Children and Theories of Social Justice

This paper is about children as subjects of social justice. It argues that economic welfare theory, utilitarianism, and other theories of justice based on utility theory assume rational individuals with stable preferences, and therefore cannot be applied to children. Libertarian justice treats children as possessions of the parents without rights of their own. A Rawlsian social contract, on the other hand, can be extended to include children. The main part of the paper consists of an attempt to sketch such an extension. It argues that justice to children is basic to Rawlsian justice, and that the Rawlsian case for equality is strengthened when children are taken into account. The principle of extensive liberty, when applied to children, must imply that children cannot properly be regarded as the possession of their parents.     

Rethinking Work and Income Maintenance Policy: Promoting Gender Equality Through a Citizens' Basic Income

A citizens' basic income scheme is based on the principles of individuality, universality, and unconditionality; when combined with the notion of meeting "basic needs" it would serve to provide a minimum income guarantee for all adult members of society. However, implementation would entail radical reform of existing patterns of welfare delivery and would bring into question the institutionalized relationship between work and welfare, a basic premise of modern welfare states. To date, the debate over a citizens' basic income has emphasized its effects on labor markets, thereby displaying an androcentric bias. Although the role of women in society is central to social policy reform, the existing basic income literature is disturbingly void of any comprehensive treatment of women. No genuine discussion has taken place about the nature of women's lives and work and how these should be valued. Social policy reform should take account of all gender inequalities and not just those relating to the traditional labor market. This paper argues that the citizens' basic income model can be a tool for promoting gender-neutral social citizenship rights, but that any future marriage of justice and efficiency must first divorce work from income.     

The Social Norm of Tipping: Does it Improve Social Welfare?

Some economists believe that social norms are created to improve welfare where the market fails. I show that tipping is such a norm, using a model in which a waiter chooses service quality and then a customer chooses the tip. The customer’s utility depends on the social norm about tipping and feelings such as embarrassment and fairness. The equilibrium depends on the exact social norm: higher sensitivity of tips to service quality (according to the norm) yields higher service quality and social welfare. Surprisingly, high tips for low quality may also increase service quality and social welfare.     

How context matters: A survey based experiment on distributive justice

We explore distributive justice and perception of fairness using survey data from freshmen and senior students of economics and sociology. We analyse the impact of context and education on their preferences over a hypothetical distribution of resources between individuals which presents a trade off between efficiency and equality. With context giving minimal information, economics students are less likely to favour equality; studying economics influences the preferences of the subjects, increasing this difference. However, when the same problem is inserted into a meaningful context, the difference disappears. Four distribution mechanisms are analysed: egalitarianism, maximin, utilitarianism and utilitarianism with a floor constraint.     

论社会公平正义的地位及其实现途径

实现社会公平正义是社会主义社会的本质特征,是构建和谐社会的必然要求,是我国市场经济发展的客观需要。我国实现社会公平正义面临的突出问题主要表现为权利机会不公平、规则制度不公平、收入分配不公平。实现我国社会公平正义,要积极培育社会主义核心价值观,营造实现社会公平正义的思想氛围;着力推进科学发展,打牢实现我国社会公平正义的物质基础;加强制度建设,创造公平正义的社会环境。     

从资本属性看劳资关系的平等性和公平性

中国经济转型时期资本在循环过程中的不公平、不平等问题,揭示了资本不可忽视的社会属性以及这种属性对劳资关系中平等性、公平性的影响。而"契约"作为连接资本与劳动力的重要环节,必然体现出二者之间的经济和社会关系,契约自身的不公平性和不平等性揭示出资本所蕴含的、其自身无法解决的社会与经济两方面的公平、平等和正义问题。因此,资本经济属性的实现并不会必然导致公平和平等,而无视资本的社会属性,经济越是发展,公平与平等程度越低。     

Presidential Address: Welfare Economics Beyond Welfarist-Consequentialism

Capitalizing on the recent work in social choice theory, I re-examine the foundations of post-Pigovian welfare economics and social choice theory. The structure of the "old" and "new" welfare economics is critically scrutinized, and the culprits of the poverty of welfare economics as well as of Arrovian social choice theory are boiled down to their common informational basis, referred to as welfarist-consequentialism . Alternative avenues that may be taken in an attempt to escape from the poverty of normative economics are identified and examined. These are focused on interpersonal comparisons of welfare levels, opportunity preferences and the procedural fairness of social choice.
JEL Classification Numbers: B21, D63, D71.     

A concern about low relative income, and the alignment of utilitarianism with egalitarianism

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under utilitarianism is equality of incomes.     

