Income is important because we need to be sensible in managing our budget. Moreover, when we see some people get paid more to do something we are capable of doing, we have an incentive to change what we are doing. We may say 'income inequality is a signalling device which helps factors of production to move to more useful or productive employment'. This can be done across borders. British Doctors may emigrate to America where they are paid more, while Danish dentists might relocate to Britain to earn more money. Finding out that you are 'unequal' to someone like you, helps change your behaviour so you do less of the stuff which results in worse outcomes and more of the stuff which puts you ahead. In other words, information about inequality is a driver for change of a beneficial type,
Economic inequality is about the dynamics of the Economy of a country as a whole. True, it is linked to current differences in Income, Wealth, 'life-chances' as well as access to 'Public' & 'Merit' goods. But, we can always just add or subtract 'imputed' items to money income to get to what is relevant. But that isn't enough. Economic inequality is about the subsequent trajectory of the whole country. In other words, it is concerned with some things which no individual can do for herself. I suppose, absent 'entry or exit', you could redistribute income through the tax & benefit system. However, this might destroy the economy or lead to much more, not less, economic inequality as people reduce their exposure to the 'white' portion of the market.
An Economy needs to try to become equal to the best economies among countries of its type. This is likely to involve rising Income and, inter alia, rising Income inequality, at home.
It is important to keep in mind that, because of preference heteogeniety, a country may have increased income inequality while simultaneously enjoying less economic inequality and vice versa. This can impact demographic balance and, ultimately, the political 'culture' of the country.
Economic inequality has to do with 'collective action' problems as much as what individuals do. To understand economic inequality you need a thorough grounding in the theory of Public Finance as well as an understanding of Coasian 'Law & Economics' which presupposes some knowledge of historical peculiarities of various countries.
Sadly, back in the mid-Fifties, India decided to forget about 'Public Finance' and 'budgets' and to go in for a psuedo-mathsy type of 'Central Planning'. This permanently destroyed the ability of some Bengali economists to understand even elementary aspects of the subject they would ignorantly teach decade after decade.
As a case in point, Amartya Sen, a quarter of a century ago, gave a talk titled 'From income inequality to economic inequality'. He argued that 'Focus must be shifted from income inequality
which can be measured. Moreover, you can add in 'imputed' income from 'owner occupation', access to health care etc, so as to get a fuller picture of well-being.
to economic inequality
which can't be measured because we don't know the future. The Economic concept of Income is that which can be spent without reducing future income. As Partha Dasgupta points out, we don't know if our current way of life is sustainable. We might discover that 'depreciation' is much higher than we currently estimate. We were living off capital not spending income.
because of the presence of causal influences on individual well-being and freedom that are economic in nature
in which case they involve 'scarcity' and opportunity cost. But we don't know the true opportunity cost of our actions. We may have been devouring our wealth rather than living within our income.
but cannot be expounded by simple statistics of incomes and commodity holdings.
They can be estimated well enough for any practical purpose.
Attention must be given to heterogeneous magnitudes.
Which can be made homogenous by applying 'weights'.
Moreover, there is a need for the derivation of partial orderings based on explicit or implicit public acceptance.'
There is no such need. We only need to know the next best alternative foregone, not how to rank all the foregone alternatives.
In any case, representative democracy is about delegation. Let Civil Servants sit down with the politicians and set a budget.
In "Equality as a Moral Ideal," Harry Frankfurt (1987), the distinguished philosopher, provides a closely reasoned critique of what he calls economic egalitarianism, defining it as "the doctrine that there should be no inequalities in the distribution of money". The distinction (between Income inequality and Economic inequality) however, is important.
No. You can add in 'imputed' income of various types.
Many of the criticisms of economic egalitarianism as a value or a goal applies much more readily to the narrow concept of income inequality than it does to the broader notions of economic inequality.
No. The criticism is the same. We want there to be income inequality because factors of production need an incentive to be mobile. We may not want too much economic inequality because
1) this increases uncertainty and risk aversion among the poorest who are also those who potentially can have the biggest 'catch up' productivity gain. However, reducing risk for the poorest may increase inequality as some rise faster than others. Moreover, 'transfers' as a percentage of the GDP may go down and, if the poorest are themselves paying for collective provision of a 'safety net', it may appear that the tax/national insurance system is becoming more regressive though the impact is highly progressive. These are 'aggregation' problems which, however, can be tackled by studies done in good faith.
2) it stabilizes aggregate demand or staves off an 'underconsumption' crisis. Again, the aim is to reduce uncertainty though, it turns out volatility, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing
3) you are likely to get 'separating equilibria' rather than 'risk pooling'. This means 'discoordination games' gain salience. One may then speak of a 'divided' society or a deleterious change in 'political culture'. Essentially, 'collective action problems' become intractable because of interessement by vested interest groups or identity classes.
Thus, in promoting economic equality, we have to be careful that the system is 'incentive compatible' or that foolish or short-sighted behaviour is not being rewarded. My point is there is no 'equality' if everybody in the country is worse off because an economy needs to be trying to be as equal as possible to the best economies among countries of its type. After all, your smart people may move to the country where smart policies are being implemented.
For example, giving a larger share of income to a person with more needs, say due to a disability, can be seen as militating against the principle of equalizing incomes,
No. We can 'impute' income from health. The disabled person has less of this. That's why Courts and Social Security systems give higher awards to the disabled.
but it does not go against the broader, precepts of economic equality since the greater need for economic resources due to the disability must be taken into account in judging the requirements of economic equality.
Sen seems unaware that National Income accounts have 'imputed' income from owner occupation etc. Sen did not study Economics properly. He should have studied Welfare Econ as part of Public Finance. But Public Finance is based on National Income accountancy.
Well, the subject of this paper is precisely the difference between economic inequality and income inequality.
There is no difference. Accountants can ensure that the latter captures the former well enough for any particular purpose.
It will be argued that we ought to pay much more attention than we conventionally do to economic inequality in an appropriately broad sense, taking note of the fact that income inequality, on which economic analysis of inequality so often concentrates, gives a very inadequate and biased view of inequalities, even of those inequalities that can be powerfully influenced by economic policy.
This is not a problem for actual applied Economists more particularly those with Accountancy qualifications.
There is a serious gulf here, and the distinction, I would argue, is of considerable importance for economic practice as well as for economic theory.
