Rawls, Piketty and the New Inequality

Alan Thomas1
Tilburg University
Abstract
The forty year period 1970-2010 saw two developments in the USA: first, at the level of theory,
intense academic interest in the egalitarianism of John Rawls. Second, at the level of practice,
fundamental changes in the institutions, policies and norms of US society that have led Gilens and
Page [2014] to conclude that it has become an oligarchy de facto if not de jure. A central component
in that practical development is the tolerance of extensive inequality and the emergence of not
merely the 1 percent, but the elevation of an upper decile of wealthy individuals into a position
of economic and political dominance. In spite of pioneering work by Krouse, MacPherson and
Arneson, little academic attention has been paid to whether a political economy with roots in
Rawlss work might be the most effective response to these practical and institutional changes. That
situation may be about to change given the popular, as well as academic, response to Thomas
Pikettys Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In this paper I will consider whether a form of
economic system described by Cambridge economist James Meade a common source for both
Rawls and Piketty offers a feasible egalitarian ideal. It will be argued that the USA represents a
"test case" for other advanced democracies faced with the challenge of a new form of patrimonial
capitalism. It is further argued that only a structural change to societys fundamental wage setting
institutions, along the lines recommended by Meade and Rawls and implicit in Piketty, will bring
about the necessary structural change to implement a political economy for a just society.

This paper takes as its starting point the conjunction of two striking facts: the first is that
the last forty years has seen intense academic discussion of the work of John Rawls, but
comparatively little discussion of what he called the choice of a social system. [Rawls,
1971, p. 242] The second fact is that the last forty years has also seen marked changes in
the economies of several Western democracies, but those changes are the most marked in
the United States. I will elaborate on both points in turn.
First, Rawlss work on domestic justice culminated in the arguments of Justice as
Fairness in which the question of our choice of a social system plays a significant role in
his discussion. Notably, he argued that liberal market socialism or a property-owning
democracy were the only systems that could adequately specify his conception of justice
as reciprocity. [Rawls, 2001] In particular, he dismissed welfare state capitalism the

the author 2016

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predominant form of successful egalitarian societies in our own world on the grounds
that it neglects the principle of reciprocity and is, therefore, structurally unjust. There has
been some discussion of these claims in the voluminous secondary literature on Rawls,
notably by Dick Krouse and Michael McPherson.2 [Krouse & McPherson, 1986] But the
comparative scale of this discussion, compared to such topics as Rawlss approach to
public reason or religious accommodation, has been puzzlingly slight.3
I turn now to the second starting point of my discussion, namely, the major
economic changes in social democracies across the Western world. These changes are the
most marked in the USA which is why European social theorists such as Pierre
Rosanvallon and Thomas Piketty are drawn to study them. [Rosanvallon, 2013; Piketty,
2014a] They are well illustrated in this table that I reproduce from Pikettys book Capital
in the Twenty-First Century:

Figure 8.5 Income inequality in the United States 19102010.

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My selective interest in this tabulated data is what it tells us about income inequality in
the USA for the period 19702010. It shows us the extent to which the wealthiest 1 per
cent and top 10 per cent of American citizens have pulled away from their fellow citizens
over the last forty years. I will be concerned in this paper with some other phenomena
associated with this development: the hollowing out of Americas middle class and
stagnant incomes for those at the lower end of the income distribution. Relative inequality
has significantly widened caused by a hyperconcentration of gains at the top.4 [Hacker
& Pierson, 2010, p. 3]
Further components of what Richard B. Freeman called the New Inequality5 are
the distinctively American problem of the toleration of very high levels of executive
remuneration; the emergence of very high rewards in the financial sector; the breakdown
of Americas distinctive public-private partnerships when it comes to social insurance
provision and, therefore, the exposure of many American on lower incomes to very high
levels of risk. At the level of what one might call the background conditions to this
inequality there has been a structural change in the US economy from manufacturing to
services and the further weakening of organized labour as a countervailing force to all of
the foregoing changes.6 Some commentators, such as Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson, and
Sheldon Wolin take another key to these changes to be that which Wolin calls the
political coming of age of corporate power in America. [Wolin, 2008, p. x]
I am not an economist and am in no position to assess macro-economic
arguments, but I note, for the sake of completeness, the claims of Joseph Stiglitz and
James Galbraith that such levels of inequality in income and wealth are economically
damaging. [Stiglitz, 2012; Galbraith, 2014] They contribute to an economy with

