Donal Curtin has an interesting post up (responding to a talk I gave), in which he looks at whether large income gaps lead to lower social mobility. He presents a version of the graph below (where unequal countries have high ‘generational earnings elasticity’, i.e. a strong link between parents’ income and the income of their…
In light of today’s news that ACT leader Jamie Whyte believes most children are poor because their parents are addicts, I thought it was worth briefly posting some comments made last week by ACT’s Auckland Central candidate Dasha Kovalenko. Speaking at a forum on poverty that I chaired, Kovalenko, a 25-year-old junior lawyer, said there…
Recently I was interviewed for an article by a Marlborough girls college media student, Michaela Brooke Baillie, on inequality in New Zealand. One of the most disturbing parts of the article is the following section, in which she describes an evening meal at the local soup kitchen: After everyone has eaten and returned their plates,…