Word: rawlsian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...anyone does anything you disapprove of, you can just cock your head, look disappointed, and say, "That's a fascinating approach to the problem, I do admit, but really, have you considered a Rawlsian approach?" (Of course, you don't actually have to know anything about John Rawls to make use of this technique...
...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...
...Glick's December 9 editorial entitled, "A Perversion of Justice," charges Feldstein and his colleagues in the Economics Department with misrepresenting the work of John Rawls, whose ideas about social justice have revolutionized modern political philosophy. Unfortunately, Glick's own article seems more likely to aggravate confusion over the Rawlsian theory than to help clear...
...issue is the so-called "Difference Principle," the Rawlsian criterion for judging the fairness of economic institutions. A society governed by the Difference Principle will permit economic inequalities only to the extent that they benefit the worst-off members of society. Income and wealth must be redistributed to the poor from more advantaged citizens up to the point of diminishing returns--that is, until the harmful "supply-side" effects of heavy taxation begin to undermine the economic prospects of the lower classes themselves...
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...