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I have remained silent for too long! I have to admit, that as a
sociologist, the notion that income inequality is good for society
is anathema to our discipline (which is probably one reason
sociologists and economists have a noted rivalry).
But putting intellectual/philosophical disagreements aside, from a
purely rhetorical/debate perspective, I have been somewhat frustrated
by the notable absence of empirical evidence used to back up the
arguments that income equality is good for society or at least
"fair." Since we are loyal positivists who embrace the scientific
method, allow me to introduce some research on the matter.
Since my area of interest, forgive me if I focus on the health
effects of income inequality. A question which has preoccupied
health researchers/sociologists, and even health economists is
whether, indeed, the growing gap between the rich and poor is good
for a society's health (let's use mortality, a nice objective
indicator. Dying young is less good than dying old, all else being
equal).
There are reasons to believe that income inequality hurts everyone,
even those not on the bottom. Let's assume two states have the same
average income-- $50,000. In one state, the distribution is pretty
wide, so there are people really poor and people really rich; in
another, the distribution hovers around the $50,000 mark. Which
state would we want to live in, from a health perspective at least?
Research suggests that it would SUCK to live in the first for a
couple of reasons. First off, in an unequal society, you are much
more likely to be in the bottom than on the top, and being poor is a
well-established cause of bad health. Second, David Marmot, an
epidemiologist, has argued that simply being in a stratified society
can harm health. A twenty-five-year follow-up from the Whitehall
study found that the higher the position in the occupational
hierarchy in Britain, the lower the mortality rate from all causes,
from coronary heart disease, and from a range of diseases not related
to smoking Note that NONE of these men was poor in any usual sense
of that word. They were all in stable, office-based employment in and
around Whitehall, London. (Marmot, "Inequalities in Health," New
England Journal of Medicine (12 July 2001): 134 136). Here, relative
income deprivation mattered more than absolute.
But even beyond that, it seems that a society with large income
inequality hurts those at the top. One of the more famous studies,
by George Kaplan of U. of Michigan and colleagues (1996) examined
income inequality among the 50 states. Kaplan et al. showed that
that income share held by the least well-off 50 percent of the
population in each state was strongly correlated with the state's
mortality in 1990 (r=3D-.62, p I have to respond to your yootles critique
first!
> Our aim is both to decrease to next to nothing the overhead of
> applying more formal mechanisms to decision-making (and more
> recently, prediction and prediction+decisions) as well as convince
> you there's plenty to be gained. Bethany and I yootle every day
> for every little (and big) thing imaginable. (Being both
> indecisive types it often saves us a ton of time.) Granted, we're
> gigantic dorks and no one else cares yet.
>
> I'm of course not done defending my boyfriend Paul either. More on
> that later.
>
> But I'm actually delighted that we're making real progress on
> circumscribing the disagreement while identifying common ground
> (eg, Graham is at least right in some other fantasy universe;
> Trixie won't like that concession at all! and of course I conceded
> on slavery and may do so on health care, where basic human rights
> are at stake.. although Kevin may set you straight on the
> healthcare issue!).
>
>
> --- \/ FROM James W Mickens AT 07.08.31 22:21 (Yesterday) \/ ---
>
>>> You're characterizing our disagreement as hinging on whether public
>>> policy should optimize economics subject to moral constraints or
>>> optimize morality subject to economic constraints. I'm unclear
>>> on what
>>> either of those really mean for public policy.
>>
>>
>> There's a difference in the intent of your policy and the methods
>> that you will use to evaluate it. For example, suppose that you've
>> devised a new tax code for an underdeveloped country. When you
>> evaluate its success, will you look at how much additional wealth
>> it generated, or some actual measure of utility such as the
>> percentage of citizens who have access to electricity or clean
>> water? I use the term "actual measure of utility" because I think
>> that just examining, say, the increase in GDP is a bad way to
>> measure net social welfare. The net wealth of a society is, at
>> best, an indirect measure of its net welfare because aggregate
>> wealth trends tell us nothing about the *distribution* of wealth
>> or whether that wealth is being used to satisfy some particular
>> goal. The classic example is health care. Despite rising levels of
>> aggregate wealth in America, many *individual* Americans have poor
>> health and inadequate access to proper medical care. Is the
>> solution to this problem the creation of even more wealth in the
>> hope that the health care industry will spontaneously reorganize?
