Friday, July 21, 2017

Inequality, Fairness, and Poverty

Welcome friends!

Did you ever have one of those depressing moments when you realize a problem you noticed and delved into many years ago still exists in nearly identical form and no progress of any sort appears to have taken place in the intervening decades?  I had that sensation the other day while reading an article on economic inequality.  Apparently some researchers who study people’s attitude to wealth disparity discovered ideas of fairness or what we used to call social justice can play a role.  To quote a younger and slightly more uncouth version of myself, “No shit Sherlock!”  Sorry to get all juvenile and sarcastic but is this really as far as we’ve advanced in terms of the social discussion of distributional issues?  One’s ideas about fairness may play a role?  Someone had to write it up in a newspaper article?  It’s especially disheartening to me because as I’ve probably mentioned before I feel distributional issues are behind a good deal of what’s wrong with human societies today.  I don’t mean just in terms of the ethical issues and costs associated with inappropriate distributions but also in terms of the social conflict and instability our inability to come to grips with distributional issues generate.  How to explain the feeling I was having?  To put the phenomenon in a different context let’s imagine one was concerned with some basic health issue, let’s say long term behaviors that reduce the risk of heart attack, and one noticed an article in a newspaper that looked potentially relevant only to find on closer examination the article revealed merely that some doctors suspect having a beating heart might be important for one’s health.  Just give me a moment to calm down again.  Perhaps I’m being unreasonable.  Given our collective aversion to any serious discussion of distributional issues most likely because the haves of the world don’t really like the have nots of the world talking or thinking about such matters perhaps it’s not really all that remarkable each generation has to discover rudimentary features of the issue and write newspaper articles informing one another of their insights.  But I can play that game too.  In the grand tradition of reinventing the wheel let me take a few moments this week to say a few words about distributional issues, again, and how ideas about fairness may play a role, again.  Hey, anything worth saying once is worth saying a million times, right?

Let me first just quickly summarize the article so we all know what we’re talking about.  By way of introduction the authors mention what most literate people must surely already know: the resources of the world are currently distributed very unequally and more so every day.  Indeed, the top one percent of the world’s economic elite apparently now controls about fifty percent of the world’s wealth.  However, they note some researchers have recently suggested income (and I suspect they also meant wealth) disparity itself may not be the “main problem.”  No, the researchers in question apparently feel the “main problem” may be unfairness and in particular how unfairness relates to poverty.  Yes, it seems a team of researchers from Yale University recently published a journal article establishing that people tend to prefer unequal societies because they find legitimate reasons for some degree of inequality and they feel having everyone attain exactly the same outcome would not be entirely fair.  These researchers noted that in the present day USA as well as much of the rest of the world there is so much inequality some people just assume it must be unfair and have started talking about inequality in the abstract rather than sticking with the more central issue of fairness.  They argue this complicates the situation and note there are three separate but related ideas that typically feature in discussions of inequality: 1) equal opportunity, 2) fair distribution, and 3) equality of outcome.  To make any progress addressing “inequality” they argue we should first reach some agreement on what aspect of inequality we have in mind.  They go on to suggest people pay too much attention to the relative standing of the one percent and so on and suggest we instead focus on helping people who are unable to improve their situation because of a lack of fairness.  The article cites Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, who argues in his book On Inequality that the moral obligation in question should involve eliminating “poverty” and striving to make sure everyone has “the means to live a good life” rather than achieving “equality.”

Got the picture?  Then let’s dive right in shall we?  The first point I would make is it seems eminently plausible to me many people think fairness is relevant to distributional issues.  This makes it all the more remarkable the textbook defense of the distributional system associated with the generally market based system by which we conduct our affairs in this country and many others doesn’t really mention fairness at all but instead involves the competing philosophical framework of utilitarianism.  According to utilitarianism something that generates greater utility is preferable to something that generates less utility, which in practice and under the conventional philosophical versions of utilitarianism amounts to the notion it’s nice when people are happy.  (I suppose using the idiosyncratic and just plain peculiar version of utility that appears in neoclassical economic theory one might say when some person is happy since we might be talking about one of those superconductors of utility allowed for in that system.  If you’re not getting what I’m driving at here you should take a glance at any of my previous posts on this topic filed most likely under utility or economic theory or something of that nature.  I’d go over it again here but I’m afraid this post is already destined to be overly long).  In the utilitarian framework there isn’t really any discussion of whether the people (or possibly the person in the case of economic theory) in question ought to be happy or deserve (or deserves in the one person case) to be happy or even why we should be concerned with people being happy.

