Inequalities

Tag: income dispersion

  • Income Mobility and Geography: Important New Research

    Some new research by Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez, Nathaniel Hendren, and Patrick Kline finds that the likelihood of poor children moving up the income ladder in early adulthood varies dramatically by metro area in the United States. In places like Salt Lake City, Utah or Bakersfield, California, a child born in the bottom quintile has…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Has Income Inequality Really Ballooned Since the 1970s?

    One of the most influential lines of research on income inequality come from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s study of income tax records in the United States and elsewhere. Summarizing this work in Slate, Timothy Noah states: “The share of national income going to the top 1 percent (the Rich) more than doubled during the…

  • 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…

  • The Coalition, benefit cuts, and income inequality

    This is a piece that first appeared in One Society‘s ‘half-term report’ on the Coalition Government and inequality (references and footnotes available in the full report). The whole (short!) edited volume is also worth a read, containing articles by Kate Pickett, Chris Goulden, and Stewart Lansley among others. On one level, the question of whether…

  • Where do we go from here?

    In this final report on the Attitudes to Wealth and Economic Inequality in the UK event run by Cumberland Lodge, Charlotte Cavaille asks ‘where do we go from here on attitudes to redistribution?’  From the two previous posts, the following picture emerges: the UK has become a high inequality country (relative to where it was in the immediate post-war period) with…

  • Harshness or stability in attitudes to redistribution?

    In the previous post from Charlotte Cavaille based on the Attitudes to Wealth and Economic Inequality in the UK event run by Cumberland Lodge, she examined how the “middle” had faired during a time of continuous increase in the income gap between the bottom and the top. In this post, she shows how common understandings that ‘attitudes to redistribution have…

  • People’s experience of growing inequality: a closer look at the “middle”

     The next three posts from Charlotte Cavaille are based on the talks heard at a conference held by Cumberland Lodge on Attitudes to Wealth and Economic Inequality in the UK. Thanks to the Cumberland Lodge’s generous invitation, Charlotte spent a day and a half in the idyllic surroundings of the Great Park, Windsor, sharing with a…