Sen is ignorant of actual economic practice. Theory doesn't matter in the slightest.
A convenient point of departure is A. B. Atkinson’s
a good man properly trained in Public Finance.
(1970) pioneering move in the measurement of inequality.
Sadly, he thought 'inequality aversion' was a real thing at just the moment when the working class decided they were cool with much greater inequality of earnings.
He assessed inequality of incomes by bringing in an overall social objective function and measured inequality of an income distribution through the social loss (in terms of equivalent income) from that distribution in comparison with a corresponding equal distribution. However, he took the individuals to be symmetrical and also did not explicitly consider what the individuals respectively get out of their incomes and other circumstances.
So what? His work was useless. Labour found that redistribution was a vote loser. What mattered was devaluation which made beach holiday's in Franco's Spain more expensive. The working class was not interested in 'solidarity'. Also they wanted their favourite pop singers and soccer players to be as rich as fuck.
(2) There is a case for going beyond this structure and for examining the nature of individual advantages themselves as the constituent elements of social welfare (or, more generally, of social objectives).
What case is that? Being able to get a grant to write a paper nobody will read?
In this context, we have to take note of the heterogeneities of the individuals and of their respective nonincome circumstances.
Which we can only do if we are omniscient gods.
The important point to note is that the valuation of income is entirely as a means to other ends
but those ends are also means to other ends far beyond our mortal ken
and also that it is one means among others. A more inclusive list of means has been used by John Rawls in his theory of justice through his concentration on primary goods, which include rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect" (Rawls 1971, pp. 60 - 65).
Rights are meaningless without incentive compatible remedies. Preserving liberty involves having a lot of nuclear weapons- as Ukraine is discovering.
(3) Income is, of course, a crucially important means, but its importance lies in the fact that it helps the person to do things that she values doing
but she only values doing those things because that is a means to some other ends which are themselves means to other ends. Dawkins' 'extended phenotype' principle applies.
and to achieve states of being that she has reasons to desire.
but those states of being are only a means to achieve something else which we may know nothing of.
The worth of incomes cannot stand separated from these deeper concerns,
Yes it can. People take jobs on the basis of 'expected income' all the time. They don't give a fuck about 'deeper concerns'. This is just as true of philosophers as it is of plumbers.
and a society that respects individual well-being and freedom must take note of these concerns in making interpersonal comparisons as well as social evaluations.
Why? Everybody makes 'interpersonal comparisons' all the time. Sen decided his best friend's wife was nicer than his own and ran away with her to a London whose people compared themselves to Muscovites and New Yorkers and decided they would prefer to push their economy down the American, not the Soviet, path. Sen may have respected the 'well being and freedom' of his best friend but he still ran off with his wife.
The relationship between income (and other resources) on the one hand and individual achievements and freedoms on the other is not constant.
But, by the magic of the Law of Large Numbers there is a stable correlation, ceteris paribus. This can be called 'Granger causality'.
Different types of contingencies
which tend to cancel each other out for a big enough population
lead to systematic variations in the conversion of incomes into the distinct functionings we can achieve (i.e., the various things we can do or be), and that affects the lifestyles we can enjoy.
It is obvious that getting AIDS will reduce well-being. Wear a fucking condom.
There are at least five important sources of parametric variation. (1) Personal heterogeneities: People have disparate physical characteristics connected with disability, illness, age, or gender, making their needs diverse. For example, an ill person may need more income to fight her illness than a person without such an illness would need. While the compensation needed for disadvantages will vary, some disadvantages may not be correctable even with more expenditure on treatment or care.
Everybody already knows this which is why people save up money for their retirement. Still, the Government does employ actuaries and economists to figure out what scale of pension payment is sustainable. If it fails to do so, as in Greece, pensioners take a haircut.
(2) Environmental diversities: Variations in environmental conditions, such as climatic circumstances (temperature ranges, rainfall, flooding, and so on), can influence what a person gets out of a given level of income.
25 years ago, few predicted how catastrophically the climate might change. Here, it is scientists not 'moral philosophers' we should be listening to.
(3) Variations in social climate: The conversion of personal incomes and resources into functionings is influenced also by social conditions, including public health care and epidemiology, public educational arrangements, and the prevalence or absence of crime and violence in the particular location. Aside from public facilities, the nature of community relationships can be very important, as the recent literature on social capital has tended to emphasize.
Medicine should be a separate category. Once again, few would have predicted the impact of something like COVID back then.
(4) Differences in relational perspectives:
This is meaningless.
The commodity requirements of established patterns of behavior may vary between communities, depending on conventions and customs.
Arabs like riding camels only. Hindus need a cow or two to worship. Chinese people are constantly doing Kung Fu to each other. The French hop up and down the banks of the Seine seeking to devour frog legs.
For example, being relatively poor in a rich community can prevent a person from achieving some elementary functionings (such as taking part in the life of the community) even though her income, in absolute terms, may be much higher than the level of income at which members of poorer communities can function with great ease and success.
The same thing happens if you smell bad or keep knifing people. Why does Sen not include things like being charming or sexy in his list?
For example, to be able to "appear in public without shame" may require higher standards of clothing and other visible consumption in a richer society than in a poorer one (as Adam Smith [1776] had noted more than two centuries ago).
Smith was obviously wrong. Sen doesn't seem to have noticed that the England to which he returned in the Seventies had become Americanized. Old Etonians wore jeans just like young Liverpudlians.
(5) The same parametric variability may apply to the personal resources needed for the fulfillment of self-respect.
If you are having a lot of sex with attractive people you have plenty of self-respect.
This is primarily an intersocietal variation rather than an interindividual variation within a given society, but the two issues are frequently interlinked.
They became de-linked in affluent societies. Sen was too busy reading Adam Smith to notice.
(5) Distribution within the family: Incomes earned by one or more members of a family are shared by all, nonearners as well as earners.
Indians like Sen used to express horror that British Mums and Dads charged rent to their own sons and daughters. But this was smart. It encouraged those kids to save up a bit, get married, and get a mortgage from the Building Society.
The family is, thus, the basic unit for consideration of incomes from the point of view of their use.
Unless it isn't. Affluence and high female participation meant that families became less important. The kids moved out while wifey earned money and took foreign holidays with her girl friends. Poor old Dad was no longer the benevolent patriarch. Only the dog showed him any affection..
