Talk:List of measures of inequality

Accuracy dispute
Where is there anything in the Zipf's law or zeta distribution articles, or the one on Benford's law, that deals with measures of inequality? I think of variance or information entropy as measures of inequality; whoever wrote that list seems to think of any probability distribution at all as a measure of inequality. Why not just re-name probability distribution and call it "measures of inequality"? (Besides the fact that that would be absurd? And so, for the same reason, is the inclusion of an article in this list merely because it's about a probability distribution.) Michael Hardy 00:41, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Some of these seem to be about measures of statistical dispersion. The intended topic of this article is not clearly defined. Michael Hardy 00:49, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Although I am the originator of the article (list), I do agree with some of this criticism. All probability distributions, and in fact nearly all of statistics, may be described as measures of inequality.

However, certain devices within statistics specificly try to capture the degree of inequality in some data, either with one key number, or with a simple graph. Zipf's law is a case in point; it is obviously related to e.g. the Lorenz curve.

If someone can think of a better title for this article, or can improve the introduction to clarify what belongs and what does not belong to the list, it will please me enormously. Maybe something about "rank distributions"? I think "standard deviation" and "interquartile range" may not belong to the list - perhaps "zeta distribution" and other links do not belong there either.

I created the list because I found that the "See also" sections in certain articles tended to have a large number of links in common. In particular, I here think of the articles on Zipf's law, the Lorenz curve, and the 80-20 rule (although this rule is quite naive, the idea in it is interesting).

Perhaps, the list should be replaced by a proper article - but I am not able to write it. --Niels Ø 08:38, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)

Well, I would suggest putting this articles into Category:Probability distributions and/or Category:Socioeconomics, and adding mention of the relevant ones to the Measurement section of Economic inequality. -- Beland 23:48, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Or income inequality metrics, actually. -- Beland 23:50, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The common theme in the articles referenced in the list is not limited to the field of economics or sociology. E.g., there are applications in linguistics, too. --Niels Ø 20:13, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, as you can see in my edit summaries, I added appropriate terms to Category:Computational linguistics. -- Beland 02:54, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)