To Each the Same and to Each his Own: A Proposal to Measure Responsibility‐Sensitive Income Inequality

Abstract

This paper deals with the question of how to incorporate modern responsibility‐catering egalitarianism into economic theory on the measurement of income inequality. I present a particular axiomatic expression of the main aspects of such egalitarianism. Then, to measure offensive inequality separately I construct a norm or reference income distribution based upon the axiomatic model to replace the perfectly equal income distribution that is used as norm by all common inequality measures. I defend the use of a particular measure of distributional change to determine the degree of offensive inequality, and apply the method to Belgian income data.