Documents social inequality 1 503 results

"Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect articles employing narratives that portray inequality as the consequence of systemic unfairness to increase demands for redistribution. We test this proposition via an online survey experiment with 7426 respondents in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our narrative treatment significantly increases attitudes favoring redistribution in five of the countries. In the US the treatment has no effect. We consider several reasons for the non-result in the US – highlighting beliefs about government inefficiency – and conclude by discussing general implications of our findings."
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

"This book unpacks what political economy is and does through an investigation of its main questions and approaches. Bob Hancké, Toon Van Overbeke and Dustin Voss offer a historical and thematic review of the evolution of political-economic thought, centred on the relation between capitalism and democracy.
Chapters discuss how interests, ideas and institutions are the methodological and conceptual building blocks of political economy. The authors use these concepts to understand how markets work and why they fail, the problems facing the welfare state, the political economy of voting and democracy, and the problems of cooperation in a world of interdependent democracies. Covering the main analytical approaches that political economists have developed to tackle the complexities of this social world, the book expands on some of the most important questions confronting the field."

"This paper uses an individual-level survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Barometer in mid-April for 11 advanced and emerging market economies to examine perceptions of government performance in managing the health and economic crisis, beliefs about the future, and attitudes about redistribution. We find that women, non-college educated, the unemployed, and those in non-teleworkable jobs systematically have less favorable perceptions of government responses. Personally experiencing illness or job loss caused by the pandemic can shape people's beliefs about the future, heightening uncertainties about prolonged job losses, and the imminent threat from automation. Economic anxieties are amplified in countries that experienced an early surge in infections followed by successful containment, suggesting that negative beliefs can persist. Support for pro-equality redistributive policies varies, depending on personal experiences and views about the poor. However, we find strong willingness to provide social safety nets for vulnerable individuals and firms by those who have a more favorable perception of government responses, suggesting that effective government actions can promote support for redistributive policies."

"A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear. Progress is not automatic but depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity.
Much of the wealth generated by agricultural advances during the European Middle Ages was captured by the Church and used to build grand cathedrals while the peasants starved. The first hundred years of industrialization in England delivered stagnant incomes for workers, while making a few people very rich. And throughout the world today, digital technologies and artificial intelligence increase inequality and undermine democracy through excessive automation, massive data collection, and intrusive surveillance.
It doesn't have to be this way. Power and Progress demonstrates that the path of technology was once - and can again be - brought under control. The tremendous computing advances of the last half century can become empowering and democratizing tools, but not if all major decisions remain in the hands of a few hubristic tech leaders striving to build a society that elevates their own power and prestige.
With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the understanding and the vision to reshape how we innovate and who really gains from technological advances so we can create real prosperity for all."

"Markets and power in digital capitalism delves into the complex world of modern capitalism, where technology giants reign supreme. From Google and Apple to Amazon and Tencent, these internet behemoths have reshaped the economic landscape, transforming capitalism as we know it.

Philipp Staab takes readers on a thought-provoking journey through the virtual realm, exploring how digital surveillance and evaluation practices have infiltrated every aspect of our lives. What sets digital capitalism apart, he argues, is the rise of 'proprietary markets'. No longer focused on producing goods and selling them for profit, today's meta-platforms thrive by owning and controlling the very markets in which they operate. This raises important questions about power dynamics, market monopolies and the future of economic systems.

With sharp insight and meticulous research, the book sheds light on the intricate workings of our digitised economy. Staab's compelling analysis challenges us to confront the realities of surveillance capitalism and the urgent need to address the inequities it perpetuates."

