{"id":12385,"date":"2011-12-05T08:33:22","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T13:33:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12385"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:35:20","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:35:20","slug":"debunking-memes-the-gini-co-efficient-as-a-spark-for-rioting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/12\/05\/debunking-memes-the-gini-co-efficient-as-a-spark-for-rioting\/","title":{"rendered":"Debunking memes: the Gini co-efficient as a spark for rioting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theodore Dalrymple<\/a> shows that the widespread habit of journalists in Britain to attempt to attribute the root cause of August riots to the Gini co-efficient fails the common-sense test:<\/p>\n

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An August feature story on the riots in Time<\/em> offered a particularly striking example. The author suggested that to understand the riots, we should start with \u201csomething called the Gini co-efficient, a figure used by economists to indicate how equally (or unequally) income is distributed across a population.\u201d In this traditional measure, the article notes, Britain fares worse than almost every other country in the West.<\/p>\n

This little passage is interesting for at least two reasons. First is the unthinking assumption that more equality is better; complete equality would presumably be best. Second is that the author apparently did not think carefully about the table of Gini coefficients printed on the very same page and what it implied about his claim. Portugal headed the list as the most unequal of the countries selected, with a 0.36 coefficient. Next followed the U.K. and Italy, both with a 0.34 coefficient. Toward the bottom of the list, one found France, with a 0.29 coefficient, the same as the Netherlands. Now, it is true that journalists are not historians and that, for professional reasons, their time horizons are often limited to the period between the last edition of their publication and the next. Even so, one might have expected a Time reporter to remember that in 2005 — not exactly a historical epoch ago — similar riots swept France, even though its Gini coefficient was already lower than Britain\u2019s. (Having segregated its welfare dependents geographically, though, France saw none of its town or city centers affected by the disorder.)<\/p>\n

As it happened, when I read the Time story, I had an old notebook with me. In it, among miscellaneous scribblings, was the following list, referring to the riots in France and made contemporaneously:<\/p>\n