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Course Description

Summary

Economic inequality is a matter not only of unequal distribution in income and wealth, but also of unevenness in people’s access to basic needs, such as health, nutrition, and environmental conditions of well-being. This advanced seminar will explore issues of inequality from a spatial perspective, focusing on how people’s geographic locations shape their ability to access goods and services. Issues of inequality will be theoretically examined through the lens of distributive justice, and various measures of inequality will be explored empirically to describe distributional asymmetries in a population in a region. The seminar will also examine ways to decompose the measures across spatial groups of population members, and study certain basic techniques of analyzing hierarchic/multilevel spatial data. This exploration of inequality will be transdisciplinary, drawing upon the fields of philosophy, statistics, geography and economics.