ABSTRACT
Any account of inequality in contemporary Europe has to start with the changed role of the market and of money. Money is the measure of most things, not least the extent of inequality and poverty, but the last decades of the twentieth century were marked by the new role of wealth. This chapter explains much of the importance of consumption for social and personal identity on which so much contemporary theorising about post-modernity rests. It shows how the seamless gradient of income inequality has become steeper both in Europe and especially in the USA. The most basic question to ask about income distribution is whether there are extremes of rich and poor in a society. Here a measure such as the Gini coefficient is a useful indicator. The lower the Gini coefficient, the more equal the distribution: in the limiting case of complete equality, with every person having exactly the same income, the coefficient has a value of zero.
