Introduction to the symposium on “Inequality: new directions”
Forty years ago economists’ thinking about inequality underwent a revolution. By explicitly linking inequality and welfare economics Tony Atkinson and Serge Kolm inspired fundamental work on the nature of economic inequality, on the role of social values and moral intuition in the assessment of income distributions and on the structure of several classes of related measurement problems in poverty, mobility, polarisation and other fields. The huge theoretical literature that resulted was accompanied by extensive empirical and policy analysis as abstract ideas were converted into practical tools. Kolm and Atkinson [1, 2] laid the basis for the field of distributional analysis as we know it today. To mark this fortieth anniversary, in September 2009 Cornell University and the London School of Economics organized a conference, “Inequality: New Directions,” in Ithaca, New York. The focus was on identifying new challenges in the field and on taking stock of the extraordinary developments that followed the seminal contributions. This symposium grows out of that conference, with papers being selected subject to the standard refereeing procedures of the Journal of Economic Inequality. Appropriately, the founders of the modern literature lead off this symposium. In “Lateral Thinking”, Tony Atkinson acknowledges the thinking that led him to draw on the then emerging literature on measurement of risk. But he cautions against simplistic extensions of the now common approach in measuring income inequality to the measurement of inequality in other dimensions such as health, or to the visual portrayal of achievements in multiple dimensions. He argues that the theory of copulas in the statistics literature can provide insights into measurement of multivariate inequality, with the copula function as a tool to “separate changes in the