Inequalities

Tag: employment

  • Could ‘pre-distribution’ boost the wage share?

    In a guest post, Stewart Lansley captures the key findings from his latest TUC pamphlet (with Howard Reed) on how to reverse the increasing share of national income going to profits rather than pay packets. There has been much discussion in the UK of the merits of tackling inequality by prioritizing ‘pre-distribution` – of attempting…

  • Justifying ‘Never-Working Families’?

    In a recent post, Lindsey Macmillan showed that “The ‘never working’ family may be an easier sound bite but it is not representative of the true situation”. Here she responds to yet another attempt to make these claims – except this time, the Government have been forced to justify their claims in a Freedom of Information…

  • Is there life after work? The welfare state in a future without jobs

    Peter Frase argues that liberals are wrong to focus on universal employment: “Forget job creation, we need to do more job killing. Cutting the military budget, reining in the financial sector, and dismantling the prison-industrial complex will destroy many jobs. So, too, would a single payer national health care system: the Republican attacks on Obama’s…

  • 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…

  • What can doormen teach us about inequality?

    Mixing across social class boundaries is rare in the United States and becoming rarer. In places like New York City, the professional elites often live in well-manicured and exclusive buildings in coveted areas like the Upper East Side, and entry into this world is carefully controlled. Doormen can be found in front of virtually every…

  • The misreported death of solidarity in Britain

    It’s rare for journalists to be waiting for social research with baited breath, pens poised and column inches left blank in anticipation. But the annual release of the ‘British Social Attitudes’ series does just that, a testament to just how interested we are in what we think about one another (and to cheap journalism…). The…

  • Social mobility and ethnicity in the UK

    In a guest post, Neil Smith reviews the evidence – including his own – on the links between ethnicity and life chances in the UK, and why this matters for the drive to improve social mobility. In March 2012, we heard that over a half of the UK’s Black youths aged between 16 and 24…

  • The work ethic in generous welfare states

    A few weeks ago I asked ‘has the work ethic declined because of generous welfare states?’, looking at trends in the work ethic over time. In this (slightly delayed!) conclusion to the piece, I go on to compare the work ethic in generous welfare states – and find that simple claims in either direction are…

  • Has the work ethic declined because of the welfare state?

    ‘The welfare state makes people lazy.’ Thus runs one of the oldest and most consistent critiques of the welfare state, echoing through the principle of ‘less eligibility’ in the Victorian Poor Law in Britain, right up until the present day. Three recent papers try to provide evidence on this, with one claiming to show the…

  • Reconsidering the Link Between SES and Health in Whitehall

    The Whitehall studies followed two cohorts of British civil servants over several decades and found a strong and steep gradient between higher occupational category and a range of mental and physical health outcomes. Much of the literature on Whitehall focuses on how social status in adulthood predicts occupational prestige and autonomy, which are plausible mechanisms…