What are the fairness buttons?
I just published an essay in the New York Times titled “How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles.” The main point of the essay is that there are several fairness buttons in the human mind, but equality of outcomes is not one of them. This is why arguments about how much the “1%” have, in comparison to the “99%” don’t get much traction. Even showing graphs of rising inequality doesn’t do much for most Americans, because our moral psychology just doesn’t respond to inequality of outcomes in a vacuum. Rather, there are (at least) three fairness buttons that come into play in discussions of taxation, wealth, and inequality:
1) The “Share the Spoils” button. People feel a strong desire to share, even to share equally, when they feel that they have collaborated with others to produce the wealth. If a gross disparity arises because two people worked separately, even if they both worked equally hard and one was just plain lucky, most people don’t feel that they are entitled to a share of the more successful person’s resources. This is the focus of the article, drawing on an important study published last year in Nature by Katharina Hamann and Michael Tomasello. Tomasello is one of the heroes of chapter 9 of The Righteous Mind, for his research on how humans and only humans can do shared, joint projects like the marble sharing.
2) The “Shared Sacrifice” button. Churchill offered Britons nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” John F. Kennedy asked us all to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle” against communism. When a leader asks everyone to sacrifice for the common good, it pushes a very powerful button, one that makes rich and poor alike willing to share. (I criticize Obama for not pushing this button in response to the economic crisis, but I should note that George Bush failed to push it in an even more golden opportunity, after 9/11. That would have been an ideal time to get our house in order, to prepare for the long and costly struggle Bush was about to take us on.)
3) The “Procedural Fairness” button. People don’t just care about whether they got a fair slice of the pie. That’s “distributive fairness” (which depends critically on whether they collaborated to make the pie, see button #1). They also care a great deal about whether open, honest, and impartial procedures were used to decide who got what. This is the main problem with fairness in America, in my opinion. This is why I approvingly quoted Sarah Palin’s condemnation of “crony capitalism.”
If the Democrats are going to campaign this year on fairness, they would do well to know where the psychological buttons are, and to stop assuming that most people are concerned by gross inequalities of outcome by themselves. In my research at Yourmorals.org, my colleagues and I find that it’s only people who are already on the far left who agree with the statement “ideally, everyone in society would end up with the same amount of money.”
This is not to disagree with the thrust of your argument, but there are reasons even for a conservative to be concerned with our country’s income inequality; perhaps not its mere existence, but surely the unprecedented rate at which technological change is accelerating it. Even if low taxes on the rich were proven to be the best immediate way to grow the economy, long term social stability will surely depend on our finding a way for less of the benefits of increased productivity to flow just to a few brilliant innovators (and their financiers) and more to flow to those vulnerable to displacement by these very innovations. It is certainly true that part of the problem is the often limited marketable skills of those who are displaced. Because our economy relies less and less on unskilled labor, the lower half of the bell curve, the sort of people whose hard work helped build this country, are of decreasing economic value. Unfortunately, the liberal idea that the problem is just that the schools need more money, is just as naïve as is the conservative idea that the schools (and also the poor) just need better incentives. It is fun to imagine that the next crop of high school students will all be able to benefit from a university or some advanced technical college. But we need to wake up from this pleasant dream, and acknowledge the limits of our ability to mold people, as well as our obligation to mold our society so as to humanely accommodate all of its citizens, not just the idealized imaginings of our social schemes. Such an accommodation needs to be made, even where it requires real sacrifice on the part of those most in a position to help.
Thank you, I fully agree! I think the left is correct to be warning about these economic factors and trends that are hurting the working class, and the many documented ill effects of high income inequality, but they are reluctant to talk about cultural factors and family breakdown for fear of blaming the victims. The right has the opposite problem, focusing too much on cultural factors.
Thank you for your response. I just want to clarify that I’m not arguing for some fusion of the liberal idea that our problems are structural (i.e. just a mismatch between this generation’s training and the current labor market) and the conservative idea that our problems are caused by social breakdown. Sure, there is truth to both ideas, but neither acknowledges the severe limits of our current ability to meaningfully raise cognitive ability, which is increasingly the currency of the modern economy. We need both more basic research into cognitive ability, and strong incentives for companies to generate more jobs consistent with the actual current distribution of abilities within our population. A good start might be to disincentivize the practice (and subsidy for the wealthy) of importing cheap immigrant labor for low skill jobs. What we don’t need is a perpetual game of blame slinging, as each side fails to achieve miracles. My modest hope is that some public intellectuals will begin to “speak truth to tenaciously held popular delusions”.
I agree with you. The repeated invocation of education as the cure for inequality problems is nuts. Education causes inequality because it allows the cognitively gifted to get advantages that the less cognitively gifted can’t realistically obtain.