Liberal democracies are today confronted with a wave of popular distrust in their ability to serve the majority of their citizens and solve the multiple crises that threaten our future. This threatens to lead us into a world of dangerous populist policies exploiting the anger without addressing the real risks, ranging from climate change to unbearable inequalities, or major global conflicts. To avert major damages to humanity and the planet, we must urgently get to the root causes of people’s resentment.
Sociological research on inequality has increasingly moved beyond the examination of inequalities as they
presumably exist to explore the generic narrative processes that perpetuate that inequality. Unfortunately,
however, this research remains concentrated on either individual or ideological grand narratives and
ignores the fact that the work narratives do, including the production and structuring of inequality, occurs
at multiple levels: cultural, structural, organizational, and personal, and never exclusively at just one of
these. In this study, we use Somali origin narratives to describe conceptually the ways in which narratives
produced at different personal and societal levels—cultural, institutional, organizational—dialectically
structure the generic processes that produce and perpetuate social inequality.
In a shift away from European Central Bank orthodoxy, a senior bank executive has argued that even though the ECB’s monetary policy led to a decrease in labour income inequality, its asset purchase programs would lead to wealth inequality.
Wie stark lassen sich Lehrende durch Learning Analytics in ihrer Bewertung von Studierenden beeinflussen? Welche diskriminierenden aber auch ungleichheits-reduzierenden Effekte gehen von Algorithmen aus? In diesem Beitrag stellen die Autor*innen das Potential und die Gefahren von Learning Analytics vor und werten die Forschungsergebnisse eines Conjoint-Experiments aus.
The crisis may have opened a window of opportunity, but positive change cannot be taken for granted. To truly recover in the years ahead, Europe will need a new socio-ecological contract bringing together questions of inequality, climate and the digital economy.
While the Europe 2020 strategy actively promotes entrepreneurial self-employment as a means to create good jobs, policy makers at national and EU level are actively looking at better social protection for self-employed workers. Understanding this paradox requires looking beyond the ‘self-employed’ label and acknowledging it as an umbrella term covering a widely differing group of workers.
Seven years ago, the combined wealth of 388 billionaires equaled that of the poorest half of humanity, according to Oxfam International. This past January the equation was even more unbalanced: it took only eight billionaires, marking an unmistakable march toward increased concentration of wealth. Today that number has been reduced to five billionaires. Trying to understand such growing inequality is usually the purview of economists, but Bruce Boghosian, a professor of mathematics, thinks he has found another explanation—and a warning.
A study by Norm Augustine found that in a variety of professions--writing, football, invention, police work, and other occupations--the top 20 percent of the people produced about 50 percent of the output, whether the output is touchdowns, patents, solved cases, or software (Augustine 1979).
Reducing income inequality would boost economic growth, according to new OECD analysis. This work finds that countries where income inequality is decreasing grow faster than those with rising inequality.
It will take a better statistician than I to draw any strong conclusions from this, but it looks to me like wealth equality correlates with significant economic growth over the long term, and with slow growth in the short term.
This website, launched in April 2014 to coincide with the book Mobilizing against Inequality, creates a new online conversation about how unions and organizations have engaged in mobilizing and empowering the immigrant workforce.