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suppressed consumer demand and, in the absence of fiscal measures to reduce the
comparative advantage of the wealthy, macro-economic policy can only stimulate growth
in ways that exacerbate the tendency of a lightly regulated capitalism to inherent
instability. [Stiglitz, 2012; Galbraith, 2014] We can reasonably predict an unstable series
of boom and bust cycles that reproduce the pattern of events that lead up to the global
financial crisis of 2008. These cycles are in no-ones interest, and the better off stand to
lose just as the worst off do, but societys wealthiest people are the best placed to spread,
and hence manage, their risks while the worse off are not.7 That places them in a
comparatively better position to take advantage of deflated asset prices at the outset of a
recovery: they lose less, they recover faster and, indeed, in doing so they consolidate their
comparative advantage.8
The post-2008 phenomenon of an economic recovery for the rich is therefore
explicable as part of this self-reinforcing cycle and one we can expect to see repeated.9 If
those who hold capital assets have a significant influence on policy, then they will selfseekingly favour policies that set the goal of low inflation as a priority over other
economic goals. They will, therefore, favour so-called austerity policies even in an
economic downturn. The overall macro-economic effect is a set of policies that both
increases the frequency of boom-bust cycles and causes the recessionary phase to last
longer than they ought to do so in such cycles. All of this plays into what Robert D.
Solow calls the rich get richer dynamic. [Solow, 2014]
Returning from the economics to the politics of inequality, if concentrations of
wealth and monopolistic control of capital have the political consequences that Rawls
fears when he described his laws and tendencies of the social world, then that explains

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why his two favoured forms of social system pre-emptively disperse capital holdings.
Alternative political systems, such as the one currently dominant in the USA, may stand
in a mutually reinforcing relation to high levels of inequality of income and wealth and
produce a drift to oligarchy (to use Thomas Pikettys helpful phrase).10 The central
thesis of Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Piersons Winner-Take-All Politics is that Americas
wealthiest citizens have proved highly politically effective beyond their comparatively
small numbers in a democracy and have, indeed, successfully won an ideological and
political battle over the last forty years to cement their control of political and economic
policy.
To use Rawlss metaphor, the space of contested power is a limited space and
inherently competitive. The very wealthy in American society collectively constitute an
unusual powerful political actor that works to roll back the state, extend the scope of
market provision, lower direct and indirect taxation and transfers, and conceptualise
social programs as an inefficient form of insurance from which employers and wealthy
individuals ought to withdraw. All of this is as a result of, and with the aim of
consolidating, their monopolistic control of capital.11 Political office need not be literally
bought and sold if, in the inherently competitive space of politics, the wealthy are the
most powerful political actor vis--vis other actors and able to exercise undue influence
over democratic governance.12 [Page and Winters, 2009; Gilens and Page, 2014]
Indeed, Martin Gilens and Jeffrey I. Page made international headlines last year
when they argued that the USA has become an oligarchy. They concluded that
multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing
business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while

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average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent

influence.13 The form and structure of democracy de jure co-exists with oligarchy de
facto in the sense that the view of the majority of voters is epiphenomenal to the process
of formulating and implementing policy.
For radical critics the contribution of John Rawls to these economic and political
changes was to play the fiddle while Rome burned; my aim in this paper is to convince
you otherwise.14 My goal is to show that Rawlss conception of justice as fairness, when
fully specified as one kind of social system, is not only the most normatively desirable,
but also the most realistically utopian, response to these changes changes that are
obviously not beyond the control of democratic politics.

Rawls Fundamental Choice of Social System

It is an open question how much my normative orientation differs from that of Rawlss
own; my fundamental commitment is to a society free from domination and working out
the consequences of that commitment has implications for the topic of material
inequality.15 My goal, shared with others such as James Bohman, is a society in which the
material basis of domination is made structurally impossible. Bohman argues that
republicanism assigns to citizens, jointly and severally, an achieved political status that
makes it impossible to fall under the control of another.16 [Bohman, 2010, p. 436,
emphasis added; see also Schuppert, 2013] The aim is so to re-structure material
incentives that the capacity to dominate is taken away from any economic actor; we are
not simply in the business of making domination costly to agents, some of whom might
think that paying such metaphorical traffic tickets was worth it.

