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Locating Equality

For years, wealth and income inequalities have been rising within industrialized countries, kicking off a broader debate about technology and globalization. But at the heart of the issue is a fundamental good that has been driving social and economic inequality for centuries: real estate.

MUNICH – Inequality is the leading political and economic issue of the current era, yet debates about it have long suffered from a degree of imprecision. For example, the standard measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, reduces a country’s entire income distribution to a single number between zero and one, and is thus highly abstract. Similarly, while inequality is rising in many parts of the world, there is no simple correlation between that trend and social discontent or unrest. France is much less unequal than the United States, and yet it has similar or even greater levels of social polarization.

Today’s inequality debate effectively began in 2013 with the publication of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which found that the rate of return on capital tends to outpace the rate of growth, thereby causing inequality to increase over time. Specifically, appreciating real-estate values seem to be a fundamental driver of rising inequality. But here, too, one encounters a degree of imprecision. Real estate, after all, is not a homogenous good, because its value famously depends on “location, location, location.” There are elegant castles and palaces that now cost less than small apartments in major cities.

Wealth stirs the most controversy where it is most tangible, such as when physical spaces become status goods: the corner office is desirable precisely because others cannot have it. More broadly, as major cities have become magnets for a global elite, they have become increasingly unaffordable for office workers, policemen, teachers, nurses, and the like. While the latter must endure long, tiresome commutes, elites use global cities as they see fit, often hopping around from place to place. Large swaths of Paris and London are eerily shuttered at night. Manhattan now has nearly a quarter-million vacant apartments.

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