"This book argues that the changing shape of the class structure (from a ‘big working class' to a ‘big middle class') since 1945 has forced the parties to change, which has both reduced class voting and increased class non-voting. The book develops this argument in three stages. The first shows that there has been enormous social continuity in class divisions. This is done using extensive evidence on class and educational inequality, class identity and awareness, and political attitudes over more than fifty years. The second stage is to show that there has been enormous political change in response to changing class sizes. Party policies, politicians' rhetoric, and the social composition of political elites have radically altered. Parties offer similar policies, appeal less to specific classes, and are populated by people from more similar backgrounds. Equally, the mass media have stopped talking about the politics of class. The third stage is to show that these political changes have had three major consequences. First, as Labour and the Conservatives became more similar, class differences in party preferences disappeared. Second, new parties, most notably UKIP, have taken working class voters from the mainstream parties. Third, and most importantly, the lack of choice offered by the mainstream parties has led to a huge increase in class-based abstention from voting. Working class people have become much less likely to vote. Britain appears to have followed the US down a path of working class political exclusion, ultimately undermining the representativeness of our democracy."

"It is impossible to view the news at present without hearing talk of crisis.
This timely book looks at how three major crises – the economy, pandemic and climate – are related to the crisis of work, making it more precarious, intense and unequal.
Providing an original and critical synthesis of recent trends in the field, expert scholars offer a programme for transcending the crisis of work.
Offering a timely contribution to understanding the important issues facing the world, this book presents an important new way of thinking about work in contemporary societies."

"Cet ouvrage propose une analyse croisée de la crise sanitaire en Belgique, au Canada et en Suisse, avec une attention singulière portée à Bruxelles, Montréal et Genève. Les observations menées dans ces différents contextes permettent d'identifier certaines récurrences en matière d'inégalités sociales de santé. Si celles-ci sont bien connues des professionnels de la santé et documentées dans la littérature scientifique depuis de nombreuses années, les interrogations relatives à leur rôle dans la propagation de la Covid-19 et de ses effets différenciés au sein de la population n'ont été formulées qu'assez tardivement. Produit d'un travail pluridisciplinaire, cet ouvrage met particulièrement l'accent sur les conséquences sociales et de santé des mesures gouvernementales prises durant cette crise sanitaire sur les populations les plus précarisées. En dépit des variations politiques liées aux contextes nationaux, un même cadrage des politiques publiques a prévalu. Il ressort que ce dernier a été dominé par des préoccupations et des données médicales et épidémiologiques, mais il s'est montré très peu sensible aux enjeux des inégalités sociales qui n'ont été abordés qu'à l'occasion des difficultés rencontrées lors des campagnes de vaccination."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"This paper evaluates claims about the large macroeconomic implications of new advances in Artificial intelligence (AI). It starts from a task-based model of AI's effects, working through automation and task complementarities. So long as AI's microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task level, its macroeconomic consequences will be given by a version of Hulten's theorem: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and aggregate productivity gains can be estimated by what fraction of tasks are impacted and average task-level cost savings. Using existing estimates on exposure to AI and productivity improvements at the task level, these macroeconomic effects appear non-trivial but modest – no more than a 0.66% increase in total factor productivity (TFP) over 10 years. The paper then argues that even these estimates could be exaggerated, because early evidence is from easy-to-learn tasks, whereas some of the future effects will come from hard-to-learn tasks, where there are many context-dependent factors affecting decision-making and no objective outcome measures from which to learn successful performance. Consequently, predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years are even more modest and are predicted to be less than 0.53%. I also explore AI's wage and inequality effects. I show theoretically that even when AI improves the productivity of low-skill workers in certain tasks (without creating new tasks for them), this may increase rather than reduce inequality. Empirically, I find that AI advances are unlikely to increase inequality as much as previous automation technologies because their impact is more equally distributed across demographic groups, but there is also no evidence that AI will reduce labour income inequality. Instead, AI is predicted to widen the gap between capital and labour income. Finally, some of the new tasks created by AI may have negative social value (such as the design of algorithms for online manipulation), and I discuss how to incorporate the macroeconomic effects of new tasks that may have negative social value."

"Over the past half century, democracies around the globe have become more unequal, while in the past quarter century, democracy in many countries has frayed. It turns out that these two trends are related: the more unequal a country's distribution of income, the more likely its democracy is to erode. Therefore, policies that reduce income gaps are not only important on economic and moral grounds; they are also an invest ment in the resilience of global demo.."