In the aftermath of past pandemics, fiscal policy played an important role in reducing or amplifying income inequality. This column predicts the likely distributional effects of Covid-19 by analysing evidence from five previous outbreaks (SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola, and Zika). It finds that severe austerity measures were associated with inequality increases three times greater
Book Buzz: Picture Books publishersweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from publishersweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
An Equality Worth Defending
In our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote of self-evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and condemned government that was destructive of those ends.
Given how important that document was, with its signers putting all of those ends at risk, there had to be a high level of agreement about what “created equal” meant (sadly, with the exception of slaves). Since then, however, discussion of equality has become a source of confusion and contradiction.
Monday, April 05, 2021
View Larger +
A user in a low-level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free, according to multiple news reports. The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India, writes Business Insider. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses. While Facebook says that the vulnerability that allowed this information to be scraped was patched in August 2019, that does nothing to protect the information that has already been leaked, wrote Jason Aten for Inc.com. It also does nothing to alleviate concerns that Facebook collects and monetizes its users personal information, but has a poor record of protecting that information f