Hmmm... I see that the Bank of England has been strangely quiet on the doubling of Tesco CEO Ken Murphy's pay-packet last year to just under £10m...
Surely they were compelling only recently that continued wage inflation was a problem for the economy & was likely to delay any reduction in interest rates...
[checks notes] oh sorry, that's just ordinary workers' pay that's the problem - CEO's pay is a well-deserved reward for hard work.... apologies, I was being stupid
@rbreich What the people who say "I worked hard for what I've got" always miss or ignore is that simply having the opportunity to work hard and be fairly rewarded is itself a privilege denied to many. #wealth#economics#inequality
The deselection of Faiza Shaheen, and her subsequent decision to stand as an independent is an unforced error for the Labour Party.
Here four of her colleagues set out why they're supporting her candidacy as an independent & in doing so summarise what many of us feel is wrong about how this has proceeded.
Given her expertise in inequality, one can but suspect that the Starmer team wanted her out of the way before she embarrassingly started to demand action on inequality as an MP?
Mike Savage (LSE) puts the deselection of Faiza Shaheen by Labour into the context of her work on wealth inequality & concludes:
'in pursuing an ugly & manifestly factional manoeuvre in their deselection of Faiza Shaheen, UK Labour may be doing more harm than they realise when it comes to promoting their stated goal of “a decade of national renewal”.'
Shaheen has been a major campaigner for greater equality, might that not be what Labour wants?
South Africans angry at joblessness, #inequality & power shortages have cut support for the #ANC to 40% in this week's election, ending 3 decades of dominance in #SouthAfrica by the party that freed the country from #apartheid.
A dramatically weakened mandate for the legacy party of #NelsonMandela, down from the 57.5% it got in the previous 2019 parliamentary election, means the ANC must share #power w/a rival in order to keep it.
Vote tallying from Wed's poll was in its final stages on Sat, w/results from 99.53% of polling stations giving the #ANC 40.21%.
The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), had 21.80%, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), a new party led by fmr president Jacob #Zuma, had 14.60%, while the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters ( #EFF), led by former ANC youth leader Julius #Malema, got 9.48%.
Wealthy white men from rural areas are the UK’s biggest emitters of climate-heating gases from transport, according to a study by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
The richest 0.1% in Britain emit 22 times more from transport than low earners & 12 times more than average. Income is directly linked to levels of mobility.
In the UK, transport is now the largest source of emissions.
A drone view shows informal shacks of the high-density suburb of Masiphumelele extending into a wetland adjacent to Lake Michelle private estate in Cape Town, South Africa. REUTERS/Nic Bothma
Ready for news that will shock nobody? It turns out globalization mostly helps out the richest 10% and has little to no impact on the poorest.
"The influence of globalization on income inequalities worldwide was greater than we had expected. We were particularly surprised that these differences were mainly due to the gains of the richest and that the lower income groups benefited little or not at all."
Holly Pester's short novel The Lodgers (2024), is a timely mediation on the unanchored life of the peripatetic life of the renter/lodger. At times elliptical, with two narratives whose relations remains unsettled, this is a book which offers a real feeling for a key element of modern life; moving from one lodging/rental to another. While at time wry, it remains elegiac in its approach to tenant's despair & longing.
The more I read of #Covid revisionists, the more I want to tell about this book--a detailed look at the history of crappy approach to #pandemics.
" The disproportionate harm experienced by marginalized individuals is not the product of their own decisions; instead, the collective choices of society and the tangled web of interactions across people and communities leave these groups most exposed to the perils of epidemics."
"Our review covers 127 peer-reviewed studies into climate change and #inequality.
The vast majority of studies confirm that #ClimateChange is exacerbating economic inequalities or hitting the poorest the hardest. This finding holds true across regions, types of physical impacts, sectors, types of inequalities and assessment methods. It is particularly prominent in studies that compare the impact of climate change across countries. "
So the one thing you can say about the Tories wrecking of the UK's economic wellbeing is that they have at least spread the pain around relatively equally, in that all income levels have seen a drop in disposable income (yes, of course this takes no account of wealth inequality, but remains notable nonetheless).
What is interesting is looking at other Parliaments - no wonder the rich like Thatcher - look at her second term, whereas the first Blair term spread income growth widely.
The 'bank of mum & dad' is an engine for consolidating & maintaining inequality.
The top 10% of earners received a disproportinate amount of help from family members to buy their first home.
As the size of the transfers for the top 10% suggest, the rich are helping themselves, stoking inflation in the housing market & blocking normal people's aspirations to own their own home.
One more dimension of the UK's problem with inequality, which compounds over time!
Peter Turchin introduces the concept of the "wealth pump," by which the elites funnel money and resources away from the poor and up to the very top. It's an accurate description of the changes to modern society around the late 1970s and early 80s. Turchin predicts the outcome of this "wealth pump" will be violent revolution if the elites don't voluntarily turn it off on their own.
In the new episode of New Books Network, we’re discussing my new book ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ together with sociologist Dr. Anna Zhelnina. Enjoy listening to our conversation!
Two books I loved, part 1: Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Riku Onda, which is about four entrants in a classical piano competition in Tokyo, and the characters are all interesting and charming but best of all it just has wonderful writing about music -- like the title itself as a description of how a particular player makes a particular piece sound. It's beautiful, and unlike many books with multiple POVs, I loved all the protagonists equally and was never annoyed by a switch at the wrong time. Just beautiful stuff.