Figure 2.3: Lorenz Curves for Spoils Distribution on Pirate and Naval Ships
Figure 2.3, titled 'The distribution of spoils: pirates and the British navy,' graphically compares income distribution between eighteenth-century pirates and the British navy using Lorenz curves. The curve for the pirate ship Royal Rover is very close to the 45-degree line of perfect equality, reflecting egalitarian rules. In contrast, the curves for the naval ships Favourite and Active bow significantly away from the equality line, indicating that ordinary crew members received only about a quarter of the spoils, with the rest going to officers. The graph also confirms that the distribution on the Favourite was more unequal than on the Active.
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Figure 2.3: Lorenz Curves for Spoils Distribution on Pirate and Naval Ships
Relationship Between the Lorenz Curve Area and the Gini Coefficient
Unequal Spoils Distribution on the Royal Navy's 'Favourite' and 'Active'
Lorenz Curve for Spoils Distribution on the Royal Rover
Evaluating Wealth Distribution in Maritime Crews
Consider two eighteenth-century maritime crews with different systems for distributing captured treasure. Crew A operates under a strict hierarchy where officers receive disproportionately large shares, leaving a small fraction for the common sailors. Crew B follows a set of articles ensuring a much more even distribution, where each member's share is clearly defined and the difference between the highest and lowest shares is relatively small. If you were to plot a graphical representation of each crew's wealth distribution, with the cumulative percentage of the crew on one axis and the cumulative percentage of treasure they receive on the other, what would you expect to observe?
Explaining Distributional Differences
Match each description of a system for distributing spoils among a ship's crew to the corresponding characteristic of its graphical representation of inequality, where the axes plot the cumulative percentage of the crew against the cumulative percentage of spoils they receive.
Comparative Fairness of Pirate vs. Naval Systems in the 18th Century