Inequality as Relative Deprivation

Abstract

Although concerns for inequality are at the heart of the sociological tradition, few sociologists have taken a serious interest in the normative and methodological issues involved in the choice between different measures of inequality. It is argued in this article that the widely used but also widely criticized Gini index can be seen to incorporate a particularly sociological conception of inequality. The Gini index has features that are alien to mainstream welfare economics, but perfectly sensible if inequality is understood more sociologically as arising from a state of relative deprivation. However, the commitment to a relativistic conception of inequality leads to serious theoretical and practical complications. The implicit rationale of the Gini index assumes that it is applied to a ‘reference population’ – where everybody compares themselves with everybody else. It is not obvious that the residents of a nation-state always constitute a reference population in this sense, and arguments can be found both for widening and narrowing the scope of the relevant population. Both aggregation and disaggregation from whatever is considered to be the ‘appropriate’ scope of the reference population is problematic and requires different methodological solutions.