Income Inequality and Scale Independence

December 10th, 2009
money, politics
Looking around at different ways of measuring income inequality (which I'm not convinced is a problem in and of itself: "people start startups in the hope of becoming much richer than they were before. And if your society tries to prevent anyone from being much richer than anyone else, it will also prevent one person from being much richer at t2 than t1") and I see that "scale independence" is valued in an income inequality metric. I'm not sure it should be. If you have a society and make everyone 2x richer, then a scale independent metric would say inequality hasn't changed. But what if you make everyone 1000x richer? Because the value of money is not linear in the amount you have (I would rather have a 50% chance of gaining $1M than a 25% chance of gaining $2M. Heck, I'd even prefer it to a 25% chance of gaining $3M.), as you scale incomes up inequality decreases. What I want is an income inequality metric that is explicitly scale dependent, considering along with each income the decreasing value of large amounts of money.

Comment via: facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Starting With Chords

A lot of people play fiddle. Basically nobody starts by learning chords before learning melodies. But that's actually how I learned. I started with chords. One of the nice things about learning to play violin this way is that you can go busking even…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts November 15, 2024

Stuffies

I have some stuffies and I just have a bunny. Bunny is a rabbit. Woof is a seal. My favorite stuffie is bun bun. I play with my stuffies. Sometimes I jump up with them and I roll them. I can just throw them in the air when I want to play bthululubp wi…

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts November 15, 2024

You Can Buy A Malaria Net

2024 election takes

via Thing of Things November 6, 2024

more     (via openring)