# Visualizing Inequalities in a 3-Person Economy

Yesterday, in the course on inequalities, I mentioned (too) briefly the 3-person Economy. I wanted to spend some time in a short post on visualisations of inequalities in such a context. As mentioned in the slides,  it is possible to use a ternary plot representation. In the case where we believe that the scale independence principle makes sense, i.e. $I(\lambda\boldsymbol{x})=I(\boldsymbol{x})$. A distribution of incomes can be represented as a barycenter in an equilateral triangle (also called de Finetti diagram). The midpoint is the equal situation: the three agents share the same wealth. Because of the scale independence property, we can look at distribution of wealth on the simplex. A wealth distribution is a vector $\boldsymbol{\omega}=(\omega_A,\omega_B,\omega_C)$ where each component is one of the (red) distance below. A is on top of the triangle, and the vertical distance is proportional to the wealth of A. The closer to the bottom line, the poorer A is.

To visualize this distribution of wealth, we can use the trifield package. To add the point and the three segments, the code is

tripoint=function(s){
p=s/sum(s)
p1=c(0,s[2]+s[1]/2,s[3]+s[1]/2)/sum(s)
p2=c(s[1]+s[2]/2,0,s[3]+s[2]/2)/sum(s)
p3=c(s[1]+s[3]/2,s[2]+s[3]/2,0)/sum(s)
C <- abc2xy(matrix(p,1,3))
points(C,pch=19,col="red",cex=2)
C1 <- abc2xy(matrix(p1,1,3))
C2 <- abc2xy(matrix(p2,1,3))
C3 <- abc2xy(matrix(p3,1,3))
segments(C1[1],C1[2],C[1],C[2],lwd=2,col="red")
segments(C2[1],C2[2],C[1],C[2],lwd=2,col="red")
segments(C3[1],C3[2],C[1],C[2],lwd=2,col="red")
}

For instance, to visualize the equal case (inequality indices are defined as a distance to this situation)

tripoint(c(1,1,1))

For a case where there is inequality, use for instance

tripoint(c(1,2,3))

We’ve seen in the course that there was a natural ordering, based on Lorenz curve. In the case of a 3-person economy, Lorenz curve is juste based on 2 points,

library(ineq)
plot(Lc(1:3))
s=cumsum(1:3)/6
points((1:2)/3,s[1:2])

An income distribution $\boldsymbol{x}$ is more unequal than distribution $\boldsymbol{y}$ if $L_{ \boldsymbol{x}}(u) \leq L_{ \boldsymbol{y}}(u)$ for all $u\in[0,1]$. What it means is simply that

$\frac{x_1}{x_1+x_2+x_3} \leq \frac{y_1}{y_1+y_2+y_3}$

and at the same time

$\frac{x_1+x_2}{x_1+x_2+x_3} \leq \frac{y_1+y_2}{y_1+y_2+y_3}$

For instance, for this distribution of wealth

we have non-ambuigity about the ordering : this new distribution is more unequal

Because it is simple to compare we can use a simple function to compare two distributions

lorenz_dominance=function(s1,s2){
ss1=(cumsum(sort(s1))/sum(s1))[1:2]
ss2=(cumsum(sort(s2))/sum(s2))[1:2]
dom=0
if(sum(ss1>ss2)==2) dom=1
if(sum(ss1<ss2)==2) dom=-1
return(dom)}

where +1 means more unequal, -1 means less unequal, and 0 means that it is an ambiguous situation, and curves cannot be compared (there is a single crossing here).

Thus, given a reference distribution, it would be nice to visualize all distributions that are more unequal and less unequal. The first step is to get a grid

library(trifield)
grid.size = 128
tg = ternary.grid(grid.size)

Then , define function

f = function(x) lorenz_dominance(x,c(1,2,3))

which compares all points with our reference.  Then we use some sort of ‘apply’ function, to compute that function on all points of the grid

z = ternary.apply(tg, f)

and then we simply plot the contour plot of that output

tf = ternary.field(tg, z)
plot(tf,col=c(rgb(1,0,0,.2),"white",rgb(0,0,1,.2)))

I can add the reference point on the map

tripoint(c(1,2,3))

The output is nice, isn’t? The code here is natural, based on what I would do on a standard cartesian representation… But the output is not valid. And I could not find why… To check, let us draw randomly some incomes, and then plot them

ternary.legend()
for(s in 1:50000){
x=rexp(3); x=x/sum(x)
points(abc2xy(matrix(x,1,3)),col=c(rgb(1,0,0,.2),"white",rgb(0,0,1,.2))[lorenz_dominance(x,c(1,4,5))+2],pch=19,cex=.7)
}

The output is rather different…  If my reference is (20,10,1)

ternary.legend()
for(s in 1:50000){
x=rexp(3); x=x/sum(x)
points(abc2xy(matrix(x,1,3)),col=c(rgb(1,0,0,.2),"white",rgb(0,0,1,.2))[lorenz_dominance(x,c(20,10,1))+2],pch=19,cex=.7)
}

which is comparable with a graph one can find is some slides of Economics 1391 (but no reference is mentioned)

I still don’t undertand what went wrong with the initial code…

Actually, we can visualize almost anything, like iso-curves for Gini index. Again, using simulations, I get

for(s in 1:50000){
x=rexp(3); x=x/sum(x); g=Gini(x)
points(abc2xy(matrix(x,1,3)),col=heat.colors(100)[round(100*g)],pch=19,cex=.7)
}

But this time, if I use functions of the trifield package, it seems to be fine (and consistent with graph one can find in various papers, e.g. in  some slides of Economics 1391)

f = function(x) Gini(x)
z = ternary.apply(tg, f)
tf = ternary.field(tg, z)
plot(tf)

And we can visualize iso-inequality curves for any inequality index, for instance Theil index

f = function(x) Theil(x)
z = ternary.apply(tg, f)
tf = ternary.field(tg, z)
plot(tf)

or the generalized entropy,

f = function(x) entropy(x,2)
z = ternary.apply(tg, f)
tf = ternary.field(tg, z)
plot(tf)

That sounds promising, and I believe nice visualizations can be obtained in that 3-person economy, but I still have to understand why the Lorenz-comparison graph did not work…

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