Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality: Rethinking Distributive Justice and the Principle of Desert

Description

This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii Introduction (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 1-8 Front Matter ....Pages 9-9 The Die Is Cast: Chance, Merit, and Inequality (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 11-45 Autonomy and Desert (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 47-77 Front Matter ....Pages 79-79 Equal Opportunity and Just Deserts: Better Late than Before (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 81-96 Efficiency and Just Deserts: Economists’ Big Trade-Off (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 97-113 Liberty and Just Deserts: Slaves, Dynasties, and Moral Agents (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 115-129 Front Matter ....Pages 131-131 Economy and Desert (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 133-140 Measure for Merit (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 141-149 The Individual Moral Agent (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 151-158 The Natural Lottery Alone (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 159-170 Just Deserts (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 171-189 Just Deserts Outcomes and Aggregate Analysis (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 191-211 The Just Deserts Economy (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 213-222 Conclusion (Joseph de la Torre Dwyer)....Pages 223-224 Back Matter ....Pages 225-248