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This goal is realized by so pre-distributing capital that the context of market

transactions is transformed. It is transformed so as to make their results fair in the only
feasible way in which that can be achieved, namely, by patterning outcomes from the
market. [Thomas, 2011, 2012] The proposal is to permit material incentives while
constraining the inequalities that they generate to operation within a permissible range.
[Rawls, 1999a, p. 74; Thomas, 2015] Both aims can be secured, I will argue, by attention
to the issue of who holds capital. Addressing this question allows us both to focus on the
structural basis of domination and to pre-distribute capital assets so as to harness the
advantages of the market while patterning its outcomes as just.
That aim is shared with Rawlss theory of justice as fairness; I take it the content
of his principles of justice are familiar. Less familiar is his later claim that the underlying
principle of reciprocity can only take a fully specified form in a property-owning
democracy or a liberal market socialist system. Both involve a guarantee of the basic
liberties, freedom of occupation, freedom to hold private property and a free market. Yet
that which primarily distinguishes them, together, from other social systems is their
sensitivity to who controls capital.
I will not, in this paper, discuss the prospects for liberal market socialism and will
focus here on property-owning democracy.17 By the time he wrote Justice as Fairness,
Rawls described a property-owning democracy as realiz[-ing] all the main political
values expressed by the two principles of justice. [Rawls, 2001, p. 135] He explicitly
states that it forms the institutional background to the realisation of the complete
conception of justice as fairness from one generation to the next even if his discussion
of it must remain, in his words, illustrative and highly tentative. [Rawls, 2001, p. 136]

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Rawls focuses on the pre-emptive dispersal of the ownership of wealth and capital
in a property-owning democracy, but for a specific political end:
[T]o prevent a small part of society from controlling the economy and indirectly,
political life as well . Property owning democracy avoids this, not be the
redistribution of income to those with less at the end of each period . but rather
by ensuring the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (that
is, education and trained skills) at the beginning of each period, all of this against a
background of fair equality of opportunity. [Rawls, 2001, p. 139]
This relatively compressed later discussion of a property-owning democracy focuses on
the way it realises justice as fairness. In this respect, it contrasts with Rawlss earliest
discussion of the idea in the first edition of A Theory of Justice in which there is a great
deal more macro-economic detail. Rawls there states that:
The aim of the branches of government is to establish a democratic regime in which
land and capital are widely though not presumably equally held. Society is not so
divided that one small sector controls the preponderance of productive resources.
[Rawls 1971, p 280]
If this economic system does indeed work well, then Rawlss ideal property-owning
democracy envisages markets operating in a context structured pervasively so as to make
their patterned effects fair. The state intervenes not only to supply public goods and to
counter negative externalities, but also to impose adjusted procedural justice. In the first
edition of A Theory of Justice, Rawls states that steeply progressive taxes may very well
be justified given the injustice of existing institutions. [Rawls, 1971, p. 279] But in his
realistically utopian theory when justice has been more fully implemented, then the role
of progressive taxation is significantly reduced. That reflects a general commitment to
pre-distributive, as opposed to re-distributive egalitarianism. That choice of egalitarian

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strategy, in turn, reflects a primary normative focus on underlying holdings of, and access
to, capital. If we focus on the initial distribution of all forms of capital, human and
physical, we have a reduced reliance on ex post income re-distribution.
In order to explain why progressive taxation plays such a reduced role in the
ideally just society, compared to our own, we need a better grasp on how a propertyowning democracy is justified by Rawlss principles working as an interlocking group.
Paul Smith noted that:
The idea that the equalization of property ownership would transform the labour
market, by equalizing bargaining power and eliminating the economic coercion to
accept drudge jobs at low pay and thus forcing employers to make all jobs
attractive, all things considered, is crucial to Rawlss idea that, in a competitive
labour market located in a just basic structure, income inequalities would tend just
to compensate the costs of different jobs, that is, tend to equality, all things
considered. [Smith, 1998, p.225]
Smith believes that this explains some of the distinctive features of Rawlss egalitarian
strategy (the strategy that we would now call predistributive a word that Smith does
not use):
Economic equalization is more likely and reliably to be effected, as Rawls thinks,
by institutions and policies that equalize bargaining power than by an egalitarian
ethos restraining the exercise of unequal bargaining power (and egalitarian
institutions and their distributional results are what, if anything, could produce an
egalitarian ethos. [Smith, 1998, p. 227]
This is the central idea of the New Keynesianism that Rawls inherits from Cambridge
economist James Meade: we so structure the labour market that what looks like the
introduction of special incentives under the difference principle works under a set of
macro-economic arrangements that make such incentives tend to be merely
compensatory.18 So the difference principle leads to inequalities that fall only within a

