Inequality into numbers

Newton International Fellowship - The British Academy

Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

"Inequality increases property and violent crime"; "Less equal societies have more unstable economies"; "Inequality aggravates social and political conflicts" (www.equalitytrust.org.uk). These claims rest on inequality measurements, typically based on survey-data that is aggregated, summarised and compared. While most people agree that equality is one of the aims of social progress, we do not usually trust inequality measurements as much as we trust well-defined physical quantities like temperature, mass, duration. As a consequence, the implications of inequality measurement for science and policy are also under question. The measurement of inequality is far from straightforward and frequently provokes heated debates about what is being measured and how. The reasons include that inequality is a complex phenomenon, which has a loose definition and context-dependent nature, and the lack of an internationally agreed set of rules for measuring it. 

Is inequality measurable? Can we compare heterogeneous measurements of inequality? How accurate are these measurements and how can we evaluate their reliability? Solving these problems can improve the quality and the social impact of scientific research on inequality. The project addresses these questions by drawing on insights from the recent philosophical literature about measurement.

Publications:

Basso, A. and C. Lisciandra (forthcoming) “Models and measurement of inequality.” Contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Scientific Modeling edited by Tarja Knuuttila et al.

Basso, A. (forthcoming) “The comparison of inequality measurements across countries and time.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Pre-pring doi: https://doi.org/10.1086/719568