The well-being or freedom of individuals in a family will depend on how the family income is used in furtherance of the interests and objectives of different members of the family, Thus, intrafamily distribution of incomes is quite a crucial parametric variable in linking individual achievements and opportunities with the overall level of family income. Distributional rules followed within the family (e.g., related to gender or age or perceived needs) can make a major difference to the attainments and predicaments of individual members.
I suppose Sen is repeating this nonsense because Feminist Academics were pretending that husbands beat their wives and forced them to have sex in return for a little pin-money. Still, it is a good idea to give welfare payments to the Mum, not her current paramour or pimp.
Illustrations of Contrasts I shall take the liberty of dwelling on a few such illustrations to indicate what kind of contrasts may be involved. Figure 1 presents the gross national product (GNP) per head and life expectancy at birth of six countries (China, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Brazil, South Africa, and Gabon) and one sizeable state (Kerala) within a country (India).(7) The income-poor people of Kerala or China or Sri Lanka enjoy enormously higher levels of life expectancy than do the much richer populations of Brazil, South Africa, and Namibia, not to mention Gabon.
Because there is a big cultural difference between these countries. Also, Kerala was a remittance economy with (thanks to Socialist policies) low wages and a tradition of exporting Doctors and Nurses. Thus it defeated 'Baumol Cost Disease'.
Since life expectancy variations relate to a variety of economic influences, including epidemiological policies, health care, educational facilities, and so on, the reach of economic opportunities is much broader than that of income alone.
It is obvious that Public Health policies differ because of historical factors. But so do things like diet, level of promiscuity, percentage of illegitimacy etc, etc.
I have had the occasion to discuss elsewhere how public policies in particular have been quite crucial in influencing the quality of life and longevity of different populations (see Sen 1981; Dreze and Sen 1989).
Public policy affects public outcomes. What is surprising about that? But Public Policy may be a function of State Capacity which itself depends on history and culture. You learn nothing by comparing apples and oranges.
Even though the income per capita of African Americans is considerably lower than that of the American white population, African Americans are of course a great many times richer in income terms than the people of China or Kerala (even after correcting for cost-of-living differences). In this context, it is interesting to compare the survival prospects of African Americans vis-a-vis the immensely poorer Chinese or Indians in Kerala. American blacks do much better in terms of survival at low age groups (particularly in terms of infant mortality), but the picture changes over the years. It turns out that, in fact, the Chinese and the Keralites decisively outlive American black men in terms of surviving to older age groups.
Which is scarcely surprising when you look at differences in diet and lifestyle.
Even American black women end up having similar survival patterns for high ages as the Chinese and decidedly lower survival rates than the Indians in Kerala.
Few women in Kerala take any type of alcohol or indulge in rich, fatty, food.
So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in the income space (vis-a-vis American whites), they are absolutely more deprived than the much poorer Indians in Kerala and the Chinese (in the case of men) in terms of living to ripe, old ages.
No. They are not deprived relative to Keralites. That is why they don't emigrate to Kerala whereas people from Kerala gladly emigrate to the US though, it is true, they then are at higher risk of diabetes, heart disease etc.
In explaining these differences between living standards judged by income per head and that judged by the ability to survive to higher ages, a number of causal issues are relevant (including medical insurance, public health care, elementary education, law and order, etc.) that are not unrelated to economic policies and programs.
Sen does not mention the only thing which is relevant- viz. diet, promiscuity and saying no to drugs and alcohol. Also religion is better than gangsta rap if you want to live long.
... GDP figures would put Haryana and Punjab very much higher than Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but in terms of aspects of quality of life, exactly the opposite is the case.
Tamil Nadu has a much bigger population than Haryana and Punjab put together. Some parts are still very poor but high female participation means that demographic transition has occurred.
As these illustrations exemplify and as can be confirmed by other statistics there are substantial differences between the income-based view and the nonincome indicators of quality of life.
These can be easily compensated for by adding imputed income.
Inequality comparisons will yield very different results depending on whether we concentrate only on incomes or also on the impact of other economic and social influences on the quality of life.
This is obvious. When we compare what we could earn in another city, we look at cost of living, access to health care, education etc.
A further issue concerns the severely negative impact of unemployment, especially persistent unemployment, on the lives that people can live.
Unemployment has a positive impact if you move to where the jobs are or learn a useful trade.
This is an especially important issue for the assessment of quality of life and inequality in contemporary Europe.
No it isn't. Unemployment caused people to move out of rural shitholes and get ahead in big cities.
Even though unemployment benefits and social security may reduce the impact of the extraordinary levels of high unemployment on European income inequality in particular, the persistence of unemployment leads to many other kinds of deprivation that are not reflected at all in the income statistics.
But they could be made to do so easily enough. One way of reducing 'structural unemployment' is just to classify a lot of people as disabled. The fact is the 'NAIRU' for Europe probably increased. Ageing societies can have this problem. Moreover, there could be haircuts for pensioners or outright entitlement collapse.
An over-concentration on income inequality alone has permitted greater social and political tolerance of unemployment in Europe
Nobody gives a fuck about statistics. Voters showed they didn't give a toss about unemployment. Also they didn't really like Trade Unions or virtue-signalling libtards.
(and even some economic smugness vis-a-vis the achievement of low unemployment levels in the U.S.)
Clinton's 'workfare' went down a treat with African Americans who had no love for 'Welfare Queens'.
that cannot be justified if a broader view of economic inequality is taken.
It doesn't matter whether stupid academics take a broad or narrow view because nobody listens to them.
Can we really get an alternative, practically usable approach based on the broader concentration on functionings rather than incomes?
Sure. Just estimate different types of 'imputed' incomes and add them in.
Before taking on this issue fully, I would like to examine a related question, proposing a different alternative to the focus on incomes. Are we not likely, it may be sensibly asked, to be served better by opting for a more familiar notion, like utility, in shifting away from income inequality?
Utility can't be measured anymore than 'Capability'. We can find out how much money people make and add in the value they receive from living in their own homes or having a good school in their neighbourhood.
The possibility of interpersonal comparisons of utilities was, of course, famously challenged by Lionel Robbins (1938) and others in the high days of simple positivist criticism of utilitarian welfare economics.
Back then, some argued that Jews and Women and Darkies would want to be slaves- if only they knew what was good for them. I often say to Bill Gates that he has wasted his life. To really contribute to humanity's well-being he should have become a pole-dancer.
