Inequalities

Tag: measurement

  • Does the new poverty measure fully capture disability poverty?

    In recent years, we have seen fierce political battles over what poverty is, and the best way of measuring it. The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) is therefore a brave venture – to get a politically diverse group of people to agree how poverty should be measured in the UK, led by one of Iain Duncan Smith’s former […]

  • Just how common is benefits stigma in Britain?

    To (loosely) coincide with my paper on benefits stigma coming out in the Journal of Social Policy, I’ve written a short summary on the LSE Politics and Policy blog. (Long-running readers of the blog will see that this is a developed version of the earlier report that I did with Kate Bell and Declan Gaffney in 2012 – […]

  • Trends in out-of-work benefit claimants in Britain

    As long-term readers will know, I’m intrigued by people’s beliefs about the benefit system, and their truthfulness or falsity of these beliefs. Later in the summer, I’ll talk about a new aspect of this: people’s perceptions of how many out-of-work benefit claimants exist, and whether they think this has risen or fallen. In preparing for this, though, we […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Social Factors and the Evaluation of Mental Disorders

    The American Psychiatric Association is set to release the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) this month. These new guidelines will have a profound effect on how clinicians diagnose mental disorders, how health insurers reimburse for treatment, how drug makers market their products, and how the government determines benefits […]

  • 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 […]

  • Ease off the alarm bells: New data on ADHD diagnosis rates

    The New York Times has a cover story today reporting on the estimated prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (they don’t identify the survey by name). The story is going to get a lot of people interested in what is happening to children — every new datapoint on ADHD […]

  • 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 […]