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Richard Layard is one of Britain's foremost applied economists, whose work has had a profound impact on the policy debate in Britain and abroad. This book contains his most influential articles on education, equality and income distribution and on the lessons of economic transition in Eastern Europe. It is published along with a companion volume. Inequality argues that lifetime inequality is the basic inequality we should worry about. In this context education is a powerful instrument of redistribution, as well as a national investment. Cash redistribution has efficiency costs which can be calculated, but it may also serve to discourage inefficient over-work arising from each person's efforts to earn more than his neighbour. A final series of essays is based on Layard's recent work on reform strategies in Russia and Poland. The book opens with Richard Layard's personal credo 'Why I became an economist'.

AbstractA vast literature suggests that economic inequality has important consequences for politics and public policy. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in dictatorships. Most such arguments crucially assume that ordinary people know how high inequality is, how it has been changing, and where they fit in the income distribution. Using a variety of large, cross‐national surveys, we show that, in recent years, ordinary people have had little idea about such things. What they think they know is often wrong. Widespread ignorance and misperceptions emerge robustly, regardless of data source, operationalization, and measurement method. Moreover, perceived inequality—not the actual level—correlates strongly with demand for redistribution and reported conflict between rich and poor. We suggest that most theories about political effects of inequality need to be reframed as theories about effects of perceived inequality.

PDFs, CDFs, quantile functions, and Lorenz curves -- Summary inequality measures -- Choices of inequality measures -- Relative distribution methods -- Inference issues -- Analyzing inequality trends -- An illustrative application: inequality in income and wealth in the United States, 1991-2001

This essay examines narratives about class and inequality in Helena María Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them (2007) and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's The Dirty Girls Social Club (2003). These two novels entered the literary scene during a period of increased market neoliberalization, which has produced extreme social and economic inequality. Drawing on Latinx literary criticism and theories about neoliberalism and the free market, this essay maps out how these two novels reproduce and interrogate the market structures that make inequality appear normal and quotidian. One novel narrates the bourgeois sensibilities of six affluent Latinas; the other tells of the social injustice imposed upon and internalized by the racialized poor through the stories of four women in East Los Angeles. Although their characters are seemingly at opposite ends of the class spectrum, the novels nevertheless share the same ideologies about class. Indeed, these literary representations of latinidad and chicanidad directly engage the many structural mechanisms that ultimately normalize growing class disparity as part of our everyday lives. By narrating the neoliberal discourses of "success" and "failure," the novels lay bare certain determining features of inequality, such as marketable ethnicity, social mobility, and entrepreneurship. For Their Dogs and Dirty Girls, rich and poor become embodied states of being that ultimately make inequality the standard social order.

Abstract
Concern about inequality, particularly inequality of income and wealth, has become prominent in public discourse around the world. This article first discusses issues of measurement and goes on to ask why we should care, emphasizing fairness and the market distortions and negative externalities found in unequal societies. It documents that the decline in global inequality in recent decades has been due to falling inequality between, rather than within, countries. The popular picture of rising inequality in OECD countries is more varied and complex than often perceived. Its drivers include aspects of globalization and of technological change as well as changes in the distribution of market power, in financial markets, public policy, and monetary policy. There are two over-arching questions about how governments can address inequality. The first is what should be tackled at the international level and what should be the preserve of national policy. The second is what should be the balance between pre- and post-market interventions. Both have a role but generally the balance has been too skewed towards the latter.

INCOME INEQUALITY: AN ALARMING U.S. TREND -- INCOME INEQUALITY: AN ALARMING U.S. TREND -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- Chapter 1 TRENDS IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF HOUSEHOLD INCOME BETWEEN 1979 AND 2007 -- NOTES AND DEFINITIONS -- PREFACE -- SUMMARY -- Increased Concentration of Market Income -- Income at the Very Top of the Distribution -- The Role of Government Transfers and Federal Taxes -- Increased Concentration of after-Tax Income -- TRENDS IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF HOUSEHOLD INCOME BETWEEN 1979 AND 2007 -- Introduction -- CBO's Analysis -- Increased Dispersion of Households' after-Tax Income

Income inequality has become a global phenomenon. Rapid technological advancement and an expanding global workforce will continue to place huge pressure on wages all over the world, including Singapore. This edited volume is the product of the robust exchanges that took place in a series of closed-door discussions (CDDs) on inequality that the Institute of Policy Studies organised in the first half of 2012. The essays provide a range of views on the multi-faceted nature of inequality in Singapore, discuss candidly the specific challenges we face, and offer some policy recommendations

Herbert Schiller, long one of America's leading critics of the communications industry, here offers a salvo in the battle over information. In Information Inequality he explains how privatization and the corporate economy directly affect our most highly prized democratic institutions: schools and libraries, media, and political culture. A master media-watcher, Schiller presents a crisp and far-reaching indictment of the ""data deprivation"" corporate interests are inflicting on the social fabric