In a Society where the income distribution is excessive ________ the handful individual there has unlimited money.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), Asymmetry. The printed sentence is badly constructed and has to be read for its sense rather than its grammar, but the second half of it settles the answer on its own: a society in which a handful of individuals hold unlimited money is a society whose income distribution is lopsided, with a very large share of the total in the hands of a very small number of people. The word for a distribution shaped that way is asymmetric, and asymmetry is exactly what statisticians mean by skewness. Income distributions are in fact right-skewed almost everywhere: the great majority of earners are bunched near the bottom, a long thin tail stretches away to the right, and because a few very large incomes drag the average upward the mean income sits well above the median. That gap between mean and median is the arithmetic signature of the asymmetry the sentence describes, and it is the reason average income per head can rise in a country where the typical household feels no better off. The measurement apparatus built on this idea is the Lorenz curve, which plots the cumulative share of income against the cumulative share of the population, and the Gini coefficient derived from it: a perfectly symmetric, perfectly equal distribution traces the straight diagonal and scores zero, while the more asymmetric the distribution the further the curve sags away from that diagonal and the closer the coefficient moves to one. The blank is asking for the property that produces a concentration at the top, and only asymmetry names it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Equality is the direct opposite of what the rest of the sentence describes. If income were distributed equally there would be no handful of individuals with unlimited money — every share would be the same, the Lorenz curve would coincide with the diagonal line of perfect equality, and the Gini coefficient would be zero. Filling the blank with equality makes the sentence contradict its own second clause, which is the clearest possible test that a fill-in-the-blank answer is wrong: read the completed sentence back and see whether its two halves agree.  (c) Deficiency is a statement about a shortfall in quantity, not about the shape of a distribution. A society can suffer a deficiency of income in aggregate and still share what it has fairly evenly, and it can have no deficiency at all while a few people hold most of it — which is precisely the situation the sentence describes. The word also does not combine sensibly with 'income distribution', since a distribution is not the sort of thing that is in short supply; what is in short supply is income, and the sentence is about how income is spread rather than how much of it there is.  (d) Abundance likewise describes the total quantity of income rather than its spread across the population, and a society can be abundant and even-handed at the same time — indeed high average income and moderate inequality coexist in several countries. Reading the completed sentence back exposes the mismatch: an excessively abundant income distribution would say that there is a great deal of income, which leaves entirely open the question the sentence is actually asking, namely why so much of it sits with so few people.

Concept: Two quite different questions can be asked about a country's income: how much there is, and how it is spread. The first is answered by aggregates such as national income and income per head; the second requires the tools of distribution. The empirical starting point is that income distributions are asymmetric — positively skewed — in every society for which data exist. A histogram of incomes rises steeply, peaks well to the left, and then trails off in a long tail of high earners, so the arithmetic mean is pulled above the median and describes nobody in particular. Economists formalise the asymmetry with the Lorenz curve, which ranks the population from poorest to richest and plots the cumulative share of income they receive against the cumulative share of people; perfect equality traces the forty-five degree diagonal, and real distributions sag below it. The Gini coefficient measures the size of that sag, running from zero at perfect equality to one where a single person holds everything. Related descriptive tools include decile and quintile ratios, the share of the top one per cent, and the Kuznets hypothesis that inequality first rises and then falls as an economy industrialises. All of them are ways of putting a number on the same asymmetry this sentence is groping towards.

State PCS 2024 Q50 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q50 — Economy PYQ with Answer