Every year when International Women’s Day rolls by, I can’t help but reflect on power, how it’s shared, and how women use the power they have. This year, I am struck by women’s power to reduce inequality, and not just to help ourselves. Women are key to reducing income inequality.
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Accidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Following up on yesterday’s column, David Atkins discusses his own preference for front-end fixes to poverty and inequality: The standard way you’ll hear most progressives address inequality issues is to allow the labor market to run as usual, but levy heavy taxes on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, featuring my take on the IMF’s recent report (PDF) on the relationship between equality, redistribution and growth. I’ve already linked to other responses to the report from the Guardian and the Economist. But the column raises a point left largely unaddressed in those pieces – and which seems particularly
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Brian and Karen Foster question why steadily improving productivity has led to increasing stratification rather than better lives for a large number of people: (W)ith all the optimism, why hasn’t technological progress actually opened up a world where we all work, and we
Continue readingAutonomy For All: Toronto Needs Progressive Property Taxation
In November, the TTC board decided to raise fares for 2014 by approximately $60/year for people who buy metropasses every month. Many have already noted that this amount is the same as the $60 VRT that Mayor Ford and Council repealed early in thi…
Continue readingAutonomy For All: Toronto Needs Progressive Property Taxation
In November, the TTC board decided to raise fares for 2014 by approximately $60/year for people who buy metropasses every month. Many have already noted that this amount is the same as the $60 VRT that Mayor Ford and Council repealed early in this term. Quite plausibly, this is a
Continue readingAutonomy For All: Toronto Needs Progressive Property Taxation
In November, the TTC board decided to raise fares for 2014 by approximately $60/year for people who buy metropasses every month. Many have already noted that this amount is the same as the $60 VRT that Mayor Ford and Council repealed early in this term. Quite plausibly, this is a
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – The Economist looks at the relationship between equality and growth, showing that there’s at worst little evidence that fairer economies have any trouble matching their more-polarized counterparts – and best some indication that they perform better: Inequality is more closely correlated with
Continue readingThings Are Good: IMF: Tax the Rich to Improve the Economy
The International Monetary Fund has just completed a study that compiled data across time and space to conclude that taxation isn’t harmful for economies. Indeed, taxing the rich is actually very beneficial for any national economy because it stops inequality – which is an awful thing for both people and
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – Nick Kristof writes that the growing gap in income reflects a similarly growing gap in social perception – and that there’s plenty of need to reduce both: There is an income gap in America, but just as important is a compassion gap. Plenty
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – The New York Times editorial board points out that a higher minimum wage can produce clear economic benefits for businesses as well as for workers: One 2013 study by three economists — Arindrajit Dube, T. William Lester and Michael Reich — compared the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading. – David Macdonald comments on Statistics Canada’s latest wealth survey, with particular emphasis on the continued gap between a privileged few and the vast majority of Canadians: (T)he top 20% of families have twice as much wealth as the bottom 80% of families
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: The IMF Wades In on Inequality
The hard Right have transitioned seamlessly from the fight to thwart action on climate change to their even more desperate rear guard effort to defend inequality from nasty, money-grubbing reformers. Well, Movement Conservatives, have just lost a potential ally, the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has just released a report
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: We can’t all be workers: Putting inequality in the inequality debate
It’s easy to get confused about who is a worker and who isn’t these days. Your CEO may worker longer hours than you, not the top-hatted capitalist of the Monopoly board he. Indeed, it may seem that the leisure class of the turn of the last century has been replaced
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: The labour share and income inequality
All the recent talk about the Canada’s shrinking middle class and rising income inequality got me thinking that it might be a good time to take a fresh look at a somewhat neglected economic concept: the labour share of income. The labour share of income hopes to measure the portion
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Stephen Hume writes about the importance of tax revenue in building a functional and compassionate Canada: My taxes provide our mostly peaceful, prosperous and safe society; a health care system that for all its flaws and glitches is pretty darn good compared to
Continue readingThe Disaffected Lib: Canada’s Mythical Middle Class and the Quislings of Parliament Hill
The government likes to say it’s all about the middle class. So, too, the opposition parties. On Parliament Hill it seems Canada’s middle class is virtually surrounded by a sea of friends, each clamouring to outdo the other to lend a hand, give a leg up. With friends like that
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Why the Minimum Wage Debate Isn’t Going to Go Away
Yesterday I tweeted this: <blink> Gap will raise minimum hourly pay Walmart “looking” at support of min wage raise In honour of the momentum, I am posting the piece I wrote for Economy Lab a while back, and including the numbers that drive the chart that attracted quite a lot
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Rick Smith hopes that the Cons’ backtracking on income splitting means that they won’t go quite as far out of their way to exacerbate income inequality in the future: (T)he unfortunate reality is that we are still becoming ever more unequal, a trend
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Tough austerity measures in Greece leave nearly a million people with no access to healthcare, leading to soaring infant mortality, HIV infection and suicide – Europe – World – The Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/tough-austerity-measures-in-greece-leave-nearly-a-million-people-with-no-access-to-healthcare-leading-to-soaring-infant-mortality-hiv-infection-and-suicide-9142274.html Filed under: Austerity, Greece, inequality, Neoliberalism Tagged: Austerity, crisis, Greece, neoliberalism
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