Certainly, the claim to a high scientific status of utility comparisons is compromised by many practical difficulties in relating observations to firm and indisputable conclusions regarding interpersonal rankings of utilities and utility differences. On the other hand, comparisons of pleasures and happiness are made in our day-to-day reflections and discourse, and there is considerable discipline in the making of such comparisons.
Not if we are merely letting off steam. On the other hand, if you see a guy quit his job and move somewhere far away, you start to wonder whether he might not have had a good reason for doing so.
Indeed, as Donald Davidson (1986) has pointed out, the nature of our understanding and communication regarding intrapersonal comparisons of states of happiness and desires are not radically different from the corresponding interpersonal exercises.
We do keep financial accounts but don't bother doing anything similar for 'utility' or 'ophelimity' or 'happiness'.
Also, interpersonal comparison of utilities need not take an all-or-nothing form, and it is possible to have "partial interpersonal comparability" with a rigorous analytical structure .
Only by arbitrary stipulation. I can say 'Amartya Sen is greatly deprived. This is because the only thing he truly enjoys is eating dog poo. Yet he is unable to satisfy this craving and is the most miserable creature on the planet.'
The difficult issue in basing inequality analysis on interpersonal comparisons is not so much the impossibility of making such comparisons but the possibility of being misled by such comparisons (particularly about important differences in the substantive deals that people get and the real predicaments from which they suffer).
So what if I am misled about Sen's appetite for dog poo? Who gives a fuck?
Our ability to take pleasure in very adverse circumstances tends to adapt to the hardship of circumstances so that the badly placed underdogs do not typically spend their lives weeping over what they have missed.
It is true that Sen is not weeping over all the dog poo he has been unable to devour. Yet, as an 'underdog' he does taste the pleasures of coprophagy.
People learn to make the most of small opportunities and to cut desires to size, that is, to levels that are realistic under the circumstances. Thus, in the scale of pleasures and desire fulfillment, the deprivation of the persistent underdog finds rather muffled and muted expression.
This essay is a cri de coeur from an underdog denied the pleasures of feasting on the turds of superior canines.
There is, I believe, force in this criticism of relying on interpersonal comparison of pleasures and desire fulfillment for making judgments about inequality or injustice. However, this critique does not touch at all the more modern definition of utility as a numerical representation of individual choice behavior.
Yes it does. There is no 'natural' or 'non-arbitrary' way of giving such a numerical representation. I am welcome to say 'Sen experiences 10 units of disutility every day that he fails to devour dog poo' but it is an arbitrary assertion. Moreover, it can't be proved or disproved.
In this interpretation, to say that a person gets more utility from x than from y is not essentially different from saying that, given the straightforward choice between x and y, the person would choose x.
Sen would choose to devour dog poo. Sadly, he is constrained by a censorious Civil Society.
The malleability or adaptation of pleasure-taking ability need not compromise the perspective of utility as real-valued representation of preference. However, if we see utility only as a numerical representation of each person’s choice behavior, there is, then, no basis here for interpersonal comparisons of utility since each person’s choice behavior is a distinct and separate entity. My choices may well reveal that I prefer a banana to an apple, but no choice of mine would, in any obvious sense, reveal whether I prefer to be someone else.
If you choose to dress up like Beyonce, most people would think you would prefer to be her.
Interpersonal comparisons deal with objects of comparison that are not objects of actual choice.
Which is why I can say that Sen prefers to eat the poo of Alsatians rather than Labradors.
This point is often missed when it is presumed that similarity of choice behavior over commodity space must reveal a congruence of utilities. It is often presumed that, when two persons are observed to have the same demand function, then they must be seen as having the same level of interpersonally comparable utility for any given commodity bundle.
They are indistinguishable in this matter. You can't show they don't have the same utility level.
Indeed, much of real-income comparison proceeds on the basis of identifying individual advantages with the commodity basket enjoyed, evaluated by a shared preference relation, and that procedure is not illegitimate for making situational comparisons of different persons’ opulence.
What other type of comparison could you usefully make?
But to interpret them as utility comparison, going beyond opulence, would be a complete non sequitur.
But opulence is the same thing as ophelimity which is the same thing as utility.
If instead of assuming that each person gets the same utility as others do from the same commodity bundle, it were assumed that one gets exactly one tenth of the utility that another gets from each respective bundle, then that too would be perfectly consistent with all the behavioral observations (including the shared demand function).
But why would that be assumed? It is foolish. Anyway, talk of the degree of a homogeneity of a function is useless if there is no fucking function because the underlying sets are not well defined. They are 'intensional' with unknown extension.
Congruent demand functions
are merely estimates or heuristic devices. They have no 'Platonic' existence because of the 'intensional fallacy' which arises where a thing is fundamentally epistemic and changes as knowledge changes.
tell us nothing about the congruence of utility functions,
which aren't functions for the same reason.
and this follows generally from the fact that the observations on which demand functions are based do not lend themselves to any presumption about interpersonal comparisons of well-being (only of commodity holdings and opulence). This must not be seen as just a fussy difficulty of theoretical interest; it can make a very big difference in practice as well.
No. In practice, if you are a good Econometrician you can get paid quite well for estimating demand functions. The thing is rough and ready. It isn't philosophical at all.
Even if a person who is disabled or ill or depressed happens to have the same demand function as another who is not disadvantaged in this way, it would be quite absurd to assume that she is having exactly the same utility or well-being from a given commodity bundle as the other can get from it.
But these individual differences cancel out thanks to the Law of Large numbers. One depressed person gets no joy out of eating cake. The other finds it the one bright and shining moment in a horrible day.
To attribute the same utility function to each and to treat that as the basis of interpersonal comparison for the analysis of inequality or injustice would be both epistemologically unsound and ethically unfair.
It doesn't matter what simplifying assumptions you make so long as what you are doing is useful. The guy baking cakes may assume that everybody will enjoy his cake. You say to him 'have you ever considered that a person eating your cake may have been sexually molested by a squirrel?' This causes the baker to spend a lot of time on the internet researching squirrels of a sexually predatory type. He begins to lose interest in baking cakes. His shop closes down and his family starves. Then a squirrel rapes him to death. I'm not saying anything like this happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
Utility cannot, therefore, serve as a satisfactory basis for interpersonal comparison for inequality analysis,
Why not? It is a Tarksian 'primitive'- i.e. is undefined.
and this holds no matter whether we interpret utility as pleasure or as desire fulfillment or as a numerical representation of choice behavior.
because the thing is undefined. It doesn't matter how you interpret it. Are you doing something useful? That's what matters.
