Online research in philosophy

This note presents a very simple way of interpreting the Gini coefficient of inequality, in `equivalent' welfare terms, as the proportion of a cake of given size going to the poorer of two individuals in a two-person cake-sharing problem.

This note suggests that the exercise of measuring poverty in a society is greatly aided by clarity on precisely what one means by “the extent of poverty”. The latter concept may refer to the extent of poverty normalized for population size, or to the extent of poverty not so normalized. Absence of clarity on this distinction – which is both simple and non-trivial – could lead to rather straightforward problems of coherence and consistency in the measurement of poverty.