Indeed, the problem is that the two sound so similar – I blame the English language 😉

That’s the word we have been missing! Injustice!

Justice BEFORE equality.

The inequality fetishists treat all inequality as an injustice, and then whine whenever anyone says the two aren’t equivalent.

We sort of need to know what “inequality” means before we can say much. Hopefully within the next month I will have a long, long, long document up that will talk about inequality measures – and the things they represent. I’m guessing it might hit 50 pages – so I’ll try to write a summary in a blog post.

People care, justifiably, about injustice. We need a correspondence from this to other measures before we can discuss an “equity”-“efficiency” trade-off. I’ve always found it sort of abhorrent how the e-e trade-off has just been boiled down to “GDP”vs”GDP dispersion”!

Generally I find that data hunts in packs, so I would be interested in examples of inequality measures that show opposite results. Having said that, for those concerned about inequality I would think it sensible to have several (techinical) measures of inequality so that any policy changes they make can be evaluated broadly

Inequality is way, way, too vague. Everyone agree that we should, as a society, co-operate to reduce inequality – where everyone disagrees is what this inequality actually constitutes.

It is empty to say “lets lower inequality” – as Kolm notes, even if we restrict ourselves to only income inequality, and ignore many of the complications that come from individual differences, we can construct reasonable sounding indices of inequality that show opposite results.

You’ll note that this critique is not only of “inequality”, but of “productivity” and to a lesser extent “GDP”. Output based fetishism is as much a way to obfuscate costs/benefits as it is a form of communication – and this is something we should be aware of!

Relevant to who? Most issues of concern in the world can have several levels of interpretation. Something like “crime rates” can be understood at a technical level using precise and closely defined technical descriptions – but only understood by a few people. At a level that communicates with a broad and diverse audience you need language that stands the ‘public square test’. And I would think that inequality was one of those terms that has pretty effective communicative power, and is far from meaningless today bearing in mind that the usage of the term ‘inequality’ has risen hugely since the 1960s