Patrick Heller
There are so many definitions of inequality but I think it boils down to two different individuals having two different opportunity sets in life. This opportunity is of course a function of income, but it’s also a function of human capabilities – and we've learnt that this relates to the neighborhood you’re born into, and the networks of cultural capital you have. So it’s obviously very complicated, but what it boils down to is having different opportunity sets in life.
Catherine Boone
I think what is happening in social science --very broadly speaking--is that there’s a conceptual shift with this mainstreaming of the idea of inequality. We used to talk about poverty and unemployment before we had this radical popularisation of the concept of inequality with the work of Piketty and others. So what is the difference? I think inequality is different in that it includes the idea of a relation. So the notion of inequality is suggesting that there’s a kind of predatory relationship between people and social groups.
