News About Inequality - October 2008

'Showdown'

• The Economist, October 30, 2008
  California's fight over gay marriage hints at changes in the culture wars.

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'Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty'

• The New York Times, October 30, 2008
  Striking new evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage.

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'Inquiry Targeted 2,000 Foreign Muslims in 2004'

• The New York Times, October 30, 2008
  An operation in 2004 meant to disrupt potential terrorist plots before and after that year's presidential election focused on more than 2,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, but most were found to have done nothing wrong, according to newly disclosed government data.

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'Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty'

• The New York Times, October 29, 2008
  Striking new evidence has emerged of a widespread gap in the cost of health insurance, as women pay much more than men of the same age for individual insurance policies providing identical coverage, according to new data from insurance companies and online brokers.

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'Will the Market Kill Your Marriage?'

• Time Magazine, October 23, 2008
  Recession and divorce, it is said, go together like carriage and horse.

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'Cost of Child Poverty is at Least 25bn Pounds a Year'

• The Guardian, October 23, 2008
  Child poverty is costing Britain at least 25bn pounds a year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals today.

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'Pain All Around, Please'

• The Economist, October 23, 2008
  The importance of fairness in an economic downturn.

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'Working Longer as Jobs Contract'

• The New York Times, October 22, 2008
  IN recent years, many retirement experts have been giving the same unwelcome advice: American workers who are not as rich as Warren E. Buffett should retire three or so years later than they had planned - to ensure that they have a large enough nest egg.

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'In Sour Economy, Some Scale Back on Medications'

• The New York Times, October 21, 2008
  For the first time in at least a decade, the nation's consumers are trying to get by on fewer prescription drugs.

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'Are We Growing Unequal? OECD Media Summary for the Growing Unequal Report'

• OECD, October 21, 2008
  New evidence on changes in poverty and incomes over the past 20 years.

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'Income Gap Growing Wider'

• Toronto Star, October 21, 2008
  Canada lags behind 17 developed countries; has no detailed plan to fight poverty, study finds.

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'Mind the Gap'

• The Economist, October 21, 2008
  If there was any doubt that the rich have improved their lot more than everybody else in recent years, the OECD offers new evidence and urges governments to take action against growing inequality.

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'Post-Cyclone Aid Divides Myanmar Between the Helped and the Helpless'

• The New York Times, October 20, 2008
  The cyclone that ravaged Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta five months ago has led to an unexpectedly robust influx of foreign money and relief workers, showering aid on a small part of Myanmar's population but leaving other, equally desperate parts of the country to fend for themselves.

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'Post-Cyclone Aid Divides Myanmar Between the Helped and the Helpless'

• The New York Times, October 20, 2008
  The cyclone that ravaged Myanmar's Irrawaddy Delta five months ago has led to an unexpectedly robust influx of foreign money and relief workers, showering aid on a small part of Myanmar's population but leaving other, equally desperate parts of the country to fend for themselves.

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'Reinventing the American Dream'

• The Chronicle Review, October 17, 2008
  There are at least two competing versions of the American Dream, and they are not only different but mutually incompatible. Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that they will both need to be reinvented if our children and grandchildren are to inhabit a livable planet.

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'Link by Link'

• The Economist, October 16, 2008
  The crash has been blamed on cheap money, Asian savings and greedy bankers. For many people, deregulation is the prime suspect

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'Capitalism at Bay'

• The Economist, October 16, 2008
  What went wrong and, rather more importantly for the future, what did not.

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'When Fortune Frowned'

• The Economist, October 9, 2008
  The worst financial crisis since the Depression is redrawing the boundaries between government and markets, says Zanny Minton Beddoes (interviewed here). Will they end up in the right place?

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'Citizen Enforcers Take Aim'

• The New York Times, October 6, 2008
  The public urge for punishment that helped delay the passage of Washington's economic rescue plan is more than a simple case of Wall Street loathing, according to scientists who study the psychology of forgiveness and retaliation.

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'End of an Era on Wall Street: Goodbye to All That'

• The New York Times, October 4, 2008
  To be sure, living large and flaunting it are unlikely to exit the American stage, infused as they are in the country's mojo. But with Congress having approved a $700 billion banking bailout, historians, economists and pundits are also busily debating the ways in which Wall Street's demise will filter into the popular culture.

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'The End of Prosperity?'

• Time Magazine, October 2, 2008
  Congress's initial rejection of the Bush Administration's $700 billion bailout plan calls to mind an unhappy precedent. Back in 1930, the Senate passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised duties on some 20,000 imported goods. Historians define this as one of the critical steps that led to the Great Depression - a tipping point when the world realized that partisan self-interest had trumped global leadership on Capitol Hill.