Justice, what money can buy: a lab experiment on primary social goods and the Rawlsian difference principle

Joshua Chen-Yuan Teng (), Joseph Wang and C. C. Yang
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Joshua Chen-Yuan Teng: National Taipei University
C. C. Yang: Academia Sinica

Constitutional Political Economy, 2020, vol. 31, issue 1, No 2, 45-69

Abstract: Abstract Many governments and charities adopt Rawlsian difference principle by maximizing the welfare of the least advantaged and giving priority to equality over efficiency. There are two views about which domain the principle should be applied to. The first applies it to the final distribution of income. Previous empirical studies have focused on this but found little evidence supporting it. The other view linked the principle with Rawlsian primary goods: Since the cost of losing primary social goods is huge, people will maximize the benefit of the least advantaged behind the veil of ignorance, such that everyone has access to necessary means. According to the latter reading of Rawls, we experimentally imposed a great cost for losing primary goods, and observed a salient majority of subjects obeying this principle, unlike previous studies finding a minority. Moreover, even if we lowered the cost for losing primary goods, more than one-third of the subjects still adopted this principle.

Keywords: Difference principle; Primary social goods; Fair equality of opportunity; Veil of ignorance; John Rawls (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D63 D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1007/s10602-019-09297-z

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