The Indian Express

: Consider two facts about India. Fact No.1: Every year, nearly 4,000 people die in the Mumbai commuter train system, most because they fall out of overcrowded cars in the cheap standing-room carriages, or try to hold onto the outside of the train to avoid paying the fare. Fact No. 2: According to an international survey of rental prices released earlier this month, Mumbai is the world’s sixth most expensive place to rent an apartment, falling just behind London pricewise and well ahead of Paris and Rome.

Now add to these a third fact: Measured by the Gini index — the standard yardstick of inequality and the number that’s being referred to whenever you read that, say, the Scandinavian countries are “more equal” than the United States — India is substantially more equal than the United States. It is also a little bit less equal than Israel and Japan.

As the election season heats up, we hear ever more discussion of the problem of inequality, much of it driven by the assumption that growing inequality is creating an American underclass — you know, those folks clinging to guns and religion because they’re falling behind. [But] measuring inequality, or what most people think of as inequality, is not simple. And, perhaps more importantly, the standard measure of inequality tells us a lot less about poverty than we might think or hope.

The problem here is that the Gini index alone does not yield enough information to indicate what proportion of a country’s people are poor — even if we know the country’s total income. A measure omitting that crucial concept doesn’t get to what people really mean when they talk about inequality. Take it out, and most of the rhetoric about inequality loses its soul...

When we talk about inequality, it’s not about resentment of the next door neighbours’ pool. It’s about gut issues: whether we feel poor, whether we feel that those around us are poor. That’s why it’s worth thinking about in the first place.

Unfortunately, the usual way that economists talk about and measure inequality tells us next to nothing about it.

Excerpted from Mark Gimein’s ‘Is India more Equal than the United States?’ in Slate, May 1

editor@expressindia.com