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Socio-Economic Review Advance Access originally published online on August 14, 2009
Socio-Economic Review 2009 7(4):669-694; doi:10.1093/ser/mwp016
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Inequality measures as conventions: new interpretations of a classic operationalization problem

Stephan Kampelmann

CLERSE, Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences, Lille 1 University, Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex, France

Correspondence: stephan{at}internationalistfoundation.com

Various authors have identified a consensus among economists as to how inequality should be quantified, namely by implementing the ‘axiomatic approach to inequality measurement’. However, empirical studies have revealed that this method is often in contradiction with the attitudes of ordinary citizens towards inequality. It is thus a relevant question why the axiomatic approach still commands support in academic applications. This article adopts a historical perspective and presents evidence for our main hypothesis: the axiomatic approach can be interpreted as a result of conventions that allowed specialists to overcome the indeterminacy of the concept ‘inequality’. An unintended consequence of today's measurement conventions appears to be the crowding out of non-scientific representations.

Key Words: economic inequality • economic methodology • inequality statistics • conventions


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