

New method better than Gini at measuring economic inequality - sanoli
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/26/wonkabroad/

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brownbat
GoodBadStats praises the intuitive nature of the Palma, but has concerns about
the rest of the argument in favor of it.

Especially the part where the author argues Palma can safely ignore the middle
50% because it never changes, but then says Gini is over-sensitive to changes
(which apparently don't exist?) in the middle 50%.

Some comments here:
[http://goodstatsbadstats.com/?p=1836](http://goodstatsbadstats.com/?p=1836)

The Hoover Index / Robin Hood Index is another interesting measure:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_index](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_index)

Probably good to have several measures kicking around, or maybe any one of
them is just as good as any other. If there's a relationship in some study
between one of these indices and some other factor (famers per capita, land
area of streams, whatever), it's unlikely to suddenly disappear just because
you use another index to approximate the same thing.

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applecore
_The Gini overweights changes in inequality that happen in the middle of the
income distribution, which is exactly not what we should be looking at, given
how stable the middle is._

Except when it isn't.

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dragonwriter
I'm not sure why it even matters that its supposedly "better"; its not like
you can't look at multiple measures, or that distribution is something simple
that can be adequately measured by a single unidimensional measure.

Palma _intentionally_ obscures all inequality within a certain range to focus
on the extremes, Gini is sensitive across the whole spectrum. Why not use both
together?