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permissible range. Rawls argues that the scale and complexity of a modern economy
forces the conclusion that the only way to implement principles of justice is by
structuring the context in which market transactions occur. [Thomas, 2012]

Rawls, Piketty and the Drift to Oligarchy

We know that Rawls was aware of the work of economists contemporaneous to him, but
we do not know how he came across the work of post-War British egalitarian James
Meade. The context in which Meade formulated his ideas was as an adviser to the
revisionists in the post-War British socialist (Labour) party. Meade believed that the
standard Labour Party procedure of strengthening the power of Britains labour unions
when the socialists were in power, only to be met by a matching strengthening of the
power of employers when they were not, generated a destructive and wasteful cycle of
inflationary pressure and economic instability. His solution was a macro-level
restructuring of the context in which labour and capital confronted each other: this restructuring gave every citizen access to capital in order to reduce their dependence on
income from labour with a transformatory effect on the economy as a whole.
This work is the common source for Rawlss ideal of a property-owning
democracy and a tradition within economics of politically engaged work on income and
wealth that runs from Meade, via economist Anthony Atkinson, to Thomas Piketty.
Pikettys contribution to the argument I am developing here is two-fold: first, he provides
us with as comprehensive a data set as is feasible given that some information is
unavailable and that information of this kind is politically contested (and often
deliberately concealed). This is as complete a narrative as we are likely to assemble,

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provisionally, for two and a half centuries of capitalism and the results are not
encouraging for reasons that I will go into in more detail.
Secondly, Pikettys more important contribution is to expose, and to critique, both
a general and a special argument in defense of inequality that represents it as the result of
the working out of an autonomous logic of capitalism. The belief that there is such a
thing as an autonomous logic of capitalism is the first, general, argument; the more
specific claim that the current inequality in the USA is the product of the opening of the
US economy to global forces is a special instance of this more general claim.
The aim, in both cases, is to imply that we face a choice between the prosperity
that results from the untrammelled operation of a free market that respects this
autonomous logic, with unjust inequality as a regrettable side effect, or democratic
interference with this logic that obstructs this prosperity. This line of argument hopes to
show that the broadening and deepening of markets always makes them more efficient
and is highly likely to improve wellbeing overall; capitalism is a win-win proposition
for everyone, at least potentially, and the morally privileged institution of the market is in
everyones interests. We will have to abandon the goal of regulating the top end of any
distribution, but in Feldsteins memorable phrase only the spiteful egalitarian would
reject Pareto improvements that benefit others on the basis of what Rawls calls a
reasonable envy. [Feldstein, 2005]
The globalization argument is a special instance of the more general argument:
the autonomous logic of capitalism has always to be respected, and the New Inequality is
produced by the exposure of the US economy to the forces of globalization. The
hollowing out of the American middle class may be regrettable, but it is the downside

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of economic changes that are more broadly to be welcomed.19 This explanation fits easily
with another: that the direct effect of globalization on the US economy is to place a
premium on skills, particularly those connected to new technology: that explains why so
many American citizens have lost out.20
Piketty challenges both of these arguments. His more fundamental claims is that,
with his historical narrative before us, we can see that they are both instances of Sartrean
bad faith: as representing as beyond our democratic control that which is, in fact, the
product of deliberate political choices. This instance of bad faith is, itself, in good faith at
a deeper level for those who propose it: it represents the concern of those who benefit
from these changes to represent them as both inevitable and irreversible and not subject
to democratic choice.
I think Piketty helps us to see why we need, now, to undertake a radical, structural
reform of our central market institutions the kind of expanded economic basic
structure represented by a property-owning democracy. This is for two reasons: the first
is that the situation that we are facing is, if Piketty is right, historically unprecedented.
The period between 1970 and 2010 has seen the return of capital, but Piketty knows
that the nature of this society differs from the most radically unequal societies of the past.
The composition of the top decile has changed. There is a greater amount of wealth in the
top decile (the residual 9 percent) that is made up of income from labour, even if the
top one percent still holds a disproportionate amount of equity. This is not, then, the
society of the late nineteenth century rentier that was wiped out by the shocks to capital
and periods of high inflation in the twentieth century. But the point is: that could be

