The half life of economic injustice

David Miles

Economics and Philosophy, 2022, vol. 38, issue 1, 71-107

Abstract: This paper addresses a question which is fundamental to the perceived legitimacy of the distribution of resources today: to what extent does unfairness in how assets came to be acquired in the past affect incomes and wealth now? To answer that question requires two things: first, a principle to determine what is, and what is not, a just acquisition of wealth or a just source of income; second, a means of using that principle to estimate what fraction of wealth and income is now unjust. I use a principle put forward by Robert Nozick to provide the first of these things and then use a model of wealth accumulation and economic growth to illustrate its implications for the scale of unfairness today. The greater is depreciation of assets, the higher are saving rates out of labour income and the less important is human capital the more transient are the effects of past economic injustices. I use data on the perceived unfairness of economic outcomes to see if there is any evidence that those features which the model implies should influence the durability of injustice help explain cross-country differences in attitudes towards unfairness.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Half Life of Economic Injustice (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:71-107_5

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics and Philosophy from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().