policymakers demonstrate

Inequality and Welfare: Is Europe Special? 553
to talent as fair, despite the fact that talent to a large degree is the result of a
genetic lottery. Understanding this discrepancy between normative theory and
what people actually think could be important for understanding what drives
support for different welfare policies.
12.6 Data Are Improving but Remain Largely Incomplete when
Looking at More Specific Issues
Data in Europe on income and wealth distributions are improving rapidly but
are still insufficient to cope with the study of poverty and inequality of opportunity.
We have already mentioned the remarkable effort to build the world
top incomes database 23 managed by Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony Atkinson,
Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (Alvaredo et al., 2013) and which gathered
more than 30 researchers all around the world. Another remarkable enterprise
supported by both institutions in Europe and the US is the Luxembourg
Income Study, which helps to build a data archive and research centre dedicated
to cross-national analysis. LIS is home to two databases, the Luxembourg
Income Study Database, and the Luxembourg Wealth Study Database. 24
We should also talk about the European Survey of Income and Living Condition
(EU-SILC) and the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to
assess earnings inequality in Europe from 1994 to 2009. The ECHP is a survey
of 15 countries in the European Union from 1994 up to 2001. The EU-SILC
is a collection of timely and comparable multidimensional micro data covering
EU countries, starting in 2004 and ending in 2009, for a total of six waves.
These surveys share many features, which makes it possible to harmonize the
variables of interest. One advantage of these data is that they provide information
for an overall period of 15 years within which we can observe a total of
12 European countries: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland,
France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and the United Kingdom.
However, when looking at equality of opportunity, the lack of good data
is widespread, except in Nordic countries where inequalities, including those
linked to initial background, have been a social and political issue for a very
long time. 25 One can say that there is a kind of paradox: In countries where the
concern is high regarding inequality, we have good data, and to some extent,
inequalities and inequalities of opportunity are low, while it is the opposite in
countries where the social concern for inequality is weak. So we have good
data for countries where the issue is almost fixed. A point should be raised
about the fact that in most databases, measures of cognitive skills (such as IQ)
and of noncognitive skills are missing. This hampers good identification of the
impact of the social background on the destiny of offspring.
Nevertheless, the lack of good knowledge of the bottom part of the distribution
is likely to be the most important handicap for our understanding of