The Glass Half-Empty by Rodrigo Aguilera

Author:Rodrigo Aguilera
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912248810
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.17: The rewards of growth in the US have gone to the rich

Note: This chart shows the share of income received by the bottom 90%, the top 1%, and the top 10-1% (basically the top 10% minus the top 1%). This shows how the top 10% and 1% have gradually increased their share of income gains, particularly since the Reagan period. During the Bush-era expansion, the bottom 90% received practically no growth, while in the immediate post-financial crisis recovery, the gains were being reaped almost entirely by the top 1% while the bottom 90% lost 16%. If this chart doesn’t convince you on the moral and practical urgency in addressing inequality, nothing will. Source: Adapted from Tcherneva, P.R. (2015).50

Rawls therefore appeared to be justifying a welfare state to prevent people from obtaining the worst possible outcomes of a laissez-faire society. This Rawlsian view of justice, however, suffers from a failure to see justice as an outcome rather than as a process, and hence that even a society governed by “just” institutions can produce outcomes that are far from just.51 And not just institutions, but also the cultural norms that underpin them, as was mentioned in the proposed definition of progress in Chapter One. For example, you could easily believe in equality of opportunity rather than outcome and assume that a society based around aspirational values like the “American Dream” is good enough behind the veil: regardless of whether you were born as an Amazon warehouse worker, you can aspire to become CEO after Bezos retires with enough hard work, persistence, and grit. It doesn’t matter that this is highly improbable, only that it be possible.

Absent any moral framework for economic justice, the inevitable result under liberal capitalism is a surrender to the amorality of the market mechanism, one that demands sole obedience to rational rather than reasonable impulses. In his defense, Rawls did not fail to notice this in his later work, Political Liberalism, which echoes the same distinction made between rationality and reasonableness that W.M. Sibley described (Chapter Two):

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.