More on Inequality

After the last post on inequality and different ways to look at it, I came across this entertaining post by Mark Perry on scoring inequality in the NBA. He also applies this method to Olympic medals and home runs in baseball.

Anyway, all this talk about inequality reminded me of something Hayek once wrote: "From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict which each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time." (From The Constitution of Liberty.)

And that, of course, is reminiscent of Vonnegut's famous short story, "Harrison Bergeron," in Welcome to the Monkey House. (There was a thought-provoking essay on Vonnegut, by the way, in the Winter 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.)

Inequality is not a simple issue conducive to Gordian solutions, and proves at least two things: (1) the once seemingly dead discipline of "political economy" is not dead, and (2) discussions of economics are perhaps inevitably informed by philosophy. Namely, why type of justice should we have?

Comments

[Michael F. Martin]

I like a version of Rawls that would admit the possibility that of change in who is categorized as the least well off. In other words, welfare (or happiness, or utility, whatever you want to call it), ought to take account of the mutability of any configuration of welfare, both of individuals and in the aggregate. Happiness is quite ephemeral. I think Rawls was on the right track looking after widows and orphans. But what makes them special? Public and private institutions ought to be measured by how inclusive they are of the slowest and most off-beat individuals -- and managed to increase theeir inclusiveness of these individuals. The gain in human capital over the long term will outweigh the temporary losses incurred on the new and modified infrastructure necessary to being more inclusive. The Internet is powerful evidence of that fact.

[Jordan Weber-Flink]

Michael, I disagree.

"Public and private institutions ought to be measured by how inclusive they are of the slowest and most off-beat individuals -- and managed to increase theeir inclusiveness of these individuals."

Why? And in so doing, wouldn't we give up a lot of the freedom that has made us the most productive country in the world? I think Dane's post illuminates that we have a choice between equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Freedom has been proven to be economically superior to socialism, and I would argue that in the long run it is also morally superior.

The gains from the inclusiveness of the internet are not the result of some draconian social movement which modified and altered the web in order to bring the slowest, most off-beat individuals online. It was instead a natural and emergent effect of billions of people exploring new freedoms.

[Michael F. Martin]

Jordan,

We may not disagree as much as you think. I see capitalism writ large as a decentralized mechanism for synchronizing the activities of individuals without a centralized source of political power. In other words, emergent institutional structures such as represenative democracies or the Internet succeed because they have made inclusiveness a stated goal. You and many others who live in representative democracies take this point too much foe granted. To be clear, I believe the dichotomy between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome is a false one. Equality of opportunity is constitutive of equality of outcome. We have proved that in the US.