Wealth Inequality
Where We Are
In our last class we looked at Nozick's arguments against patterned theories of justice. According to Nozick, so long as a state of society has evolved by fair rules from a fair starting point, it must be just. Nozick therefore gives us an extreme and self-explicit case of someone who prioritizes procedural justice over distributive considerations, and the reason that we read him was in order to see that contrast made explicitly.
For today's class we're going to turn to think through the real consequences of Nozick's view. The plan is to think about how inequalities in wealth are self-perpetuating, and about what this means for inherited wealth.
Thomas Piketty
Thomas Piketty is a French economist who is one of the most influential figures in the world thinking about the dynamics and significance of wealth inequality. His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, first published in French in 2013 and then in English in 2014, offers an accessible and highly influential recent treatment of these topics that brings together very simple mathematical models with extensive surveys of historical data.
You can see him here in a TED talk from late 2014, soon after his book was published in English:
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Our reading for this class is a selection of three passages from Piketty's book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It is a relatively high number of pages to read compared to anything else we have read this semester, but I think you will find it mostly pretty accessible and easy to follow and read. I chose the passages to include part of the introduction, part of a chapter about the differences in income from wealth (accumulated capital) and income from labor, and part of a later chapter about inheritance.
Jane Austen, whose references to income and the value of property Piketty cites in his book.
As you read, watch for a few key things: (1) the largest contributor to the dynamics of wealth accumulation, according to Piketty, is a simple inequality between two key economic numbers. What is it? (2) Piketty suggests that social inequality has socially destabilizing consequences. The passages that I've selected don't include a lot that he has to say about this, but pay attention to what he does say. And (3) one striking fact exhibited by the data that Piketty discusses is how unusual the middle of the twentieth-century was in historical terms, in terms of the level of wealth and income inequality. Watch out for the evidence that he gives of just how unusual this period was, in historical terms, and think about how that could have distorted the perceptions of people who grew up during that period.
Remember that Piketty is an economist, not a philosopher, so we are not looking to him for philosophical arguments. What we are looking for, is some context in order to think about what limits there might be on fair procedures of wealth accumulation, and whether such limits could be consistent with procedural justice, so that is what we will try to talk about in class.