Abstract:
The economist’s conceptualisation of inequality in terms of
interpersonal distribution of income or wealth, and the tradition of
measurement of inequality that follows from this conceptualisation have
not paid adequate attention to the need for reckoning inequality across
social groups. In this paper we show that certain simple statistical tools
to analyse categorical data can be shown to have properties that conform
to our normative judgement on group inequality. We then analyse the
grouped data available from such sources as the NSSO to illuminate our
understanding of group inequality in India. A broader goal of this paper
is to combine the insights from the literature on axiomatic method of
measuring inequality with the idea of inequality that is commonly shared
by other social science disciplines like sociology and political science.
