CONCLUDING REMARKS
Economists are sometimes criticized for concentrating too much on efficiency and too little on equity. There may be some ground for complaint here, but it must also be noted that inequality has received attention from economists throughout the history of this discipline. Adam Smith, who is often thought of as "the Father of Modern Economics," was deeply concerned with the gulf between the rich and the poor (more on this late, in chapters 5 and II). Some of the social scientists and philosophers who are responsible for making inequality such central of public attention (such as Karl Marx, a subject Stuart Mill, B. S. Rowntree and Hugh Dalton, to take writers belong- ing to very different general traditions) were, in terms of substantive involvement, devoted economists, no matter what else they might also have been. In recent years, economics of inequality as a subject flourished, with major leadership coming from such writers as has A. B. Atkinson. This is not to deny that the focus on efficiency to the exclusion of other considerations is very evident in some works in economics, but economists as a group cannot be accused of neglecting inequality as a subject.
If there is a reason to grum tance that is attached, in much of economics, to inequality in a very narrow domain, viz., income inequality: This narrowness has the effect of contributing to the neglect of other ways of seeing inequal- ity and equity, which has far-reaching bearing on the making of economic policy. Policy debates have indeed been distorted by over- come poverty and income inequa emphasis on glect of to the ne deprivations that relate to other variables, such as unemployment, ii and social exclusion. Unfortunately, the health, lack of education identification of economic inequality with income inequality is fairly common in economics, and the two are often seen as effectively syn someone that you are working on economic onymous. If you inequality, it is quite standardly assumed that you are studying income distribution