Word: glick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...real problem seems to lie, not with the Difference Principle or with Ec 10's examination of it, but with Glick's failure to recognize how radical the Rawlsian theory really...
...problem set which Glick criticizes is intended to illustrate this principle. Should a nation of 100 people choose an economic system (let's call it the Great Society) which provides every citizen with an income of $2, or a less drastically egalitarian one, which provides 99 citizens with $100,000 apiece and only $1 for the last unlucky stiff...
...Difference Principle tells us to choose the former, says Ec 10--and that's where Glick gets off the bus. "What lunacy!" he writes. "I would never choose to live under such constraints...
...Glick complains that the problem set creates an unfair dilemma, since it assumes that income redistribution entails enormous social costs. He asks us to imagine instead that slicing the pie more equally won't shrink it at all, allowing him to hand the citizens of the Rawlsian economy a hefty $99,000 each. Surely, he suggests, the nefarious authors of Ec 10 problem sets could only have come up with the original example as a ploy to discredit the Difference Principle...
...problem set's figures are exaggerated, of course, but Glick's alternative seems to miss the point completely. In an economic system where redistribution was easy and painless, it would be a straightforward matter to forbid any inequality whatsoever. It's precisely because redistribution does require trade-offs that Rawls' theory needs the Difference Principle at all, as a democratic check on the inequalities which no economic system can do without...