Tag: Inequality

[Link] Kissing and Income Inequality

“Research that makes people laugh, then think” is what the IgNobel Prizes celebrate, since 1991

In 2020, the IgNobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Christopher Watkins & 8 others, for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries’ national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.

They explain what they did, & why they did it in this short podcast.

Intended consequences? [Article]

The world’s rich & powerful meet every January to discuss ways, apparently, to alleviate the world’s manifold problems (or if you like conspiracies, to decide how to collectively direct the exploitation of the rest of the world). The Davos summit draws an eclectic mix of businessmen & politicians from around the world. If you ignored the mainstream media (controlled of course by those same rich folk), you may (or may not) be surprised to hear that, according to a recent Oxfam report, merely the increase in the wealth of the world’s top 100 wealthy people was enough to end the entire world’s poverty and still have 3/4ths left over. As the executive director of Oxfam notes, “We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true.”