Peer2Politics

"“My reading of the data is that technology is the main driver of the recent increases in inequality. It’s the biggest factor,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School. The coauthor, with fellow MIT academic Andrew McAfee, of The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson, like Piketty, has recently gained unlikely prominence for an academic economist.

"Most analyses of capitalism have tended to treat workers as waged white men, whereas reproductive labour is deemed to be supplementary – the province of the unwaged – women domestics and carers, peasant farmers, and indigenous hunter-gatherers. However, the latter meta-industrial groupings, nominally outside of the economic system, actually constitute the majority of workers in twenty-first century of global capitalism.

"Individuals must have access to high-quality data about themselves and their communities. If certain groups routinely do not have data collected about them, their problems may be overlooked and their communities held back in spite of progress elsewhere. Given this risk, policymakers should begin a concerted effort to address the “data divide”—the social and economic inequalities that may result from a lack of collection or use of data about individuals or communities." (http://www2.datainnovation.org/2014-data-poverty.pdf)