Abstract
There are those who recognise that Britain is becoming a more unequal, more brutal and degraded country, but they believe nothing can be done about that. Despair offers great comfort. Once well into it, you can give up worrying about the rest of the world and cheerfully cultivate your own garden. Before looking more closely at their standpoint we should step back and reflect briefly on our times.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction. Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1991.
TH Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1950.
Charles Murray, Losing Ground: America’s Social Policy, 1950–1980, New York, Basic Books, 1984.
Gordon Tullock, Welfare for the Well-to-do, Dallas, Fisher Institute, 1983
For a moderate example, see Julianle Grand, The Strategy of Equality. Redistribution and the Social Services, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1982.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, London, Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1944
Claude Fischer et al., Inequality by Design. Cracking the Bell Curve Myth, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996.
AB Atkinson, ‘Seeking to explain the distribution of income’, in John Hills (ed.), New Inequalities, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 22.
William Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society, London, Allen & Unwin, 1994
Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Inquiry into Income and Wealth, vol. 2, York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1995, p. 47.
This point was first made with supporting evidence from particular urban areas by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 72–92.
Carey Oppenheim and Lisa Harker, Poverty: The Facts, London, Child Poverty Action Group, 1996, p. 36.
Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Population Trends, London, HMSO, 1993.
See, for example, Ray Pahl, Divisions of Labour, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984.
Colin Williams, ‘Social and spatial inequalities in the informal economy: some evidence from the European Community’, Area, 25(4), 1993, p. 358
Colin Williams and Jan Windebank, ‘Black market work in the European Community: peripheral work for peripheral localities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 19(1), 1995, p. 23.
David Donnison, Long-term Unemployment in Northern Ireland, Belfast, Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, 1996, pp. 31–2.
Nina Oldfield and Autumn Yu, The Cost of a Child, London, Child Poverty Action Group, 1993.
Keith Joseph and Jonathan Sumption, Equality, London, John Murray, 1979.
Richard Freeman and Lawrence Katz (eds), Differences and Changes in Wage Structures, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995
Copyright information
© 1998 David Donnison
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Donnison, D. (1998). Can Anything Be Done?. In: Policies for a Just Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26058-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26058-4_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-65645-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26058-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)