Timeline for Measure combining growth and distribution of income
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 19, 2015 at 9:23 | vote | accept | Giskard | ||
| Nov 19, 2015 at 4:18 | answer | added | HRSE | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 18, 2015 at 20:28 | answer | added | Kitsune Cavalry♦ | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 18, 2015 at 18:46 | comment | added | dismalscience | Just observing the median (or any nth percentile of) income over time will go a long way toward addressing distributional concerns. Even taking a simple average of growth rates at each income quintile (or decile, or whatever), or applying some subjective weighting scheme (maybe weighting quintiles based on how far short they are from the $70k-ish number that shows up in the literature as being "enough" income) could do it. | |
| Nov 18, 2015 at 10:05 | comment | added | Giskard | @ArthurTarasov I was not trying to imply that absolute (or any kind of ) equality is desirable. If there is a measure that takes growth & exact distribution of income into account you can probably modify it in a way to measure distance from some 'ideal' income distribution. Ideally this would be left as an input parameter because as you note there is no agreement on what would be ideal. | |
| Nov 18, 2015 at 9:42 | comment | added | Arthur Tarasov | The problem is that inequality per se is not bad. I remember a story how in 19th century Vilfredo Pareto was measuring wealth across societies and found that universally about 10-30% always had more than the rest. He then invented the famous Pareto distribution to describe it. Some inequality in societies is very much desirable to reward greater effort, entrepreneurship, superior skills, etc. The problem arises when there is too much inequality. But where is the threshold? | |
| Nov 18, 2015 at 8:43 | history | asked | Giskard | CC BY-SA 3.0 |