There are obvious Rawlsian sorts of measures that could be brought to the table immediately (or to House or Senate). Not merely higher taxes, but entitlement programs of various sorts, even WPA sorts of programs (making all votes passable by majority instead of 2/3s seems correct, Rawlsian or not). The usual academic however usually either is too preoccupied with teaching/ research, or concerned about tenure (or losing it) so any Applied-Rawls generally depends on Les Miz, though Les Miz generally has no need for procedures or contracts, and the A-R becomes bureaucratic socialism of various sorts. So it goes…………………

What you’re missing is that most important, most valuable ingredients are shared between the Lexus and the Corolla—high-tech engine and transmission technology, air-bags, anti-lock brakes, and so on. If you prefer, think of the $2000 laptop as the progressive taxation subsidizing the $500 laptop.

salient: Perhaps hypothetically, if we eventually achieve the kind of society which we are attempting to work toward, I’ll buy this. At this point in time, no.

I think we’re closer than you think we are. Recall the Jack Nicholson bit from ‘As Good As It Gets”:

Some have great stories, pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just no one in this car. But, a lot of people, that’s their story. Good times, noodle salad. What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you’re that pissed that so many others had it good…

But notice that the people in that car weren’t without those pretty stories because of an unequal share of resources. And, on the other hand, great stories involving lakes and boats and friends are within the financial means of a family living on two Walmart associate incomes.

Well, I hope not! But for the moment it may be best to quit while we’re ahead.

I’m a bit disappointed that you can’t conceed the egalitarian alternative is worse from a dynamic point of view. This seems so obvious and so supported by the facts.

You misquote me by cutting the quote after ‘short term calls’, there was no full stop for a while in that sentence (but I know my sentences are twisty to say the least). It doesn’t matter because none of my ‘end games’ would be long term seen from your angle. I – on the other hand – would have a principled issue with your type of end game. I believe it’s one of the worst things to target a closed system of rules, I think it’s inhumane.

Sweeping change, yes, but as to the hostage situation I do recommend you read, or you re-read, Rawls: some of the most concrete suggestions he has are on this side. As to the B: if everyone is worse off, even an egalitarian should have issues. That being said, I do not see why Rawlsians would object to (B) in principle (& I think your proposal is quite in the direction of what I at least would find reasonable in current circumstances) but I do see why they would object to (B) being a principled attribute of a liberal democracy.

We’ll have to agree to disagree, I guess.

the end game I’m looking for merely is (to come back to John): accepting we need to reluctantly make short term calls

Well, okay, but “short term” is not an end game by my definition. I guess my point is, probably to your dismay, that this is a sensible time to advocate for sweeping change in conventional wisdom as well as policy, especially an increase in egalitarianism: not just policies, but advocacy for currently low-priority principles and ideas that “ought to be commonsensical.”

what do we need to do – e.g. when the normality is restored in credit – to avoid being hostage again of the rich & powerful

See, I think this is (or should be) an “applied” question for political theory and theory of social justice, and (apparently as opposed to John) I don’t think that Rawlsian perspectives and intuitionist perspectives lead to advocacy for the same policies. In particular, I think we need (A) strong disincentives for the accumulation of wealth derived from investing other people’s money, and (B) a very progressive estate tax that peaks near 100%, perhaps with the upper bound on untaxable inheritance indexed to 1 year’s median U.S. citizen annual earnings {exempting the value of a primary residence up to $1 million}. I suspect the Rawlsians would agree to (A) but not to (B) on the grounds that it would reduce productivity and make everyone worse off.

I guess we’re alone by now ;-)

1. agreed, but the egalitarian alternative is worse (see above)

2. agreed, but any idea of personal justice is part of a comprehensive doctrine leading to the issues of political liberties that are the starting point of Rawls thinking (in fact – yes, Rawls’ system is open for better models whilst a comprehensive doctrine adopted as the final one is per definition not open for essential improvement) – I admit to being a fan of the free market to regulate the interaction between individuals, evolutionarily it is the only context that allows progressive evolution (obviously the current markets are unchecked in important ways and even worse: not free because the big players are dominating)

3. I disagree, the idea of VoI – artificial and unconvincing as it is – will ensure that there is a 0% chance that the lowest incomes will be such that life is merely tolerable; but it’s really the most minor element of our discussion (I don’t like the VoI for reasons you’re making above)

4. I disagree, my end game is not an ideal society; the end game I’m looking for merely is (to come back to John): accepting we need to reluctantly make short term calls – e.g. the Geithner plan – (because we’re de facto hostage of the rich & powerful), what do we need to do – e.g. when the normality is restored in credit – to avoid being hostage again of the rich & powerful

5. to 4, my proposal: break-up large companies into smaller units (on top of tax haven intn’l regulation and widespread increases in taxing wealth)

3.

