In Which Suresh Naidu Has a Vision of the New Jerusalem...
Luke the Physician wrote:
[T]he multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.... Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need...
But it was not just on the consumption side: it was on the production side as well:
Agabus... [declared] there should be great dearth... which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar. Then the disciples, everyone according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea, which also they did, and sent it to the elders by the hands of Barnabas and Saul...
Suresh Naidu reads G.A. Cohen and writes:
The Slack Wire: Redistributive Justice and Wonkery: There are murmurs on the intertubes about redistributive justice... related murmurs about the lack of seriously left-wing blogs.... I have just finished reading G.A. Cohen's "Rescuing Justice and Equality", which is essentially a critique of Rawls from the left. The point is that the Rawlsian difference principle legitimizes a lot of inequality that runs counter to some of our ethical intuitions.... Rawls' argument allows talented people to hold back exercising their talents until they are compensated enough.... Cohen's book suggests the superstar doctor monster, who has medical skills and talents that are very valuable to the poorest people, but demands so much compensation that the resulting inequality is horrific. Liberals have no criticism of the doctor, but socialists think the doctor is fundamentally an unethical jerk.... Socialists can believe that the doctor's lack of solidarity, despite material abundance, depends on the presence of capitalist institutions that encourage rapacity, and criticize that kind of selfish behavior....
At the core of Cohen's argument is this "trilemma", that it is impossible to have all three of efficiency, equality, and free allocation of labor. Basically any two of these precludes the third (Stalinist rule gets you the first two and Rawlsian justice gets you 1 and 3, and nobody really wants the homogeneously poor society entailed by dropping 1). In economics this is formalized in the Mirrlees optimal income taxation problem... [in which] talented people should not be taxed because they produce a large amount per hour worked. A lot of the knock-on early Mirrlees-derived literature had a zero top-tax rate at the optimum (but recent literature weakens this, basically because the income distribution is potentially unbounded above and has fat tails).
Rawls is ok with that kind of inequality.... So I don't think that Rawlsianism is a socialist principle of distributive justice. In fact it is the bedrock philosophy of left-liberal and social democratic interventions.... Rawlsianism is also therefore the bedrock philosophy of the policy wonk, who thinks that social justice is a property of states alone and not a whole suite of institutions and behaviors.... Hence the endless key-punching on the details and consequences of this or that Democratic proposal, but little dialogue with social movements, political campaigns that are outside the government (like labor and tenant organizations), or radically non-neoclassical visions of the economy. Make no mistake, I enjoy and benefit from it, but I don't think its particularly agenda-setting for the left.
Cohen offers a way out of the trilemma by suggesting that we expand the domain of justice to include labor-supply decisions and preferences more generally.... Cohen thinks about egalitarianism as an ethic, not just as a property of government. He draws on feminist (and I would add anarchist) ideas that "the personal is political", that people's preferences and values are objects of justice, and that we can have a free allocation of labor that maintains distributive justice if people have ideals and ethics of conduct that sustain egalitarian distributions. So we should have grounds for criticizing the bankers and doctors for demanding so much money to do their jobs... [we should] organize for values and ethics (and deliberative politics that let us collectively construct and enforce these values and ethics across a variety of social sites) that sustain a society where anybody with talent would feel ashamed and ridiculous for demanding large amounts of compensation.
The idea that talented labor should demand a high wage is repugnant to socialist ethics; as Cohen eloquently states "labor, like love, should be freely given". As a scholar, the gift (and status) based economy of tenured academia is a lovely alternative allocation mechanism for human labor (and the reason I shouldn't start blogging for another 7 years)....
Bringing this all back together, I think I want to make two points about Rawlsian social democracy: a) It is quite compatible with a large amount of inequality and this is partially because b) it restricts the domain of criticism to the wonk playground of state policy. The Cohen book has the seed of a criticism of social democratic bloggers; it is against both the amount of inequality that Rawlsian social democracy (the kind favored by Yglesias et al.) allows as well as the narrow spectrum of technocratic state-centered instruments by which any extra inequality is addressed, So I think Freddie deBoer's criticism of the left-liberal wonk blog stands, and is part of the general libertarian socialist critique of the social democratic left.
I think the weakest point of Suresh's argument is something he recognizes: the "(and status)" in his description of the economy of tenured academia, which elicits enormous amounts of work effort with relatively small (and not very important) amounts of material inequality.
You can have a situation in which people work hard because they really want to be, as somebody-or-other once said, "one of the three international economists in the top ten" and otherwise everybody dresses in identical blue overalls and eats sustainably-farmed root vegetables.
You can have a situation in which people work hard because they want to go on the meal plan at The French Laundry and want the worst bottle of wine that ever touches their lips to be the 2005 Petit Bocq from St. Estephe.
The first tends to be zero sum. The second is positive sum. Perhaps you can argue that a society can value average the high consumption produced by general prosperity while scorning the pleasures brought by high consumption produced by inequality, but that would be a neat trick to accomplish when the fires of ideology begin to die down.
Indeed, even by the time St. Luke wrote his narrative down, the from-each-according-to-his-ability-to-each-according-to-his-need ethic of the first generation was but a memory, never again to be seen in this fallen Sublunary sphere.
This is an old, old fight in progressive political theory and practice. On the one hand we have the believers in the New Jerusalem, the advocates of a Republic of Virtue--the Jean Calvins and the Jean-Jacques Rousseaus and the Maximilien Robespierres and the Karl Marxes. As Robespierre said, we don't need no stinking checks-and-balances or optimal incentive schemes, for:
[T]he fundamental principle of the democratic or popular government... the essential strength that sustains it and makes it move... is virtue... the public virtue which brought about so many marvels in Greece and Rome and which must bring about much more astonishing ones yet in republican France; of that virtue which is nothing more than love of the fatherland and of its laws...
Of course Robespierre went on to say immediately thereafter:
[T] the strength of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror; terror without virtue is disastrous, virtue without terror is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most urgent needs of the fatherland...
The other side of the argument, of course, is that of Bernard de Mandeville on how clever institutional arrangements can harness the engine of selfishness to drive forward the public good and thus derive public benefits from private vices...