Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality
Rethinking Distributive Justice and the Principle of Desert
Authors: Dwyer, Joseph de la Torre
Free Preview- 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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- About this book
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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.
- About the authors
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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.
- Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Introduction
Pages 1-8
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The Die Is Cast: Chance, Merit, and Inequality
Pages 11-45
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Autonomy and Desert
Pages 47-77
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Equal Opportunity and Just Deserts: Better Late than Before
Pages 81-96
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Efficiency and Just Deserts: Economists’ Big Trade-Off
Pages 97-113
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Chance, Merit, and Economic Inequality
- Book Subtitle
- Rethinking Distributive Justice and the Principle of Desert
- Authors
-
- Joseph de la Torre Dwyer
- Copyright
- 2020
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-030-21126-4
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-030-21126-4
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-030-21125-7
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-3-030-21128-8
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XVII, 248
- Number of Illustrations
- 6 b/w illustrations
- Topics
