ABSTRACT

I begin by recounting a true story—a rather trivial and innocuous story, as it happens, but one with something of a lesson. Some years ago, when I went to give a lecture at another campus, I chose “Economic Inequality” as the title of my talk. On arrival, I found the campus covered with posters announcing that I 261was speaking on “Income Inequality.” When I grumbled about it slightly, I encountered gentle, but genuine, amazement that I wanted to fuss about such “an insignificant difference.” Indeed, the identification of economic inequality with income inequality is fairly standard, and the two are often seen as effectively synonymous in the economic literature. If you tell someone that you are working on economic inequality, it is quite commonly assumed that you are studying income distribution.