This and that for your Thursday reading. – Kevin McKean discusses how inequality undermines the goal of ensuring a healthy population. Matt Bruenig examines new data showing that the concentration of wealth in the U.S. is getting more extreme by the year. Steven Pearlstein writes about new polling showing that
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Accidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Jeremy Corbyn offers a look at what the next UK Labour government plans to do – and provides an example which we should be glad to follow: The next Labour government will be different. To earn the trust of the people of
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Steve Roth points out how extreme concentrations of wealth lead to poor economic and social outcomes: If wealth is consistently more widely dispersed — like it was after WW II — the extra spending that results causes more production. (Why, exactly, do you
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – The Oxford Martin School has published a new report on the spread of inequality. And Noah Smith discusses the role of offshoring along with automation in stacking the economic deck against workers. – Meanwhile, Mike Blanchfield reports on the U.S.’ refusal to allow
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Phillip Inman and Jill Treanor write about the debt time bomb facing UK households. Jim Edwards discusses how widespread underemployment has become the norm in the UK – making unemployment alone a misleading indicator as to workers’ well-being. And Owen Jones highlights
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Matthew Yglesias offers his take on how to strengthen the U.S.’ economy through full employment and improved wage and family benefits. And Richard Florida discusses how everybody can benefit if an increasingly important service sector starts to provide higher wages and better work:
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Income and geographic distribution of low-income renters in Toronto
In this second of a series of housing-related posts I analyze the income and geographic distribution of renter-occupied households in the City of Toronto. My first post focussed on affordability and inequality trends by analyzing time series (2001-16) data for Ontario by household income quintiles. As a complement, this blog
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – George Eaton discusses how some U.S. state governments are taking steps to fight inequality with taxes at the top of the income scale. – The Canadian Coalition for Tax Fairness is coming together to push for a tax system where everybody pays
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Phillip Inman reports on a new UN study (PDF) showing that the inequality caused by austerity results in particular harm to women who are forced to take on more unpaid labour. – David Sloan Wilson interviews Sigrun Aasland about the mix and balance
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Assorted content to end your week. – Leslie McCall and Jennifer Richeson offer another look at what happens when Americans are properly informed about the level of inequality in their country: What effect did this information have? First, more respondents came to believe that “coming from a wealthy family” and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Andrew Jackson, Tavia Grant et al, Kate McInturff and Trish Hennessy each look at Statistics Canada’s new income data which shows worsening inequality and persistent poverty over the past decade. – Jordan Brennan offers a needed response to a Financial Accountability Office
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Some comments on the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario’s minimum wage commentary
The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO)—an independent, arm’s length, non-partisan research institute—released a paper on September 12th outlining the likely economic impacts flowing from the pending minimum wage increase (see here). The FAO’s findings are already garnering significant media attention and will almost certainly be used by the opponents
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ben Steverman examines the unfairness of the U.S.’ tax system – which, like Canada’s, offers gratuitous giveaways to wealthy investors which force workers to pay more: Politicians have intentionally set tax rates on wages much higher than those on long-term investment returns. The
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Book review: Social policy in Canada (second edition)
Oxford University Press has recently released the second edition of Social Policy in Canada, co-authored by the father-daughter duo of Ernie Lightman and Naomi Lightman. I recommend this book as an excellent resource for students of social policy. It will be useful for classroom instruction, while also being a handy
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
This and that for your Sunday reading. – Janine Jackson interviews Sarah Anderson about the lack of any public return on massive U.S. corporate tax breaks. And Greg Jericho discusses a new IMF study finding the same result for high-end tax cuts in developed economies generally, as giveaways to the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rachel Sherman writes about the steps taken by wealthy Americans to hide how much they spend to paper over income inequality: Over lunch in a downtown restaurant, Beatrice, a New Yorker in her late 30s, told me about two decisions she and her
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – Matthew Hoffmann discusses the reality that addressing climate change will require substantial changes to how we currently live – but that we don’t have a reasonable choice but to put in the work to make the transition. – Michael Wolfson writes that
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Ben Chu reports on a new study showing that the UK’s economy is broken in failing to translate GDP gains into any help for workers whose wages are falling. And the Canadian Press reports on the latest survey showing how many Canadians are
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Stefan Stern writes that our current corporate culture needs to be changed in ways going far beyond reining in excessive executive compensation: Wage inequality is also a symbol of something more fundamentally wrong in the business world. Too many corporations are competing to
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Alex Himelfarb writes about the need to expand our idea of what’s possible through collective action: Is Trump the product of over forty years of attacks on the very idea of government, of decades in which government seemed to back away from our
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