Inequality, Advantage and the Capability Approach

Abstract

Inequality has acquired a newfound prominence in the academic and political debate. While scholars working with the capability approach (CA) have succeeded in influencing the conceptualisation and measurement of poverty, which is increasingly understood in multidimensional terms, recent scholarship on inequality focusses overwhelmingly on economic forms of inequality, and especially on inequalities in income and wealth. In this paper, we outline how the conceptual framework of the CA (focussing on ends rather than means, multidimensionality, and recognising the value of freedoms as well as attained functionings) has the potential to enrich the study of distributional inequality through offering a rationale for why inequality matters, exploring the association between different forms of inequality, and providing an analysis of power. But applying the CA in the context of advantage exacerbates some existing challenges to the approach (defining a capability list, and the non-observability of capabilities) and brings some fresh ones (especially insensitivity at the top of the distribution). We recommend a stronger and clearer distinction between concepts and measures. Capability inequality is a more appropriate and potentially revealing conceptual apparatus, but economic resources are likely to remain a crucial metric for understanding distributional inequality for the foreseeable future.

Keywords:

• Inequality
• Capability approach
• Poverty
• Income
• Distribution
• Multidimensional

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Flavio Comim, Hartley Dean, Enrica Chiappero Martinetti, David Piachaud, Polly Vizard, participants at the Cambridge Capabilities Conference in 2016, two reviewers and the editor for comments and discussion on the ideas in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

About the Authors

Dr Tania Burchardt is Director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. Her research interests lie in theories of justice, including the capability approach, measurement of inequality and applied welfare policy analysis and she teaches on social disadvantage and on research methods. She is co-chair of the Equality and Diversity Forum Research Network, which seeks to bring together academics, policymakers and voluntary sector organisations working in these areas. She recently published “Public policy and inequalities of choice and autonomy,” co-authored with Martin Evans and Holly Holder, in Social Policy & Administration, 2015.

Dr Rod Hick is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at Cardiff University. His primary research interests are the conceptualisation and measurement of poverty; the capability approach; the analysis of poverty and anti-poverty programmes, and social security. His recent papers include “The coupling of disadvantages: Material poverty and multiple deprivation before and after the Great Recession,” which was published in the European Journal of Social Security in 2016. He is co-editor of the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice.