Introduction In Part I, I discussed origins, but three cultural and historical differences struck me fairly immediately when I came to work in England in 1981. First, many scientists I met seemed to have little knowledge of the humanities. Correspondingly, knowledge of science seemed lacking among non-scientists. I was hardly the first to notice. C.P…. Read more
Category:
Inequality
Gang culture for toffs? understanding the right wing mind – part three
Sanna Marin, the Finnish Prime minister, who I’ve referred to previously, also has another good quote: I have never thought about my age or gender. I think more about the motivations that brought me into politics. Here is somebody concerned not about her interest group (or ‘gang’), but fired up about why she wants to… Read more
UK Deprivation by Constituency and Voting Patterns in England and NI
Introduction Deprivation and inequality have been regular themes on Progressive Pulse but a very interesting visualisation of deprivation by constituency has been published online by Prof. Alasdair Rae of the University of Sheffield (@undertheraedar on Twitter), displayed in Fig. 1. There is more on the underlying methodology and data here. This is a high-resolution image,… Read more
Normality is the problem
Most will be aware of recent large demonstrations in Chile in favour of greater equality. These often comprised around a million people – a remarkable turnout in a country with a total population of about 19 million. Demonstrators were met with violent military intervention and curfews. The state of emergency has now been rescinded and… Read more
Understanding monetary ‘plumbing’ and where it gets us
There is an interesting podcast from the American site Macro’n Cheese with the Scottish Professor Mark Blyth, who, though he long ago emigrated and has become Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University in the US, he has certainly managed to hang to most of his Dundonian dialect! I have to say I usually… Read more
Westminster: Most Similar Country Ireland? – A new EU Regional Productivity Analysis
Introduction An interesting paper “The big European sort? The diverging fortunes of Europe’s regions” has been published by the Centre for European Reform (CER). Such papers are of great interest at PP. The paper analyses regional productivity. As a single metric productivity is one of the best, but as Charles Adams says, in order to… Read more
Regional inequality: the utility of many metrics
To measure – political success or anything else – we need to choose the right metrics. It is widely recognised that GDP per capita or average income is not necessarily that useful. A point that must be repeated over and over is that when in comes to wealth and income, it is not the crude average… Read more