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For the purpose of hedging risks to standards of living, the logical place to look first would be to markets for claims on total income; but such markets do not exist, and they have apparently never even been proposed. By making it possible to hedge the capital value of a stream of aggregate income, markets in perpetual claims or perpetual futures, long‐term swap markets, or retail analogues of these would facilitate management of the kind of longer‐run income risk that really matters to individuals and organizations; nations or other groupings of people could also use such markets to insure themselves against the prospect of a declining standard of living or the prospect of relative poverty. By hedging such risks, these macro markets would allow the natural tendency for convergence of incomes to reduce inequality of incomes, and might make significant progress toward equalizing wealth across nations, regions, categories of people, and individuals. There could be markets for hedging the risk of fluctuations in aggregate income, national income, or aggregate labour income for each country (or even region) of the world, and these could be divided up in different ways—although since most people's income is labour income, creating markets for claims on total income means for the most part creating markets for claims on labour income. The different sections of the chapter consider possible hedging arrangements in perpetual claims or perpetual futures markets for national incomes (market structures and associated institutions), whether income markets should be in actual or full‐employment income, and various measurement issues associated with incomes (including uncertainty).

Health inequalities are at the forefront of public debate in many countries, including the United States and the European Union. Governments have in recent years set in place programmes to tackle health inequalities. However, the current economic and fiscal crisis is threatening progressive health policies. The aim of this paper is to show how a deeper understanding of the issues of measuring inequality helps us develop policy responses. The paper starts from the parallel with the measurement of income inequality, but argues that the dimension of health needs different treatment. In the same way, we should not treat health and income symmetrically in indicators, such as the Human Development Index, that seek to combine income and health in a single performance measure. The paper then examines the inter-relation between income and health: the issue of health “inequity”. The nature of the health gradient however needs to be carefully established, since different forms have different implications for policy. It goes on to widen the scope of the discussion to consider the role of health-related social transfers and the distribution of the benefits from public health programmes. The final part addresses issues raised for health policy by the economic crisis.

Housing prices have risen in the United States and Hong Kong mostly because of the high regulation costs of development. In each of the developed countries, a very large array of complex regulations has made development difficult and effectively prevented housing supply from responding to demand. The problem is not market competition, but government regulations that prevent markets from functioning properly. The rising ratio of capital to income is almost entirely due to the rise of housing. What begins initially as inequality in housing wealth gets transmitted into the next generation and is transformed into other forms of inequality, in particular inequality in opportunities, with other distributional consequences.