It is customary to assume that income is redistributed between the sexes within the family. This article investigates alternative assumptions about sharing within the family and their effects on the distribution of income. Using data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey for 1968 and 1986, we contrast two assumptions about sharing within the family; the conventional assumption of equal sharing or ‘pooling’, and an alternative of ‘minimum sharing’. Under each assumption, we examine the composition of extreme quintiles of the income distribution, and compute the numbers of men and women falling below an arbitrary ‘poverty line’. The contribution to inequality of the net transfers between the sexes and other sources of income is also examined. We estimate that resource transfers (other than for housing) between spouses could, if all income is pooled, account for about one third of married couples’ pooled incomes in 1986 and about 56 per cent of the inequality of married women's incomes (in 1968, 56 per cent and 50 per cent respectively). Taking the bottom quintile of pooled income as an arbitrary ‘poverty line’, we calculate that 15 per cent of married people would have been below this line in 1986 if all incomes were pooled. On the minimum sharing assumption, 52 per cent of married women, but only 11 per cent of married men would have been under the line.

In common with most countries in the world, China is facing an increasing demand for welfare. The free-market economic reforms of the last decade have dramatically transformed social policy in China, which is gradually retreating from an egalitarian and collective approach and moving towards a pluralistic and ‘residual’ orientation. Now, widening income inequalities are accepted as both necessary and inevitable.

During the 1980s, about 30 per cent of the council housing stock of Great Britain was sold to sitting tenants. The popular areas for purchase and the popular types of property were semi-detached and terraced houses rather than flats or maisonettes, away from the large conurbations. The types of household most likely to buy were married couples with adult children in skilled occupations. This large scale selling of council housing led to the fear of a residual poor population, living in flats in inner cities. Since nearly half of Afro Caribbean households were living in council housing and since their pattern of housing was the obverse of the types that sold in large numbers, it was thought that they would be among the residualised households. The paper reports on field survey and special GHS data which show that Afro Caribbeans are more rather than less willing to buy their council homes, once property type has been controlled for. It also argues that, in some circumstances, the right to buy may act against residualisation. However, a particularly residualised group appears to be Caribbean single mothers in high rise blocks.

Postmodernism claims that the universalist themes of modern society (society-wide political ideologies, the nation-state, the theme of rational planning in government policy, the large-scale public or private sector bureaucracy) are obsolete, to be replaced by a plural interest in diversity and choice. These ideas have strong implications for both the theory of social policy, which typically stresses universal themes of inequality and privilege, and the practice of social policy, which relies on rational analysis to inform society-wide government provision. This article suggests that such an approach ignores the significance of market liberalism and the associated trends to inequality, privatisation, retrenchment and the regulation of the poorest groups. From this perspective, postmodernism functions as an ideological smokescreen, preventing us from recognising some of the most important trends in modern social policy. It is unfortunate if, at a time when the results of increasing inequality are everywhere apparent, one of the dominant approaches in social science obscures the issue.