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Locating Equality

For years, wealth and income inequalities have been rising within industrialized countries, kicking off a broader debate about technology and globalization. But at the heart of the issue is a fundamental good that has been driving social and economic inequality for centuries: real estate.

MUNICH – Inequality is the leading political and economic issue of the current era, yet debates about it have long suffered from a degree of imprecision. For example, the standard measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, reduces a country’s entire income distribution to a single number between zero and one, and is thus highly abstract. Similarly, while inequality is rising in many parts of the world, there is no simple correlation between that trend and social discontent or unrest. France is much less unequal than the United States, and yet it has similar or even greater levels of social polarization.

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