This paper is concerned with concepts – poverty, inequality, affluence, and polarization – that are typically treated … motivation of Foster and Wolfson’s paper “Polarization and the decline of the middle class” (1992/2010) was the sensitivity of … middle class and polarization based on partial orderings” (2010, page 247). We introduce an alternative partial ordering …

: inequality and polarization indices, to illustrate basic trends, stochastic dominance techniques, to provide unambiguous economic … welfare and poverty comparisons across regions and over time, and transition probability techniques and polarization …

regressions, time series modelling, panel data analysis - can be misleading for understanding convergence; a model of polarization …

transmission leads to a political polarization. We then endogenize the order of entry to show that in general some high quality …

labor market risk, infuences the degree of polarization in the wealth distribution, as poor agents in particular save more …

, the polarization (P) index, and the total relative deprivation (TRD) index. The paper proposes a tentative guide to …