This is largely true. I nevertheless disagree with the (unstated) idea that people simply get what they deserve in American society.

1. Families differ wildly in the opportunities and safety nets they can offer children. A rich person, or even the child of professors, will have many more opportunities to find something they are good at, and will have many more opportunities to recover from bad judgment, bad decisions, bad school performance, etc.

2. A lot of life is about who you know. People generally don’t manufacture their social networks from scratch. Labor markets rely heavily on personal networks, for instance. The education system makes things a little more impersonal but hardly eliminates the effect fully—many companies like to hire from particular universities, many universities like to accept students from particular high schools, etc.

3. People’s worth cannot and should not be entirely defined by their personal characteristics as teenagers. It’s true that smart hardworking studious teenagers from poor families are often provided with great opportunities to succeed. But teens from the same family who are intelligent, impulsive, and have a hard time dealing with authority are likely to be shafted by our current system. Traits like impulsiveness are not unchangeable, having a hard time dealing with authority is not even necessarily a negative trait, and people do mature over time. (Our system tends to reward a certain brand of overly mature child.) Nevertheless, someone who screws up in high school is dealt a big blow—they are not in a hopeless situation, but they have to climb out of a hole. (I believe the situation is even tougher in Europe though.)

I do think that transfer payments are an incomplete solution, and that in many ways the poor in America often enjoy a decent amount of material comfort, although I think that Slocum overstates their luxurious conditions (speaking from personal experience, I spent two years as a child with 20/200 vision and no glasses, almost never went to the dentist, etc.)

I am saying: the heirs will gunk up the system. Rawls does not provide a mechanism for assessing this, and in fact (I believe) his mechanism selects for conditions in which heirs have the greatest potential to gunk up the system.

I think, in order to be both reasonable and complete, a system of justice shouldn’t have to pull from the future. It should be able to assess, given a set of initial conditions and rules, whether those conditions and rules will result in a stably just society. So I maintain, at least tentatively,

(1) The Rawlsian two-principle serial framework is insufficient to apply to initial-value conditions and determine whether a society is just. In particular, I feel the difference principle will favor systems that will prove to be unstable over time due to the effects of wealth accumulation, and I believe this favoring is insufficiently tempered by the liberty principle.

(2) The Rawlsian assessment of just society is market-oriented (someone suggested I should say state-oriented instead on a previous thread, still considering this; I think the greater specificity of “market” is justifiable). This has interesting implications when we attempt to broaden our definition of justice sufficiently far to recover just behavior between individuals. In particular, I think (very tentatively) that justice generally is ensuring that no person is subjected to more suffering than is his/her due, and that a better model will more directly address the concept of human suffering and address market politics as a corollary.

(3) The idea of the veil of ignorance assumes a pure rationality, and I still haven’t found evidence that the interaction of pure rationality with pure chance (inequality & veil of ignorance) won’t tend to favor merely making the least-well-off position tolerable, in order to maximize the most-well-off—do rational people gamble their own self-interest? Does “rationality” mean that one mentally consigns oneself to the worst of all possible chances when debating behind a veil of ignorance—or does one deliberately take some from the worst well-off to improve the most well-off, up to some tolerance limit, in the hopes of happening to fall in a favored category? (This was my Situation A/B.)

(4) While I’d rather live in a more Rawlsian-just society, it’s important to discuss the principles that we want to persuade other people to accept, and this requires a system of justice. Thus (I agree with JoB) we do need to discuss “end-game” : what is the ideal society we are working toward? What principles ought to be commonsensical?

Don’t pin me on my example, please but there ARE positive examples of differences in wealth.

By the way although most couch potatoes are poor, I am regularly a couch potato watching the latest reality-TV (yesterday the local version of Beauty & The Nerd with my kids) and I’m rich. And I tell you: I won’t have no Cohen come in and tell me that I should work for the good of the community – I vote for the good of the community and I don’t tell others what they should do – other than get a basic education and vote – & that’s the extent of what I HAVE to do for the good of the community

Perhaps hypothetically, if we eventually achieve the kind of society which we are attempting to work toward, I’ll buy this. At this point in time, no. Getting at least somewhat an equal share is still of primary importance, low unemployment is important, economic stability is important. It’s worth looking at the annual wages of the lowest 20% of earners in each country and considering that one in five people are living on that, etc.

Granted, it’s not the same as having nothing. We can always say, “but there’s someone poorer in the world!” That doesn’t, in my mind, translate into “we ought to not have sympathy for those in poverty among us.” ( And poverty doesn’t translate into lifestyle choices, unless one is the kind of person who quivers with rage at the hallucination of a nation of “welfare mothers.” )

Anyhow, there’s a long way to go before I believe your statement above is true.

