How data science can help with measuring the outcome for social and economic justice in our society?

In the words of Ray Dalio :

Equal opportunity is not the same as equal outcome.

The question then becomes how do we measure the outcome to judge it’s equality or rather inequality? As a free society, we have the ideal goal of giving everyone in the society an opportunity to be in the pursuit of happiness and preparing for the best outcome to the best of their abilities.

Now, the best outcome may not be the same equal for everyone as each individual and their environmental circumstances are unique. Nevertheless, it is still important to measure the socioeconomic outcomes in the society to close the feedback loop and make sure the indifferent outcomes are not a direct result of gap in opportunity level.

One of the efforts to make our world understandable based on reliable statistics is done by Gapminder. As an example of using the rich data-set of world socioeconomic indicators for 142 countries from 1952 to 2007 available from Gapminder data like Average Life Expectancy (social and medical quality metric) and GDP per capita (educational and financial quality metric), there are some insights to note:

Bubble chart showing 142 countries with bubble size indicating the population of the country as of 2007, X-axis (Average Life Expectancy) represents social and medical care quality, Y-axis (GDP per capita) represents educational and financial quality of the country as a whole

Source: Gapminder data and web application analysis @ https://gapminder-data-exploration.herokuapp.com/

1. For the majority of countries, the trend to shift over time is towards the upper-right indicating better quality of social and economic standards. This is where most of the developed nations are as of today, most of Europe, Oceania and North America.
2. The lower-left indicates under-developed nations, mostly African countries.
3. The middle of the two clusters above indicates developing nations cluster, mostly Asia and South America.

Socioeconomic indicators’ trend-line over time

If for a given country, say United States of America, we could do a similar set of indicators study, for example, measuring average life expectancy and median income levels based on race and ethnicity, do we the see trend moving in the right direction (upper-right) for all humans regardless of their race or ethnicity? Such data analysis could show the rate of change of moving in the upper-right direction is still disparate based on unjust environmental conditions.

One quick ending thought here is education is an opportunity as well as an outcome (educational level of the larger population) and that runs in a generational loop. To a lesser degree, same can be said about the financial wealth too. Hence, the outcome of a generation drives the opportunity for the next generation. So, the first step is to acknowledge the difference in outcomes, understand what is/are the cause(s) for the difference in outcomes, and make sure that the difference in outcome does not create a permanent suffering by creating a gap in opportunity. This will ultimately lead us to a free, just and happy society.