This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By William Watson, May 21, 2024
Elsewhere in today’s FP Comment, Herbert Grubel looks at an interesting difference between the two Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Justin Trudeau. Judging by the “Gini coefficient,” which measures how unequally incomes are distributed, equality went down during the Chrétien years but measures of happiness went up. During the Trudeau years, in contrast, equality has gone up but happiness has come down.
A lot goes on in a society that determines both the degree of equality in it and people’s average self-assessed happiness, so it’s best not to jump on such correlations with both feet. But they should get people thinking.
They got me thinking about Gini coefficients, which I haven’t actually been tracking that closely since writing a book about inequality in 2015. The Gini coefficient takes the value zero if there’s complete equality in the distribution: everyone has the same amount. And it has the value one if there’s complete inequality: one person has everything.
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