THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF INCOME DISTRIBUTION STATISTICS

In both political discussions and scientific literature the income distribution has come to occupy a central position for the consideration of social welfare and economic equalization. It has been assumed that an individual's income reflects his consumption opportunities and therefore his standard of living or economic welfare. The thesis of this paper is, however, that there are reasons for being quite pessimistic about drawing meaningful conclusions from income distribution data. As illustrated by the use of Swedish data, the distribution of income gives an extremely incomplete picture of the distribution of consumption for a wide variety of definitional and statistical reasons. The distribution of consumption, furthermore, cannot be transformed into a corresponding distribution of welfare, since there is no well defined concept of welfare. The treatment of public consumption in empirical analysis of the distribution of welfare also raises problems. The paper closes with the presentation of the conceptual basis for an alternative to the traditional method of analyzing the distribution of income.