Getting Real About Inequality is a contributed reader that gives instructors a set of materials to help them moderate civil, productive, and social science-based discussions with their students about social statuses and identities. It is organized around myths and stereotypes that students might already believe or be familiar with, and employs an intersectional perspective to underscore the nuanced mechanisms of power and inequality that are often lost in everyday discourse.

Getting Real About Inequality is a contributed reader for undergraduate courses in Race/Class/Gender, Social Inequality, or the Social Construction of Difference and Inequality. It gives instructors in these courses a set of materials to help them moderate civil, productive, and social science-based discussions with their students about social statuses and identities. Like the book it is modeled after, Getting Real About Race, it is organized around myths and stereotypes that students might already believe or be familiar with through the media or popular culture. A panel of expert contributors were enlisted to write short, accessible essays address the same questions (What is the myth or stereotype under investigation? How do we know that the myth or stereotype is widespread? What does the empirical data tell us?) and provide the same pedagogical features (a summary of the research data, discussion questions, suggestions for further study, suggested activities and assignments). All of pieces in the book employ an intersectional perspective, to help students see the nuanced mechanisms of power and inequality that are often lost in everyday discourse.

Getting Real About Inequality is a contributed reader that gives instructors a set of materials to help them moderate civil, productive, and social science-based discussions with their students about social statuses and identities. It is organized around myths and stereotypes that students might already believe or be familiar with, and employs an intersectional perspective to underscore the nuanced mechanisms of power and inequality that are often lost in everyday discourse.

________________ As seen on Sky News All Out Politics ‘There’s no understanding global inequality without understanding its history. In The Divide, Jason Hickel brilliantly lays it out, layer upon layer, until you are left reeling with the outrage of it all.’ - Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics · The richest eight people control more wealth than the poorest half of the world combined. · Today, 60 per cent of the world’s population lives on less than $5 a day. · Though global real GDP has nearly tripled since 1980, 1.1 billion more people are now living in poverty. For decades we have been told a story: that development is working, that poverty is a natural phenomenon and will be eradicated through aid by 2030. But just because it is a comforting tale doesn’t make it true. Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms, and aid only helps to hide this. Drawing on pioneering research and years of first-hand experience, The Divide tracks the evolution of global inequality – from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus to the present day – offering revelatory answers to some of humanity’s greatest problems. It is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change for the better.

Consumption baskets vary across households and inflation rates vary across goods. As a result, standard consumer price index (CPI) inflation may provide a misleading measure of the inflation actually faced by poor households, more so the more unequal the distribution of aggregate consumption across households. Likewise, changes in observed nominal consumption inequality may be very different from those in true inequality, that is, that measured using household-specific CPIs. The authors explore empirically these issues using household data covering nine episodes from four Latin American countries (Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru). They find that in these countries standard CPI inflation typically reflects the inflation rate faced by a rich consumer located in the 80 to 90 percentile of the distribution of consumption expenditure. In most episodes the authors also find that inflation was anti-rich-that is, the inflation faced by the richest consumers was higher than the inflation faced by the poorest consumers. As a result of this bias, the observed increases in nominal inequality generally exceed the actual changes in real inequality. These results are robust to correcting for quality change bias in the CPI, to the use of alternative price indices, and to the use of alternative inequality measures.

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.