Curving for Justice

*** Wooden Womb has responded to this blog here. After reading this you might want to check it out. I responded to that response here.***

Dear friends,

Imagine drawing a curve. On the x axis is time, and on the y axis is income. Imagine how you would draw a curve on that graph is what you drew fixed your income for the rest of your life.

Of course, it would have to be abstracted from one's immediate position otherwise one would probably simply make the curve spike up suddenly from that moment in time, followed by whatever the person desired after that. Imagine drawing the curve from something like the original position, maybe after you draw the curve we imagine you are placed at random at a point in your life. In this framework we might imagine that the area under the curve must equal a certain amount, representing society's limited resources. I wonder how you would draw such a curve. I wonder how I would. And I wonder how we can draw such a curve for the whole of society.

The problem with intergenerational justice is that the basic Rawlsian solution doesn't work, not even a little bit. Rawls' intuitive argument makes that case that facts about a person that they are not responsible for are no basis for the deserving of rewards. Heirs don't deserve their parents' fortunes, tall people don't deserve lucrative basketball careers and even clever people don't really deserve Nobel prizes: they don't deserve the traits that they have and so they don't deserve the rewards. Rawls' solution to this is to distribute the rewards in society evenly, with one addendum: that inequalities in this distribution are appropriate just as long as they benefit the least well off.

Rawls changed his position over time, and we might be better served by examining more recent thinkers, but if we are going to start thinking about intergenerational justice Rawls is a good place to start. On first inspection the Rawlsian method seems entirely appropriate for the problem of justice between generations. This is because nobody could reasonably believe that somehow they deserve to be in the generation they are in. Therefore, we might suppose, society's rewards should be evenly distributed between generations. Right?

Unright. What I was trying to bring out at the start with the ideal income over lifetime curve (I damn well hope this thought experiment has not been done before so I can call it the Caleb Curve {almost but not quite entirely tongue in cheek}) was that we might not want income to be evenly distributed across our lifetimes, and therefore we would reject equal distribution of rewards across generations for that reason.

Wisely, Rawls talks not about simple money but about social primary goods. This means things like secure jobs and houses. One feature of the Rawlsian approach which I think is appropriate is that there will never be a time when people drawing their curve will not want secure jobs and houses.

I think if we use a slightly more powerful tool than the curve, for example a chart of all the different resources one would want to have at different times, we would find that rarely if ever will people want to go without secure jobs and houses, and healthcare for that matter, in their ideal resources over lifetime charts. At various points education will be more important, or care for young children or the elderly, but some things will be constant.

The main result I think we would see from these charts or curves is that people, on the whole, will want their disposable incomes to go up over time, thus giving them a feeling that life is getting better, and so they can be optimistic and not worrisome. There may be bumps in this, such as a brief bulge at the start when people want to acquire education, or useful property like their first rung on the housing metaphor and that folly private transportation, and a bump when they are faced with the additional costs of raising a family. People may wish for their curve to decline at the end, so they can just spend their wealth (implicit in this thought experiment is that people will know roughly how long they are going to live, which in an unrealistic simplification that we are just going to have to deal with. The effects of inheritance tax are also not counted in this model yet).

Justice then looks like it will not be an even distribution of resources or incomes across generations, rather it looks like it will consist of an irregular and generally increasing distribution over time. This result appears incongruous given my efforts in campaigning for a greater allocation of society's resources to young people. The framework I have developed appears to justify existing intergenerational iniquities. Think so? Think once more, but be less wrong this time.

We must return to the curve I began with. If one actually drew out these curves and aggregated them with equal  weight, we would find a schematic for a fairer distribution of resources across generations, and it would look wildly different to the settlement we have today. Most people would want to have radically gentler slopes, to have rather less in their late middle to early old age in return for a lot more in their youth. I am confident that this is what the results would show, but I am not satisfied just at that. I want to frame the question in such a way to provoke honest answers, and actually ask people what their ideal lifetime distributions would be. In his later work Rawls spoke more about the importance of overlapping consensus within society as the quality that allows politics to begin. Though we don't agree on everything, we agree enough on enough things that responsible government is possible. Extolling the virtues of overlapping consensus is one thing, however, and actually going out and finding what that consensus is is quite another. We must actually find out what people's reasoned and deeply held views are before they can, as they should, be taken into account. This is one among many examples of areas where political philosophy demands of us that we take our thoughts out into the wider world and engage with people, something which many of that calling are loathe to do. Hesitant or not, if one really believes what one professes to believe, one must act on it.

***Edit: As my wise housemate helpfully pointed out, we actually have a mechanism for transferring wealth between periods of our lives in the form of student loans, which until recently in the UK were charged just at the rate of inflation and not at an interest rate reflecting the risk of default or investors' other options. Thus we know empirically that given the opportunity to change their lifetime resource distribution curves to shift wealth from later to earlier periods many people often will. I don't advocate this as the mechanism by which a better distribution is occurred, but it is an interesting proof of the concept. End edit***