Maybe Rawls theory of justice has nothing to say about differences in quality of life in such a counterfactual world—but if so, it has less and less to say about differences in the world we actually live in (in wealthy societies, that is).

That’s a point I’ve been considering: whether, in Rawls, all social goods are cast in terms of liberties and economics, and whether this is of sufficient scope. Yet it’s very difficult to describe justice in terms of quality of life directly, because the notion of “give each person her/his due” is so strongly wrapped up in ideas of (1) personal freedom and (2) fair distribution of resources/opportunities which derive from resources.

But an expensive car does really consume more resources and especially more labor (per vehicle, especially in development) than other cars. Buying a Lexus is not a progressive tax, it is a very complicated way of having other people work for your pleasure. And its utility is exactly that: a car whose point is that it cost a lot of labor to make.

You could as well claim that having a pyramid build for you is a form of progressive tax.

Yep, we’d tend to agree on estate tax but I get your point of principle – it’s a good point even if it is a bit surprising for me to see the difference principle used in the inverse. It was designed such as to have an upper limit on wealth, not to support the no-limit world. But it can be construed as you do so let me try to give it my best.

First: Whether the zero-estate-tax condition is or isn’t fair is a question of fact, not of principle.

Second: What you seem to assume is that this condition would be economically good over-all &, at the same time, constitutive of a systematic unequality of opportunity. I do not think that this first assumption is very likely to occur but if it does it would still be unallowed on principle if it, in fact, leads to the second assumption because the second assumption conflicts with Rawls’ 1st principle (and does so head-on).

Third: I grant the instability issue of his theory but in defense of Rawls, he has proposed rather strong anti-’nepotism and the like’ rules (based on the 1st principle, not the difference principle when I have my thoughts straight). It is by the way imaginable that – in a society damaged by an egalitarianism gone wild – a zero-estate tax might be required to restore the liberty of owning an house.

Now to your paraphrase of Cohen:

A justice-minded person should agree, the accumulation of wealth, in excess of stability and security, should be conferred to social good in the event of one’s death. Equal rights, in pure egalitarianism, demands some reasonable degree of equal access to the net wealth available to society, which is compromised by the lack of estate tax. “You received your wealth from society while you lived; you should return it to society’s benefit when you die” is the kind of principle we should be advocating as commonsensical.

That sounds all right and positive and stuff but how do you implement it a. w/o infringing on an elementary set of political liberties & b. that you have an actual economy. In reality, I think, all of the evidence is that the administration of the egalitarian government creates power, in hands of a few individuals, and that power gets abused in a matter of years (not decades). If Rawls has a weak flank evolutionarily, Cohen just has no defense other than his wish for people to be, in a certain comprehensive way he likes, like he wants them to be. I’m all for Marx but I don’t think the solutions of the problems of now is to disregard all of the knowledge that we gathered since he died.

On coming back to John Q, I couldn’t agree more: what’s the end game. I repeat that the issue in my view that is not being tackled is the concentration of power in private hands. The solution is not in taking that out of their hands and putting it in other private hands that speak for all of us, Chavez comes to mind. So whatever we do now, there has to be a discussion of the end game – & I will not make myself popular but if the end game is egalitarianism than I will side with bankers until somebody comes up with a better end game than the one we tried and failed miserably at.

Surely ‘the veil of ignorance’ should not ultimately be about economics, it should be about the quality of life. But as societies become more affluent, a couple of things happen. First, the overall quality of life improves dramatically, which is great. But second, relationship between money and material goods gets weird. Because of mass production, the most useful technologies are inherently high volume products and, therefore, cannot and do not remain the exclusive province of the rich. Instead, the rich subsidize everyone else by buying ‘gold plated’ versions that cost far more but provide little additional functional utility (think of a $70,000 Lexus as a form of progressive taxation).

So the relationship between money and material goods becomes less direct (unlike the 19th century where food was scarce and expensive, and a low income meant chronic hunger and stunted growth). So greater differences in cash translate into smaller differences in the utility of material goods. So differences in quality of life are less and less a function of getting an equal share of the cash, and more and more a function of one’s personal and social resources.

As a thought experiment, imagine we were living in the world that 1950s futurists used to like to worry about—where machines did all the work and produced all the goods and the problem was leisure. Surely in such a world, there would still be widely diverging results in terms of quality of life. Some people would live wonderful rich, productive, creative lives and others would go off the rails and drink themselves into an early grave (and, of course, everything in between). All based on the same material resources.

Maybe Rawls theory of justice has nothing to say about differences in quality of life in such a counterfactual world—but if so, it has less and less to say about differences in the world we actually live in (in wealthy societies, that is).

With respect to the estate tax, I maintain you are wrong. Though I have no idea what you mean by “those getting more out of their lives” when we’re talking economy: it should be “those getting more than an equal share of the resources.”