Inequalities

Tag: political attitudes

  • 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…

  • Perceived fraud in the benefits system

    It’s impossible to understand political attitudes towards the benefits system without thinking about ‘deservingness’ – that is, whether claimants are seen to be deserving. (Regular readers will know this is one of my abiding interests). This week I want to quickly look at a key aspect of this: how much fraud people think there is. To…

  • 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…

  • Democracy in danger as young people’s disenfranchisement accelerates

    In a guest post, Craig Berrydraws attention to the increasing weakness of young people’s voters compared to older people’s votes – both because of the ageing population, and because young people in Britain are much, much less likely to vote. Young people are more affected by the outcomes of the democratic process than other cohorts:…

  • 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…

  • Does College Make You Liberal?

    “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob… There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he…

  • Conditionality and the deservingness of benefit claimants

    In this, the final of three posts responding to John Humphrys’ Future State of Welfare, I consider whether the benefits system should be conditional on taking crap jobs or making people take steps back towards the labour market.  It’s relatively easy to sit back and cherry-pick misleading claims made by journalists about the benefits system. In the past…

  • The deservingness of benefit claimants (II)

    In this second of three posts responding to John Humphrys’ Future State of Welfare, I look at his example of people who want to work – but won’t work in crap jobs. The critical questions are: do these people exist?  If so, how common are they? And (next week), what does all this mean for welfare…

  • The deservingness of benefit claimants (I)

    This is the first of three linked posts on the ‘deservingness of benefit claimants’. In this post, I explain the title, speak about the BBC programme that prompted the posts, and suggest why the British public massively overestimate the levels of benefit fraud. A few weeks ago, the BBC broadcast a documentary about the British…

  • Perceptions of inequalities in the world: food for thought

    In a guest post Charlotte Cavaille reviews recent data on perceptions of inequality internationally, and amid some surprising findings finds both reasons to be optimistic and pessimistic…  How did we do research before the internet?! Yesterday, I randomly bumped into a 2010 survey on perceptions of inequality that had not shown up on my radar the first…