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Over the years, egalitarian philosophers have made some challenging claims about the nature of egalitarianism. They have argued that the Rawlsian leximin principle is not an egalitarian idea; that egalitarian reasoning should make us reject the Pareto principle; that the numbers should not count within an egalitarian framework; that egalitarianism should make us reject the property of transitivity, that the Pigou-Dalton principle needs modification, and that the intersection approach faces deep problems. In this paper, taking the recent philosophical debate on equality versus priority as the starting point, I review these claims from the point of view of an economist