At some point people need to learn that the poverty rate is mostly about the safety net or lack thereof and not the economy. The economy was doing historically well, real wages rising for the first time in decades, etc. And poverty rose because pandemic safety policies expired.

Unfinished business: 50 years after Henderson (14 October 2025). Online panel discussion on the trajectory of Australian poverty and policy since Henderson's landmark report. Panellists: Cassandra Goldie, Bruce Bradbury, Kay Cook, Jeremy Poxon www.eventbrite.com.au/e/unfinished...

More evidence, on top of Baby's First Years experiment, that cash alone in early childhood does not improve children's early developmental trajectory. In contrast, there is strong evidence that policies that improve children's care experiences do improve their early development & adult outcomes.

"it is horribly bad news for the products of our education system. In order to be productive with AI, they need to obtain skills and experience that appear to come from learning by doing, except that they may not have the opportunities to ‘do.’ Second, wage dispersion is going to increase further"

Crisis in Indonesia: "This is not yet about Prabowo. ... for the time being, this movement has been directed at the parliamentarians and the police."

Paul Krugman's substack series on Inequality is now all up on the Stone Center website: stonecenter.gc.cuny.edu/tag/people-p... (originally on his substack: paulkrugman.substack.com)

Exactly. There was tendency in policy research to think that longitudinal data would solve all our causal questions. I think (hope?) we are well past this now.

"the Australian government [should] establish an open, transparent and rigorous process to develop an official poverty measurement framework as soon as possible." Our paper in the latest issue of the Australian Economic Review onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14678462...

Looks like #IZA will continue under the umbrella of the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). Great news

Record low welfare receipt-amongst working-age Australians = 'generation of slackers' www.aph.gov.au/About_Parlia...

"Until we have the resources to properly feed and educate all our children, we shouldn’t worry that we are having too few" @johnquiggin.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/johnquig...

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Two new post doc positions studying wealth and poverty at the Stone Center at CUNY (New York). A fantastic opportunity! cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/... cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

Australian living cost indices: "Living costs for households whose main source of income is government payments recorded the strongest quarterly rise in living costs". Mainly due to ending of energy rebates. www.abs.gov.au/statistics/e...

Strange article in the Oz claiming DSS incoming gov brief included an 'extraordinary bureaucratic plea to bring welfare under control'. Article focuses on the increase in long-term JobSeeker recipients but suggests this is linked to concerns over spending www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/polit...

UNSW Sydney, Green fellowships: Up to 2 years, for people with very strong research profiles. EOIs are about to close. DM me if you want to come to the Social Policy Research Centre. www.unsw.edu.au/research/gre...

"Fearful of losing control of any scrap of virtue, managers needed to relentless check on every little task."

Wow. Research findings with p-values marginally less than 0.05 attract 60 to 110% higher Altmetric scores than those with p-values marginally above 0.05. p-hacking means more popular attention! p-hacking FTW!

This is one of the least appreciated shifts in Australian welfare policy over the last two decades. A remarkable change in how we provide support for the cost of raising kids — and almost no one knows about it.

Branko Milanovic looks at the rise of a homoploutic elite - people with both high income and wealth. Particularly high now in the US (and also China, not shown). branko2f7.substack.com/p/new-capita... Figure: The % in the top decile of income who are also in the top decile by capital income.

Just asked Copilot to translate a 2 page PDF for me. Did a very nice job - except that it simply deleted one (very important) paragraph! The sort of thing a skilled but sloppy human assistant might do. Give me an AI that is more machine-like!

In June: Unemployment rate: 4.3% (from 4.1% in May) Underemployment rate: 6.0% (from 5.9%) Underutilisation rate: 10.3% (from 10%) #ausbiz #auspol

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will not be releasing the 2023-24 Income and Housing Survey due to 'data quality problems'. This is the main Australian data collection for household incomes, poverty and inequality. The last survey was for 2019-20. www.abs.gov.au/media-centre...

"to understand generative AI, we need to accept that linguistic creativity can be completely distinct from intelligence, and also that text does not have to refer to the physical world; ... This all flows from Cultural Theory properly understood." www.programmablemutter.com/p/cultural-t...

