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to determine whether increase in income inequity is bad or good, we should also study whether there is social mobility.  If social mobility remains strong, income inequality would be less of an issue. But looking at income inequality, which is the gap between those with very high income and those with very low income, is not sufficient, because one has to examine the poverty rate to see how widespread the impact of poverty may be.  If the poverty rate is high, coupled with income inequality, social mobility is likely to be low. Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/oxfam-inequality-index-singapore-minimum-wage-10815924

Why has housing become so expensive in high-productivity places? It is true that there are geographic constraints (Manhattan isn't getting any bigger) but zoning and other land use restrictions including historical and environmental "protection" are reducing the amount of land available for housing and how much building can be done on a given piece of land. As a result, in places with lots of restrictions on land use increased demand for housing shows up mostly in house prices rather than in house quantities. In the past, when a city like New York became more productive it attracted the poor and rich alike and as the poor moved in more housing was built and the wages and productivity of the poor increased and national inequality declined. Now, when a city like San Jose becomes more productive, people try to move to the city but housing doesn't expand so the price of housing rises and only the highly skilled can live in the city. The end result is high-skilled people living in high-productivity cities and low-skilled people live in low-productivity cities. On a national level, land restrictions mean less mobility, lower national productivity and increased income and geographic inequality.

"Modern societies are often highly mobile, with people moving around for work, school or just to start afresh. The research found that the more people have moved around the country, the more they tend to have a disposable view of both objects and close social ties."

male participants of the '6-Day Sample Study' who achieved or exceeded career goals they set at the age of 18 were found to believe, in older age, that life had more meaning. "In men," explains Brett, "unstable early careers or lack of goal attainment appears to be negatively related to their subsequent outlook on life, and the degree to which life makes sense in old age." Women were similarly found to attach importance to life achievements, but different ones to those valued by men. Whilst a stable and established career topped the list of factors conducive to male happiness, female participants were found to be most satisfied and contented once they had reached a high level of education or experienced upward social mobility.

I was struck by this paragraph from the lead story in the Sunday edition of the Times, which charts the unlikely path New York's marriage equality bill took to passage late last Friday night (read the whole thing, by the way, it's a wonderful snapshot of modern American politics in action: "…the donors in the room - the billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, joined by hedge fund mangers Cliff Asness and Daniel Loeb - had the influence and the money to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure. And they were inclined to see the issue as one of personal freedom, consistent with libertarian views. Within days, the wealthy Republicans sent back word: They were on board. Each of them cut six-figure checks to the lobbying campaign that eventually totaled more than $1 million" In other words, if a particular billionaire hadn't have had a gay son, we might not be looking at legalized same sex marriage in the most populous state yet.

"The real reason for Hong Kong's decline, is the failure/irresponsibility of Hong Kong's elite ruling class. Maybe to many people's surprise, since its handover to China, Hong Kong has effectively been ruled by the local elites, NOT by Beijing. Sure, Beijing appoints the governor, but the governors are locals, and there was never any direct "order" from Beijing, well, sorta until recently, when Beijing began to see the failure of the local Hong Kong government. Those elites are composed of mega real estate/business tycoons. Being the elites in the most capitalist city-state in the world gives them tremendous wealth and power, but to the disappointment of Spider-man, with that great power there's no great responsibilities. The ruling class mega riches don't see income inequality as a problem, but a badge of honor for themselves, to show how "they've made it", while all the poors are just not smart/hardworking enough. Any efforts to "appease the poor" are hindered by the ruling business-politician symbiotics, because those efforts get in their way of accumulating more wealth. The frustration of the youth and the poor stems from the sense of inequality, unfairness and despair as they see no chances of upward mobility. Yet, even the poorest in Hong Kong is a capitalist at heart, so they are poor not because of the rich, and they certainly do work hard, then who's to blame? China, Beijing, the mainlanders, because they are evil, communist, denying tian'anmen square, yada yada..."

"There is systematic abuse of the family members of insurgents," Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, and an expert on the Caucasus, said in a telephone interview. "There can be short-term results, but I wouldn't call it success," she said. "You can prevent some episodes of violence at the moment, but you are radicalizing whole communities." "When innocent Muslims are targeted for the expediency of security services, this legitimizes the jihadist cause," she said.

