Inequality and Instability

George Sayers Bain

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Inequality of wealth and income is currently a hotly debated subject not only in the academy but also in society more generally. The protagonists disagree about how inequality should be meeasured. But however they measure it - whether by Gini coefficients, the share of the total distribution earned by a particular group (e.g., the top one per cent), or other ways - they generally agree that inequality has greatly increased in a wode range of countries since the mid-1970s. Agreement does not exist, however, about what causes inequality, what problems result from it, and what might be done to solve them. This paper attempts to answer these questions by reviewing and assessing a diverse literature drawn from economic theory, political science, sociology,philosophy, and economic and financial history.

Keywords: inequality; equality; economic and social instability; rent-seeking; capitalism; fairness; social mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: P10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-pke
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:86709

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