Yay! @madselk.bsky.social, @benansell.bsky.social, @mhaslberger.bsky.social, @aslicansunar.bsky.social, Laure Bokobza, and my piece on 𝙬𝙝𝙮 𝙞𝙨 𝙞𝙩 𝙨𝙤 𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙩 𝙬𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙩𝙝 𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙦𝙪𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 is out in @worldpolitics.bsky.social! Find it here: muse.jhu.edu/article/964464

Please support Sociology and Social Policy at Macquarie University: www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/sa...

⚽ Soccer headers affect the brain A new study found that even light, non-concussive headers caused small changes in brain chemistry and function in male players, even without clear symptoms 🔗 sportsmedicine-open.springeropen.com/articles/10.... #SciComm #Football 🧪 @josimarfootball.bsky.social

JobSeeker Payment and Youth Allowance (Other) recipients as at May 2025: 982,870. Highest number of recipients since April 2022. Sources: data.gov.au/data/dataset... and data.gov.au/data/dataset...

In May 2025 there were around 366,200 JobSeeker Payment recipients (41.5% of recipients) with an assessed capacity to work of less than 30 hours a week (a 'partial capacity to work'). The % declined in 2020-21 due to a large increase in the total number JobSeeker recipients. Same sources as above.

Is replacing stamp duty with land tax back on the agenda? A great idea, but there are problems. Here is my proposal: keep stamp duty (a lump sum payment paid by purchasers) but give it the economic properties of a land tax. bsky.app/profile/bruc... www.smh.com.au/politics/fed...

Almost one-half of families with children in poverty who are not working contain an adult with a disability or limiting health condition. Read more in our recent research on child poverty ⤵️ buff.ly/hbdiilh

One guy down the hall talking with another guy down the hall. Paul Krugman and Branko Milanovic discuss global inequality, elephants, life chances, Rawls, and more. @pkrugman.bsky.social @brankomilan.bsky.social @stone-lis.bsky.social @lisdata.bsky.social paulkrugman.substack.com/p/global-ine...

🚨 Major release alert We’re thrilled to launch lissyrtools v0.2.0 — our R package that makes working with LIS & LWS microdata simpler, faster, and clearer 📦 🧵 1/12

In Australia, what fraction of unemployed people receive an income support payment? CoPilot tells me 80% - which is probably the popular perception. In fact, its about half that, and its been steadily decreasing over time - even for single people (not affected by the spouse income test).

In Crikey today I take a close look at more problems in Australia’s welfare system. The so-called Targeted Compliance Framework is in crisis, with the Ombudsman investigating and three separate reviews. The whole thing may well be unlawful www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/12/a...

Australian household incomes finally inching upwards again.

"Australia’s system of award wages are, on average, the highest minimum wages in the developed world." Well, except that they are job specific and well over what we label as the National Minimum Wage. us11.campaign-archive.com?e=357b2b4c0b...

At the blog I wrote about a new paper by @natewilmers.bsky.social , @zparolin.bsky.social , and @lukaslehner.bsky.social . We're living in a novel era of inequality discordance. What's going on?! asocial.substack.com/p/inequality...

Australian rents: price indices for capital city and regional rental stock. Since 2018, capital city rent increases were _less_ than the overall CPI (to March 2025, 124.5), but regional areas higher. www.abs.gov.au/articles/lat...

Families' wealth in 1427 predicts their wealth in 2011.

"Calls for tripling of [Chinese] rural pensions"

I'm not at ANU, but it's great to see an Australian University Council candidate who is taking university accountability seriously - rather than the usual platitudes that we see in candidate statements.

ABS to planning to remove the Basic Microdata from the 2026 Australian Census data release and replace it with synthetic data. A major backwards step. Synthetic data will be unable to capture the complexity of interactions the microdata will show. #Census2026 www.abs.gov.au/statistics/r...

Quite the quote.

"My suspicion is that when DEI ideas were first taking shape, people gravitated toward “equity” language precisely because it had this looseness about it." Why philosophers hate that ‘equity’ meme open.substack.com/pub/josephhe...

Here's an update on sociology (and some demography) journal editorial polices with regard to sharing preprints before submission and after acceptance. A big improvement from the last edition of this table. With one exception.

There are two main problems with reform in this area (in most countries). Liquidity (asset rich, income poor people) and transition. Reforming stamp duty to make it have similar properties to land tax is my solution to these. www.austaxpolicy.com/stamp-duty-r...

"You can either look back to some lost Tradcath Eden in which workers were valued and everyone knew their place, or look forward to a post-Singularity utopia ... . But you can’t plausibly aspire to both at once, however much Vance wishes that you could." www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-reacti...