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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

From the article: In my hometown of Mumbai, we have had many of these conveniences...This narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this new economy would fall apart: inequality.

Only one problem with the narrative: India (Gini 33.9) has considerably less inequality than the US (Gini 48).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

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Only one problem with the narrative: India (Gini 33.9) has considerably less inequality than the US (Gini 48).

You point out the problem with measuring inequality using the Gini co-efficient.

A country where everyone is equally poor has a lower (better) Gini co-efficient than a country where few are poor and few are very rich.

A country where everyone is equally poor has a lower (better) Gini co-efficient than a country where few are poor and few are very rich.

How is "equally poor" bad from the point of view of inequality enabling services like Uber though? In the extreme case, if everyone in India was "equally poor" as you put it, no one should be able to do jobs as cheaply as the author mentions.

Might be better then to consider the inequality-adjusted HDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...

India is less unequal than the US, yes. But it has a lot more poor people.

Which points out that income inequality is not useful on an absolute scale. In other words if you make 1M a year and your neighbor makes 2M a year your lifestyles are very similar. However, if you make 10$/day and your neighbor makes 20$/day your lifestyle can be very different.

Just because a number is useless on its own does not mean that it's useless in all circumstances. Generally, we know both inequality and average income.

The article says this, too, so what point are you trying to make?

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