Scope and format of system and world data sheets

The question arose in the thread about Navabharata as to what the “equality” rating means. The answer is that I am using one minus the Gini coefficient (of household income per household member)

The rationale is there is a convention (now going out of fashion) of using that as a conversion factor to turn GDP per head into “standard of living” for international comparisons. The problem is that it’s completely obscure. For anyone except some economists you have to define the Gini coefficient, and though I know how it is defined it really doesn’t communicate anything even to me.

So, what are the alternatives?

  • A 10% Rich/Poor ratio? (e.g. the income of the richest 10% in Australia is about 12.5 times that of the poorest 10%. The corresponding figure for Denmark is 8.1, for the USA 18.5, for South Africa 33.1 and for Bolivia 93.1).

  • A figure for X% of households earn 100-X % of all income? (50% earn 50% at perfect equality, 0% earn 100% at perfect inequality.)

@whswhs suggests a scale of 0–6 of qualitative descriptions set out in a key, like “Control Rating” in GURPS. I’m going to have to think about whether to provide a scale of equality or of inequality, and have a care to write the descriptions so as to indicate inequality per se and not the material misery of the poor etc.

0–6 seems like a strange range to me. I would naturally think more of a scale of zero to ten, or of no stars to five stars. I could be done in a text document like this: ★★★☆

And then I had a really ditzy idea. Emoji!

Tau Ceti could be: :woozy_face::frowning::neutral_face::neutral_face::neutral_face::neutral_face::grinning::man_white_haired::older_man::face_with_monocle:

Navabharata could be: :rage::pleading_face::pleading_face::pleading_face::frowning::frowning::frowning::neutral_face::grinning::clown_face:

What could convery more than that? It only emoji didn’t look all alike.