Rawls,rules and objectives: A critique of the two principles of justice

John Rawls has made two large claims for the two principles of justice: that they are what everyman would choose behind the veil of ignorance as the foundation for laws and institutions, and that they are the rock bottom requirement for the stability of political liberalism. I argue here that these claims are altogether unsubstantiated. The two principles are more like a social welfare function than like what we ordinary think of as justice. They are a false social welfare function in the sense that everyman would not choose them behind the veil of ignorance. Their connection with the stability of liberal democratic government is tenuous at best. Stability is dependent on the entire corpus of rules by which a society is guided, rules that are no more identifiable behind the veil of ignorance than when the veil is lifted. There no basis for supposing that the appropriate rules can be derived from the two principles of justice, and there is some question as to whether they can be derived from any well-specified social welfare function. What remains valid in the two principles was recognized long before the two principles were enunciated. The exaggeration of common ideas in the two principles is not enlightening.     

The Welfare State, Budgetary Pressure and Labour Market Shifts

Public debate about the welfare state in OECD countries has emphasized the need for reform to meet a twofold set of shocks: budgetary pressure and a labour market shift against unskilled workers. The aim of the paper is to set out a framework for examining the implications of these shocks for the optimal scale of social transfers and, in particular, the impact on different societies, distinguishing a restricted welfare state, labelled "the United States" and a more extensive welfare state, labelled "Continental Europe".     

Social evaluations when populations differ in size

Assessments of “social welfare” do not usually take into account population sizes. This can lead to serious social evaluation flaws, particularly in contexts in which policies can affect demographic growth. We develop in this paper a little‐known though ethically attractive approach to correcting the flaws of traditional social evaluations, an approach that is sensitive to population sizes and that is based on critical‐level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU). Traditional CLGU is extended by considering arbitrary orders of welfare dominance and ranges of “poverty lines,” as well as values for the “critical level” of how much a life must be minimally worth to contribute to social welfare. We apply these social evaluation methods to rank Canada across 1976, 1986, 1996 and 2006 and to estimate normatively and statistically robust lower and upper bounds of critical levels over which these rankings can be made.     

Economic inequality and paretian welfare economics: Some insinuating questions

This paper examines the academic soundness of the Pareto welfare criterion as a normative rule for evaluating alternative economic inequality scenarios and suggests that the criterion has several weaknesses, which weaken its usefulness. First, the Pareto principle is of limited use in the inequality debate because labor markets hardly satisfy the conditions of perfect competition, the pivotal assumption of the theory. Second, the proposition that competitive equilibrium leads to the “common good” of society is difficult to defend. Third, the Paretian welfare economics barely answers the questions society demands, because perfect competition does not guarantee fairness in the determination of relative prices in the initial situation of income distribution. Fourth, in the distribution theory, the marginal productivity principle determines the rewards to the factors of production. If we assume that rent, wage and interest incomes are determined by this theory, then questions arise about how profits, the potentially huge surpluses generated by the businesses, are distributed. Fifth, income distribution, being a public policy topic, is a political issue. However, Pareto's primary motivation in formulating the principle was to alienate the income distribution debate from political and policy discourses. Finally, by invoking the Pareto principle, economists are in fact avoiding the real issues of the public debate on personal distribution of income. Personal income distribution truly refers to division of income generated by a group of people working together and therefore, ought to be analysed with reference to the sector of employment. Thus, Tommy Franks' earning should be compared with that of a private, while an ordinary worker's salary should be compared with that of the CEO. History testifies that the public earning structure is much more equitable than that of the private sector. This poses a very serious question: Which earning structure reflects improvement in social welfare: public or private?     

Sustainable recursive social welfare functions

What ethical criterion for intergenerational justice should be adopted, e.g., when faced with the task of managing the global environment? Koopmans’ axiomatization of discounted utilitarianism is based on seemingly compelling conditions, yet this criterion leads to hard-to-justify outcomes. The present analysis considers a class of sustainable recursive social welfare functions within Koopmans’ general framework. This class is axiomatized by means of a weak equity condition (“Hammond Equity for the Future”) and general existence is established. Any member of the class satisfies the key axioms of Chichilnisky’s “sustainable preferences”. The analysis singles out one of Koopmans’ original separability conditions (his Postulate 3′a), here called “Independent Present”, as particularly questionable from an ethical perspective.     

