5—What about redistribution?
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Why eat an ice cream cone when someone in Malawi is starving?
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our personal obligations toward the poor appear strong.
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less than two dollars a day.
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millions of children died of preventable diseases such as diarrhea
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how far such obligations extend
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In contrast to utilitarianism, common sense morality typically suggests
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Wealthy doctors should spend large parts of their careers, if not their entire careers, in African villages.
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Wall Street wizard and then a wealthy philanthropist.
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Are you willing to value the interests of others on par with your own,
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a mother might have to abandon or sell her baby in order to raise money to send food to the babies of others.
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Most people would instead become a kind of utility slave,
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excessively demanding
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Peter Singer, who trumpet the call for greater sacrifice
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I am a pluralist
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we’ll see that there are some strong and strict limits on our obligations to redistribute wealth,
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siding with common sense morality,
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the correct approach to our cosmopolitan obligations does not lead to personal enslavement
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Most of us should work hard, be creative, be loyal to our civilization, build healthy institutions, save for the future, contribute to an atmosphere of social trust, be critical when necessary, and love our families. Our strongest obligations are to contribute to sustainable economic growth and to support the general spread of civilization, rather than to engage in massive charitable redistribution
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we should redistribute wealth only up to the point that it maximizes the rate of sustainable economic growth.
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Other benefits of redistribution stem from political improvements. Social welfare programs can buy the loyalties
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social welfare programs make many citizens feel better about their state, again boosting public order as well as political consensus and stability.
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we should describe them as investments—and
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an overly generous level of wealth transfer harms economic growth. Many people end up working less,
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if it is standard procedure to approach government for a handout, that will induce too much rent-seeking,
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create urban cultures of dependency and crime,
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non-infrastructure government spending is correlated positively with lower growth rates,
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Excess transfers are bad for another reason, namely that they make it harder to absorb high numbers of immigrants
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resent it when some immigrants receive government benefits.
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rather than redistributing most wealth, we can do better for the world by investing in high-return activities like supporting immigration
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producing new technologies with global reach, such as cell phones
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Many people mock the term “trickle-down economics,” but most social benefits do take a trickle-down form.
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I favor pluralism rather than utilitarianism or common sense morality per se.
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now consider the question of why public and private ethical codes might differ so much in their recommendations.
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Altra questione da qui
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mother is justified in looking after her own baby rather than selling it to send resources
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Yet in the public sphere, it is widely believed that governments should be more impartial,
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not favor the interests of one particular baby over another,
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But why should morality be so bifurcated?
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This is actually just another application of Adam Smith’s classic principle of the division of labor. It’s easy to see why parents do best when they attend to their family priorities and governments do best when they institute a legal regime based on impartiality and the rule of law.
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the case for redistribution would be stronger if the world were going to end in the near future. If the time horizon is extremely short,
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imagine that the world were set to end tomorrow. There would be little point in maximizing the growth rate;
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The attitude of historical pessimism is therefore one of the most important critiques of my arguments.
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Many advocates of greater state spending—especially non-economists—seem to like the idea of a very low discount rate.
Note:Contraddizioni a sinistra... non puoi essere progressista, avere quindi tassi bassi, e voler spendere anziché investire ... per investire bene non devi redistribuire
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like our government to devote more resources to education, to infrastructure, and to improving the environment, all positions associated with the political left overall, at least in the United States. They see a lower discount rate as supporting all of these policies.
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They often favor market-based discount rates, which are relatively high, but when the topic is redistribution, they worry much more about the longer-term consequences.
Note:Contraddizione al contrario a destra... non puoi vedere alti tassi di sconto e non spendere...non puoi essere pessimista e non redistribuire
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A greater orientation toward the future is likely to increase the desirability of policies favoring a market economy, economic growth, and technological innovation.
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Martin Luther King Jr. brought much good to the world
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It would be fair to say that King did the right thing in choosing to pursue higher ideals rather than playing golf all day,
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so it’s not morally clear which individual is obliged to make the sacrifice.
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This becomes a problem of game theory,
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so that it is better if someone makes a sacrifice to achieve a socially valuable end, but it is worse if everyone sacrifices or tries to sacrifice to achieve that end.
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the sacrificers should be the people most inclined to do so.
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In any case, individuals are more likely to sacrifice too little than too much, and too few individuals are willing to sacrifice much at all.
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We should strengthen our consciences, as well as social norms,
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Should money be redistributed to the rich?
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utilitarianism may support the transfer of resources from the poor to the rich. A talented entrepreneur, for instance, can probably earn a higher rate of return
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If we combine the trickle-down effect from the wealth of the wealthy with a zero rate of discount, it is easy to generate scenarios in which utilitarianism would recommend the redistribution of wealth to the wealthy.
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over a sufficiently long time horizon the poor will benefit
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Our obligations to the elderly
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while we should do a good deal to help the elderly, the logic of sustainable growth places limits on these obligations, too.
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“Why don’t we value human lives at replacement cost?”
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I’ve been thinking about that question for a long time because it challenges a lot of our moral intuitions.
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So let’s say a human life is worth $4 million,
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but we can create another human life for about $10,000, say by subsidizing births
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Virtually all of us would agree that $10,000—it could be even less—is not, in general, an adequate valuation of a life,
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the life we would lose and the new life we would create would not be identical.
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replacing
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Furthermore, failing to save the first life and investing in helping or creating another life are not usually causally related.
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Still, replaceability should not be completely irrelevant to how we think about the value of a life.
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losing an irreplaceable civilization is a much greater tragedy than losing a civilization in a way which allows for the birth of a new and different one in its place.
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additional wealth that accumulates as a result of economizing on life-saving expenditures does lead people to buy safer cars,
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this possibility lowers the value of spending a lot of money to extend a human life.
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My arguments therefore suggest a lower estimate of the value of a life, including an older life, than most other plausible frameworks, because replacement and replenishment of the civilizational flow are considered as one factor among many
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To put it more concretely, today in the United States we are spending too much on the elderly and not enough on the young.
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Once-and-for-all changes vs. growth rate changes
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such policies may yield some benefit in a once-and-for-all fashion; imagine increasing the power of all light bulbs for one year. Second, the new benefits may be ongoing and self-augmenting; imagine scientific policies that speed up the rate at which better light bulbs (or other innovations) are developed.
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To consider a simple example, many scientists believe that global warming will increase the number of virulent and persistent storms on our planet.
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More generally, many environmental problems hurt our prospects for long-run sustained growth.
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In contrast to the threat of severe and ongoing storms, some of the costs of climate change take the form of one-time adjustments, such as the cost of relocating coastal settlements.
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The most prominent economic approach to growth, the Solow model,
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National output is the result of capital inputs,
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In this model, the primary way to increase ongoing growth is to induce a higher rate of technological innovation.
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The Solow model helps us to understand the phenomenon of catch-up growth,
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In the model, the rate of return on capital diminishes as the capital stock increases.
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In contrast to the Solow model, the increasing returns model suggests that growth begets more growth.
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In this view, larger economies should grow more rapidly than smaller economies,
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Ideas, and their non-rival nature, are often cited as the fundamental source of increasing returns.
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Paul Romer,
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To put these growth theories into my own terminology, the increasing returns model suggests that there are lots and lots of Crusonia plants
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The increasing returns growth model will therefore make us more wary of non-growth-enhancing wealth redistribution than will the Solow growth model.
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Individuals who believe in the increasing returns model should be much more skeptical of non-growth-enhancing redistribution than individuals who believe in the Solow catch-
