> "Why does the cause ... matter if the effects of it are the same?" The statistics do not say "no matter what the cause, the effects are identical." What the

> "Why does the cause ... matter if the effects of it are the same?" The statistics do not say "no matter what the cause, the effects are identical." What they show is a tendency, not an absolute hard-and-fast rule. I contend that, if you separated out countries with high inequality due to corruption from countries with high inequality due to innovation, you'd find that inequal-corrupt has lower growth than equal, and equal has lower growth than inequal-innovative. But since they're averaging inequal-corrupt with inequal-innovative, that effect gets hidden -- which leads to people trying to solve inequality (counterproductively!) when the real problem is corruption.