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about to happen particularly in the United States where inequality currently take an
extreme form.21 Piketty contrasts two forms of highly unequal society (in income terms):
[T]here are two different ways for a society to achieve a very high inequality of top
income . The first . is through a hyperpatrimonial society (or society of
rentiers): a society in which inherited wealth is very important and where the
concentration of wealth attains extreme levels . This is the pattern we see in
Ancien Rgime France and in Europe during the Belle poque. [Piketty, 2014a, p.
264]
That is an episode in the past of capitalism; however, the second form of unequal society
is far more recent:
The second way . is relatively new. It was largely created by the United States
over the past few decades. Here we see that a very high level of total income
inequality can be the result of a hypermeritocratic society (or at any rate a society
that the people at the top like to describe as hypermeritocratic) . The peak of the
income hierarchy is dominated by very high incomes from labor rather than
inherited wealth.22 [Piketty, 2014a, pp. 264-5]
But this over-simplifies the real issue:
The stark contrast I have drawn here between two types of hyperinegalitarian
society a society of rentiers and a society of supermanagers is nave and
overdrawn. The two types of inequality can coexist: there is no reason why a person
cant be both a supermanager and a rentier and the fact that the concentration of
wealth is currently much higher in the United States than in Europe suggests that
that may well be the case in the United States today. And of course there is nothing
to prevent the children of supermanagers from becoming rentiers. [Piketty, 2014a,
p. 265]
That, I take it, is the central issue that Piketty raises in the case of the USA, with the
threat that it can generalise more widely across the jurisdictions that he studies: the two
logics . may complement each other in the century ahead and combine their effects .
The future could hold in store a new world of inequality more extreme than any that
preceded it.23 [Piketty, 2014a, p. 265]

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Piketty is describing empirical tendencies and isolating them so that we may,

collectively, take political action to redress them. In spite of his (perhaps unfortunate)
name-checking of Marx in the title of his book, Pikettys thesis is not a prediction of
some apocalyptic end for capitalism. Returns on capital will, indeed, diminish just as neoclassical theory predicts, but the key issue is imbalanced growth.24 The New Inequality
will provide the background conditions for an imbalanced development of capitalism if it
is left unchecked by political action.
In so far as Pikettys arguments are empirically grounded, then, new data or better
explanations may undermine them. My point is that the truth of Pikettys key equation r
> g is not imposed by some autonomous logic of capitalism, but by our political
choices (as he emphasizes).25 This equation expresses the relation between returns on
capital assets (r) and the rate of growth (g). Growth is slowing in our societies
because they are already affluent, but if it is true that returns on capital will average 5 6
percent a year while growth (determined by both population growth and technological
innovation) will not keep pace, then we are facing the consequences of what could be a
momentous social change. In particular, the role of inherited wealth will become
disproportionately strong: to cite the phrase from the book most likely to stay in the
minds of its readers the past tends to devour the future.26 [Piketty, 2014a, p. 378]
The benign post-war growth patterns captured by Simon Kuznets famous
Kuznets Curve were taken to represent a normal phase in the development of capital,
but Piketty argues that this phase was, in fact, historically anomalous. [Kuznets, 1953]
Patterns of growth in capitalist societies are always shaped by political choices and if, in
Pikettys narrative, the only countervailing forces to excessive inequality are the capital

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15

shocks represented by World War, then we need to do better. We need to reconstruct, in

so far as we can, the special political conditions that produced, economically, the trente
glorieuses and, politically, the work of James Meade who was theorising these new
conditions of capitalist society in medias res.27
This leads on to the second reason why I think this data mandates that we adopt
the radical strategies of Rawls and Meade. Pikettys data covers (primarily) the last two
centuries including the emergence of welfare state capitalism in all its manifestations.
Pikettys point is that social democratic politics has failed to prevent a return to extensive
levels of capital based inequalities approaching their late nineteenth century precedent
over the long run. Those capital based inequalities are dangerous for democracy given
that those who benefit from the process of concentrated capital accumulation exert undue
political influence to ensure that the rich get richer dynamic continues unimpeded.
[Solow, 2014] The real challenge of Pikettys argument is that we have not yet imagined
or implemented a political option that will solve the problem of preventing capital
accumulation threatening the values of liberal democracy.28 The relatively low rates of
growth that feature in the problematic equation r > g also feature in Pikettys pessimistic
account of the prospects for a social democratic politics founded wholly on an expanded
role for progressive taxation and welfare state capitalism: we have tried this option, and it
has not worked over the long run.
Low growth rates in income mean that current electorates will not welcome a
substantially higher tax burden; the latter has stabilized across the main jurisdictions that
Piketty examines and for a good reason. [Piketty, 2014, p. 382] There is a jurisdiction
relative cultural consensus on the role of the state and how extensive its provision of

