Inequality and Instability

Bain, George Sayers (2018): Inequality and Instability.

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.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: inequality; equality; economic and social instability; rent-seeking; capitalism; fairness; social mobility
• Subjects: P - Economic Systems > P1 - Capitalist Systems > P10 - General

References

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridege, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler (Oxford: OUP, 2017).

Paul De Grauwe, The Limits of the Market (Oxford: OUP, 2017).

J. E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (London: Penguin, 2013).

Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, The Captured Economy (Oxford: OUP, 2017).

William Watson, The Inequality Trap (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).