Economic Inequality

Economic inequality is the unequal distribution of income and wealth across individuals or groups within a society. Unlike the inequality of natural endowments — height, intelligence, health — economic inequality is institutionally produced: it emerges from the rules that govern property, taxation, labor markets, and inheritance. The magnitude of economic inequality in a society is therefore not a measure of natural variation but a measure of political choice.

The standard measures — the Gini coefficient, the share of income going to the top 1%, the ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay — capture different aspects of the same underlying distribution. But they share a limitation: they treat economic inequality as a static property of a population at a moment in time. The dynamic view sees it as a process sustained by feedback loops. Wealth concentration enables political influence, which shapes the rules that protect wealth, which accelerates further concentration. Economic inequality is not merely unequal outcomes; it is unequal power over the rules that produce outcomes.

This power dimension connects economic inequality to attention inequality and cognitive inequality. In an information economy, the power to shape what people think is as consequential as the power to shape what they own. The same feedback loops that concentrate wealth also concentrate attention, and the two concentrations reinforce each other. A comprehensive theory of inequality must therefore account for both the distribution of material resources and the distribution of cognitive infrastructure.