What I am wondering is what would happen if the survey respondents were actually to choose where to live behind a veil of ignorance of everything except the level and distribution of income of different societies. I imagine that there might be a subsequent migration away from both the egalitarian societies and those with greatest focus on efficiency.

So he thinks, and/or he thinks his target demographic thinks, that it would be better to make wealthy people worse off even if it makes nobody better off (in fact, it would probably make everyone worse off).

He said the reason was “fairness”.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/04/17/obamas-truly-radical-capital-gains-tax-agenda/

What was interesting to me was that none of the models had an idealist/communist option, which would look like this:

**********************

And it’s just obvious to me that people would have a preference about these. If your options are:

(a)
*******
*******
*******

versus

(b)
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
***********************

then option (b) seems likely to have a very large poverty rate, and a few very very rich people. I’ve been to places like that, and they suck. A lot.

So, Will, what’s the mystery?

My reinterpretation: I interpret each picture as a way to slice up the same pie (i.e. the total GDP is the same in each) and each row a size of a slice of pie. In my experience, people often believe the size of the pie is fixed and they believe wealth distribution is a zero-sum game. The X’s are the number of people with each size of slice. Under this interpretation, the middle row doesn’t represent the same amount of income in each picture.

I also interpret this as a “behind the veil” experiment, so there’s no discounting of others’ incomes. Finally, in this sort of experiment people are considering the distribution of others’ income, not necessarily their own, but they have preferences over others’ incomes. This kinda changes the meaning of Pareto improving; its more of an individual’s criterion. (If people didn’t have social preferences, then clearly none of these distributions would be PI over any of the others… some people would be hurt by the change.)

Given survey takers had this interpretation of the diagrams, E isn’t necessarily a Pareto improvement over D. In fact, D may be a Pareto improvement over E. It depends on how much diminishing returns to others’ income there are for the person behind the veil.

This is why its not clear what sort of social preferences are being suggested by this survey data. It would have made the “people have preferences for equality” case more clearcut if the survey had option E as Will describes, i.e. everyone better off. As it is, it could be that people have a preference for efficiency, they see D as a Pareto improvement over E and that would explain a preference of D over E.

By that standard, E is also the clear winner, but before making my choice, I’d like to know more about the absolute wealth of each society, and also how big an increment we have from one bracket to the next, and whether that increment was standard. I could easily imagine favoring distribution A if for example the lowest bracket was $1,000,000 per year. I might likewise find A untroubling if the differences between the brackets were trivial and if the overall standard of living were still high.

But then… the original question still stands: Why ARE we arguing about the justice of patterned distributions? What are the processes that get us to each of them?