On Inequality

By Fernando Teson On January 28, 2012 · 40 Comments · In Current Events, Libertarianism, Social Justice

President Obama said in his State of the Union that one of his goals is to reduce wealth inequality, and advocated increased taxes on the rich to do that. His critics gave two answers. The first is that higher taxes will stymie growth, and the second is that the President is waging class warfare.

Yet, outside the rarified circles of political philosophy journals, I haven’t heard many folks ask two other important questions about the President’s approach. Yet these questions are, to me, obvious.

First, why should reducing income inequality be a worthy goal? If we are concerned about the poor, then we should focus (as Rawls famously does) on improving their lot in absolute terms, regardless of the effect of such improvement on the gap between them and the rich. Again, this is common currency in academic circles, but I don’t hear anyone in our public debate making the point.

Second, conceding for the sake of argument that reduction of inequality is a worthy goal, why would increased taxes achieve that? I want to hear economists on this, but it seems pretty obvious to me that tax increases cannot reduce inequality unless we also eliminate corporate welfare and other forms of unjustified and unproductive public spending. Moreover, surely a concern with the public debt animates the call for higher taxes. Exactly how will servicing the debt reduce inequality? For higher taxes to reduce inequality, taxes should be used to transfer wealth to the poor, not to the likes of Solyndra (I’m ignoring here the dynamic counterproductive effects of wealth transfers.). Yet, if the President gets his way, it is at least dubious that this is what will occur in the current political and economic climate.

Maybe I missed something, but none of the Republican candidates made any of these points.

Tagged with: inequality

Anonymous

School vouchers are corporate welfare. More than that, but very much so.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Cody-Smith/1523220029 Cody Smith

What?

Anonymous

Prof. Teson calls his support of school vouchers a “no brainer”. Yet here in this post he talks about the need to end corporate welfare.

Jameson Graber

What you’re saying has some merit, but school vouchers are still a “no-brainer” for someone who values individual choice. Look at it this way: a government-regulated stock market is still better than socialized production.

Anonymous

You can also have a situation where socialized production has less negative effects than a more imposing regulation. I am from the school that views regulation as the right wing destruction of competitive property right, v. the left-wing form of outright confiscation. It matters much how far along these trajectories things have gone. In the case of school choice you might have simultaneity: left-wing socialism via taxation combined with voucher and/or contract outlays that come with heavy regulatory burden.
Anonymous

Even if a school choice program did not come with visible regulatory nooses– this conspicuous absence could be the inside political deal.

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Paul deRien

Perhaps this is because I’m not a bleeding heart of any stripe, this seems to me an unusually obtuse post. In an affluent society most goods are positional, including the all-important one of power - and positional advantage tends toward self-perpetuation. It would be stupid not to be concerned with inequality, simply as a matter of self-interest. Inequality is the good itself. The audience for that message in the SOTU was for neither the poor nor those especially concerned with the poor. The message was about size, stability and relative power of the middle classes. You could argue whether the progressive structure of the tax burden matters directly or only as a signaling mechanism on the middle/elite relationship, but in practical terms what a robust regime does is provide the revenue necessary for the middle class to have many of the advantages of the elite, from a decent if not first rate education in youth to guaranteed health care and moderate financial security in old age, without sacrificing its own present consumption as much as would be otherwise necessary.

Ken S

You would think anyone who has a passing familiarity of OWS and the Tea Party would realise all this. Maybe ‘poor’ is a euphemism for the middle-class now.

“Yet, if the President gets his way, it is at least dubious that this is what will occur in the current political and economic climate.”

If the President gets his way, clearly the political climate has changed somehow. Some of the things that could easily have money sent their way would be underwater mortgage refinancing, student loan debt, or simply more progressive tax rates. Not that I’m claiming spending money on any of that is sound economic policy.

tom hewitt

Why is inequality always about money? What about appearance? Real ugly guys have a hard time achieving any kind of a normal sex life, which means more than money to some of them, and then it’s illegal for them to sidestep the ugly dilemma by purchasing sex. That doesn’t seem quite right. How about short people? Studies seem to show that they don’t make as much money or advance as far as their taller rivals. Maybe inequality is actually based on appearance, stature and perhaps intelligence, not money.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

First, why should reducing income equality be a worthy goal?
It’s a worthy goal for people who care about supporting and strengthening democracy. But since libertarians don’t care about democracy, there are few arguments one can make that would appeal to libertarians. There are some I would make that rely on broadly utilitarian reasoning, but libertarians don’t care about that stuff either, so what’s the point.

