This remarkable new video posted recently on Reddit shows the enormous disconnect between what Americans think is the distribution of wealth in their country and what it actually is

Last week the Pew Research Centre published a report containing this simple but remarkable chart of the change in mean family income in the US over the last sixty years. It’s only a simple graphic but it’s come up multiple times in social media over the last few days because it tells an important story clearly [...]

London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, released the World cities culture report 2012 yesterday, a survey he commissioned comparing the cultural strength of 12 international cities on 60 variables. One of those twelve cities is Sydney and, of course, London’s there too. The others are Berlin, Istanbul, Johannesburg, Mumbai, New York, Paris, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo The Financial Times [...]

Federal MP Andrew Leigh has a vivid metaphor for describing inequality in Australia. He asks us to imagine a ladder in which each rung represents $1 million of household wealth. Then: The typical Australian household is halfway to the first rung A household in the top 1% is at least 5 rungs from the ground [...]

We’re accustomed to thinking of social capital and density as very positive things, but that’s not always true. Some gangs are more effective murderers, rapists and thieves precisely because they have high levels of social capital. Some cults are all the more oppressive because they engender trust. And for all its virtues, density raises occupancy [...]

According to a report in The Australian last week, the Queensland Housing Minister, Dr Bruce Flegg, is proposing to forcibly move public housing tenants with empty bedrooms into smaller dwellings. Dr Flegg said a Government audit found there are 8,700 public housing units in the State with two or more unoccupied bedrooms. Under-occupancy is the biggest [...]

One of the most persistent ideas I see in urban policy is that the physical environment should be designed to provide more opportunities for casual and random interaction between people who’ve never seen or heard of each other before. The “stranger multiplier” – the concept that accidental contact with complete strangers can significantly increase social [...]

We’re used to the idea that large cities are melting pots of diversity where exposure to difference and new ideas promotes innovation and creativity. However according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, a new study suggests bigger cities not only don’t promote diversity but seem to lead to its opposite, uniformity. The bigger [...]

The Courier Mail reported the death of a son and his elderly mother in their Brisbane home earlier this month under the headline “Left to die a lonely death in the suburbs”. Their bodies were not discovered for at least a week. The paper said that “at some point before Mark Thomas died in his [...]

Crikey readers who live in the outer suburbs should sit up and take notice – according to this Fairfax editorial, urban sprawl is making you sick. Moreover, it is “imposing a massive cost on taxpayers, in the form of chronic health and social problems in the new suburbs”. The main villain is car dependency, which [...]