In the arguments about how wealth and income are shared out, one of the common lines is that poverty matters, but inequality, in the sense of the gaps across all of society, is a distraction. This is usually buttressed with a reference to China: just look, people say, at the way that hundreds of millions…

A couple of weeks ago, a report from Credit Suisse claimed that New Zealand had the highest median wealth in the world. At the time, I questioned the claim: could the average New Zealander really be wealthier than the average Swede, Australian or Dane? I also thought the figures were well out of line with…

The Dominion Post is running an opinion piece of mine this morning, comparing the cost of paying the Living Wage to Wellington City Council staff (about $1.7 million a year, on campaigners’ estimates) with the payments for the council’s senior staff in recent years. Below is a spreadsheet with the details of the calculations. What…

Reporting on the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report has repeated its claim that New Zealand has the second highest average (mean) wealth in the world – and the highest median wealth. But is that true? It sits oddly with personal experience. Does anyone who has been overseas, or seen other countries depicted, think that…

A little while back, Finance Minister Bill English gave a speech in which he claimed that “poor urban planning is one of the significant drivers of inequality”. His logic is that bad urban planning drives up the cost of building new houses, limiting supply and thus causing rents to rise sharply and house prices to…

The combined wealth of New Zealand’s Rich Listers in 2015 turns out to be $57.4 billion, around $2.4 billion higher than initially estimated and a striking 12 per cent increase on the previous year’s figure. When the Rich List was announced in July this year, the National Business Review (NBR) put the value of its…

Following the announcement that the Green Party’s Russel Norman would be stepping down, to be replaced by Marama Davidson, I did this chart of Parliament’s gender breakdown. It doesn’t make pretty reading.Only the Greens have more female MPs than male. Labour have 12 female MPs to 20 male (although if they had won more seats,…

This document summarises the key points on inequality and poverty from the 2015 Household Incomes Report, published by the Ministry for Social Development. Inequality On most measures, income inequality is either at the highest level it has been since records began in 1982, or is very close to that level. It has also risen sharply…

Did the small child poverty package in May’s Budget makes the issue go away for National? Not in the slightest, according to the polling shown in the graph below. Concerns about poverty and inequality, which had already skyrocketed since 2010, have only increased in recent months – and the last poll was taken in June,…

At the end of last week, there was a brief flare of outrage about a shot from Beyonce’s new video (available only on Tidal), in which she apparently pours a bottle of champagne worth thousands of dollars into a swimming pool. As someone observed on Twitter, when there are people starving and homeless, this isn’t…