Rawls's influence and counter-influence on Sen: Post-welfarism and impartiality

Abstract

This article aims to clarify Sen's paradoxical relationship to Rawls's work in the face of some misconceptions. It is argued, first, that the dialogue between the authors did not start with Sen's 1980 article “Equality of What?”: Rather, this article represents the beginning of a transformation in Sen's position towards Rawls. Second, Sen's approach to justice is not a mere extension of Rawls's theory of justice as fairness: The departure relies less on a different metric of justice than on a divergent conception of impartiality, one which undermines the foundation of Rawls's theory of justice.     

Corporate Control and the Decapitalization of Subsidiary Corporations: The Looting of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is examined from the perspective of experimental methods in economics and complex adaptive systems simulations. This paper first discusses the justice principle selection process in Rawls's representation of it as a hypothetical experiment. This hypothetical experiment fails to satisfy reasonable experimental controls, particularly as reflects the conception of the individual it employs. The second section of the paper discusses the differences between Rawls's two conceptions of rational persons associated with his distinction between thin and full theories of the good. The third section uses his fuller conception of rational persons, life plans, and psychological laws in the third part of the book to offer an alternative view of the selection process understood as a complex adaptive system. The fourth section turns to a topic raised by this complex system approach, the status of normative reasoning in political-economic systems. The fifth section summarizes.     

The Theory of the Individual in Economics: Identity and Value

Fundamental to social provisioning is ensuring that community members have access to employment opportunities that pay living wages and sustain the environment. In a previous study, two of us (Underwood, Friesner and Cross 2014 Underwood, Daniel, Dan Friesner and Jason Cross. “Toward an Institutional Legitimation of Sustainability.” Journal of Economic Issues 48, 3 (2014): 870–885. [Google Scholar]) presented criteria for sustainable community economic development, a three-fold test to comparatively assess economic development policies: ecological holism, community centeredness, and institutional legitimacy. Applying this test generates an iterative, evolutionary process of economic development. Absent from these criteria is the concept of intention, as policy options are not “given,” but rather designed by self-interested groups to manipulate interpretations of these test criteria in advancement of their vested interests — outcomes which can be juxtaposed to the “interests of community.” Here, we integrate two additional principles: economic diversity and solidarity. Economic diversity emphasizes living wages in numerous industries to stabilize exogenous economic shocks. Solidarity, as a unit of socio-economic interdependence, stresses commonality of wellbeing within communities. Integrating solidarity and economic diversity into the criteria for sustainable community economic development improves policy design and outcomes that sustain the environment, while also providing living wage employment for community members.     

Planning through the Socialization of Property Rights: The Community Reinvestment Act

This paper reassesses themes developed in the authors' Economic Abundance: An Introduction (Dugger and Peach 2009) in the context of the so-called "Great Recession." In this paper, we make several arguments. First, there is always a substantial gap between actual production and the capacity of the economy to produce. Second, the great recession widened the production gap, but did not change the basic relationship. Third, the anti-recessionary policies, adopted during the recession, were anti-abundance policies, for the most part. Fourth, almost by definition, short-term (cyclical) fiscal and monetary policy regimes do not address longer-term structural issues or the creation of widely shared abundance. Last, but not least, despite the great recession, and the myopic policy responses it generated, the abundant economy — based on a largely undamaged joint stock of knowledge — remains a genuine possibility.     

On the Relevance of John Rawls's Theory of Justice to Welfare Economics

Mainstream microeconomic theory makes some use of John Rawls's Theory of Justicein discussing welfare economics and social welfare functionals. While various elements of his approach are usually mentioned, his basic point is generally taken to be his difference principle (maximizing the welfare of the worst off individual) applied as a decision principle for evaluating the equity of resource allocation.

To take the difference principle as the essence of Rawls's work is an error. The present paper reviews the basic argument of the Theory of Justice

compares it with the use that economists make of it, and concludes that in a number of quite specific ways Rawls's ideas are misrepresented and misused by mainstream microeconomists.     

Degrees of Connection: A Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Mutual Disinterest

John Rawls's solution to the problem of justice between generations is premised on the idea that “a generation cares for its immediate descendants, as fathers say care for their sons” (John Rawls 1971: 288, emphasis added). This paper brings mothers into the Rawlsian social contract. I argue that, when children have more than one parent, there is a contradiction between the assumption of concern for descendants, which underpins Rawls's account of justice between generations, and the mutual disinterest assumption, which characterizes parties negotiating in the “original position.” Concern for descendants creates connections within generations as well as across generations. The critique is internal and nonradical, but its implications are subversive. It demonstrates that an “add women and stir” liberal feminist reworking of Rawls's theory cannot be successful; bringing sexual reproduction out of the realm of nature and into the social contract necessitates a radical reconstruction of Rawls's theory.     

