Resources and Functionings: A New View of Inequality in Australia

The degree of inequality in the levels of well-being of its citizens tells us a great deal about a society. It enables us to judge its social and economic system, to identify those citizens with a claim on community compassion, to identify the sources of hardship, and to devise strategies for reducing levels of hardship. The value of such information is undoubted. But we confront a severe practical problem in first defining, and then measuring, what we mean by well-being. It is surely multi-dimensional, and difficult to reduce to a scalar-valued index.