e inequality and poverty are separate issues. For many people this is obvious. But there are numerousChristians who believe that e inequality is an important issue because they assume it is a proxy for poverty. If this were true, Christians would indeed need to be concerned about e inequality because concern about poverty is a foundational principle of any Christian view of economics.

Fortunately, there is neither a necessary connection nor correlation. A country could have absolutely no poverty at all and have extremely e inequality. The reason is because e inequality (measured by the Gini coefficient), measures relative, not absolute, e.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Harry Frankfurt, a philosopher who has written a book on inequality, has a guest post at Forbes in which he makes the same point: e inequality and poverty aren’t the same thing.

What is bad is not inequality; it is poverty. We should want each person to have enough—that is, enough to support the pursuit of a life in which his or her own reasonable ambitions and needs may fortably satisfied. This individually measured sufficiency, which by definition precludes the bur­dens and deprivations of poverty, is clearly a more sensible goal than the achievement of an impersonally calibrated equality.

[…]

It is not inequality itself that is to be decried; nor is it equality it­self that is to be applauded. We must try to eliminate poverty, not because the poor have less than others but be­cause being poor is full of hardship and suffering. We must con­trol inequality, not because the rich have much more than the poor but because of the tendency of inequality to generate unac­ceptable discrepancies in social and political influence. Inequality is not in itself objectionable—and neither is equality in itself a morally required ideal.

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