Are the rich getting richer?
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, co-founders and co-directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Nobel laureates in economics, in their book 'Poor Economics' explore the poverty traps that keep low income individuals from achieving economic mobility, writing: 'The poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are, the more the right decisions are made for you.'
When the EU imposed a continent-wide cap on bankers’ bonuses in 2014, Britain did not go down without a fight. George Osborne, the then chancellor, took his opposition all the way to the European Court of Justice, claiming that cutting bonuses would create “perverse incentives” to raise pay instead.
He was right. In the years that followed, banks simply increased salaries to compensate. The cap was meant to limit risk-taking in the wake of the financial crash, but perhaps inevitably, people found a way around it.
On Tuesday, that nine-year cap will be lifted. While it may have made little difference to bankers’ prosperity, it was at least popular: some 63 per cent of people oppose lifting it, according to a YouGov poll earlier this month.