Income Inequality and Scale Independence

December 10th, 2009
money, politics
Looking around at different ways of measuring income inequality (which I'm not convinced is a problem in and of itself: "people start startups in the hope of becoming much richer than they were before. And if your society tries to prevent anyone from being much richer than anyone else, it will also prevent one person from being much richer at t2 than t1") and I see that "scale independence" is valued in an income inequality metric. I'm not sure it should be. If you have a society and make everyone 2x richer, then a scale independent metric would say inequality hasn't changed. But what if you make everyone 1000x richer? Because the value of money is not linear in the amount you have (I would rather have a 50% chance of gaining $1M than a 25% chance of gaining $2M. Heck, I'd even prefer it to a 25% chance of gaining $3M.), as you scale incomes up inequality decreases. What I want is an income inequality metric that is explicitly scale dependent, considering along with each income the decreasing value of large amounts of money.

Comment via: facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Linkpost for July

Effective Altruism

via Thing of Things July 3, 2026

Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island

I've been using AI fairly heavily since last November and the whole thing is a funny experience. An agent will do something that, if a human did it, you'd immediately fire them. My reaction, of course, is to act as if this is great and spin up a t…

via Posts on July 3, 2026

Variable fonts aren't universally supported

I make a lot of webpages. I also use Lockdown Mode on iOS and MacOS for a bit of extra security. Sometimes I realize that I forgot to test on Safari and it looks like crap, or I test and don’t notice that there’s been a problem for months (as was the case…

via Home June 27, 2026

more     (via openring)