When I was on Waiheke Island last year, local filmmaker Scott Ewing did an interview with me. The result, this concentrated 6min take on inequality in New Zealand, has just come out. It’s a pretty good summary of the whole issue, especially for new comers. Thanks to Scott for putting it together.
A century of growing inequality, as the gap rapidly widens between those who have assets and those who don’t: that’s the grim prediction of French economist Thomas Piketty, whose new work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is being hailed as this decade’s key economics tome. In the recent debates about inequality, wealth has often been…
Thomas Piketty’s new book ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’ has been making waves overseas: it’s number one on Amazon, and has been lauded as a book that will transform how we think about society and do economics – by Paul Krugman, no less. So far, there’s not been much attention on how it will…
Income inequality isn’t the real issue: what matters is social mobility, the ability that people have to move out of poverty. That, at least, is the line that some commentators are taking in response to the irrefutable evidence of widening income gaps, both here in New Zealand and elsewhere. The most fundamental problem with this…
Charles Crothers at AUT has just pulled together a special issue of the journal New Zealand Sociology (v28:3 at the link), on inequality. It includes essays on class, media ownership and other issues, a user’s guide to inequality by Brian Easton, and a review of Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis by Peter Skilling. There’s also…
The news today is that mistakes by the Treasury and Statistics New Zealand mean that poverty and inequality are even worse than we thought. By double counting the Accommodation Supplement and making some other errors, they accidentally inflated low incomes. How big is the mistake? It’s significant. The headline number is that there are 285,000…
Following recent criticism of the Living Wage calculations by Brian Scott, Charles Waldegrave, one of the principal creators of the methodology, responds here. http://www.scribd.com/doc/207883123/Waldegrave-Responds-to-Living-Wage-Critique To quote his summary: This paper addresses the conceptual basis and evidence of Scott’s critique. It demonstrates the critique lacks an informed understanding of the definition of a living wage, confuses…
UMR Research have just released their latest Mood of the Nation report (not online yet), and it shows huge public concern about our widened income gaps. The key findings are: Concern Fully half the country is “very concerned” about inequality, with a further 37% “somewhat concerned”; just 13% say they are not concerned about it…
This metaphor, from inequality writer Chuck Collins, captures something about the way that advantage and disadvantage get compounded: Imagine a ten-mile race in which contestants have different starting lines based on parental education, income, and wealth. The economically privileged athletes start several hundred yards ahead of the disadvantaged runners. Each contestant begins with ten one-pound…
As the Living Wage campaign gathers momentum, the latest development is a petition being circulated at Auckland University, calling on the Vice Chancellor, Stuart McCutcheon, to support a Living Wage for all university staff. It comes on the heels of Wellington city council agreeing to pay the Living Wage to all its staff (with contractors…