Anonymous

Please define democracy. Lenin, Tom Jefferson and Newt Gingrich all claim to be proponents. Can they all be right? Then there is the doctrinaire classical liberal Ludwig Von Mises believing the market to be democratic. ’Every dollar is a vote.’

http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

Well, that would be a fairly ridiculous definition of democracy, isn’t it? People can offer a variety of competing definitions of “democracy” which capture the vague traditional understanding equally well. But surely any approach that begins with the idea that a person’s number of votes is directly proportional to the number of dollars they possess is a non-starter.

I would say democracy is a system of government in which all members of a community of political equals share equally in the responsibility for governing their society, to the extent that is practically possible. The first job of a democracy is preserving itself, and a democracy does that by perpetuating the social conditions that make democracy possible. And that means attending vigilantly to growing gaps in personal power among the citizenry. Since wealth is the foundation of power in every society, preventing gross inequalities in political power means preventing gross inequalities in wealth.

Anonymous

There are incompatible views of democracy. Why should yours win? Maybe more importantly, how do you plan to win and enforce it?

It seems that the economic corollary to your political system would be socialism or outright communism. Even if you plan to get to the former via heavier regulation. If you want to talk about a “non-starter”, that would be it. Your scheme is utopian. And like most utopian plans– the first thing that their designers do is attack private property and markets.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

Your proposed definition of democracy isn’t intellectually serious. And that only helps confirm my initial hypothesis that libertarians don’t care about democracy.
Anonymous

Where did I define democracy?
Ron Paul, e.g., is not a libertarian?
There are many kinds of self-identifying libertarians. Those of any intellectual seriousness care deeply about democracy. Especially its dangers. Ever hear of tyranny of the majority?
How does democracy– how you describe it– overcome its vitiation of the market?

http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

“members of a community of political equals share equally in the responsibility for governing their society.”

Your definition empirically eliminates the United States by any objective measure. I’m interested to see if you actually have the gall to actually defend the US as satisfying your definition. It would only demonstrate how much of a conservative you actually are.

gaffigubbi88

I can’t think of many economic inequality angles pertaining to democracy, except maybe something like “the wealthy have too much political influence”, which I would agree with. However, reversing the state of affairs with wealth redistribution or progressive taxation would be a sisyphean task. To level the playing field on who gets to have the most political influence, you would have to grind the rich so much that even Warren Buffett would have to say “Whoa, easy there!” If rich people exist in an economy with rents, monopolies and other privileges plus a “public” budjet to loot, they will always have the upper hand.

The other angle could relate to the ownership of natural resources (a concern which many left-libertarians would certainly share), which might have a negative effect on democracy – but I don’t see that as being a wealth inequality issue, but rather a result of poorly functioning property institutions.

I really don’t see economic inequality as being the problem – it seems that it’s merely a symptom of some other illness. I’d like to hear your thoughts. What are you aiming at here, exactly?

http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

I explained it in my response to 3cantuna.

Of course if people are convinced that failure is inevitable in any attempt to create a democratic society, then there is not much point in trying to argue with them about it.

But I don’t believe failure is inevitable. Taxation, wage caps, full employment programs with wage floors and a variety of other means can be used redistribute the wealth that exists, and to prevent the accumulation of too much personal wealth. This can be done, but accomplishing it will require building a coalition of the many to consolidate the power of sheer numbers which has always been the only counterweight to the concentrated wealth of the few.

It goes without saying that the rich won’t like a movement like this. Not even Warren Buffet and George Soros will like it.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-DiMare/100000504645309 Rick DiMare

Yes, this is the problem. For Milton Friedman’s negative income tax (though we’re not supposed to expose its operation) to work properly, the rich need to be taxed at levels they deem unacceptable, and apparently these are taxation levels that even the IRS is unwilling to enforce.

But another victim of ineffective enforcement of Friedman’s negative income tax is the libertarian notion of self ownership, including the self ownership a poor working person could have in his/her wages.

