Is one distribution (of income, consumption, or some other economic variable) among families or individuals more or less equal in relative terms to another? Despite the seeming straightforwardness of this question, there has been and continues to be considerable debate over how to go about finding the answer. There are two points of contention. One is the issue of cardinality vs. ordinality. Practitioners of the cardinal approach compare distributions by means of summary measures such as a Gini coefficient, variance of logarithms, and the like. Accordingly, some researchers prefer an ordinal approach, adopting Lorenz domination as their criterion.