Indeed, as I have tried to discuss, attempts to make that use arbitrarily can be pernicious for judgments of equity and justice.
Why? Such judgments are arbitrary. If they are protocol bound and 'buck stopped' they may still serve some useful purpose.
Quality of Life, Functionings, and Capabilities The choice of nonutility variables in terms of which inequality can be judged has been a matter of some interest in recent years, and such concepts as the quality of life or freedom of living and other such notions have been invoked.
But nothing useful has been accomplished. Americans like hearing words like 'Freedom' and 'Democracy' and so they may pay a little money to brown monkeys who keep repeating these words while America gets busy slaughtering 1.3 million Muslims so as to promote Democracy and Human Rights and handing over Iraq to Iran and Afghanistan to the Taliban.
It is, however, important to emphasize that focusing on the quality of life rather than on income or wealth or on psychological satisfaction is not new in economics. Indeed, the origin of the subject of economics was strongly motivated by the need to study the assessment of and causal influences on the conditions of living.
No. The origin of the subject had to do with some Greek pederasts/pedagogues being able to give a course of lectures of supposedly practical value to the sons of rich men.
The motivation is stated explicitly, with reasoned justification, by Aristotle,
No it isn't. Aristotle was merely a pedagogue pontificating about how Estates or Polities should be managed. But he was as stupid as shit and so the Epicurean economists made fun of him. Cicero popularized the views of the latter albeit with a Stoic twist.
but it is also strongly reflected in the early writings on national accounts and economic prosperity by William Petty, Gregory King, Francois Quesnay, Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and others.
They were concerned with the State's ability to raise tax revenue without killing the golden goose of enterprise.
While the national accounts devised by these pioneers established the foundations of the modern concept of income, the focus of their attention was never confined to this one concept. They were also very aware of the basic issue that the importance of income is instrumental and circumstantially contingent rather than intrinsic and categorical.
The amount of tax you can collect depends on the money income of different classes of people. The days of feudalism were long over. You needed to finance a standing Army or, in the case of England, a kick-ass Navy.
In traditional welfare economics, there has been interest both in individual utilities and in individual incomes.
Welfare Econ was a branch of Public Finance. Raise welfare and money incomes rise as do tax receipts.
When individuals are taken to be symmetrical,
indiscernibly identical for a particular purpose
the two are closely linked. John Rawls has pointed to the important issue that income is not the only versatile means that facilitates a person’s pursuit of his or her respective objectives.
But money income is what can be taxed so as to pay for Public and Merit goods not to mention salaried pedagogues.
He has focused instead, as was stated earlier, on the broader category of primary goods, which are general-purpose means that help anyone to promote his or her ends (including "rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect").
why no mention of charm, sexiness, or the ability to fart melodiously? If I were charming or sexy I wouldn't be so fucking poor.
The concentration on primary goods in the Rawlsian framework relates to his accounting of individual advantage in terms of the opportunities they enjoy to pursue their respective objectives.
His accounting was shit because he wasn't a fucking accountant.
Rawls’s Difference Principle, which is part of his theory of justice as fairness, assesses efficiency as well as equity in terms of the respective holdings of primary goods, represented by an index.
Which nobody has compiled because it would be utterly useless. On the other hand, everybody would agree that melodious farters should receive higher remuneration in return for remaining confined to their hovels. Yet whenever I ask for money to compile an index of melodious farting, people become evasive or suggest I go talk to somebody else.
The broadening of the narrow concentration on incomes alone involved in this move is significant, but this widening of the informational focus from incomes to primary goods
which can't be measured and are wholly 'non-informative'. I may say 'Ukraine has never been so free and endowed with Liberty as now when it battles Putin's hordes- something which only happened because it had the courage to give up nuclear weapons.' This is mere rhetoric. The Ukrainians would have preferred to have kept their nukes rather than get invaded.
is not adequate to deal with all the relevant variations in the relationship between resources and functionings.
We don't know what is or isn't a resource or is or isn't a function. Is my flatulence a sign of some intestinal complaint or is it a great resource which God has entrusted to me so as to lead humanity to a brighter future?
Primary goods themselves are mainly various types of general resources,
e.g dog poo which Sen would eagerly devour but for God having decided that he should have a miserable life
and the use of these resources to generate the capability to do things is
nonsense. The capability to do things is the product of evolution. Resources may be used up in doing particular things but they do not themselves generate any capability whatsoever. That is why resources in the asteroid belt aren't being used up as we speak.
subject to distinct types of variations (as has been already discussed), including personal heterogeneities, environmental diversities, variations in social climate, and differences in relational perspective.
Variations between biological organisms matter. But so does doing useful stuff rather talking bollocks.
We can have complete equality of the chosen index of primary goods, and yet some people may be immensely more deprived than others because of age, disabilities, proneness to illness, epidemiological conditions, and so on.
Why not decide that age, health, sexiness etc. are primary goods? Make everybody the same age and equally healthy and wealthy and what further 'inequality' could there be?
I have tried to argue for some time now (Sen 1980, 1985a, b, 1992) that, for many purposes, the appropriate space is neither that of utilities (as claimed by welfarists) nor that of primary goods (as demanded by Rawls).
Define 'primary goods' as those which produce utility and have done with the matter.
If the object is to concentrate on the individual’s real opportunity to pursue her objectives, then account would have to be taken not only of the primary goods the person holds but also of the relevant personal characteristics that govern the conversion of primary goods into the person’s ability to promote her ends.
Make 'conversion ability' a primary good and equalize its distribution by killing anyone who has more or less of it. Equally you could say utility is just some aggregate of this expanded primary good basket and equalize utility by killing anybody who says they have more or less of it.
For example, a person who is disabled may have a larger basket of primary goods and yet have less chance to lead a normal life (or to pursue her objectives)
only if you left 'health' out of your basket. Why not add it in?
than an able-bodied person with a smaller basket of primary goods. Similarly, an older person or a person more prone to illness can be more disadvantaged in a generally accepted sense even with a larger bundle of primary goods.
It would be kindest to put them out of their misery- right?
The concept of functionings, which has distinctly Aristotelian roots,
i.e. is teleological and thus wholly useless because Life evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape.
reflects the various things a person may value doing or being.