If we assume that the income tax regulated currency we’re living with now is the only currency, then the capacity of alternative Treasury-Direct coin-based currencies to hold a property right in labor gets conveniently overlooked, and the discussion reverts back to how much we need the super-wealthy to create jobs for the poor.

Thomas D

” … (though we’re not supposed to expose its operation) … “

Elaborate, please?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Rick-DiMare/100000504645309 Rick DiMare

Whether it’s happening unconsciously, or by central bank/legal system conscious design, we’re not told about, or encouraged to discuss the fact that we have legal power: (1) to reject the central bank in its role as the issuer of an income-tax-regulated currency, and (2) to use the Federal Reserve only in its capacity as “fiscal agent” (servant) of the Treasury Department, and thereby gain access to Treasury-Direct currencies that would provide workers with a legal opportunity to claim self ownership, including ownership of one’s wages as one’s personal property, not as income.

Even Milton Friedman never discussed it, but he wasn’t a lawyer, so maybe he didn’t know how to distinguish the Fed’s two highly conflicting roles, one as a monopoly enforcer of the tax code with the IRS, and the other as gateway to an individual’s self ownership through the use of Treasury-Direct coin-based currencies.

I also think Friedman may have been so focused on the complexities of using the negative income tax to alleviate suffering of the poor and disadvantaged that he was unable to see how an income-tax-unregulated Treasury-Direct currency could advance libertarian ideals of self-ownership.

Anonymous

Is that a statement that we cannot change the structure of our democratic process so that individual wealth, and even corporate wealth, has little influence and impact on the democratic outcomes? If not, isn’t a better approach to reform democracy’s structure and then see what the remain impact of wealth is?
http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

Democracy is a means not an ends. I make it clear. I have a lot more sympathy for democracy in Sweden, Iceland and Switzerland than the United States. But then again, thanks to the Wikileaks cables, we have to ask when did the Swedes vote for the foreign influence/dominance of their local officials by the US. Then again, when did, we, “the community,” vote to dominate the Swedes?

http://www.realadultsex.com figleaf

I dunno. I don’t think equality is measured strictly in terms of income. For instance the super wealthy are often given deference even when they’ve committed what would otherwise be felonies such as gravely injuring someone in a hit and run and then not being charged because the local DA says crap like “Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession.” (Erzinger was, and thanks to the DA still is, a hedge fund manager.)

Oh, and lest you think this “equality” business is just about “the poor,” the guy he hit was a transplant surgeon! Now it’s unlikely that Erzinger himself has an income more than an order of magnitude higher than the doctor he ran over on his (unimpeded!) way to work, but in terms income and clout the doctor’s income is closer to a hobo’s than the clients who’s interests would have been at stake had Erzinger been detained.

So.

So the extent society can be constructed such that no amount of wealth what so ever can lead to, say, one individual getting a pass on committing a crime that another would be prosecuted for (either under a government-run judicial system or, for anarchists and ultra-libertarians, vigilante justice) then no, wealth inequality shouldn’t be a big deal.

Now.

Since as far as I know no libertarians, bleeding-heart or otherwise, propose amending the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution to remove all hints of equality, I’m pretty sure there should be no controversy about an equality under the law standard in libertarian circles. Furthermore, while I’m not as certain I’m still pretty sure most libertarians would object to manipulations of the law such that hobos, surgeons, and the ultra-rich alike are forbidden from sleeping under railroad bridges (or just, say, remaining in non-slum parts of town after sunset) but only the ultra-rich could afford to do so.

On the other hand, human nature being what it is, it’s difficult to imagine a legal system wherein equality under the law could be sustained despite extraordinary income gaps unless there were some pretty draconian and structurally difficult-to-corrupt enforcement mechanisms in place to ensure it.

In fact I’m… pretty sure most libertarians (and a lot of non-libertarians!) would object strongly to a legal system rigid enough to prevent routine abuses of purely economic power such as the power exercised on behalf of Mr. Erzinger. I certainly would be wary of such a system.

An alternative and, perhaps ironically, lower-government-intrusion method would instead to maintain a tax structure that prevented disparities of wealth to grow to a point where the ultra-rich would no longer be equal under the law but instead would be subject to essentially no law at all.

