Why the world is getting better but no one notices
Imagine that things are getting better, hugely better, but no one knows. You might take me for a hopeless optimist in saying that things are getting better, but far from it, it is actually a cold look at the data that makes any other view seem nonsensical. It also hardly matters how you define progress, as the world and life in Germany is getting better in almost any regard.
With how man working hours are people happy?
How many hours should people work? I am pretty sure you, and everyone you know, has asked that question. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, I can actually show with how many working hours people are most satisfied on average. And the results are pretty strange. In short, while mothers can be satisfied with their life while working long or short hours, fathers become unsatisfied with their life when
Does inequality make people unhappy?
In every society, some have more income than others. In some societies, some have much more income than others. But are people that live in more equal societies happier with their life? The prevailing view is that income inequality breeds unhappiness. But does someone from Sweden really wake up in the morning to thank god that she does not live in a country with more inequality? Probably not… Indeed, empirical
Inequality and trade unions as prey and predator
Imagine a population of wolves and sheep. Wolves eat sheep. The wolve population grows, as long as there are sheep. But once the wolves have eaten all the sheep, the wolves starve and die. When the wolves are gone, the sheep population can recover. This is a basic prey and predator model. Essentially, it shows how trade union power is linked to inequality, trade unions are the wolves and inequality
How we get used to income inequality
In a recent paper I wrote, I can show that when more income inequality exists in a country, people also start to accept more income inequality. This means that when inequality increases in a country, after 3 to 4 years, people have adapted their social justice views to this and have accepted the increased inequality. This shows why people are not more outraged by rising inequality, they simply seem to
How have views on fair social inequality changed in the US since 1950?
Hey there, I thought I would let you in on my newest research results. I wanted to know how, with increasing social inequality, conceptions of ‘fair’ social inequality have changed? I will show you in the following, how justice norms in the media have changed from favoring a more egalitarian distribution of incomes to favoring more social inequality. In order to understand this, I have looked at changes in income
Germany does not have the 1 percent
Hey, I just did some research with Piketty and Saez numbers and Germany did not have the rise in income of the 1 percent.