This like the German notion of 'funktionslust'. Assholes want to be recognized as musical prodigies and thus fart melodiously- well, if you understood Schoenberg's 'atonal' music, you would understand that my farts are actually a very avant garde type of music.
The valued functionings may vary from such elementary ones as being adequately nourished and being free from avoidable disease to very complex activities or personal states, such as being able to take part in the life of the community and having self-respect.
just include them as 'primary goods' or part of the utility function or whatever. Don't forget to add in melodious farting.
The extent of each functioning enjoyed by a person may be represented
arbitrarily
by a real number
Sen gains ten utiles by devouring dog poo
and, when this is the case, a person’s actual achievement is given by a functioning vector in an n-dimensional space of n functionings (presuming finiteness of distinct functionings).
You are also presuming they can be separated. But if we could separate out the functioning of our hand from the functioning of our brain we would be able to build excellent robotic hands and brains and so forth. My point is, for any useful purpose, you can arbitrarily separate out functionings but we don't know how they are actually interrelated. Also there is probably a lot of 'multiple realizability' which is why the thing might not be, currently, mathematically tractable. I may mention, we would need a Godelian 'Absolute Proof' to be sure we could actually do anything like this because otherwise we don't know if 'positive properties' are a particular type of ultra-filter.
When numerical representation of each functioning is not possible, the analysis has to be done in terms of the more general framework of seeing the functioning achievements as a functioning n-tuple and the capability set as a set of such n-tuples in the appropriate space (this will, then, not be a vector space).
We can see things in a mathematical way only if we actually do the fucking mathematics. In this case, nobody has bothered to study the underlying vector space. Why? Because the thing is arbitrary and useless.
The set of alternative functioning vectors available to her for choice is called her capability set.
You are arbitrarily imputing a domain for her choices which, in practice, she can't possibly have because the thing is too cognitively costly to compute- indeed, the computation would take longer than the lifetime of the universe.
While the combination of functionings (strictly, n-tuples) a person undertakes reflects her achievements, the capability set represents the freedom to achieve: the alternative functioning combinations from which this person can choose
The problem here is that I know there is some sequence of option trades that I can make over the next month which will make me as rich as fuck. I'd like to choose to do so but don't know what that sequence might be.
It may be useful to think of choice in this space in terms of an indifference map of valued living defined over the functioning vectors, and x can then be seen as belonging to the highest reachable indifference curve (as indicated).
This is about as useful as my knowing I could become as rich as fuck by buying some sequence of traded options.
.. it is useful to ask whether the focus on capability is likely to be very different from that on functionings.
Both are useless. True, I can demand money from the Government because of my capability or functioning as a melodious farter, but this won't really help me or help society in any way.
The capability approach can be used either with a focus on what options a person has -
I don't know what options I have. Only now, after four decades of being a complete loser, does it occur to me that I should have learned a bit of Econ when I had the chance. It was a mistake to emulate Sen in this respect.
given by the whole capability set - or on the actual functioning combination she chooses - given by the chosen functioning vector.
We don't know what 'functioning vector' we are choosing. I thought I was eating a delicious curry which wouldn't give the shits. Boy, was I wrong!
In the former procedure, what may be called the options application, the focus can be on the entire K,
which is unknowable
whereas in the latter, the choice application, the concentration is more narrowly on x.
which only becomes known after the fact when you get the trots which impairs your ability to function as a person who isn't sitting on the crapper all day.
By a well-established tradition in economics, the real value of a set of options lies in the best use that can be made of them and, given maximizing behavior and the absence of uncertainty, the use that is actually made.
Sadly, we don't know the future. We don't even have a complete probability distribution because we don't know all possible states of the world. Indeed, we never will even with hindsight. Thus this mathsy masturbation is useless. Indeed, there are not sets or functions or 'vector spaces' here because nothing is well-defined or escapes the intensional fallacy.
The use value of the opportunity, then, lies derivatively on the value of one element of it (to wit, the best option or the actually chosen option).
No. The use value is independent of the opportunity cost. However, you experience disutility if you know you have chosen an inferior option. Sen never understood that disutility is what matters.
In this case, the focusing on chosen functioning vector coincides with concentration on the capability set.
However, choosing is itself a functioning. Some people may be impulsive or antagonomic or plain crazy. As I said, there is no 'vector space' here because functionings can't be separated out from each other. We can't say 'hunger caused her to choose cake'. All we can say is 'her choice functioning has such and such observable patterns. When she hasn't eaten for many hours, she tends to buy cake.'
With this type of elementary evaluation, the two uses of the capability approach share not only the identification of a relevant space (that of functionings)
there is no such space. A thing's length does not depend on its height or width. But functionings are interdependent. We may say 'hungry people choose differently. Don't do your grocery shopping when you are hungry because you'll end up buying cake rather than food that is good for you.'
but also the focal variable in that space (the chosen functioning vector).
But, since choice is itself a functioning you have impredicativity and the intensional fallacy which is why there is no Hilbert space here whatsoever.
However, the options application can be used in other ways as well since the value of a set need not invariably be identified with the value of the best, or the chosen, element of it. It is possible to attach importance to having opportunities that are not taken up.
Which is why I am right to say Sen devours only dog poo precisely because he has never actually taken up this opportunity.
This is a natural direction to go if the process through which outcomes are generated is of significance of its own.
The fact that Sen does not eagerly devour dog turds is because his wife beats him if he shows any such inclination. Poor chap!
Indeed, choosing itself can be seen as a valuable functioning
in which case 'functioning' is impredicative and thus not mathematical at all.
and having an x when there is no alternative may be sensibly distinguished from choosing x when substantial alternatives exist.
This is arbitrary. One might say 'there is always an alternative' or 'there is never an alternative', but this is merely a way of speaking. A guy might get depressed if he feels he has never really chosen anything for himself. Also, maybe shape shifting lizards are controlling him through mind-rays broadcast by the neighbour's cat.
The importance of this type of consideration lies more in drawing attention to broader concerns
of a psychiatric type
than in offering a quick resolution of interpersonal comparison of freedoms (and thus of overall individual advantages that take note of the significance of freedom).
Back in the Seventies we got sick and tired of crazy Maoists telling us that true Freedom involved cutting the throats of the boss class or, if you were a teenager, Mummy and Daddy.