I’ll go one step further here. I’m going to assert that a lot of people who claim to be “libertarian” in fact aspire to create or wish to maintain a system wherein their wealth or influence could put them above the reach of the law, and imagine this “libertarian” business is a nice way to pull it off. (Ron and Rand Paul being glaringly obvious examples. And for all their lip service the overly-referenced but curiously-selective Koch brothers being another.)

Pseudo-libertarians like the Pauls are proof by existence that no voluntary system would prevent the ultra-wealthy from violating both capital-L Libertarian principles and the principles of equality under the law. In my opinion there isn’t even shame or blame on them for this — as I said it’s an inescapable part of human nature.

I suggested, above, that an otherwise-neutral “progressive” taxation system would be one way to insure that the ultra-wealthy’s ability to express fundamental human nature to subvert non-wealth-related equality under the law. I’m sure this does not sit well with many libertarians. (It’s a forgone conclusion it won’t sit well with pseudo-libertarians.) In fact I’m not super crazy about it myself. Therefore I’d be extremely interested to hear any and all other proposals that would create the same result — genuine equality under the law — while still overall decreasing rather than increasing the coercive power of governments (and government-like private entities.)

Note: I won’t accept solutions that rely on magic “we’ll just change human nature.” Nor will solutions resembling the semi-anarchist Russian and southwest Canadian Doukhobor communities (wherein private individuals traditionally and routinely gathered together to burn the barns of neighbors who’s wealth begins to put them above the law.) They’ve got to be real and they can’t assume more violence.

figleaf

http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

The progressive entreats the libertarain: why don’t you support the State enforcing moral ends? The libertarian responds: because the moral ends, if not at first, will surely become those of plunder and protectionism. “Social Justice” originates from theological minds, minds such as Saint Simon or Charles Coughlin, supposedly attuned to God’s moral preferences that always ends with the necessity of a Corporate Dirigisme as designed obedience to God’s will.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

Plunder and exploitation are the routine everyday activities in capitalist societies. Capitalists don’t need the assistance of the “state” to dominate and despoil. The capacity to accumulate the power to dominate, and the social conditions that make the drive to dominate or be dominated the order of the day, are built into the foundations of an weakly regulated social order based on private property and private markets.

Anonymous

How would you even know that plunder exists without the institution of private property? Empirically speaking, plunder via the use of the state is exponentially greater than all other forms combined. Just look at the financial bailouts and how the Fed Reserve operates. Now throw in all the state plunder complex’s and such, like the military-industrial, prison-industrial, nationalized healthcare, public school industrial, the drug war, the war on terror, pharma-industrial…. and so on.

The more regulated the industry, the more plunder is taking place.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Dan-Kervick/100000673155327 Dan Kervick

I suspect you really know nothing at all about the financing of the bailouts or about how the Fed operates.
Anonymous

Why do you suspect that? Enlighten me then. How does the Fed work? How did the bailouts work and were they necessary in your view?
http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

“Dan the conservative.” Defending central banking and the bailouts of wall street investment banking houses. Do you realize that your hard-core conservative defense of the status quo dressed in the garb of egalitarianism is actually demonstrating the libertarian argument.

What next Dan? A defense of the hard-working men and women of the TSA, DHS and DEA?

http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

You should cite the political theorists and academic sources regarding your theory of capitalist exploitation outlined above. It’s certainly not the Marxist view nor the anti-propertarian left view because they view capitalism very much an artificial product that requires the State.

of course, i’ll save you the trouble. It stems from the Corporate Dirigisme of the likes of Saint Simon, as I mentioned above. In the united states, we would call it corporate liberalism, a political doctrine deconstructed by the Wisconsin revisionist New Left in the 60s as originating from the 19th century robber barons who used the exact same arguments for a public-private joint partnership to eliminate competition, squash radical labor, and centralize the wealth- government power nexus.

James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko,William Appleman Williams. These aren’t libertarians.

If you are going to argue that private property is fundamentally exploitative, then in no way can you support western governments. You are not a lefty; you are a conservative masquerading as a “lefty” using an “equality” spiel to legitimize the plunder of the status quo.

http://www.realadultsex.com figleaf

“Here we see the moral justification of the “break your legs, give you crutches” moral ends of the State.”