So how does one square the fact that although most people think fairness is relevant to distributional issue the main theoretical context in which we tend to talk about distributional issues, the neoclassical demonstration of the ostensibly desirable outcomes associated with a free market, says nothing at all about it?  Well, that gets to something I’ve discussed before many times and that I’ve long associated with conservative rhetoric and ideology in general.  Basically my perception is many conservatives don’t discuss issues in what one might call a real or genuine way.  They use words and arguments and theories strategically or rhetorically.  If it gets them where they want to go they don’t worry too much about the actual meaning.  They spout off about economic theory and what it says about markets not because they necessarily agree with the philosophical framework used in economic theory to talk about markets but because it happens willy nilly to support what they support on some entirely different basis they are unable or unwilling to discuss.  I suspect that must be the main reason they continue to use the flawed and implausible version of utilitarianism in economic theory no matter how many times I or anyone else may demonstrate its rather obvious shortcomings.  It just doesn’t really matter to them.  They don’t take it that seriously or to put in the context of the discussion of how arch conservative President Trump’s supporters view their champion, they may take it seriously but not literally.  It’s more in the nature of useful rhetoric than a serious intellectual endeavor.

Along the same general lines I can’t help but detect a certain straw man element in the focus on “inequality” in some abstract and absolute sense rather than in terms of acceptable levels of inequality.  I doubt very much if anyone expressing concerns about inequality has ever argued a need for absolute equality.  I strongly suspect most people who talk about such matters are more concerned with the level of inequality and in particular the level of inequality justified by concerns relating to fairness.  It’s hard to avoid the implication that like those who talk about the glories of the free market in terms of economic theory without really buying into the moral philosophizing that informs that theory the authors in this case are setting up some sort of irrelevant dichotomy between absolute equality and fairness as a way to basically encourage people to stop talking about inequality and to think about fairness in some implausible way that doesn’t involve inequality in the sense of relative outcomes.

I’m picking up a bit of the same feeling from the passage in which the researchers note the three separate but related ideas that typically feature in discussions of inequality: 1) equal opportunity, 2) fair distribution, and 3) equality of outcome.  These issues seem to me entirely complementary and compatible.  One may feel one prerequisite for a fair distribution is equal opportunity.  Similarly one’s feeling about acceptable levels of inequality may hinge on one’s notion of fairness.  I don’t really see any reason we can’t take up these interrelated issues as a unit or anyway simultaneously.  Again, it’s almost as though the authors are trying to separate out issues of equality and get people talking and thinking about opportunity and fairness divorced from inequality but I’m just not sure I can take that objective very seriously.  If we have a very unequal sort of society where some kids have all the advantages wouldn’t that affect one’s feelings relating to equal opportunity?  If we’re discussing what we think is a fair distribution based on some consideration X wouldn’t we want to know something about the relative standing of those possessing or expressing X relative to those who do not?  If it’s fair such a person has let’s say twice the economic power of the other person does it necessarily follow it must be fair that person has one million times the market power of the other?  Again it’s hard to avoid the feeling the authors are trying to build a sort of wall around inequality or offer up a sort of indirect defense of inequality rather than sincerely trying to improve our understanding of the subject.

I might also mention I’ve never been a huge fan of discussions relating to distributional issues that focus on “poverty” and things like “the means to live a good life” as opposed to relative economic power.  I get relative economic power but “poverty” seems so subjective and arbitrary and anyway is just as relative as just looking directly at inequality in general.  Most likely we’re all doing pretty well relative to let’s say some Stone Age tribe eking out a subsistence living in a jungle somewhere.  Does that mean all distributional issues have been resolved?  Not to my mind.  And what is a good life anyway?  Sitting in a lawn chair with a glass of wine and a nice book?  Actually that does sound pretty good to me but I wonder what other people have in mind.  A big TV?  A computer?  A vacation?  A nice car?  Superior health care?  No I think we’re going down the wrong path when we stop thinking about inequality in relative terms and start thinking about “poverty” and “the means to a good life.”

