Hayek on Inequality

In the second volume of his Law, Legislation and Liberty, which is entitled The Mirage of Social Justice, Hayek makes the following claim:

Though it might seem reasonable so to frame laws that they will tend more strongly to improve the opportunities of those whose chances are relatively small, this can rarely be achieved by generic rules. There are, no doubt, instances where the past development of law has introduced a bias in favour or to the disadvantage of particular groups; and such provisions ought clearly to be corrected. But on the whole it would seem that the fact which, contrary to a widely held belief, has contributed most during the last two hundred years to increase not only the absolute but also the relative position of those in the lowest income groups has been the general growth of wealth which has tended to raise the income of the lowest groups more than the relatively higher ones. (p.131, emphasis added)

In the footnote to this paragraph, Hayek adds:

The chance of all will be increased most if we act on principles which will result in raising the general level of incomes without paying attention to the consequent shifts of particular individuals or groups from one position on the scale to another… It is not easy to illustrate this by the available statistics of the changes of income distribution during periods of rapid economic progress. But in the one country for which fairly adequate information of this kind is available, the USA, it would seem that a person who in 1940 belonged to the group whose individual incomes were greater than those of 50 per cent of the population but smaller than those of 40 per cent of the population, even if he had by 1960 descended to the 30-40 per cent group, would still have enjoyed a larger absolute income than he did in 1940. (p.188, emphasis added).

I think Hayek is comparing the mid-point (average income) of the 50-60 decile with the mid-point of the 30-40 decile. I couldn’t find data for 1940 on deciles, but the data on quintiles for the U.S. are readily available back to 1947. The picture they present is very interesting.
Continue reading Hayek on Inequality

POLS 451: Libertarianism and Its Critics

Last year I taught this course as POLS 456, even though the description of that course is “politics of identity”. This year I will be teaching it as POLS 451.

Course Description: “This course examines some of the main theoretical defences of free markets, private property, and the limited state, covering thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and Gerald Gaus (not all of whom are libertarians in the strict sense). The course also covers the recent development of “left-libertarianism,” which tries to reconcile the libertarian principle of self-ownership with an egalitarian approach to the division of the world’s resources.”

Recent Activity

Not yet back in town, but in the meantime, some work to report:

“The ‘Mirage’ of Social Justice: Hayek Against (and For) Rawls” Slightly revised text of a lecture I gave at Balliol College, May 10, 2011. Thanks to last year’s POLS 456 class for stimulating these thoughts about why Hayek was really a Rawlsian (or would have been, if he’d consistently applied his basic normative ideas). I will be reworking this paper for publication as part of a symposium on Hayek, so comments are welcome.

“Justice as Fairness and Reciprocity.” A paper about the relationship between justice and reciprocity, starting from the disability critique of Rawls’s contractualism, moving on to global justice. Also based on a lecture I gave this year at Balliol. The paper will be published in the journal Analyze & Kritik.

“Inconsistent Idealization in Rawls”

Will Wilkinson has an interesting post up arguing that Rawls is inconsistent in the idealizing assumptions he makes in A Theory of Justice. The gist of it is that Rawls initially says (in §2) that he is assuming “strict compliance” (i.e. everyone is assumed to have an effective sense of justice), leaving problems of “partial compliance” for later (e.g. just war, rebellion, civil disobedience), but then (in §42) admits that we need the coercive power of the state to ensure that people don’t free ride, which seems inconsistent.

I don’t think Rawls is retracting his strict compliance assumption, in Section 42. It’s just that he assumes that the sense of justice involves a reciprocity condition. Continue reading “Inconsistent Idealization in Rawls”

Conference Papers

Two recent conference papers I’ve written are available online. The first was for the MPSA annual meeting in Chicago, is called “Epistemic Proceduralism and the Scope of Democratic Authority,” and is about the role of public justification in David Estlund’s theory of democracy. The argument is quite a bit different than in my Representation article – I’m less worried about the objection that the principle of public justifiability might not itself be publicly justifiable, and more worried about the scope of political authority the principle will permit. The paper also begins with what I think is a better explanation of what I take to be Estlund’s basic idea, and why it is important.

The second is called “Justice and Reciprocity,” and is for the CPSA meeting going on this week in Montreal.

POLS 456 Reading List

The purpose of POLS 456 for Winter 2010 is to examine the most important political theories that champion the free market and permit only a limited role for the state in social and economic life.  I have called the course “Libertarianism and Its Critics,” but it could also be a called a course on the philosophical foundations of neo-liberalism, or a course on neo-classical liberalism, or a course on liberalism-in-the-European-sense.  The thinkers we will read are not all libertarians, strictly speaking (e.g. Hayek).  But, with the exception of the so-called “left-libertarians” we will read at the end of the course, they have all been influential in opposing greater state control and regulation of economic life, and in particular in resisting calls for a more equal distribution of wealth and income.

Core readings for POLS 456 will be the three books by Hayek, Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, and Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I will put all of these books on reserve in the library, but you will probably want to buy them.  They are easily available from Amazon or Chapters; any edition will do.  Most of the rest of the readings will be articles available via library subscription.  The main exception is the John Galt speech from Ayn Rand.  This will be on reserve, but if you want to buy it you could purchase either Atlas Shrugged or For the New Intellectual, which is a collective of speeches from her novels.

Continue reading POLS 456 Reading List