论经济法在构建和谐社会中的作用

建设和谐社会是社会主义的本质要求。经济法作为一部"社会本位法",从市场主体准入、市场秩序、宏观调控和社会保障方面,对和谐社会的构建发挥着特有的作用:经济法有助于社会主体的权责平衡;经济法创建市场和国家诚信、安定的经济社会秩序;经济法保护弱势群体,实现实质的公平正义。     

机会不平等与社会流动预期研究——基于CGSS数据的经验分析

随着"中国梦"的提出,对于居民社会流动预期的研究受到了广泛关注.现有文献对于社会流动预期影响因素的相关研究较为匮乏,文章在政府以实现社会公平正义为目标的改革背景之下,研究我国机会不平等对居民社会流动预期的影响,具有重要的理论和现实意义.研究表明:机会不平等作用于社会流动预期的总效应为正,即当前机会不平等程度越高的地区,人们向上的社会流动预期越显著;并且,这种正向影响在家庭背景条件较差、年龄较大、受教育程度较高以及非农业户籍群体中更加显著.文章认为,在政府以实现社会公平正义为目标的改革背景下,人们预期未来机会不平等程度会下降,导致机会不平等直接效应的不利影响受到间接效应的抵消,从而出现上述看似"有悖常理"的结论.实证结果也在一定程度上证实了间接效应的存在.因此,相对于当前现实存在的机会不平等,人们对未来机会不平等变化的预期对其社会流动预期的影响更为突出.政府部门应当在贯彻落实公平政策的同时,实施必要的预期管理,增强人们对政府部门的信任,使其保持对未来改革政策的乐观预期,从而维持当前较为良好的居民社会流动预期.     

Tax policy in the presence of emigration

This paper investigates the relationship between utilitarianism and horizontal equity in models of income taxation in particular and self-selection in general. An example involving well-behaved individual preferences is constructed in which a maximization of a utilitarian social welfare function leads via income taxation to horizontal inequities. Sufficient conditions for utilitarianism to bring horizontal equity are derived. The results are applied to the question of whether income tax credits are an appropriate way to treat differences in family size.     

Fair welfare maximization

We consider the general problem of finding fair constrained resource allocations. As a criterion for fairness we propose an inequality index, termed “fairness ratio,” the maximization of which produces Lorenz-undominated, Pareto-optimal allocations. The fairness ratio does not depend on the choice of any particular social welfare function, and hence it can be used for an a priori evaluation of any given feasible resource allocation. The fairness ratio for an allocation provides a bound on the discrepancy between this allocation and any other feasible allocation with respect to a large class of social welfare functions. We provide a simple representation of the fairness ratio as well as a general method that can be used to directly determine optimal fair allocations. For general convex environments, we provide a fundamental lower bound for the optimal fairness ratio and show that as the population size increases, the optimal fairness ratio decreases at most logarithmically in what we call the “inhomogeneity” of the problem. Our method yields a unique and “balanced” fair optimum for an important class of problems with linear budget constraints.     

The Mind of the Social Individual: A Comment on Sherman and Hodgson

In the Spring 1998 (56(1): 47-57) and Fall 1998 (56(3): 295-306, 307-310) issues of this review, Howard Sherman and Geoffrey Hodgson debated, inter alia , the extent to which Veblen-Ayres institutionalism is compatible with Marx and recent Marxist work. This paper argues that the differences between Hodgson and Sherman"s positions do not rely on assumptions of "illogical" behavior, individualist arguments or structural conceptions of the individual. Instead, the debate turns on the authors' respective conceptions of the formation and role of the human mind in what it is to be a social individual.     

Lethal model 2: the limits to growth revisited

The author examines some major concerns about global economic growth from both theoretical and empirical points of view, using "the limits-to-growth debate as a reference point to understand the earlier debate about the limits to and perils of growth, and to provide some perspective about the newer debate about environmental threats." He concludes that environmental and resource constraints on economic growth should be modest over the next 50 years and that economic growth is possible providing emphasis is given to "the importance of careful scientific and policy analysis and establishing or strengthening institutions that contain incentives that are compatible with the thoughtful balancing of long-run costs and benefits of social investments."     

社会选择的实证之维——当代西方实证社会选择理论评述

当代行为经济学和实验经济学领域的研究越来越关注社会公平正义问题。实证社会选择理论从实证角度研究人们对于公平分配的观念,体现了当代规范经济学与实证经济学的有机结合。在长期大量的实证研究的基础上,实证社会选择理论检验了关于分配正义的很多基础理论,得到了一些重要发现。实证社会选择理论的研究,对于中国的经济学理论建设和改革实践,也具有重要的启发价值和参考意义。