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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.
List of contents
1. Introduction.- 2. The Die is Cast: Chance, Merit, and Inequality.- 3. Autonomy and Desert.- 4. Equal Opportunity and Just Deserts: Better Late than Before.- 5. Efficiency and Just Deserts: Economists' Big Trade-Off.- 6. Liberty and Just Deserts: Slaves, Dynasties, and Moral Agents.- 7. Economy and Desert.- 8. Measure for Merit.- 9. The Individual Moral Agent.- 10. The Natural Lottery Alone.- 11. Just Deserts.- 12. Just Deserts Outcomes and Aggregate Analysis.- 13. The Just Deserts Economy.- 14. Conclusion.
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.
Summary
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.