Um. We see this where? Certainly not in anything I said, above.

I’m not sure how it’s “moral” to see equality under the law as a (self) organizing principle. It’s implicit in virtually any coherent definition of libertarianism! Otherwise one could be 100% “libertarian” and still support a) slavery and b) murder for hire. I mean, yeah, “to the victor go the spoils” is also an organizing principle. But since the inevitable result of victor-to-spoils giving is, well, government (depotic government at that) it’s not libertarianism. It might be pseudo-libertarianism of the sort I outlined above. But to agree to call it “libertarianism” would be to agree to call North Korea’s dictator a “dear leader,” the People’s Army of communist China a people’s army, and to call the Democratic Republic of Congo either a democracy or a republic. Or to call Newt Gingrich an “outsider” or Mitt Romney “unemployed.”

I get that you’re cranky only about “organized” government coercion. Fine. I’m more cranky about all organized coercion, including private enterprise coercion, private-individual coercion, and even (as I expressly mentioned in my original post) Doukhobor anarchist coercion.

I also get the impression that you think I believe the state should some how have, what?, paid for the medical care of the surgeon who was a victim of a hit and run? Perhaps by somehow taking imposing a tax on the guy who hit him and ran? Um. No. That’s not even wrong. Instead I said only that the amount of money one makes, or the amount of money one’s masters make, should have no bearing on whether or not one is prosecuted for a common crime.

Furthermore, to the extent that someone is able to simply buy their way out of prosecution for a common crime that others without (sufficient) money or patronage can not then there is to all intents and purposes institutional “government” of the sort most libertarians chaff at.

Fuel efficiency would be nearly perfect in a universe with no entropy, Euclidean geometry would work perfectly if parallel lines never met (as the do on, oh, say, a sphere), and Libertarianism would be perfect if there was no human impulse to accumulate power and abuse it coercively. Solutions to entropy, geometry have been found to deal with reality and I’m actually quite confident that Libertarianism can be made to deal with reality as well. But just saying “ooh, do what thou will shall be the whole of the law” won’t cut it.

figleaf

http://twitter.com/dL_1337 dL

I addressed the problem of “equality before the law” in this post earlier this month. it was a reply to a post on this by Steve Horowitz. The problem is that equality before the law, unattached to proper justice, is equivalent to recognition. And that problem has already been deconstructed by the communitarians, particularly Charles Taylor, who argued that procedural liberalism cannot ensure minority recognition.

Post:
http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/do-not-conflate-recognition-with-justice-a-reply-to-horwitz/

Regarding libertarianism, I don’t argue it in terms of “coercion,” which I think is a useless concept in terms of social theory. Any cooperation with others is coercive in that it imposes moral constraints on agent actions. A social theory of minimizing coercion is no social theory in that the min(coercion) is the “State of Nature,” or the defection state.

Post:
http://rulingclass.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/essay-on-the-state-of-nature-part-i/

The libertarian principle is a moral constraint on the “cooperative regime,” in that the regime makes no one worse off relative to no regime.

So I consider public vs private coercion to be irrelevant. Any cooperation imposes a moral constraint on agent reaction–thus, coercive. We cooperate however because the benefit of cooperation creates a surplus that outweighs the state of defection(an absence of a moral constraint). An obvious example is, say, marriage. The benefits of the union outweight the moral constraint of being monogamous.

The realism part comes in that we should expect agents to minimize what they have to give up(what constraints they will accept) to enjoy the benefits. However, this is a multi-variable max-min calculation usually designated by the term “moral contractarianism.” Reference David Gauthier on this problem.

The issue of “break your legs, give you crutches” pertains to the historical fact that the social welfare state begins with the redistribution to the “rich” from monopoly privileges that is then mitigated by a subsidized, paternalistic middle class welfare regime that is usually financed by taxation of labor. There is also a fairly nominal lower class welfare redistribution that occurs, but this is nominal relative to other two, although everyone usually thinks of the “welfare state” meaning redistribution to the poor; but that is conservative clap-trap.

What you are saying is that the burden is on the libertarain to improve on this model i just outlined above. And I responded that this model also employs aggressive violence against voluntary alternatives. It is an aggressive protector of monopoly rents. You are imposing a burden of viable challenge to thing that is actively engaged in using violence against such challenge. That’s not an honest challenge.