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services should be. There is going to be no expansion of the affirmative welfare state of
the kind witnessed between 1930-1950 (from 10 percent to between 30 50 percent of
national income) because that has already happened. No one realistically expects the
process to develop until 70 or 80 percent of GDP is appropriated by the State.29 We need
new options in our egalitarian thinking for one very good reason: advanced democratic
welfare state capitalism was already in place, but the return to our new Gilded Age in the
period 1970 2010 was not prevented not even in the Nordic social democracies that
do very well by redistributive measures, but less well by pre-distributive, capital based,
measures. My interpretation of Pikettys data is that it demonstrates that egalitarians need
new, more radical, ideas; fortunately, Meade and Rawls are well placed to provide them.

Two Kinds of Pre-distributionism versus Social Democracy

The crux of my case for taking a property-owning democracy uniquely to be our best
option as egalitarians is that its pre-distributive contextualization of the market patterns
its outcomes as fair. This is not quite, however, what is meant by pre-distribution in the
current debate over egalitarianism and that is why I would like to pursue a compare and
contrast exercise with the views of Jacob S. Hacker, the leading pre-distributionist in
this recent debate, and the views of Lane Kenworthy. As the title of Kenworthys book
Social Democratic America makes clear his preferred option is a return to the social
democratic traditions of the USA.30 [Kenworthy, 2013a] While he has not considered the
more radical views of Meade, Rawls and Piketty to date, we do have the benefit of
Kenworthys thoughtful response to Hackers proposals. [Kenworthy, 2013b] I propose,
as the litmus test for all three sets of proposals, examining how well they fare in

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addressing the problem of the squeezed middle. The problem of the squeezed middle is
that changes in the US economy over the last forty years have seen little change to the
lives of the worst off they continue to do very badly. However, it has seen significant
changes to the lives of the next category up the socio-economic ladder, namely, the
working lower middle class. It is the income of this group that has stagnated.
Pikettys historical research puts the fate of this class in an historical perspective:
the growth of a true patrimonial (or propertied) middle class was the principal
structural transformation of the distribution of wealth in the developed countries in the
twentieth century. [Piketty, 2014, p. 260] He continues:
[I]t is tempting to insist on the fact that wealth is still extremely concentrated today:
the upper decile owns 60 percent of Europes wealth and more than 70 percent in
the United States. And the poorer half of the population are just as poor today as
they were in the past, with barely 5 percent of total wealth in 2010, just as in 1910.
Basically, all the middle class managed to get its hands on was a few crumbs:
scarcely more than a third of Europes wealth and barely a quarter in the United
States . Nevertheless, the crumbs that the middle class have collected are
important. [Piketty, 2014, pp. 261-2]
This general pattern across the jurisdictions in Pikettys dataset is actually behind the
curve when one examines the major structural changes in the US economy that has
produced the phenomenon of the squeezed middle.
The American middle class has fractured: those who have benefitted from these
social and economic changes have been elevated into the lower 9 percent of the top 10
percent. However, the lower middle class has seen its life prospects deteriorate
consequent on the polarisation of the US workforce. [Stiglitz, 2012, p. 56] They have
typically reacted by sending a secondary earner to work and working longer (often by
combining separate jobs). They also face the consequences of a politically motivated shift

