Unintuitive trends in income inequality

Why don’t official statistics show an increase in income inequality?

The British Academy
Nov 4 · 4 min read

Professor Jonathan Bradshaw FBA

Why are the UK official statistics not showing an increase in income poverty given the trends Peter Taylor-Gooby describes in The Inequality Paradox? The ONS historical series ‘The effects of taxes and benefits on household incomes’ shows the Gini coefficient of net disposable income increasing sharply in the 1980s, broadly stable in the 1990s and fluctuating downwards since around 2000. (The…

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The Inequality Paradox

Inequalities in income and wealth are growing, while the meaning of ‘inequality’ is narrowing.

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