Overview
Presents a new theory of distributive justice based on a concept of desert
Offers a robust solution to inequality, poverty, and economic immobility that feels intuitively just to progressives and conservatives
Argues that desert, as discussed, maximally satisfies equality of opportunity, engages libertarians, and enables, under certain conditions, perfectly economically efficient redistribution
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Just Principles
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Joseph de la Torre Dwyer is a Researcher at Knology and based in New York where he studies equality of opportunity and economic justice. He received his PhD in Political Science from Rutgers University, USA.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality
Book Subtitle: Rethinking Distributive Justice and the Principle of Desert
Authors: Joseph de la Torre Dwyer
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21126-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-21125-7Published: 23 September 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-21128-8Published: 23 September 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-21126-4Published: 11 September 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 248
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations
Topics: Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Social Structure, Social Inequality, Public Policy, Macroeconomics/Monetary Economics//Financial Economics