Inequality & Distribution

Can society continue its long-run trajectory and commit to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can advance equality?

Peter Barnes, the entrepreneur and author of the recently published book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property, talks about how new conceptions of property - a universal commons - could fundamentally transform capitalism to make it more ecologically and socially sustainable.

The tradition of abandoning our elderly populations needs to end. Sarita Mohanty talks with Rob Johnson about her work at the SCAN Foundation, and the critical importance of combating “ageism” to strengthening our society. Learn more: https://www.thescanfoundation.org/

The social cost of America’s economic royalty

Anand Giridharadas, writer and author of the book, Winners Take All, discusses the multiple crises we are currently facing, how they could provide an impetus for real change, and how US and global elites are failing to live up to the challenge.

Max Lawson, head of Oxfam International’s Inequality Policy program, discusses Oxfam’s latest inequality report, “Inequality Kills,” which highlights the extreme growth in wealth of the billionaire class during the pandemic and how this has had a direct effect on the health and survival of the world’s bottom 50%.

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

EEO-1 employment data document the vast over-representation of Asian Americans and vast under-representation of African Americans at tech companies in recent years. How did this happen?

In a society where asset ownership is incredibly unequal, social mobility becomes severely diminished

In a society where asset ownership is incredibly unequal, social mobility become severely diminished

What does Biden’s economic policy mean for the future?

Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at UMass Amherst, discuss how first world countries are protecting pharma companies’ exorbitant profits, at the expense of vaccinating people living in the Global South and thereby also endangering everyone in the world.

The governance of technology is a new challenge. The Recovery Plans is encouraging the digital transformation of our economies. An acceleration of technological change is bound to deeply affect labor markets and income distribution. While labor-market adaptation is likely to stave off permanent high unemployment, it cannot be counted on to prevent a sharp rise in inequality.

The world won’t emerge from the pandemic until the pandemic is controlled everywhere, and this is a special concern because of the new mutations that are likely to arise where the disease is running its course. So too, the world won’t have a robust economic recovery until at least most of the world is on the course to prosperity. Global growth is far more muted now than then, and inward-looking policies in some of the nations where growth has been restored have resulted in an increase in their trade surplus, attenuating the global impact of their recovery.

Our world is full of fault lines—growing inequality in income and opportunity; systemic racism; health and economic crises from a global pandemic; mistrust of experts; the existential threat of climate change; deep threats to employment in a digital economy with robotics on the rise. These fundamental problems and others like them stem from a common crisis in values.