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Het is belangrijk en urgent dat de planbureaus de effecten van investeringen in wetenschap systematisch gaan evalueren met een ander instrumentarium. De huidige modelmatige aanpak is daarvoor ongeschikt. De waarde van investeringen in wetenschap wordt daardoor nu niet systematisch meegenomen bij beleidsevaluaties of het evalueren van partijprogramma’s. Hierdoor wordt investeren in wetenschap onterecht als een kostenpost gezien.

A host of studies on wealth inequality in pre-industrial Europe has recently been published. Out of these, a narrative emerges of rising inequality in a context of emerging markets and growing state taxation, punctuated by calamities. By surveying the available material, this article highlights an element that is less systematically discussed in this literature: the role of associational organizations. They developed less regressive forms of taxation and redistribution, embedded the transfer and use of land and capital in coordination systems that curtailed accumulation, and sometimes even imposed maximums of wealth ownership. The article tentatively argues that the resulting downward effect on wealth inequality was found most conspicuously in societies where associations of middling groups of owners-producers held strong positions in economic and political life, even despite the exclusive character of their organizations. Such societies were gradually eroded in the early modern period, most notably as a result of the emergence of factor markets and state centralization, and the associated processes of proletarianization and scale enlargement. This did not happen without opposition and conflict, however, as the process was sometimes halted and showed distinct geographical patterns, which in turn influenced patterns of wealth inequality.

Significance Reliable data on economic inequality are largely limited to North America and Western Europe. As a result, we know the least about areas where inequality presents the most serious developmental policy challenge. We demonstrate that spatial variation in night-light emitted per person can reflect the distribution of income. This allows us to map global patterns and trends in economic inequality using remote sensing., Economic inequality is notoriously difficult to quantify as reliable data on household incomes are missing for most of the world. Here, we show that a proxy for inequality based on remotely sensed nighttime light data may help fill this gap. Individual households cannot be remotely sensed. However, as households tend to segregate into richer and poorer neighborhoods, the correlation between light emission and economic thriving shown in earlier studies suggests that spatial variance of remotely sensed light per person might carry a signal of economic inequality. To test this hypothesis, we quantified Gini coefficients of the spatial variation in average nighttime light emitted per person. We found a significant relationship between the resulting light-based inequality indicator and existing estimates of net income inequality. This correlation between light-based Gini coefficients and traditional estimates exists not only across countries, but also on a smaller spatial scale comparing the 50 states within the United States. The remotely sensed character makes it possible to produce high-resolution global maps of estimated inequality. The inequality proxy is entirely independent from traditional estimates as it is based on observed light emission rather than self-reported household incomes. Both are imperfect estimates of true inequality. However, their independent nature implies that the light-based proxy could be used to constrain uncertainty in traditional estimates. More importantly, the light-based Gini maps may provide an estimate of inequality where previously no data were available at all.

Economische groei werd lang gezien als de belangrijkste graadmeter van succes. Maar neemt dan met economische groei ook de welvaart toe? Met gebruikmaking van historische datasets reconstrueren we de welvaart in Nederland vanaf 1820.