Let me just end with some random thoughts of my own on the topic of inequality and fairness.  I’ve probably mentioned most of these before but what the heck.  First of all, I don’t see any reason one can’t combine the utilitarian insight it’s nice when people are happy with the insight people like fairness as well.  Setting aside the peculiar super conductor conceptualization of utility used in economic theory I don’t see much wrong with the notion it’s nice when as many people have as much utility as possible relative to their own maximum utility.  If one also accepts the notion of diminishing marginal utility and the notion one tends to address one’s most basic and important needs and wants first I believe that does generate a certain tendency toward egalitarianism and spreading the wealth around.  But I also don’t see much wrong with supposing we’re also willing to give up some of that social utility to address fairness.  I suppose if one wanted to get all philosophical about it one could relate one’s feelings about a system expressing fairness to one’s utility from living in such a system and try to work it all out in that way but that sounds a bit of a parlor game to me.  I don’t have any particular problem mixing philosophical systems.  For example, even with respect to neoclassical economic theory I think it’s fine as far as it goes but as I’ve explained before it just doesn’t really go very far and certainly not as far as many people would like to present it as going.  I don’t see anything wrong with supposing maximizing utility is good as far as it goes with the proviso fairness is also important.   (Incidentally aside from utility and fairness the other big philosophical approach to thinking about distributions one tends to hear a lot about involves various conceptions of rights so if one wishes one can just imagine we’re including that line of thinking as well.  I’m not doing that literally here because we’re talking about inequality and fairness but if one wants to bump it up in one’s mind so to speak and think about distributions in general I think some of these same points probably apply there as well.)

So what are the issues that might justify at least some level of inequality on the basis of fairness?  As a general point I would say given my individualistic outlook on such matters the relevant consideration for the issue of fairness is whether an individual is doing something that suggests he or she deserves higher compensation than someone doing something else.  Let’s look at some specific instances of this general idea.

I think right at the top of the heap must be a willingness to accept the market incentive structure.  One might like writing poetry on a breezy hill top but if no one really wants to pay one to do that but is willing to pay one to do something else he or she finds more personally useful like let’s say digging in the old salt mine I guess it makes sense the person who agrees to work in the old salt mine should make more than the person who insists on the breezy hill top.  Trying to get along with other people and so on should probably count for something.  The nicest way to get money from other people is to do something they’re willing to pay one to do.  Of course other values may be involved as well and in this context I think one is in real danger of putting one’s ethical cart before the horse.  Depending on the distribution of economic power the most highly paid activity on the market might be something like, I don’t know, installing golden toilets in the palaces of the hereditarily wealthy.  I mean, if they have all the money and that’s what they value then that will be what the market recommends one spends one’s time doing.  Indeed under the right conditions that might be the only activity called forth on the market.  However, taking a somewhat broader view I suppose one could make an argument a nice bit of poetry or something else like let’s say providing housing or health services or what have you for the poor or something like that might be more valuable to humanity in some ultimate way.  Of course, it’s quite possible the only way to pay someone to do things like that in a market system geared to gold toilet installation might be to tax those with money and subsidize the people doing those other things, which I suppose depending on one’s ethical frame of mind might seem a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  I suppose one could also directly alter the market incentive structure by changing the pattern of economic power if one could find some generally acceptable basis on which to do that.  In our example if a few poetry lovers and poor people had a bit of money that would also solve the ostensible problem.

It may be worthwhile to note this is where the perspectives of liberals and conservatives relating to the merits of democracies and market systems really begin to diverge.  To me as a liberal democracy must take precedence.  There is no legitimate distributional system until we set one up via democratic government and what makes it legitimate is we agree to support it.  If enough of us decide something isn’t working quite right it seems eminently reasonable to me we should be able to step in and redistribute resources in some way that makes a little more sense.  Tax a bit here.  Subsidize a bit there.  This sort of thing of course drives conservatives bonkers.  They see redistribution even resulting from democratic government as a great crime against the individual.  They believe once one sets up a distributional system it becomes sacrosanct and takes on a life of its own and the only legitimate political objective from that point on is to prevent democracy from altering it in any way.  Not surprisingly this view seems most attractive to those prospering under the current system and wanting to keep it that way but sometimes they manage to pull in people who feel they should be prospering under the current system but suspect other people have been interfering with it in some way that has prevented them from getting their due.  I personally think a more middle of the road approach is more attractive.  That is to say, I suppose it’s perfectly fine to say people who go along with what those with economic power want them to do should end up better off than those who do not but I wouldn’t want to go all crazy in that respect.