Getting the Resilience Right: Climate Change and Development Policy in the ‘African Age’

ABSTRACT

Founded on a call to place climate change adaptation and climate risk management at the heart of contemporary development practice, the World Bank’s Africa Climate Business Plan presents an ambitious agenda for coordinating $19bn of loans, grants and investment over the coming decade. The centrepiece of this recasting of development thinking is the notion of resilience, which ties together the various activities proposed under the Plan. Resilience must respectively be strengthened, empowered and enabled in order for African countries to withstand climate change impacts. In this paper we subject this new climate-resilient development discourse to critical scrutiny. Using the theoretical lens of post-politics, we caution how the ill-defined category of resilience is deployed to reinforce a profoundly depoliticising agenda in which climate change is posited as an external threat to an otherwise seamless narrative of African advancement. In so doing, we illustrate how the Bank obscures the contested histories of African development and uses the discourse of climate-resilient development to perpetuate its neoliberal agenda within the continent.     

社区居民参与旅游积极性的影响因素调查研究

本文以云南省中部古州野林彝族村寨、大槟榔园花腰傣村寨两个生态旅游景区为例,在实地调查的基础上,通过定量分析,得出影响社区居民参与旅游积极性的五个因素,即社区经济和旅游业发展水平,景区优势旅游资源,社区居民对旅游开发的认知,对政府的信任度以及民族传统习俗。     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Trade-Theory Analysis of Leakage Under Production- and Consumption-Based Policies

Without a comprehensive global climate agreement, carbon leakage remains a contentious issue. Consumption-based pricing of emissions—which could in practice be implemented with a full border tax adjustment (BTA)—has been forwarded as an option to increase the effectiveness of unilateral climate policy. This paper questions the economic rationale behind this approach, using a theoretical $2 \times 2$ trade model in which leakage occurs through terms-of-trade effects. We show analytically, first, that consumption-based pricing of emissions does not necessarily result in less leakage than production-based policies. Second, the sign of the optimal unilateral carbon tariff depends on the carbon-intensity differential between the foreign country’s exporting and non-exporting sectors, and not on the differential between home’s and foreign’s exporting sectors, as implied by the full BTA approach. Third, based on empirical data for the year 2004, our model implies that full BTA applied by the European Union on e.g. imports from and exports to China would—by shifting China’s production from the export sector with a relatively low carbon-intensity towards the more carbon-intensive non-export sector—actually increase leakage.     

Germany in crisis: the unification challenge,macroeconomic policy shocks and traditions,and EMU

Conventional wisdom blames Germany's ongoing economic and fiscal crisis on the unification shock of the early 1990s and structural problems in labour markets. Challenging this view, this paper offers a fresh assessment that focuses on macroeconomic demand management. It is shown that Germany's fiscal crisis cannot be attributed to unification per se; it arose as a consequence of ill‐guided macroeconomic policies pursued in response to that event. Many structural problems that popped up along the way were mere symptoms of persistent macroeconomic mismanagement and protracted domestic demand stagnation. Arguably, systematically ill‐guided macroeconomic policies of this type are potent enough to wreck any real world economy, no matter how flexible it may be. Because Germany provided the blueprint for Europe's stability‐oriented macroeconomic policy regime, it comes as no surprise that a peculiar repeat of certain symptoms that started to arise in Germany a decade ago may now be observed across the euro area—protracted domestic demand weakness and inflation stickiness because of ‘tax‐push inflation’ in particular.     

Chasing after “good jobs.” Do they exist and does it matter if they do?

Most people believe that there are such things as good jobs—jobs that a worker would consider herself lucky to get. But for economists, the existence of good jobs is debatable. In this paper, I provide a definition of a good job based on various theories of the labour market: a job that involves a surplus captured partly by the worker. I use that definition to guide an empirical investigation of the existence and importance of good jobs. I conclude that good jobs do exist—that the labour market does not just function according to a Roy model with wage differentials reflecting only skill differentials, compensating differentials or bond posting—and that their impact on the overall wage structure is substantial. Finally, I discuss the implications of the existence of good jobs for policy setting and for assessments of the justice of a society.     

中国国家公园社区移民中的问题与对策 研究

：国家公园新体制下要求核心保护区内居民逐步实施移民搬迁。面向这样大规模、成体系的人口迁移需求,如何开展新目标、新背景下的生态移民搬迁亟待理论方法指导。通过梳理中国现行移民政策及规划体系,可以识别出国家公园社区移民工作中存在的问题,包括政策适配性差、目标定位不明确、规划实施不科学及政策灵活性不足等。并相应提出重构政策体系、明确以生态保护为核心的规划定位、在国家层面树立生态效益前置的规划目标,科学量化生态绩效及补偿标准、强调参与式规划等解决对策。     

On the limits of rational expectations for policy analysis

In this lecture, I review work addressing three questions. First, are predictions about macro stabilization policies robust to reasonable departures from rational expectations? Second, do people's expectations converge to a particular set of rational expectations? Third, if they do converge, how quickly? I discuss examples from the literature where the answer to the first question is no. The answer to the second question is that learning equilibria converge to the “standard” rational equilibria analyzed in new Keynesian models. Finally, I discuss circumstances under which the answer to the third question is very slowly. In the examples, learning is slowest and policy analysis based on rational expectations is least robust in the face of shocks that render the stakes of getting policy “right” the highest.     

