Micro and Macro Features of Inequality and Justice: Estimates across Generations in 29 European Countries

Since antiquity it has been thought that justice concerns play an important part in sociobehavioral phenomena and are thus deeply consequential for individual and society. Recent theoretical and empirical developments show that (1) the microlevel justice evaluation J, which increases with actual income X and decreases with ideas of just income X*,

J = ln(X/X*) ,

depends crucially on ideas of just income X*, and (2) aggregating multiple individuals produces three new macrolevel distributions (for X, X*, and J), each of which has its own mean and inequality, with average J considered a bellwether of overall injustice. This paper, leveraging recently-shown superior properties of the Theil MLD, obtains a new decomposition of average J,

E(J) = ln[E(X)] - ln[E(X*)] - MLD(X) + MLD(X*) ,

making it possible to discern microlevel ideas of just income and assess macrolevel links between mean X and mean X* and between X inequality and X* inequality. We use data from 29 countries in the European Social Survey of 2018 to test five patterns in microlevel ideas of just income -- whether people choose equality as the just income; whether every person compares own income to the income of every other person; whether just income is a constant; whether, if just income is a constant, it is close to the actual mean; and whether just income is an equal addition to actual income – and to assess two macrolevel relations beyond average J – whether the mean of actual income is larger or smaller than the mean of just income and whether actual income inequality is larger or smaller than just income inequality. We report all estimates for each country and for each country’s generations, specified as ten-year birth cohorts, thus obtaining a detailed view of micro and macro features of inequality and justice in Europe.