>> Or is the solution a targeted policy, whether it be nationalized
>> health care, better health education in schools, and/or something
>> else? I argue that the latter approach would be better,
>> particularly since the market has thus far been ineffective in
>> addressing this issue.
>>
>> The failure of wealth-driven policies is even more obvious in the
>> international pharmaceutical market, where drug companies develop
>> medicines for diseases that affluent people care about (e.g.,
>> restless leg syndrome, diabetes) and ignore a huge number of
>> illnesses (e.g., diarrheal diseases) that affect a much larger
>> number of people who have much less money. People who care about
>> net welfare should find this problematic. So, in the international
>> drug market, should we pursue wealth-driven or morality-driven
>> policies? In other words, should we allow drug companies to
>> maximize their profits and hope that they'll turn a charitable eye
>> towards the developing world, or should we force them through
>> regulation, subsidies, tax credits, etc., to address the needs of
>> poorer countries? History suggests that the former strategy will
>> fail if you're trying to optimize for health and not profit.
>>
>> I understand that it is extremely expensive to develop new drugs
>> and that pharmaceutical companies must be given a way to recoup
>> these costs. However, it's obvious that a market system which
>> focuses on maximizing their profits will not lead to a net
>> increase in global health (an important utility metric).
>>
>>
>>
>>> Let me first defend Graham's point. He concedes whole classes of
>>> exceptions and I think social injustices are included, if not
>>> explicitly. His argument -- that income inequality is not,
>>> inherently, unjust -- remains intact.
>>
>> Once again, I'm claiming that economic justness does not equal
>> moral justness. When you say that income inequality is "not
>> inherently unjust," you should specify whether you refer to the
>> economic definition, the moral definition, or both.
>>
>> If Graham includes social injustice in his exceptions list, then I
>> suppose that he and I are in agreement. But if Graham believes in
>> the entrenched, pervasive nature of social injustice, why does he
>> spend so much time waxing poetic about the inherent fairness of
>> economic inequality? This fairness only exists in an idealized
>> model of the economy which bears little resemblance to the real
>> one. The fact that Graham spends most of his time talking about
>> this idealized world suggests that either a) he is a hopeless
>> utopian, or b) he does not, in fact, believe that social injustice
>> is entrenched and pervasive ;-).
>>
>> ~j
>>
>>
>> p.s.
>>
>>> And just to nip a potential subthread: the non-mathematically
>>> inclined are not allowed to blithely declare human motivation to
>>> be irreducible to mathematics.
>>
>> Ah, but I claim that the mathematically inclined are not allowed
>> to blithely declare that human motivation *is* reducible to
>> mathematics ;-). The reason that I do not use yootles to determine
>> who will pick me up from the airport is that, in the common case,
>> this decision is not subject to rigorous mathematical or economic
>> constraints, nor should it be. In many scenarios, I only care
>> about approximate notions of fairness. I suppose that if gasoline
>> were $27,000 a gallon, it might be reasonable to employ a strong
>> mathematical framework to prevent tragedy (e.g., "Oh no, Todd has
>> taken me to the airport fifteen times but I haven't taken him at
>> all. Todd has now spent $405,000 on gas while I have escaped scot-
>> free."). Absent such extreme conditions, the introduction of
>> mathematics into simple human transactions will often just add
>> overhead and produce little tangible benefit.
>>
>> It is frequently possible and fruitful to analyze people's
>> behavior using mathematical models. However, that doesn't mean
>> that the underlying psychology of the individual is actually
>> driven by these models, or that giving the math to people will
>> make it easier for them to manage their lives.
>>
>
> --
> http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves - - search://"Daniel Reeves"
>
> Dilbert: "...and we'll buy a dozen of these. We're trying to
> spend our budget so it doesn't get cut next year."
> Salesperson: "This is great! You guys are so dumb that I don't even
> have to use my fake personality to make the sale!"
>
>
>
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