Inequalities

Tag: theorising inequality

  • 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…

  • Educational Inequalities in Parents’ Time with Children

    In a guest post, Pablo Gracia looks at inequalities in how parents spend time with their children, using his own research on the UK and Spain – and then considers the likely causes, consequences, and what this might all mean for policy. When people think of inequality, words like money or income often come to their…

  • So should we bother with ‘microclasses’?

    Earlier in the year I published two blog posts on ‘microclasses’ – the idea that your specific occupation is an important structuring factor for the social world, beyond its position in a broader class. In this post I look back at the critics of microclasses – both by some of the most senior class sociologists around,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Classes or ‘microclasses’? The nature of occupational inequality

    From Bush to Bush. Miliband to Miliband. Kennedy to Kennedy. Churchill to Churchill. There’s no shortage of political dynasties either in the US or UK, where politically powerful parents beget politically powerful children. Likewise, we often observe how doctors’ children become doctors, or indeed, academics’ children become academics. (This is the moment for self-confession: my father…

  • How much is health care worth to the poor?

    In my very first Inequalities blog post I considered the argument that the United States has a more generous safety net for the poor than conventional comparisons with European states would suggest because we spend so much on public health care programs for the poor, elderly, and disabled. Subsequently, I reviewed work by Richard Burkhauser…

  • A More Perfect Union: What do New Yorkers owe Texans?

    In the United States, the federal government and the fifty states split the check for many social assistance programs. Within this partnership, considerable discretion is given to each state in defining eligibility for cash welfare, public health insurance, workforce development, and other programs. This leads to huge variation in benefits across states. On a per…

  • 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…

  • Inequality of the will

    (Apologies for the lack of recent posts while I was ill – we’re back to our normal schedule now!) Among the oldest of old political battles, liberals and conservatives have constantly sparred over the causes of poverty – whether it is due to failings in the individual, or whether the causes lie outside of people’s…