The U.S. economy is growing at the fastest pace in five years, American companies are earning record profits and unemployment is at the lowest level in almost half a century.

As a sociologist who studies feminist activism, I often get asked when and how the #MeToo movement is going to trickle down. This is a fair question, and not one easy to answer.

In the wake of controversial and widely publicized incidents involving the use of deadly force by the police against racial and ethnic minorities, President Obama appointed the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in 2015 to propose ways to improve policing in the U.S.

The right would like us to believe that the inequality we see in the United States, and increasingly in other countries, is a natural outcome of market processes.

Forida, 22, lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with her infant son and husband. They live in a dark compound built mostly of tin and wood with six other families and just one toilet. It floods and leaks when it rains, and beside the compound is a polluted pond that attracts mosquitoes. Forida says that if she were paid a little more money, she could one day send her son to school. She could live happily; her family could live a better life.

Sorry to deliver the news, but it’s time to worry about the next crash. The combination of stagnant wages with most economic gains going to the top is once again endangering the economy.

There is a significant perception gap between what the general public think about why people become homeless, and what people who have experienced homelessness say

Kelsey Hrubes knew she had a challenge on her hands when she visited Germany as a study abroad student back in 2015. “I was forced to adapt to cultural norms I had never considered before and try to comprehend everything in a new language,” recalls Hrubes, a software engineer at Microsoft and 2017 Iowa State graduate in German and computer science.

One in every five people in the UK today are living in poverty – that is, living with a household income below 60% of the median national income when housing costs are considered. Food is a key component of household budgets. Poverty is linked directly to how people access food.

A family in India needs fresh water. But this family can’t just turn on a tap. Instead, the women in the household must walk to fetch it, sometimes travelling miles carrying plastic or earthenware pots, possibly with a child or two in tow, to the nearest safe source – regularly repeating the journey up to three times a day.

Halloween is a time when cultural norms are turned upside down: we encourage children to dress up as creatures from nightmares – witches, zombies, vampires – and we send them out to wander the streets in the dark, demanding sweets from strangers.

The purpose of our social, economic and political systems is to enable all Australians to lead good lives. Australia is doing well on some fronts. It ranks third out of 188 countries on the UN Human Development Index, which takes into account life expectancy, education and national income per capita. We also rank 19th on national income per capita.

You might expect that the more equal opportunities in these countries might reduce other differences between the genders, such as what kind of jobs people are more likely to have, or personality traits such as kindness or a tendency for risk-taking.

Why do the richest 1% of Americans take 20% of national income, but the richest 1% of Danes only 6%? Why have affluent British people seen their share of national income double since 1980, while over the same period, the income share of wealthy Dutch hasn’t budged?

If the United States doesn’t address rising inequality, the middle class could start feeling the effects in the form of fewer government services, one expert says.

Newly released data on life expectancy across the U.S. shows that where we live matters for how long we live. A person in the U.S. can expect to live an average of 78.8 years, according to the most recent numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Researchers have created an interactive, map-based tool—the Opportunity Atlas—that can trace the root of people’s outcomes, such as poverty or incarceration, to the neighborhoods in which they grew up.

Few things are more annoying than spending a large sum of money on a purchase, only to discover that someone else got the same thing for a lower price. This often happens with airfares. You go the same website, search the same airline, choose the same seat row and fare conditions, but you’re offered a different price depending on when and where you do it. Why?

Yale economist William Nordhaus has devoted his life’s work to understanding the costs of climate change and advocating the use of a carbon tax to curb global warming.

For millions of American women – both those who’ve survived assault and those who have experienced workplace harassment – seeing a man on the path to promotion despite allegations of harassment is jarring yet painfully familiar.

In the early days of industrial capitalism there were no protections for workers, and industrialists took their profits with little heed to anyone else.

There is currently a grand consensus of academics, policymakers and food campaign groups that “something must be done” to reduce food wastage. Malnutrition is real, but so too is the obesity crisis. But when everyone agrees, you can afford to be a little sceptical. Because food is about much more than just calories and nutrients...

In the last decade or more, economic growth has slowed across the Western world, although a belated though weak recovery has been under way since around 2017.