Claus Offe
Varieties of Inequality
What Can Be Done About Them and Why It Must Be Done
Thursday, 11 June 2015, 6:00pm - 7:30pm,
IWM library
Two
things are established beyond any reasonable doubt. First, inequality of income and, even more so, wealth have steadily increased in the OECD world since the 1980s. Second, prevailing levels and drivers of inequality are not just obscene in terms of any conceivable
notion of social justice; they are also severely damaging for the entire economies, societies and polities affected, not just for the losers. The puzzle, both theoretical and very practical, is why capitalist democracies allow the serious self-inflicted damage
of widening inequality to continue. One possibly promising practical answer is that (re)distributive policies are reframed so that they focus not on “the poor” nor on “the worker”, but on the citizen as the bearer and beneficiary of universal economic rights
as distributive claims.
http://www.iwm.at/events/event/varieties-of-inequality/
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Altzinger Wilfried
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Department of Economics
Welthandelsplatz 1 / D4, Level 2 (2.032)
A-1020 Vienna
http://www.wu.ac.at/vw1/m/altzing
++ 43 676 8213 4511
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