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+17 +1
There's A New Kind Of Inequality. And It's Not About Income
It used to be that the battle to overcome inequality was about money. It was about helping the poor get better jobs so they could access a larger slice of the economic pie. What if that approach to inequality is no longer relevant? In the latest edition of its Human Development Report, the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) argues that 20th-century thinking on global inequality no longer works in the 21st century.
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+16 +1
If People Were Paid by Ability, Inequality Would Plummet
Some may argue that top earners are simply super skilled, but that’s not what the evidence suggests.
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+15 +1
The rich are getting free money and capitalism is broken, says US billionaire
The founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds has slammed capitalism as “broken” in a post published on LinkedIn yesterday. In the post titled The World Has Gone Mad and the System Is Broken, Bridgewater Associates founder Raymond Dalio explained that current economic and market forces are driving the growing gap between the rich and the poor.
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+8 +1
California plans to end 'lunch shaming' with a new bill that guarantees meals for all students
A bill signed Saturday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to cut the recent trend in schools of "lunch shaming." SB 265, which was originally introduced by California state Sen. Robert Hertzberg, will require that all public school students have a "state reimbursable" meal provided by the school "even if their parent or guardian has unpaid meal fees."
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+17 +1
You now need to make more than $500,000 a year to be in the 1% in America, new study shows — and that's the highest it's ever been
It's getting harder to join the 1% in America. You'd need to make at least $515,371 a year to be in the top 1% of taxpayers in 2017, the most recent year for which data is currently available, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by Bloomberg's Alexandre Tanzi and Ben Steverman found. That's 7.2% higher than the year before. No more recent data has been released, Bloomberg said.
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+16 +1
Imagine a place with no elite private schools or prohibitive house prices – I've lived there
Imagine a place where there are no elite or expensive private schools. And imagine a society where housing is affordable – a three-bedroom house, for example, costing one quarter of a similar property in Sydney. What would such a place be like when the two main drivers of financial stress and resultant inequality were removed?
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+25 +1
Facial analysis AI is being used in job interviews – it will probably reinforce inequality
The fundamental problem with AI is it is often riddled with society's existing biases and prejudices.
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+3 +1
US income inequality jumps to highest level ever recorded
Income inequality last year reached its highest level in more than half a century, as a record-long economic expansion continued to disproportionately benefit some of the wealthiest Americans. A key measure of wealth distribution jumped to 0.485 in 2018, the Census Bureau said Thursday, its highest reading since the so-called Gini index was started in 1967. The gauge, which uses a scale of 0 to 1, stood at 0.482 a year earlier.
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+24 +1
Thomas Piketty's new book uses data to trace how inequality changes ideology
In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field.
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+12 +1
Low-income, black neighborhoods still hit hard by air pollution
Disease-causing air pollution remains high in pockets of America – particularly those where many low-income and African-American people live, a disparity highlighted in research presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York. The nation’s air on the whole has become cleaner in the past 70 years, but those...
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+10 +1
The Gap Between Rich And Poor Americans' Health Is Widening
Health inequities are getting worse, according to new research. Factors like income, race and gender are playing a larger role in health outcomes than they did 25 years ago.
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+15 +1
US super-rich call for wealth tax
Some of America's richest people are urging US presidential candidates to back a wealth tax on the super-rich to improve inequality and climate change. "America has a moral, ethical and economic responsibility to tax our wealth more," they said in a letter. Signatories include investor George Soros, Facebook's co-founder Chris Hughes, and Molly Munger, daughter of billionaire Charlie Munger.
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+20 +1
The [U.S.] One Percent Have Gotten $21 Trillion Richer Since 1989
The bottom 50% have gotten poorer. By Eric Levitz.
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+19 +1
How New York’s Skyline Is Changing to Give the Wealthy a Better View
New Yorkers are witnessing a boom of luxury residential buildings, which some see as a sign of the city’s wealth gap.
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+7 +1
New Federal Reserve data shows how the rich have gotten richer
The top 1 percent of the US wealth distribution has increased its net worth by 650 percent since 1989, while the bottom 50 percent saw its wealth grow by a much more modest 170 percent during the same period.
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+17 +1
Setting a maximum wage for CEOs would be good for everyone
Under capitalism, the argument goes, it’s every man for himself. Through the relentless pursuit of self-interest, everyone benefits, as if an invisible hand were guiding each of us toward the common good. Everyone should accordingly try to get as much as they can, not only for their goods but also for their labour. Whatever the market price is is, in turn, what the buyer should pay. Just like the idea that there should be a minimum wage, the idea that there should be a maximum wage seems to undermine the very freedom that the free market is supposed to guarantee.
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+18 +1
America’s 3 wealthiest families have more money than 4 million average families combined
Three families of dynastic wealth — that’s the Walton, Koch and Mars families — have seen their wealth increase close to 6,000% since 1982, according to the Billionaire Bonanza report by the progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies. Their combined wealth – a staggering $348.7 billion as of October 2018 – is more than the combined wealth of 4 million American families of median wealth.
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+13 +1
The Last Man to Know Everything
Mike Davis didn’t write his first book until his forties. He was too busy doing other things, from working in a slaughterhouse to running the Communist Party’s bookshop in Los Angeles (until he, an inveterate Trotskyist, threw out the Soviet cultural attaché). His late start as a scholar, however, has been compensated for by a deep reservoir of experiences to draw from and a swift pen: since writing his first book in 1986, he has published twenty more.
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+12 +1
America Is an Oligarchy. It Doesn’t Have to Be.
The United States is the richest society in human history. As is well-known by most of the people who live in it, it’s also a country of deep and abiding inequality. Just three billionaires own more wealth than the 160 million poorest Americans combined and the wealthiest of them — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — pockets more money every sixty seconds than the typical American household earns in a year and a half.
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+29 +1
Study Shows Richest 0.00025% Owns More Wealth Than Bottom 150 Million Americans
As survey data continues to show that raising taxes on the wealthy is extremely popular among the U.S. public, new research by inequality expert and University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman found that the richest 0.00025 percent of the American population now owns more wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent. Zucman, who helped Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) develop her "Ultra-Millionaire Tax" proposal, observed in a working paper (pdf) that "U.S. wealth concentration seems to have returned to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties."
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