Category: Uncategorized
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Why is welfare tourism such a big thing? Because rich people care about it
Ipsos Mori (a partner of King’s) has an interesting report on public attitudes to immigration in Britain which came out on January 2. In relation to the previous post on welfare tourism, there is one graph that I found particularly interesting (below). It shows the main reasons given by people who consider immigration to be a…
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How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
In 2000, economist Steven Levitt and sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics about the internal wage structure of a Chicago drug gang. This piece would later serve as a basis for a chapter in Levitt’s (and Dubner’s) best seller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything…
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The Vicious Circle of Inequality, Debt, Crisis, and Austerity
We are in a time of austerity. Public services are being cut, social benefits are being capped, and real wages are shrinking. In the last 5 years, the UK has gone through a big wage squeeze: real wages have declined by 5.5% since 2010, on par with countries such as Greece and Portugal. All these…
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The Media as a Chinese Whisper Machine
In his book (based on a public lecture) on Television, Bourdieu uses a good concept to describe how information is produced within the news media: he calls it the “circular circulation of information”. In a nutshell, the main idea is that, despite its function as a window open to the world, the media actually work…
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Brazilian Guido Fawkes Masks and Capitalism as a Giant Squid
This is a factory in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro that produces Guido Fawkes masks – those used by Anonymous. The owner says they’re producing 800 a day to supply the protests that have been taking place in Brazil over the last few weeks. The masks have also been used by the Occupy movement.…
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The Europeanization of Portuguese Democracy (Book Review)
Nuno Severiano Teixeira and António Costa Pinto (eds) (2012) The Europeanization of Portuguese Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. 278pp, £38.00, ISBN 978 0 88033 946 9. Buy it here This book analyses the Europeanisation of democracy in Portugal between the Carnation Revolution in 1974 until about 2010. Portugal has recently come to the…
Alexandre Afonso 