Inequalities

Tag: welfare

  • Benefits: Fact and Fiction

    Benefits: Fact and Fiction

    As part of the International Year of Statistics (by the way, it’s also the International Year of Water Cooperation, and the International Year of Quinoa, so good quinoa recipes in the comments please), Ipsos Mori recently conducted a survey looking at people’s factual beliefs about the UK. I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to hear […]

  • ‘Infrahumanizing’ benefit claimants

    ‘Infrahumanizing’ benefit claimants

    I’ve written before about how I think a lot of people’s antipathy towards the benefits system comes from their ideas about the sort of people benefits claimants are. That they are a special, different sort of person that is unworthy of help. There’s a horrible sort of circularity to it – being the kind of person […]

  • Lying with statistics

    In the midst of the argument we in the UK are currently having about welfare, it’s worth highlighting one factor that’s standing in the way of honest debate. This is politicians’ routine, wilful abuse of numbers. It’s an old complaint. So old it’s basically a cliché. And this is a big part of the problem. […]

  • Immigration reform without public benefits

    Any viable immigration reform proposal in the United States senate has to pass through Florida Republican Marcio Rubio. That’s why it was big news when Rubio announced his support for a bipartisan plan on the Sunday news shows, stressing that the new program would establish a pathway to citizenship but offers very little to immigrants […]

  • 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. […]

  • When are we going to stop banging on about benefits?

    When are we going to stop banging on about benefits?

    Does the amount we spend on benefits for the unemployed justify the attention they get? We write a lot about welfare benefits on this blog. They’re an important part of social policy that rarely spends long out of the newspaper headlines.