Is There an Ideal Amount of Income Inequality?
When Occupy Wall Street protesters began camping out in Zuccotti Park in 2011, Venkat Venkatasubramanian visited more than once. He didn’t participate in the protests against wealth inequality, he said, “but I knew what they were talking about. I knew that these were all legitimate concerns.”
The experience motivated Venkatasubramanian, today the Samuel Ruben-Peter G. Viele Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and director of the Complex Resilient Intelligent Systems Laboratory, to write How Much Inequality Is Fair? Mathematical Principles of a Moral, Optimal, and Stable Capitalist Society, published this year by Columbia University Press. The book is based on work parallel with his day job as a chemical engineer, over decades, treating inequality with his colleagues from an engineering systems, mathematical point of view. “This was more of a passion for evenings and weekends and summers,” he told me. “I didn’t mind this wild goose chase.”
The result is a surprising argument for the existence of an ideal inequality. Societies should be judged by how far away they are from perfect inequality, which has a definite mathematical form. “Ninety percent of people are not benefiting from the progress we’ve been making,” Venkatasubramanian explained in conversation. He believes he can help fix that by giving societies a clear
