Tag Archives: inequality

2018 State of the Inner City Report: Green Light Go...Improving Transportation Equity December 7, 2018Getting to doctors appointments, going to school, to work, attending social engagments, picking up groceries and even going to the beach should all affordable and accessible.  Check out Ellen Smirl's reserach on transportation equity in Winnipeg in this year's State of the Inner City Report! Canadian Centre for Policy AlternativesInclusionary housing in a slow-growth city like Winnipeg...

Over at the Behind The Numbers website, I’ve written a blog post titled “Ten considerations for the next Alberta budget.” The blog post is a summary of a recent workshop organized by the Alberta Alternative Budget Working Group. The link to the blog post is here. Enjoy and share:

This is the question that I am often asked and will be asked in two days. So I decided to write my answers down.… The reasons can be formally broken down into three groups: instrumental reasons having to do with economic growth, reasons of fairness, and reasons of politics.... Contra trickle down, on  one hand, and, more importantly, critiquing the engine that drives capitalism— profit as surplus value over subsistence. The consequence of this is paradox, which Marxians call "internal...

The information transfer model tracks this pretty well. Information Transfer EconomicsUnions, inequality, and labor shareJason Smith

Mixed bag. The glass is half–full or half–empty, which matters based on which half one is in. With domestic inequalities and “populism” taking center stage, the changes in global income inequality have understandably moved out of the focus. My access to the data—many of them still best obtained from the World Bank especially for poorer countries not covered by LIS—has also diminished since I left the World Bank. But one can still put together a quick update (thanks also to the contribution...

To the early classical economists, this kind of wealth – attained by simply extracting value created by others ­­– was deemed to be unearned, and referred to it as ‘economic rent’. However, ever since neoclassical economics replaced classical economics as the dominant school of thinking in the late 19th century, economic rent has been increasingly marginalised from economic discourse. To the extent that it is acknowledged, it is usually viewed as being peripheral to the story of wealth...

The Trump White House research team have issued a very strange report. It’s called “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism,”. It purports to prove that ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’ policies would be damaging to Americans because the ‘opportunity costs’ of socialism compared to capitalism are so much higher. What is strange and rather amusing is that the White House advisers to Trump deem it necessary to explain to Americans the failures of ‘socialism’ in 2018. But when you delve into the...

IntroductionBankers, agro-business elites, commercial mega owners, manufacturing, real estate and insurance bosses and their financial advisers, elite members of the ‘ruling class’, have launched a full-scale attack on private and public wage and salary workers,and small and medium size entrepreneurs (the members of the ‘popular classes’). The attack has targeted income ,pensions, medical plans, workplace conditions, job security, rents, mortgages, educational costs, taxation,undermining...

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States). The numbers for...

If the government is not as broke as some say it is, then the inability to invest in things like public education is due to a lack of political will and not some natural law written into the fabric of economic reality. SojournersCan We Afford Economic Justice In The United States? Daniel José Camacho | Associate Web Editor