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…

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…

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…

One of the enduring income inequalities in New Zealand is that between men and women. Women are paid around 13% less than men for doing the same work, and the Bartlett case last year showed that entire industries have been poorly paid simply because the work is done mostly by women. This is especially relevant…

It’s sometimes said that raising taxes, as one might do to combat inequality, will force the rich to flee in droves. But not only did this not happen when the UK recently hiked its top tax rate to 50%; not only is Sweden still home to thousands of wealthy people, despite its 50%+ tax rates;…

Last week Ted Thomas gave his Bruce Jesson lecture. The text of it is attached, but his basic argument is that the best way to tackle inequality is a rights-based campaign. As he puts it: “The community, or groups within the community, will need to take a more assertive, if not aggressive, approach to the…

Ideas of fairness – especially the cherished ‘fair go’ – have long been important in New Zealand culture. But Anglican Social Justice are running a competition for schools, entitled ‘Is New Zealand fair?’, which challenges some of those ideas. Drawing on information from Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis, it’s asking students to find new and…

(Event report by Emily Watson) One of the most serious issues facing New Zealand is the racial imbalance in our prisons. That was the view of Human FM, a Victoria University club of DJs, musicians and social justice activists raising awareness of issues  such as child poverty and climate change. Indeed the statistics are shocking:…