More recently we have gotten sick of the notion that we have a duty to liberate Muslims in far off lands by drone striking their wedding parties. Operation Enduring Freedom was fucking unendurable.
Weights, Valuations, and Explicitness I turn now to a crucial methodological issue that has received much attention
from useless tossers
in recent discussions involving the capability approach and related proposals. The heterogeneity of functionings involves the need to weigh them against one another.
by arbitrary stipulation. The world will never know true Freedom and true Democracy till Sen devours dog turds wherever they may be found.
Is this weighting requirement a special difficulty associated with the capability approach?
Nobody has bothered to do it but it could be done easily enough.
This cannot be the case since heterogeneity of factors that influence individual advantage is a pervasive feature of actual evaluation.
Actual evaluation relies on the Law of Large numbers and big, big, data sets.
While we can decide to close our eyes to this issue by simply assuming that there is something homogeneous (e.g., income or utility) in terms of which everyone’s overall advantage can be judged and interpersonally compared (and that variations of needs, personal circumstances, etc., can be, correspondingly, assumed away), this does not resolve the problem - it only evades it.
In just the same way as when my Doctor tells me I'm alive, I bitterly retort 'if you can call this living!' The fact is, I need a medical certificate showing I'm dead because otherwise I might be prosecuted for not paying my parking tickets. My Doctor, it must be said, has become very good at evading my calls. I think he jumps through the window and runs away anytime I show up at the surgery.
Comparisons of real income involve reduction of bundles of different commodities into points on a real line
Not in real life. You just look at money income and add in imputed elements- e.g. for owner occupied housing etc.
and, in judging comparative individual advantages, there is the further problem of interpersonal comparisons taking note of variations of individual conditions and circumstances.
Not for a big enough sample. Sen says he doesn't actually know any Econometrics. Calcutta was a great place for studying Stats when he was an undergrad. It is sad that nothing rubbed off on Sen.
As was discussed earlier (see section 4), even when each person’s preference is taken to be the ultimate arbitrator of well-being for that person and even when, to take a very special case, everyone has the same demand function or preference map, the comparison of market valuations of commodity bundles (or their relative placing on a shared system of indifference map in the commodity space) may tell us rather little about interpersonal comparisons of well-being.
We have assumed everybody is alike. We can deduce nothing save what we put in by way of arbitrary assumptions.
In evaluative traditions involving fuller specification, considerable heterogeneity is explicitly admitted. For example, in Rawlsian analysis, primary goods are taken to be constitutively diverse (including "rights, liberties and opportunities, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect"),
these are not diverse. The extension is the same for every individual. It is a different matter that no individual would want any such thing.
and Rawls (1971) deals with them through an overall index of primary goods holdings.
The poor fellow thought people like Arrow and Sen were smart.
While a similar exercise of judging over a space with heterogeneity is involved both in the Rawlsian approach and in the use of functionings, the former is informationally poorer,
only because of Sen's arbitrary stipulation. We can easily add more primary goods associated with various functionings, capabilities, melodious farts, ruminative belches etc, etc.
for reasons discussed already, because of the parametric variation of resources and primary goods vis-a-vis the opportunity of achieving high quality of living.
Look around the world and you will find plenty of people with a 'high quality of living'. They don't bother with 'parametric variation' or any type of pseudo-mathsy masturbation. They do smart and useful things.
The problem of valuation is not, however, one of an all-or-nothing kind. Some judgments, with incomplete reach, follow immediately from the specification of a focal space.
Nothing 'follows' from specifying stupid shit.
When some functionings are selected as significant, such a focal space is specified, and the relation of dominance itself leads to a partial ordering over the alternative states of affairs.
This is a wholly arbitrary procedure. It is also stupid and useless which is why nobody does it.
If person i has more of a significant functioning than person j and at least as much of all such functionings, then i clearly has a higher valued functioning vector than j has.
Only if the functionings are independent. Otherwise there is no metric.
This partial ordering can be extended by further specifying the possible weights. A unique set of weights will, of course, be sufficient to generate a complete order, but it is typically not necessary.
The problem here is that there is no 'unicity', 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness. We aren't speaking of functors. What we have are mere figures of speech.
Given a range of weights on which there is agreement (i.e., when it is agreed that the weights are to be chosen from a specified range, even without any agreement as to the exact point on that range), there will be a partial ordering based on the intersection of rankings
Why should there be agreement? The thing is not useful. Indeed, it is stupid and arbitrary. Even if some small clique agrees on this sort of thing, everybody else will ignore them.
This partial ordering will get systematically extended as the range is made more and more narrow. Somewhere in the process of narrowing the range, possibly well before the weights are unique, the partial ordering will become complete.
This may happen 'at the end of mathematical time' but not before that unless a Godelian 'Absolute Proof' becomes available. Consider the functioning 'proves the Reimann hypothesis'. Even if we all agreed that Terence Tao will have this functioning by the end of the decade, we are powerless to actually get him to complete that functioning.
But even with an incomplete ordering, many decision problems can be adequately resolved,
e.g. who will prove the Reimann hypothesis?
and even those that are not fully resolved can be substantially simplified (through the rejection of dominated alternatives).
It won't be me- that's something we can all agree on.
It is thus crucial to ask, in any evaluative exercise of this kind, how the weights are to be selected.
arbitrarily. Still, if somebody would pay me mega-bucks to do it, I'd give it a go.
This judgmental exercise can be resolved only through reasoned evaluation.
But mathematical logic tells us that fallacious thinking will produce nothing but stupid shit. Why go down a road we know not to be a road at all but rather a cliff edge of reason?
For a given person who is making his or her own judgments, the selection of weights will require reflection rather than interpersonal agreement or a consensus.
But 'reflection' involves interpersonal comparison (what are smart peeps doing?) and due regard to the consensus obtaining among experts in the relevant field.
However, in arriving at an agreed range for social evaluation (e.g., in social studies of poverty), there has to be some kind of a reasoned consensus on weights or at least on a range of weights.
This depends on who is funding the 'social study of poverty'. If it is me, you should give a high weightage to melodious farting.
This is a social choice exercise and requires public discussion and a democratic understanding and acceptance.
Sadly, from the Seventies onward it was clear that the public didn't want to pay for Welfare Queens. Reagan and Thatcher understood this and that is the reason their policies were accepted in democratic countries.
