Charlotte Cavaillé, assistant professor of public policy, joined the University of Cambridge via podcast to discuss income and regional inequality, why policymakers should care, and what policy interventions work best to reduce them.
"In order to understand how folks think about inequality, you need to have in mind the counterfactual, which is an equal world," she explained. "When we’re talking about inequality, we’re interested in how much does the world differ or deviate from an ideal situation where we would all be equal. I think the best way to think about this is to think about votes. One person, one vote. So if you have a country with one hundred people, they have one hundred votes to cast. An unequal situation is when one voter might have two votes, another one would have five votes, and one might have zero votes."
