I’m attending the annual conference of the New Zealand Association of Economists, and the first keynote was a terrific presentation by Professor John Creedy on inequality, or to be precise the history of economic thought on inequality and the light that sheds on the current resurgence of interest in distribution.

His starting point was the classic Tony Atkinson paper, On The Measurement of inequality. It was published in 1970, another time when inequality was a salient issue, and the talk moved onto [amazon_link id=”0674000781″ target=”_blank” ]Rawls[/amazon_link] and Sen as well. The theme was that any measure of inequality – income or wealth? Individuals or households? Gini coefficient or Atkinson’s own measure, or the simple 10/90 ratio? – incorporates some implicit value judgements. For example, do you care about individual well-being because of a principle of anonymity – who you are shouldnt matter to evaluating your distributional status? If so, then the Gini isn’t an appropriate measure because it depends on rankings of individuals relative to others. If you look at the 10/90 ratio, as [amazon_link id=”067443000X” target=”_blank” ]Piketty[/amazon_link] does, you’re saying the middle four fifths of the distribution isn’t relevant.

Prof Creedy ended cited Lionel Robbins’ famous [amazon_link id=”B001037AGS” target=”_blank” ]Essay on the Nature and Signifiance of Economic Science[/amazon_link], to the effect that economics can’t avoid making value judgements but its contribution is to shed a clear light on what the judgements are. Or at least, ought to be, but too rarely is. The word of caution about understanding the value judgements embedded in specific measures of inequality is timely given the fact that everybody from New Zealand to New York is talking about it now.