"My husband and I have been married 20 years, and the secret to our marriage is as followed: We have three kids, and we have a dog. We decided several years ago that if one person left the other one, the person who left would have to take all three kids, and the person who didn't leave would get the dog," she said. "And that has kept our marriage so strong."

In new work in the Journal of Research in Personality, psychologists from the University of Virginia quizzed college students about their geographical preferences and found that introverts prefer the mountains while extroverts prefer the ocean. The researchers found more evidence for this when they looked at who actually lives where: Residents of especially mountainous states were more introverted on average than their counterparts who live in flatter places. This finding is fairly intuitive. In the mountains one can easily find seclusion and isolation. Meanwhile, beaches tend to be crowded places full of seminude strangers, a potentially unappealing scene for introverts but exactly the point for extroverts.

"identical twins, whether reared together or reared apart, were more similar to each other than their fraternal counterparts were for traits like personality and, more controversial, intelligence. One unexpected finding in his research suggested that the effect of a pair's shared environment - say, their parents - had little bearing on personality. Genes and unique experiences - a semester abroad, an important friend - were more influential."

Workers across the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about toiling 12- to 16-hour days (often without overtime pay) and experiencing anxiety attacks and exhaustion. Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic. The people who can compete and succeed in this culture are an ever-narrower slice of American society: largely young people who are healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members. An individual company can of course favor these individuals, as health insurers once did, and then pass them off to other businesses when they become parents or need to tend to their own parents. But this model of winning at all costs reinforces a distinctive American pathology of not making room for caregiving. The result: We hemorrhage talent and hollow out our society.

Over and over, Dr. Cheryan and her colleagues have found that female students are more interested in enrolling in a computer class if they are shown a classroom (whether virtual or real) decorated not with "Star Wars" posters, science-fiction books, computer parts and tech magazines, but with a more neutral décor - art and nature posters, coffee makers, plants and general-interest magazines. The researchers also found that cultural stereotypes about computer scientists strongly influenced young women's desire to take classes in the field. At a young age, girls already hold stereotypes of computer scientists as socially isolated young men whose genius is the result of genetics rather than hard work. Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.

the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more equally to the team's discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.

 As another young professor told me, with the air of reverent exasperation that people use to talk about her, ''Alice used a writing style that today you can't really use in the social sciences.'' He sighed and began to trail off. ''In the past,'' he said with some astonishment, ''they really did write that way.'' The book smacked, some sociologists argued, of a kind of swaggering adventurism that the discipline had long gotten over. Goffman became a proxy for old and unsettled arguments about ethnography that extended far beyond her own particular case. What is the continuing role of the qualitative in an era devoted to data? When the politics of representation have become so fraught, who gets to write about whom?

Justice Kan, noting that the issue of whether a woman can be charged under section 376A had not been decided before, said: "The charges cannot stand even after (Zunika) had pleaded guilty to them. "The reference to a person who has a penis cannot be construed to include a woman without doing violence to common sense and anatomy", he added, noting that the law is clearly not gender-neutral and that "we should be slow to suggest or infer the contrary."

Imagine yourself on the socioeconomic ladder with one end of a rubber band around your ankle and the other around your parents' rung. The strength of the rubber determines how hard it is for you to escape the rung on which you were born. If your parents are high on the ladder, the band will pull you up should you fall; if they are low, it will drag you down when you start to rise. Economists represent this concept with a number they call "intergenerational earnings elasticity," or IGE, which measures how much of a child's deviation from average income can be accounted for by the parents' income. An IGE of zero means that there's no relationship at all between parents' income and that of their offspring. An IGE of one says that the destiny of a child is to end up right where she came into the world. According to Miles Corak, an economics professor at the City University of New York, half a century ago IGE in America was less than 0.3. Today, it is about 0.5. In America, the game is half over once you've selected your parents.

"My research suggests that those concerns are real, and millennials really are building wealth more slowly than the other working generations. But they are not insurmountable-as long as millennials are willing and able to work longer than their parents and grandparents did. A comparison of millennials (adults currently ages 25 to 35) with earlier cohorts (Gen-Xers and late baby boomers) when they were the same age shows that even though a higher percentage of both millennial men and women have college degrees, they are behind in almost every economic dimension."