How much better would avoid the implication we’ve gone crazy in that respect?  Ah, well, that’s the tricky part isn’t it?  I wouldn’t expect someone trying to do something that isn’t called forth by the economic power expressed in the market to be justified in wanting to live like royalty.  I suppose a middling amount that leads to a more or less reasonable style of life?  Or I suppose rather less since they have the breezy hilltops.  Just throwing out ideas. It’s all relative. Some percentage of the average?  In a sense it depends on the other side of the coin.  How much better off should someone be who pays greater attention to market incentives?  Well, I don’t know.  I guess part of it might be what level of relative income can reasonably be expected to change what people decide to do.  Writing poetry on breezy hill sides sounds a lot more enticing to me than working at the old salt mine at least if one has some modicum of interest and ability with respect to poetry so I suppose without adequate relative compensation we might very well end up with an awful lot of questionable poetry and no one working at the old salt mine.  Doesn’t seem very reasonable.  We may arguably need a bit of poetry but we probably also need some salt.  So I don’t know.  Maybe some people don’t even like writing poetry on hill tops.  Double?  Triple?  Something like that?  Perhaps see what happens?  I would think the issues must be related in some way because of course if one expects the entire incentive system to crash if one alters relative compensation at all then one would might need to be very careful indeed with redistribution at least if one places some significance on the current distribution of economic power and hence the incentive patterns flowing from that distribution but on the other hand if one sees quite of a lot of flab in relative compensation in the sense everyone would end up doing pretty much the same things anyway then maybe it becomes more of an open question even if one were trying to maintain the significance of the current distribution.

I suppose another generally acceptable basis for at least some level of inequality must be one’s level of effort or let’s say willingness to work hard.  Now certainly in our system if two people have identical jobs and let’s say they do work of roughly comparable quality and one person is willing to put in more hours than another person it makes sense the person working more hours should end up better off.  I suppose relative effort while on the job holding hours equal follows a similar path as long as one is holding everything else equal but of course the problem there is in practice everything else is typically not equal, which raises the question of whether one thinks fairness in terms of effort has to do with effort relative to a person’s maximum effort or some sort of standard criterion like output.  For example, let’s say we’re looking at some sort of physical labor like I don’t know picking fruit.  If the aspiring Olympic athlete desultorily picks more fruit than frail and asthmatic grandma is it fair he is compensated more on the basis of effort?  Or would that involve some other consideration having to do with rightful compensation based on one’s contribution to the system?  I don’t know.  My general point is figuring out how hard work relates to inequality in realistic contexts gets pretty complicated pretty quickly because of differences in talents, abilities, and situations.  Some of the hardest working people I know work at some of the lowest paying jobs while some of the most casual workers I know work at some of the most high paying jobs.  Indeed some fat cats have sufficient money to invest they make quite a nice living expending no effort at all beyond the effort involved in hauling their fat behinds to the local wine bar every afternoon.  So yes I suppose I think differences in effort justify some level of inequality when it can be identified and the general level of inequality justified might be commensurate with the relative amount of effort in that case.  If someone works twice as long I suppose they should earn twice as much.  Do I suspect there are people out there putting in let’s say a million times more effort than other people?  No, not really.

I’m trying to think of some other things that would justify inequality on the grounds of fairness but I find I’m already starting to hit a bit of a wall here.  A good part of the reason is many of the things I suspect account for a good deal of the inequality we see in our system aren’t really based on any sort of commendable activity on the part of the people involved but are more along the lines of things that just happen to people.  Let’s go over a few of these.

A big one for me is inborn talents and abilities.  Let’s take intelligence as a prime example.  I hate to be the one to point it out but some people are just not very smart.  Unfortunately lots of fields require a bit of brains.  I think this has been changing over time.  At one point probably there may have been quite a lot of demand for relatively mindless labor.  However, now that many things are automated the emphasis is more on brain work.  So is it fair someone who was born a bit of a dummy be poor or suffer materially because of it?  What if he or she is a very hard worker and is willing to go along with market incentives or otherwise do what people want them to do to the extent of their abilities?  Again, I just don’t know.  Doesn’t seem particularly fair to me although I suppose if one switches to some other line of justification like output or contributions to the system then maybe it makes more sense.

