on the medical establishment to carry the banner of public health: “every contact must count as an opportunity to maintain and, where possible, improve their mental and physical health and wellbeing.” To realize this goal conversations about preventive health may need to extend into new…

  • Health Behaviors Do Not Explain the Growing Education-Mortality Gradient

    The gap in premature mortality between high and low educated people in the United States has grown considerably over the last few decades, even as life expectancy has increased overall. A common explanation is the changing distribution of risk factors: if the less educated are relatively slow to experience declines in mortality, it must be…