CIAO DATE: 04/2014
January 2014
There is much debate in economics on the effects of inequality on individual well-being. The lack of consensus on how inequality affects well-being may be due to concerns about relative differences (which economists worry about), to those about absolute differences (which lay people tend to worry about), to transitory changes in the distribution, to long-term differences in opportunities which are transmitted across generations, among other concerns. The average citizen may not notice inequality at all unless there are significant changes in the distribution; these changes could just as easily be at the local community level, firm level, or the national level.
Resource link: Do Trends in U.S. Inequality Matter for Norms of Global Governance? Concepts and Empirics for Debate [PDF] - 4.5M