A Concluding Remark
Has Sen told us what 'economic inequality' is? No. He has merely said that a guy with a big income may be miserable because he was sexually molested by a squirrel. Apparently, this is a very big problem for those who want to follow Rawls or Atkinson or some other dead Professor. But, on closer examination, we find all of Sen's arguments arise from semantic confusion or the 'intensional' fallacy.
Economic inequality is about differences between economies of a similar type. The better economies have higher income and better public good provision. Just as income inequality drives 'Tardean mimetics' whereby you try to do what the smarter, more successful people are doing, so too does economic inequality drive economists in a country trying to push the country down the path which more successful economies have taken. If your Economy is 'catching up', Incomes are likely to be rising which also means that Income and Wealth distribution will become more skewed where Paretian 'power laws' operate.
The argument for shifting our attention from income inequality
for which we have good enough statistics
to economic inequality
for which we don't
relates to the presence of causal influences on individual well-being and freedom that are economic in nature but that are not captured by the simple statistics of incomes and commodity holdings.
Which is why there is 'imputed income from owner-occupation' etc. True, sexual molestation by squirrels may affect welfare but this gets cancelled out by the positive effects of rape counselling from empathetic penguins.
The case for such broadening of informational focus also entails the need to pay evaluative attention to heterogeneous magnitudes and calls for the derivation of partial orderings based on explicit or implicit public acceptance.
25 years ago, people might have thought Sen-tentious cretins could help reduce poverty in their own shit-hole countries. Then China used markets to lift 700 million out of extreme poverty. Sen was and is useless probably because he is incessantly sexually molested by squirrels.
The normative force of this acceptance rests substantially on the quality and reach of public discussions on matters of central social concern.
Those 'public discussions' got confined to senile professors and their apple polishing PhD students. True, some UN and other bureaucracies did try to jump on the bandwagon but they were soon derided as useless and shitty.
The subject of this essay, though nominally about inequality, is ultimately as much about the nature and importance of public discussion on social evaluation.
Society evaluated Sen-tentious shite and found it was useless. The Indian public- save in Bengal- discussed why buddhijivis were so intent on buggering the country.
In matters of public judgment, there is no real escape from the evaluative need for public discussion.
Sen should have listened to public discussions in England and America and post-reform India. Nobody wanted what he was selling.
The work of public valuation cannot be replaced by some "super clever" assumption.
Which is why Sen stuck to the super stupid assumption that Knightian uncertainty does not exist and, what's more, information is ubiquitous and general equilibrium is instantaneously and costlessly computable.
Some assumptions that give the appearance of working very well operate through hiding the choice of values and weights in some constructed opaqueness.
Not if they are made by Economists for Economists because every undergrad knows the Law of Large numbers.
For example, the assumption, often implicitly made, that two persons with the same demand function must have the same relation between commodity bundles and well-being (no matter whether one is ill and the other not, one disabled and the other not, etc.) is
a consequence of Leibniz's law re the identity of indiscernibles.
basically a way of evading the consideration of significant influences on well-being.
e.g. the fact that Sen is not eagerly devouring dog turds is an indictment of Democracy and the Public Justification principle.
That evasion becomes transparent, as I have tried to illustrate, when we supplement income and commodity data by information of other types (including matters of life and death).
not to mention melodious farts
The exercise need not, however, be as exacting as it may first appear and as it certainly would be if we were not to settle for anything less than getting complete orderings of interpersonal advantages and inequalities.
Which would only be available 'at the end of mathematical time'.
Our values about inequality aversion are not typically of the fine-tuning variety, getting the level of inequality "just right," taking note of all its pros and cons.
Why not? Inequality is the basis of Tardean mimetics which is a big driver for the spread of useful ideas and practices. We may deliberately increase inequality in certain cohorts to achieve this aim- e.g. a posh boarding school may give superior status and authority to the academically gifted even if this means that a scholarship-winner lords it over the son of belted Earl.
Rather, the engagement is mainly about the avoidance of substantial inequalities and serious injustice.
Getting mugged or raped is a serious injustice. Sen battled this type of injustice after he was bitten by a radioactive spider. Sadly, he then got engaged to his best friend's wife and ran away with her to London.
As material for public discussion and for informed consensus or acceptance, the need is not so much for a complete ordering of interpersonal advantages and of levels of inequality (which would be inevitably based on some crude assumptions and evasions) but for usable partial orderings
based on crude assumptions and evasions
that capture the big inequalities in a clear way,
like what? The fact that Elon Musk is richer than me?
taking note of the various significant concerns that go well beyond the commodity space.
e.g my functioning as a melodious farter.
The focus has to be on the reach and relevance of partial orderings that can be cogently derived and used.
But Sen produced no example of any such thing.
Insistence on completeness can be an enemy of informed and democratic decision making.
So can the insistence that something which isn't a set is actually a set or that a Hilbert space exists when, because of impredicativity, it can't possibly exist.
One may just as well say 'we don't need to believe God is omniscient. It is enough to say that God is partially omniscient and that he is definitely watching when you poop'. My point is, people of Faith prefer to have an all-powerful Deity rather than one who is just very very very strong. Similarly, we say 'I love Mummy/Wifey/Baby more than the whole World'. We don't say 'Mummy is the supremum of a poset'. Still, if you are trying to pretend you know math, you might utter nonsense of this kind.
Democratic decision making was always about tax-payers getting a voice in how their money is spent. It turned out that widening the franchise also meant that poorer and poorer people came within the tax-net and found ways of getting the Government to do sensible things which made them richer and thus able to pay more in tax.
Sadly, some stupid virtue signallers with a smattering of mathsy econ started pretending that Democracy was about redistributing income from workers to the work-shy. There was a popular back-lash. Suddenly, billionaires- like Murdoch or Trump or Musk- had more power than the Trade Union or Community leaders who had thought the virtue signalling libtards were helpful to their cause.
Consider Rawls. What effect did having to sit through lectures on his Theory of Justice have on kids on Ivy League campuses? The answer is that they went in the direction of the 'Originalists' and the 'Federalist Society' unless they were smart enough to understand Coase & Posner.
As for Sen, it wasn't till Manmohan made him Chancellor of Nalanda that ordinary Indians woke up to the fact that the fellow was utterly useless. There is no point measuring poverty or pretending you care about the poor if you wont get behind measures which will enable the poor to become more productive and to rise up by their own efforts rather than wait patiently for the 'great and the good' to agree to give them a bigger piece of cake.
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