How about environment and support provided by one’s birth family?  It’s no secret if one has the good sense to be born to wealthy and well connected parents one will end up with a much cushier life than otherwise.  Not only can they provide a nice environment to study and pay for the best education and keep one healthy and happy and so on but one would not feel compelled to make decisions based on helping them out or be in any particular rush to get a paycheck and one could probably afford to try some things with the expectation one should be able to recover from any missteps and one might reasonably expect some useful connections and introductions to be forthcoming that might smooth one’s way and indeed one might reasonably expect to be installed directly into a nice job at the family firm.  But of course one doesn’t really have any say with respect to one’s birth family.  One just pops out into the world one day and looks around and is either pleasantly surprised or a bit miffed.  Not sure I can see much inequality based on this consideration justified on the basis of fairness.

How about luck?  I think a big component of the inequality we really see in the world today is little more than being in the right place at the right time.  Honestly, many years ago when I actively studied such matters I found it rather interesting that even though the economic models meant to predict wages might include everything one might reasonably expect to be involved including the proverbial kitchen sink they could in fact only explain in a statistical sense a small portion of the observed differences in wages.  I always assumed that unexplained bit must just involve old fashioned luck.  Hard to think of what else it might be.  I’m not suggesting we banish luck but again I’m not sure I’d consider sufficiently related to fairness to justify much inequality on that account.

Maybe that’s enough talk for now.  To sum up I would suggest that as far as I can tell our current system has a good deal of both inequality and unfairness.  Not the worst system in the world of course.  I’m sure there are plenty of even more unequal and unfair systems out there.  But on the other hand I’m not ready to suggest we’ve hit the jackpot and have no room for further improvement just yet.  Even granting some level of inequality is justified due to considerations relating to fairness I don’t see the extreme levels of inequality we see here in the USA to be anywhere near the levels I would find likely to be justified by those considerations and indeed I see extreme inequality as presenting a significant and ever increasing impediment to fairness.  As such I don’t think we really need to get bogged down on parlor games involving what we really mean by inequality and so on.  We should probably just get to work.  Our system is out of kilter in the sense some people lay claim to more resources than can reasonably be justified on any ethical basis be it utilitarian or social justice.  Some undeserving people hoard billions of dollars.  Some deserving people suffer material want.  We could adjust the system to make it fairer and at the same time end up with a great many more happy people than we have now.  But do to do that we have to fight conservatives hell bent on defending the status quo levels of inequality both through fanciful anti-democratic rights based arguments of the sort that no matter how bad things get we have no ethical rationale or justification for changing anything because it’s all a matter of unchanging rights and also through purposeful attempts to obscure the issue and shut down the conversation including bogus appeals to the incomplete and let’s just say sham utilitarianism presented in economic theory and unnecessarily convoluted and unhelpful suggestions to first reach agreement on interrelated and complicated philosophical issues of questionable practical significance such as what one definition or aspect of inequality is most important.  Let’s try to keep it simple shall we? Fight conservatism.  Make the world a better place.

References

There’s a problem with the way we define equality.  Bryan Lufkin.  July 7, 2017.  BBC.  http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170706-theres-a-problem-with-the-way-we-define-inequality

Friday, July 7, 2017

What I Liked About Conservatives Of Yore

Welcome friends!

I’ve been so disappointed at the appalling performance to date of our new Republican administration and congress as well as their astonishingly low personal characters and near total absence of civic virtues that I find I’m beginning to develop a really rather pronounced distaste for the American conservatives mostly in the southern and central parts of the nation who installed them in office and who appear to believe they’ve been doing one hell of a good job thus far.  Of course, when I started this blog a number of years ago I mentioned my distaste for conservatives but at that time my dislike was tempered to some degree by what I perceived as the considerable overlap of conservative and liberal values. I considered many conservatives to be basically well meaning people who were perhaps just not thinking things through very carefully or who were possibly susceptible to being purposefully misled by wily rhetoricians and ideologues.  However, after observing the tenor of the social conservation since the advent of President Trump I must say I’m no longer sure I really believe that to be the case.  The conservative in the street now seems to be much more suspicious of democratic government, the free press, and the separation of church and state and much more accepting of authoritarianism and corruption in government than I think I ever really understood  before now.  They seem to also place much less significance on truthfulness, reliability, knowledge, competence, consistency, transparency, civilized discourse, and the basic attributes of what I would consider good personal character than I previously supposed.  To make a long story short the three headed monster of conservatism appears to me considerably more monstrous than formerly.  As a remedy to my rising feelings of hatred and disgust for this very ubiquitous segment of the American population I thought I might take a moment this week to try to remember some of the good things about my rapidly vanishing former foes the well intentioned, principled, and mannered conservatives of my youth... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!