Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
How Much Inequality Is Fair?Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
How Much Inequality Is Fair?: Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society

Venkat Venkatasubramanian

Print publication date: 2017

Print ISBN-13: 9780231180726

Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: January 2019

DOI: 10.7312/columbia/9780231180726.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM COLUMBIA SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.columbia.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Minnesota Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CUPSO for personal use.date: 03 July 2022

Global Trends in Income Inequality: Theory Versus Reality

Global Trends in Income Inequality: Theory Versus Reality

Chapter:
(p.143) Chapter Six Global Trends in Income Inequality: Theory Versus Reality
Source:
How Much Inequality Is Fair?
Author(s):

Venkat Venkatasubramanian

Publisher:
Columbia University Press
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231180726.003.0006

We compare the predictions of our theory with empirical income data from a dozen different countries. We define a new measure of inequality, called the non-ideal inequality coefficient. We show that Norway is close to ideal inequality for the bottom 99% of the population while the U.S. is the most non-ideal at the other extreme. The other countries are in between these two. We find it remarkable that the Scandinavian societies have discovered the near-ideal share by themselves in practice without any prior knowledge of even its existence.

Keywords:   Non-ideal inequality coefficient, agent-based simulation, Scandinavia, utopia

Columbia Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .