Learning to labour unequally: understanding the relationship between cultural production,cultural consumption and inequality

Inequality has become essential to understanding contemporary society and is at the forefront of media, political and practice discussions of the future of the arts, particularly in the UK. Whilst there is a wealth of work on traditional areas of inequality, such as those associated with income or gender, the relationship between culture, specifically cultural value, and inequality is comparatively under-researched.

The article considers inequality and cultural value from two points of view: how cultural value is consumed and how it is produced. The paper argues that these two activities are absolutely essential to understanding the relationship between culture and social inequality, but that the two activities have traditionally been considered separately in both academic research and public policy, despite the importance of culture to British and thus international policy agendas. The article uses the example of higher education in the UK to think through the relationship between cultural consumption and production. In doing, so the article maps out a productive possibility for a new research agenda, by sketching where and how research might link cultural consumption and production to better understand inequality.     

人口老龄化与代际财政不平等——基于代际账户核算法的模拟分析

本文采用代际账户核算方法,模拟测算了中国“现存代”和“未来代”的净税收负担值,探讨人口老龄化与代际财政不平等的关系。结果显示：如果保持当前财税制度和社会保障体制不变,未来代的净税收负担要明显高于现存代,中国存在较为严重的代际财政不平等问题,而且未来人口老龄化的进程越快,代际财政不平等程度就越高;但是,老龄化与代际财政不平等的关系还取决于劳动生产率和折现率的变化,折现率越低以及劳动生产率的增长率越高,将会缓解老龄化对代际财政不平等的冲击。据此本文认为,应逐步放开生育政策、延长退休年龄、提高劳动生产率,以改善老龄化背景下的代际财政失衡状况。     

Not all luck is created equal: Sources of income inequality and willingness to redistribute

Despite steadily rising inequality in the US over the last few decades, demand for increasing tax rates and redistribution has not increased. A growing literature argues that one reason for this is that people might perceive inequality to be fair. This literature has documented that Americans tend to perceive economic inequality stemming from merit as being fair and inequality stemming from luck as unfair. However, “lucky breaks” in the real world do not necessarily come from a lottery or random chance but from the actions of the government favoring a “lucky” few. People might be more willing to redistribute if it compensates those negatively affected by government action. Using an online experiment we show that luck stemming from the action of a government-like actor influences individuals’ desire to redistribute earnings making them more likely to favor redistribution than in instances where inequality is caused by merit or by random luck.     

Does globalization drive long-run inequality within OECD countries? A guide to policy making

We analyse around four decades of annual time-series data revisiting the long-run relationship between globalization and income inequality for 24 OECD member countries across different geographical regions, applying the Yamamoto-Kurozumi multivariate vector autoregression (VAR) framework. We observe that rapid globalization is not the key cause of rising long-run intra country inequality. This result is obtained by controlling for growth, terms of trade, minimum wage legislation, and unionization and found robust by further controlling education. Most of the countries in our study with a long-run relationship reveal the robust reverse causal impact of rising globalization on reducing inequality. Our impulse response breakdown across various sub-components of globalization suggests that economic globalization is not a primary contributor to long-run inequality for developed industrialized countries. Our framework guides future research to concentrate more on country-specific relationships, with policy guidance tailored for each country based on their level of economic development and institutional quality.     

Join to connect? Voluntary involvement,social capital,and socioeconomic inequalities

Access to social capital is stratified by socioeconomic status and has been cross-sectionally linked to involvement in voluntary organizations. Yet, we know little about the origin and interplay of these empirical regularities. Regression analyses on German panel data (SC6-NEPS) reveal that people rich in social capital join organizations more often (selection). Furthermore, joiners access more and higher-status social capital after joining (socializing opportunities). Low-status individuals disproportionally extend their reach towards higher positions through involvement but join less often. Compared to a counterfactual situation in which nobody joins, current involvement patterns marginally reduce some socioeconomic inequalities in access to social capital.     

Cognitive and non-cognitive traits and the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality

This paper studies the roles of cognitive and non-cognitive characteristics in a standard Roemerian Inequality of Opportunity (IOP) model. Using Australian microdata, we model the effects of individuals’ backgrounds and their psychological traits on two adult income variables. We find that measurable psychological traits (intelligence, locus of control, big five personality traits) are slightly more important than background characteristics (such as race, gender, social class at birth) in explaining income disparities. However, the fraction of IOP confounded by psychological factors is small (11%–12%), which suggests that background inequalities do not meaningfully reflect differences in cognitive or non-cognitive ability.