My honest challenge to you is to defend a welfare state that is looking to put me in a cage if i injest unapproved chemicals, that forces me to undero cavity searches if I want to travel and requires me to prove i’m not a terrorist to open up a bank account to save the money from my labor. In other words, why does the welfare state seemingly require the inevitable control over civil society to function?

This type of regime makes quite a few people worse off than it weren’t so. It’s a violation of the libertarian principle.

http://www.realadultsex.com figleaf

Good! I prefer the foundation you choose and love the bottoming/abandonment condition of the state of nature. Which opens up other cans of worms, sure, but those can be worked with. (The biggest can of worms being that the bottoming condition for any population is a range rather than a limit.)

I particularly appreciate your acknowledgement of the “coercion” implied in cooperation as that, for me, distinguishes realistic liberty from anarchic, the-bikers-end-up-in-charge freedom. The social constraint on swinging my fist near your face is an imposition on absolute freedom, but it is entirely consistent with liberty.

“My honest challenge to you is to defend a welfare state that is looking to… etc.”

Huh? First of all, as with monopoly rents, non-”welfare” states appear to be every bit as capable of imposing cavity searches and other egregious impositions on liberty as are “welfare” states. Indeed even private, non-state enterprises from mining companies to mafias routinely offer up these impositions!

Second of all, you’re not going to get me to defend cavity searches and chemical-ingestion prohibition. And I think it’s kind of creepy that single out opening bank accounts to save money from your “labor” when, in fact, I believe you should be free to open a bank account to save money from any source whatsoever!

For instance I’m… pretty sure both my body cavities, my bank accounts, and for that matter my business and other private property are relatively secure in the extremely high-welfare state of Denmark whereas they’re horrifyingly insecure in low-welfare states such as Burma, Somalia, or Sudan.

And not to seem too cranky but even in the U.S. aggregate infringement of liberties such as life and property predated the “nanny state,” whereas the whole body-cavity and account verification business arose many decades after the welfare state was deeply entrenched, and indeed was imposed largely by those American factions most dedicated to destroying America’s welfare systems. Meanwhile, for whatever reason, I’d say that Liberals (of all things!) have been even more appalled than Libertarians at wholesale attempts to turn the country (at national, state, and local levels) into a routine police state.

So… your challenged doesn’t make a lot of sense.

—

Based on your many excellent points, and since you’re not interested in answering my challenge, I’m going to agree with Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan that the best point to reduce the risk of extreme wealth disparities would be after the death of the wealth holder in the form of estate taxes. The (irrefutable!) benefit would be that loss of one’s estate after death is completely irrelevant, and the argument that a descendant who did not participate actively in the wealth accumulation is no more entitled to that wealth than the government or the local shelter for wayward Norwegian Blues.

Indeed, a government that raised revenue only on estate taxes could end up having very little other impact on liberty while passively ensuring a certain non-state-of-nature level of common good and minimizing liberty-infringing wealth disparities.

figleaf

Thomas Hepplewhite

On your first question everyone should read Parfit’s Equality and Priority.
http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

Some earlier thoughts on income inequality here:
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2011/10/does-inequality-matter-2/
Damien S.

I remember David Friedman’s description of medieval Iceland’s supposed anarcho-capitalism, which lasted while there was relative equality (at least among the landholders, pay no attention to the thralls outside) and collapsed when economic inequality got out of hand.

If you believe the evidence in _The Spirit Level_, more equal wealthy societies are healthier, happier, and have lower crime rates. Some of that could be due to having fewer absolutely poor people, but it could also be due to having less competitive and stressful societies. Chronic stress kills, and status seems to have biological significance. Don’t know what happens if you combine Nordic level safety nets and social guarantees with high levels of inequality but no one’s proposing that, certainly not libertarians.
Anonymous

Fernando, you didn’t ask for for economists’ comment on the first question but they might have some. Years ago I was at a seminar that was review some of the experimental economics results indicate that relative rewards may matter more than absolute rewards. Perhaps that’s actually a psychological observation. It’s also an observation, the importance of relative over absolute, I’ve heard James Buchanan make in similar context.

I don’t really see it as an unusual finding as economics is typically more interested in relative prices rather than absolute prices.
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