When we think of inequality, we most often think about the distribution of wealth and income in society. Our views on several issues, including immigration and climate change, will be partly determined by how important we consider wealth and income to be for wellbeing, and by how much we care about enduring inequalities in wealth and income. Our starting positions on these issues will also affect how we interpret evidence. Currently, there is a debate raging amongst economists about whether income inequality has increased over the last few decades. Some conclude that it has; others, increasingly, that there hasn’t been much change. This might strike you as a question of fact and not value, but income data are quite unreliable and so the assumptions that are made about the relationship between actual income and tax payments or self-reported income, for example, greatly affect the conclusions.
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