Measuring simply by how well those who have it worst is a much better metric. A world where all people have it terrible is a bad world. A world where everyone has it at least okay is a much better world.
There are downsides to inequality, but a metric that counts "everyone is miserable" as a success is an awful metric.
The worst way to measure it is inequality. How the top person is doing relative to the bottom person isn't important. How the bottom person is doing now compared to the bottom person 100 years ago is.
> Inequality is not a good metric for whether or not things are getting better.
That depends on your definition of "better". Given the fact that relative deprivation has a demonstrably very strong negative subjective disutility, demonstrated in many studies, its pretty darned important if you want to understand increases or decreases in actual suffering.
This doesn't fit the simplistic way lots of people would like to think economic indicators should map to human experience, but that's a problem with the simplistic models.
How do you know if it's making "everyone" better off or not? What does 'better off' mean, and how do you measure it?
If you could demonstrate it made 'everyone' better off, I think it'd be an interesting question to consider. But I suspect many of those at the bottom ends of our actually existing inequality are not so "better off".
It seems doubtful that income inequality is inherently bad, but perhaps it's strongly correlated with things that are inherently bad (i.e. suffering, if you ask me).
Consider a society A, and then society A+ which is identical except the most well-off person is twice as well-off. It's hard to see how A+ could be worse than A in any way. Maybe there's an even better A++ where A+ has some redistribution, but that's another argument.
We don't mind inequality within lives (nobody says it's inherently bad to have most of your happiness distributed toward the later half of your life), so we'd need an argument why inequality across lives is bad.
I do not disagree that income inequality is objectively measurable. My point is your choice of whom to include for comparison (e.g. US inequality is very different than comparing US vs Yemen inequality. Moreover, low inequality with everyone below the poverty line may not be preferred to higher inequality but everyone above the poverty line. These are all personal, philosophical decisions - there is no objective right or wrong.
My point in suggesting metrics is they force you to think about what is important and to look for data to measure it. This helps to mitigate the "I feel bad..." scenario that could simply the be the result of negative press cycles.
For clarity, I agree with you that there is no escape from the subjectivity trap as only you can declare what is important to you and your view how society/the world should work.
Because if you define "bad" as "produces human misery", inequality, in and of itself, has been shown to be bad. Relative deprivation has been demostrated to be a major source of disutility.
Inequality seems like a meaningless metric. It's not a good measure of a society's well being.
For example, let's assume a country of 10 where 9 people have $1 million and 1 person has $100 trillion. The inequality is massive but everyone has a great standard of living.
For most of human history, equality and poverty were much greater. People were equally miserable.
It is only in modern times that we discovered the productive capability to escape the Malthusian trap and improve the human condition. Because this happened unevenly, "inequality" rose. But this was not a bad thing, it was a necessary step in progress.
Today, much of the developing world is catching up to the rich world. This is reducing inequality.
Inequality is neither good nor bad in itself. Focusing on this one variable creates a far too simple model to understand the world.
There is an interesting book, "The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, that makes a very strong argument that in developed countries inequality is correlated pretty much every "bad" metric (health, crime, teenage pregnancy, etc.) of a society.
Now, of course, correlation does not mean causation and it's perhaps more interesting what the true underlying causes are. But if inequality is such a strong indicator, it is worth wondering whether inequality isn't a bad thing in itself.
I disagree. I was just reading an article by Jeremy Grantham that cited data showing how inequality is correlated with basically every measure of health and social problems. See https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level, especially the PowerPoint slides linked from that page. To quote:
It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.
Alright, narrower spreads in economic inequality appears to connote greater overall happiness in the measured society. Perhaps attributable to the averaging and not representative of the outliers, or demonstrable of modality, but that might be a separate argument. Northern European countries are famed for ranking near the top. The degree to which a society is advanced can be measured in part by how it treats its most disadvantaged members. And in the long run, we help ourselves by helping each other.
But (playing the devil's advocate here) I'm interested in equalizing opportunity, not in equal outcome and artificial fairness.
If this notion is ridiculous, would somebody care to enlighten / disillusion?
>I suspect that when most people talk about inequality, what they mean is, "a few people are doing really good and a lot of people are doing really bad". If you can lessen or remove the "doing really bad" part, whether through UBI or some other means (progressive taxation to fund other programs, whatever your ideology prefers), then statements of inequality start to mean just "a few people are doing really good" and I think there are far fewer people that are bothered by that.
I'd say the problem with inequality is something else entirely than "some people doing really good" vs "lots of people doing really bad".
It's that there are resources in the world, and some people have way more access to them.
This can hold even when all people are out of poverty: of the potential and resources of the world, still some people could take the lion's share to the exclusion of others, regardless of whether everybody has a house and food on their table.
And this inequality (with the true sense of the word, not mere poverty vs richness) is also related to opportunities and squandered potential (as in: yeah, we all have UBI, but this dumb mega-rich person could pay his way to Harvard, whereas some other with much larger potential -- e.g. smarts, inventiveness, etc-- had to settle for some lesser school, and didn't get as far in their career).
There are downsides to inequality, but a metric that counts "everyone is miserable" as a success is an awful metric.
reply