The Reserve Bank has just published a revised set of its household balance sheets – how much New Zealand households own and owe. The data is significant because it includes for the first time some things like how much households have invested in businesses that aren’t listed on the stock exchange. The result of the…

I’ve just come across this graph about who gets to go onto higher education in developed world countries – and it seems to make pretty damning reading for New Zealand. Basically, it suggests that if you have highly educated parents, in this country you are nearly 10 times more likely to be in higher education…

One of the things that banks like to do is send out research notes about what they think the “key themes” of the future will be. The ANZ research note issued earlier this month is typical of the genre, with a lot of phrases like “change is the new normal” and “the trend is your…

For years now, one of the main reasons given for dismissing inequality as an issue has been about economics: you need income gaps to generate growth. Without a wide gap between rich and poor, who would have the incentive to work harder and do the things that generate income for everyone? That argument, which had…

I was speaking a little while ago at a literary festival, in a panel session on poverty and inequality with Canterbury University’s Bronwyn Hayward and broadcaster Wallace Chapman, when an audience member got up and spoke, with great emotion, about the struggle that she and her husband faced in making ends meet on his salary…

I’m delighted to have been awarded the 2014 Bruce Jesson prize, to work on a book on wealth inequality in New Zealand. Wealth – as opposed to income – inequality is increasingly a hot topic. I also think it’s time that we looked not just at what’s happening in deprived neighbourhoods but also at how…

Bill English is quoted in the Herald today as saying, a propos of rising house prices and low housebuilding numbers: It’s clear that the lowest-income households have been the most affected so our planning processes have probably done more to increase income inequality in New Zealand than most other policies and it does remain a…

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…

Economist Gareth Morgan recently argued that it’s inequality of opportunity, not any other inequality, that matters. With respect to Morgan and his huge contribution to this debate (in The Big Kahuna and elsewhere), I don’t think that’s the case. He argues: Surely we want to make sure that the poor have enough to participate. That is the…