Comparing Environmental Policy Instruments Within an Incomplete Contract Framework

This paper compares three different legal means—no environmental policy (the pollutee pays), full liability (the polluter pays), and pollution standards—to reduce and regulate neighborhood externalities within an incomplete contract framework. It turns out that the relative efficiency of these instruments depends, in general, on details. However, moderate standards are preferable to no environmental policy and tight (but not too tight) standards dominate liability. This provides under the given assumptions (neighborhood externalities, incomplete contracts) a justification for “sensible” standards for three reasons. First, unilateral allocations of property rights are biased that distort allocations even if ex post bargaining takes place. Second, a standard is superior in the following sense: if it is set equal to the outcome under any allocation of rights, it will be improved in the process of ex post bargaining. Third, unilateral property rights encourage strategic ex ante investments up to the point that committing to no bargaining would be beneficial (if possible).     

Aristotle's analysis of bilateral exchange: an early formal approach to the bargaining problem

Exchange, as analysed by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics, should be viewed as a bilateral relation to be approached not as a market phenomenon but in terms of cooperation between two contractors. This paper accordingly proposes a reconsideration of Aristotle's analysis in the light of modern bargaining theory. This reconsideration reconciles the two principles of distributive and corrective justice as ruling simultaneously exchange relations through the figures of geometric and arithmetic proportions, respectively. It also suggests a new reconstitution of the missing diagram supposedly illustrating Aristotle's analysis, which — contrary to the conventional square endowed with diagonals, used since Albertus Magnus' commentary — fits the function to which such a diagram was probably designed, that of exhibiting Aristotle's solution to the bargaining problem.     

国家公园入口社区性质、发展特征与 政策需求

入口社区位于国家公园入口附近,其形成与发展均 早于国家公园,伴随国家公园发展而成长,旅游服务是入口社 区共同特征。保护国家公园生态系统完整性和景观风貌的融合 性,精明控制增长,促进产业多元化,维护本地经济持续发展 等是国际上国家公园入口社区发展的基本原则;理论上国家公 园入口社区是国家公园生态系统服务价值转化的重要依托,是 生态产品产业化生产与服务基地,在国家公园与区域协同发展 中具有重要的纽带作用,这些理论付诸实践必须有国家相关政 策的支持,包括土地政策、资金政策、生态保护与管理政策、 社区就业与住房政策、公共服务均衡化政策等。其中土地政策 最为关键,在国土空间规划三线划定与控制下农业用地、公益 林用地都有最严格的保护要求,入口社区发展空间非常有限, 难以承载入口社区可以承担的功     

License scheme: an optimal waste management policy under asymmetric information

A system requiring a waste management license from an enforcement agency has been introduced in many countries. A license system is usually coupled with fines, a manifest, and a disposal tax. However, these policy devices have not been integrated into an optimal policy. In this paper we derive an optimal waste management policy by using those policy devices. Waste management policies are met with three difficult problems: asymmetric information, the heterogeneity of waste management firms, and non-compliance by waste management firms and waste disposers. The optimal policy in this paper overcomes all three problems.     

Targeting Urban Congestion: Equity and Second-Best Issues

Distributional and second‐best problems of implementing efficiency based demand management of road use in Australian cities are addressed. Both road use pricing and parking policies are considered. Failure to price roads and parking spots efficiently contributes to excessive travel and to excessive urban expansion. A key policy concern is to promote demand management acceptability by offering transportation alternatives and by making explicit the sources of efficiency gain from revenue neutral road charging policies with double‐dividend advantages. Second‐best policies of restricting land releases on city boundaries to encourage more compact city development may be inferior to policies of pricing major roads, cordon pricing and demand based parking policies.     

Poverty,disputes, and access to justice in two Indonesian provinces

This analysis explores the determinants behind the unequal access to justice services among poor Indonesians. The study analyzes the stock of observed past disputes by socioeconomic group and the demand for conflict resolution services for unresolved conflicts or “trajectories.” It also models the hypothetical demand of justice services for future disputes. Results suggest that unequal access to justice might go beyond the financial costs of seeking justice and also depends on individual preferences and community infrastructure. These findings warn against focusing exclusively on formal justice costs to improve the equal access of the poor to conflict resolution services.     

The Gender Impact of Social Protection Policies: A Critical Review of the Evidence

Abstract

Over the course of the neoliberal era, social protection policies have been transformed dramatically; these changes have had profound gender implications. Since the early 1980s, welfare state regimes around the world have shifted away from ‘universalism' towards ‘targeting'. More recently, there has been a further shift—especially in industrialized countries—away from the male-breadwinner to the adult worker model. Despite the progressivity implied by this latter shift, important issues of gender inequality remain unresolved (even in Nordic countries where levels of gender equity are higher than elsewhere). This paper presents a critical review of social protection policies, examined from a gender perspective. The analysis presents a conceptual framework on gender and the welfare state, and examines the experience of major industrialized and developing countries in engendering social policy. In particular, this paper provides a careful examination of care-related programs, since this domain is particularly important to understanding the gendered effects of social protection policies. Finally, the gendered implications of the global crisis and subsequent policy measures are examined.