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players, if they believed that someone contributed more or less than they should. Results showed that
when participants were aware of the income of the other players, they rewarded poorer participants
and punished richer ones. This leads us to believe that information – at least in contexts and societies
similar to the U.S. – could be the key to the issue of redistribution and inequality. However, this
strategy, however, seems to be successful only when it is self-serving: when people learn that they
are overestimating their own position in the distribution, i.e. they are poorer than what they believed,
they lend more support to redistribution. Those who underestimate their position, i.e. they are richer
than what they believed, instead, support redistribution less, especially when they believe that
their position in the distribution stems from their personal effort. This evidence is consistent with
other research investigating self-interest theories: people will tolerate, support or reject inequality
depending on what favours their own position (Curtis and Andersen, 2015; Katadija et al. 2017).

INEQUALITY OR POVERTY?

4.15 Inequality needs to be distinguished from poverty. Inequality refers to the degree of
dispersion in the distribution of assets, income or consumption. Poverty refers to the assets,
income or consumption of those at the bottom of the distribution. Poverty could be conceptualised
in relative terms or in absolute terms. People feel themselves to be poor, and think others to be
poor if they have substantially less than what is commonplace among others in their society.
Poverty, in this view, is relative deprivation. (Brady 2003; Iceland 2003). If the poverty is
conceptualized in relative terms, there is no need to distinguish it from inequality. A relative
measure of poverty is indeed a measure of inequality.
4.16 On the other hand, if poverty is conceptualized in an absolute sense, that is, focusing on the
absolute levels of assets, income or consumption of those at the low end of the distribution, then
increases in inequality may be accompanied by reduction in poverty. Feldstein (1999) disagrees
with the common reaction of the popular press and academic discussions that regards inequality
and not poverty as the problem. He postulates that policy should aim at addressing poverty
rather than inequality. He explains with an example of a magic bird providing $1000 to each of
the Public Interest (the journal in which Feldstein's article was published) subscriber, everyone
would see it as a good thing. However, since each subscriber has greater average-income, it will
result into greater inequality in the nation. Feldstein finds it inaccurate to contemplate the $1000
bonanza as morally suspect.

4.17 The Feldstein-type challenge is consistent with a variety of other views about distributive
justice. Perhaps the best known is that of John Rawls (1971). Rawls argued that the most
reasonable way to decide upon a fair distributive principle is to imagine that you must make this
decision knowing you will be born into the world but not knowing anything about what your
assets and characteristics ⎯ intelligence, personality traits, parents, neighbourhood, gender, skin
colour, etc. ⎯ will be. Rawls referred to this hypothetical scenario as the “original position.”
He suggested that in such a situation a rational person would choose a distributive principle
requiring that any increase in inequality increase the income of those at the bottom. In Feldstein’s
example, according to the Rawlsian criterion the $1,000 windfall given to the well-to-do would
only be justifiable if it was accompanied by some increase for those at the low end. Rawls’s
distributive principle is a “maximin” one: whatever distribution maximizes the income of the
poorest (and provides basic liberties) is to be preferred.