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The harms of hidden research
It’s all about the ‘killer facts’. If you want to get social science into policy, then – as Alex Stevens’ wonderful covert ethnography of high-level policymaking shows – killer facts are the name of...
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The harms of hidden research – Part II
Last week I wrote about the need for transparency in inequalities research - how hidden research both reduces the truthfulness of its claims, and how it works against the collective nature of social...
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Don’t Let the Data Fool You — Consumption Inequality Mirrors Income...
Several important studies have shown an apparent paradox: even as income inequality has taken off over the last thirty years, differences in consumption between the rich and poor have changed slightly...
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The Earned Income Tax Credit is a Very Good Investment in Infant Health
Welfare reform was a battle fought over the wisdom of using federal dollars to supplement the incomes of low-income mothers and their children. Yet, even as Congress in the 1990s worked to cut cash...
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In defence of benefit take-up statistics
It’s well-known that some people are entitled to benefits but don’t take them up – three-quarters of British people agree that ‘large numbers of people who are eligible for benefits these days fail to...
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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...
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Adding Health Care Spending to the Poverty Equation
I discussed the challenges of measuring poverty in the United States in a three part series on this blog last year. The official poverty line is based on pre-tax income adjusted for household size. The...
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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...
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Racial fluidity is more common than you might think
Most social scientists agree that racial differences come not just from biology, but also from changing social realities. In the 20th century, categories of race in the United States were redefined...
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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...
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Ease off the alarm bells: New data on ADHD diagnosis rates
The New York Times has a cover story today reporting on the estimated prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (they don’t identify...
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Social Progress – A League Table
Strange though it is to say, but alternatives to GDP are becoming fashionable. This week saw the launch of a new measure of ‘social progress’ on which to rank countries – and perhaps surprisingly,...
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Social Factors and the Evaluation of Mental Disorders
The American Psychiatric Association is set to release the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) this month. These new guidelines will have a profound...
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Has Income Inequality Really Ballooned Since the 1970s?
One of the most influential lines of research on income inequality come from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s study of income tax records in the United States and elsewhere. Summarizing this work in...
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Is ‘the paradox of redistribution’ dead?
It has all the makings of a great academic fist-fight.* In a classic 1998 article, Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme wrote a hugely influential article called ‘the paradox of redistribution,’ which argued...
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Income Mobility and Geography: Important New Research
Some new research by Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez, Nathaniel Hendren, and Patrick Kline finds that the likelihood of poor children moving up the income ladder in early adulthood varies dramatically by...
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Trends in out-of-work benefit claimants in Britain
As long-term readers will know, I’m intrigued by people’s beliefs about the benefit system, and their truthfulness or falsity of these beliefs. Later in the summer, I’ll talk about a new aspect of...
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Just how common is benefits stigma in Britain?
To (loosely) coincide with my paper on benefits stigma coming out in the Journal of Social Policy, I’ve written a short summary on the LSE Politics and Policy blog. (Long-running readers of the blog...
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Does the new poverty measure fully capture disability poverty?
In recent years, we have seen fierce political battles over what poverty is, and the best way of measuring it. The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) is therefore a brave venture – to get a politically...
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