All Inequalities Are Not Alike

"Liberty, equality, fraternity": in France, equality sits at the very heart of the republican project. Political equality first, as the revolutionaries of 1789 intended, and then social equality. Today, France redistributes close to a third of its wealth. Before this redistribution takes place, the richest 10% earn 20 times more than the poorest 10%. After redistribution, that gap shrinks dramatically: they then earn just 6 times more.

But who deserves help, and why? Does poverty strike us as more shocking, for example, when it stems from an accident rather than from old age? When it results from a life shaped by hardship from birth, or from a failed attempt to launch a business? And who should foot the bill to close these gaps?

Moral philosophy provides a framework for these questions by distinguishing between different kinds of inequality. There are the inequalities that strike out of nowhere (the circumstances of birth, the accidents life throws in a person's path). And then there are those that can be traced back to individual decisions (working hard, taking risks, chancing one's luck. The question that remains is which of these inequalities we're prepared to compensate for. And another question lingers too: whether the answers are driven by genuine principles or simply by where individuals happen to sit on the social ladder. 

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Economic Dialogues is a digital journal for the dissemination of knowledge published by the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMU, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Méditerranée). Serving as a bridge between academic research and society, Economic Dialogues provides all citizens with the keys to understanding economic reasoning. Articles are published every two weeks.

A Debating Chamber Turned Laboratory

To investigate this question, four economists devised a real-world experiment back in 2008. The idea was straightforward: recreate, in miniature, the kinds of inequality found in real life, and then offer participants a range of solutions for correcting them.

To achieve this, around 300 volunteers were recruited through announcements, advertisements, flyers, and similar means. The participants (roughly a hundred per session) were then assembled in Marseille, in the debating chamber of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) Regional Council, which had been equipped with electronic voting devices. The same procedure was followed for each session. In the first phase, the four broad categories of inequality identified by moral philosophy were recreated – with real money at stake.