“The Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s not only physically but also ideologically dismantled the British social welfare state. In particular, centrist liberals jettisoned their party’s goal of economic equality in favor of the more modest goal of alleviating poverty.”
“Tony Blair changed the infamous Clause IV of the British Labour party constitution, with its aspiration “to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof.” Blair wanted to enhance the standard of living of the poor — not to reshape the distribution of wealth or to threaten the position of the rich.”
“Though Blair pivots smoothly, that second instance of “justice” functions rhetorically. Justice, as Plato observed long ago, concerns an interrelation of parts, not merely the amelioration of the indigent.”
“Note how cleverly Blair chooses a sports celebrity, who got rich quasi-magically, rather than a businessman or banker, whose fortunes were made with other people’s labor and by virtue of the deregulation and privatization of the British economy.”
“When detached from a theory of how wealth and poverty connect, charity, even public charity, aspires to communal improvement rather than distributive justice. The goal of alleviating poverty had entirely replaced a vision of an equal society.”
“In On Inequality, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt defends exactly such a shift in progressive politics.”
“whether he wants to or not, he has elegantly and brilliantly undergirded the centrist liberal’s rejection of equality as a goal.”
“Instead of equality, Frankfurt suggests we should value sufficiency. That is, we should desire not that everyone have the same, but that everyone have enough.”
“Equality depends on relative comparisons between people; sufficiency depends on what each person needs.”
“Frankfurt notes that while egalitarians think it better for people to have more equal incomes, they would never favor evaluating their own welfare comparatively: “Many egalitarians would consider it rather shabby or even reprehensible to care, with respect to their own lives, about economic comparisons.””
“Since people tend to spend rationally, they will first buy the most happiness-efficient goods, so that the larger their income, the less efficient each marginal dollar. If you want to maximize happiness, then, you should redistribute money from rich to poor, who will get more happiness from the money.”
“But as Frankfurt shows, some goods provide more happiness only after cultivation. Your 100th opera ticket or expensive bottle of sake may provide more happiness than your first, simply because you need to learn to appreciate opera and sake. And some goods provide much more happiness in conjunction with other goods. The last stamp in a collection is typically much more satisfying to buy than the first. So money may not have diminishing marginal utility, and this argument for economic egalitarianism fails. It is convenient but shaky logic to think that utility curves will morally necessitate economic egalitarianism.”
“While Frankfurt cleverly parries the arguments of academic philosophers and economists, he ignores Marxism entirely. The omission is unsurprising but unfortunate. Marxists often make messy arguments, which mix normative evaluation with history and political theory. They prize incisive political-economic history over the pristine, abstract concepts that populate Anglo-American normative ethics. As the philosopher Brian Leiter has argued, from a Marxist perspective normative ethics look peculiar, particularly their frequent concerns with theory over practice, subtle distinctions rather than pressing social problems, and individual choices rather than collective political systems.”
“At the risk of simplifying a complex family of discourse, one imagines that a Marxist reading On Inequality would ask: Where does inequality come from? For the Marxist, inequality is first a social phenomenon, rather than an abstract concept, and to understand a social phenomenon, you have to understand its history.”
“Marx thought that most inequality occurs because capitalists can pay workers less than the products of their labor are worth. That is, workers can be exploited. They labor very hard, they produce goods of great value, but the factory-owner or investor captures most of that value. If so, equality is desirable because it restores to workers their rightful desserts”
“Frankfurt would object that the Marxist has mixed up equality and fairness. Others would dispute the Marxist account of exploitation, but Frankfurt should not, since he wants his normative theory to stand regardless of the empirical facts about inequality. Certainly everyone is due their just rewards, and if there is exploitation, that ought to be remedied. But that is logically independent of equality.”
“On Inequality may unsettle those fuzzy-minded liberals who know they are committed to a more equal society but are not sure why. Given Frankfurt’s convincing proof that bourgeois, academic ethics cannot sustain a critique of inequality, these liberals may find themselves turning to intellectual traditions that offer a more radical, systemic critique.”