factor-market explanations, and pointing by implication to an institutional class of explanations. Our excellent cross-village data, with all the benefits of clean and comparable measurement of inequality and growth over time, however, also show the limits of how much can be ultimately learned in a growthinequality regression. Unless a researcher is willing to believe that both the underlying relationship between growth and inequality is stable, and all variation in inequality is driven by the same “treatment,” then little that is definitive can be learned from this exercise. While it is difficult to believe that either condition holds in the Chinese context, it is even harder to believe that such conditions hold in a crosscountry setting.

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