Politics and Science: A Rejoinder to Arne Melchior and Kjetil Telle

Abstract

The Russian Question Melchior and Telle (M/T) believe that I argue ‘that the omission of the former Soviet Union (FSU) could lead to a bias in our (M/T’s) results, ...’ I do not. I was simply baffled by two points in their treatment of the matter in Melchior et al. (2000). The first point was methodological. M/T ‘answer’ by giving a clear account of the matter as they now see it, with diagrams (1 and 2) which were not included in Melchior et al. (2000) or in Melchior and Telle (2001) that is, the articles to which I referred. Fine that science progresses. They might, of course, have thanked me for pointing out the original, methodological error. The second point is also cleared up: M/T do not mean to say that global Gini increased significantly from ca. 1988 to 1993, if the Soviet Union/Russia is included and if we calculate in PPP. Again fine. But their diagram 2.4 in Melchior et al. (2000: 16) included a curve which increases rather steeply for this period, in-dicating a signifi-cant increase in Gini; the symbol attached to the curve was explained as ‘Ours (PPP) with Russia’. Strangely, M/T ignore that this is the diagram to which I explicitly referred. I was baffled because M/T in the text informed us that there are no PPP data for Russia after 1989, and because the curve showed a trend for global inequality which contradicted the main result of their study. Contrary to what M/T write I do not, in this connection, refer to curves showing trends before 1989.