Abstract

If differences in market labor earnings were distributed identically to differences between same-sex siblings, how much inequality would remain? Our answer, reflecting Rawls’ Fair Equality of Opportunity Principle, is the “Fair Gini Coefficient”. We estimate this statistic for 16 countries from 5 continents using harmonized administrative data. We find that the remaining “fair inequality” averages around three quarters of observed inequality and differs little across countries, which implies that more equal countries are not distinctively fair. We characterize formal properties of our statistic and six related measures of gender and parental advantage, and provide estimates for the 16 countries.

About the Speaker

Samuel Bowles (PhD, Economics, Harvard University, 1965) is a Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Siena. His influential work on cultural and genetic evolution—much of it in collaboration with the late Herbert Gintis—has challenged the conventional economic assumption that people are motivated solely by self-interest, emphasizing instead the roles of reciprocity, altruism, and ethical behavior in economic and social life. His recent research focuses on how organizations, communities and nations could be better governed in light of the fact that altruistic and ethical motives are common in most populations.

Bowles has published in leading journals including Science, Nature, Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has also advised the governments of Cuba, South Africa, and Greece, as well as leaders and public institutions including Nelson Mandela, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.He is the author of major works including The Moral Economy and A Cooperative Species (with Herbert Gintis), and co-developer, with Wendy Carlin and CORE, of widely used open-access economics textbooks.