Fair Inequality

The Fair Inequality Project is a global research group co-founded by the organizers in 2023 to answer the following question: If differences in market labor earnings between members of a population were to be distributed identically to the observed differences between same-sex siblings, how much inequality would remain? To answer this question the project has developed a novel measure of “fair inequality” which is then measured using an unparalleled new data set.

The project is composed of a leadership group and 16 country teams that have been acquiring administrative data (e.g., tax records rather than survey evidence) upon which our research is based. With the support of SFI’s Emergent Political Economies program we met in London in December 2024 along with philosophers, statisticians and others to design the project. A second meeting to be held at the University of Oxford 14-16 June 2027 will consider revisions of our first paper for a top economics journal and develop proposals for subsequent papers as well as procedures for making our unparalleled data set publicly available.