The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
The news of society's growing inequality makes all of us uneasy. But why? In this TED Talk, behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, reveals some new, surprising research about what we think is fair, as far as how wealth is distributed over societies. He then shows how public perception stacks up to real statistics. What he exposes is an incredible knowledge gap in terms of what people think the level of inequality is compared to the reality. Ariely’s research findings got really interesting...
Jason Hickel -
International development is in serious crisis. Charities are worried about the fact that public support for development is waning – that people just don’t seem to ‘buy it’ any more. According to a recent report by the development umbrella group Bond, ‘Efforts to eradicate poverty appear to many members of the public to have failed, and scepticism about the effectiveness of aid and global development initiatives has risen.’ People are less and less likely...
Common Dreams -
Global income inequality has returned to levels recorded in the 1820s—when the Industrial Revolution produced sizable wealth gaps between the rich and poor—according to a new report released Thursday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The sweeping study, "How Was Life? Global Well-Being Since 1820," uses historical data from eight world regions to present for the first time "systematic evidence" of trends in areas such as...
Oxford University Professor, Danny Dorling, unpacks the latest research into how the lives and ideas of the 1% impact the remaining 99% in the UK. He says there’s a new cleavage opening up. The 1% used to have a more diverse group of professions, but increasingly it is concentrated in the financial sector. Britain’s 2,200 bankers earn over a million euros annually. In comparison Swiss bankers earn only half as much. A consequence of this growing division is that the UK now has...
SACSIS caught up with constitutional law expert Prof. Pierre de Vos, author of the blog, Constitutionally Speaking, to talk about how the South African constitution could be applied to deal with South Africa’s most pressing challenge, our country’s inequality.
On the question of whether our constitution could be applied to encourage more redistributive measures, de Vos argues that the constitution doesn’t have the power to change South Africa’s economic policies....
In late July 2014 SACSIS hosted a reflection workshop for our team of writers. Prof. Steven Friedman, Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Johannesburg, was asked to initiate the discussion with a lecture on the question: "What is the role of the social justice commentator in public interest journalism?"
Friedman framed his address around the question, "How do ideas change society?"
His key argument was that change is a complex and...