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of personal risk on to themselves and their families even when their income has
stagnated. (Hackers documentation of the great risk shift focuses on exposure to risk
as the inverse of inadequate capital holding.) [Hacker, 2012] Americas squeezed middle
class faces increased pressure to save to cover their individual risks while their income
has not kept pace with these demands: it has remained, in real terms, virtually stagnant
over a forty year period between 1970 and 2010.31
This group is not in any Rawlsian blind spot: justice as fairness, as realised in
an economic system, ties together the interests of all social groups.32 If it is true that the
worst off in our own society are the durably worst off in receipt of welfare payments,
then Rawls took their claims to be the most morally urgent. But it would be very myopic
to aim to lift the currently worst off into the position of the currently squeezed middle.
Those who can fully participate in society via meaningful work would, nevertheless, find
themselves exposed to risk and with stagnant income. If the choice is welfare dependency
or the long and stressful hours of a typical family in the squeezed middle, then that is not
an appealing structure of incentives. The contribution of the Meade-Rawls tradition in
thinking about inequality is to direct our attention away from income inequality per se to
the deeper inequalities in capital holding, control or access that serve to ground it.
I suggest, then, that we draw on Meade and Rawls and the economic data
supplied by Piketty to explain how we ought to realize the ambitious target of making
unjust exploitation impossible. The way that this aim is realized is by adopting a system
in which the relationship between income from capital and income from the marketing of
labour is restructured at the macro-level of an expanded economic basic structure. This
ambition is reflected in a wide range of policies: a free and high quality public education

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system, wealth tax as well as progressive income tax, high levels of estate tax, the taxing
of capital gains and capital gifts, and incentives for small savers.33 More specific policies
for the universal dispersal of capital include a society-wide unit trust made up of a
portfolio of equity held for all citizens by the state, a sovereign wealth fund (where
applicable) or some kind of demogrant scheme to encourage the individual, as well as the
collective, holding of equity. If parts of this approach ought, in my view, to be
constitutionally secured then there is one major issue that has to be the subject of
democratic deliberation, namely, the relation between private and public debt. As Piketty
points out, not only does the state in modern Western democracies typically not tax the
rich sufficiently, it actually borrows from them.34
I think a return to this capital focused and pre-distributive tradition leads to
significant differences of focus when we turn to policy choice. For example, I think their
particular focus leads to some divergence from the policies of Jacob Hacker to whose
pioneering work I am indebted. This point is worth developing as Hacker is usually
interpreted as offering the distinctively pre-distributionist contribution in policy
debates as to how to address the New Inequality. I think, in fact, that his policies are
nowhere near radical enough they certainly do not compare to that which Meade and
Rawls envisaged.
Hacker pragmatically takes the preferred institutions of the social democratic Left
to be working well and basically only in need of protection and expansion. [Hacker,
2013] That is why, from the point of view of European social democrats already
committed to welfare state capitalist institutions, Hackers message is keep what you
have and avoid the Right-wing assault on pooled capital schemes. He aims to return

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America to the goal of being an equality and opportunity society. This certainly
corresponds to Rawlss goals as articulated in his first two principles that guarantee the
equal basic liberties and fair equality of opportunity. However, nothing in this aspiration
reflects the difference principle and that is an inadequate conception of justice.
I think this difference is brought out by arguing that Hackers policies are not
going to do well in dealing with the problem of the squeezed middle even though that
was their avowed goal. This is because adopting the goal of an equality and
opportunity society encourages meritocratic defences of inequality; defences that seem
to play some role in explaining widespread tolerance of extensive inequality combined
with reflective disapproval of this state of affairs.35 Pikettys data shows that putatively
meritocratic justifications have been given to justify some of the income inequality of
the last forty years; he is sceptical about their factual basis. Admittedly, not even that
meritocratic justification fully explains this inequality; unequal capital holding also plays
an important role. But my point is that, for Rawls, meritocratic justifications are
unacceptable from the perspective of justice even if their factual basis were correct.
The ideology of meritocracy has certainly played some role in justifying the
stagnant income position of the lower middle class the very sector that Hacker wants to
help with a further expansion of welfare state commitments. Examples of the kinds of
policies he favours are the extension of effective social insurance schemes on a
stakeholder basis and the extension of transfer schemes like the working families tax
credit. I do not think any party to this debate can believe in good faith that the current
extreme inequality in capital holding and income has been shaped by free and open
competition on a level playing field.36 The great risk shift has taken place in a context

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that was already unfair. My point is that if we make the playing field fair solely by
realizing the goals of equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity, then there will still be
a problem of the squeezed middle.
This point is also made by Lane Kenworthy in his own assessment of Hackers
pre-distributionism: if our goal is to solve the problem of the squeezed middle by
finding high quality jobs for the highly educated middle class in a new knowledge
economy, then this can hardly be expected to solve the problem for this entire class of
people.37 [Kenworthy, 2013a; see also Turner, 2012, p. 86] It will, in fact, look like a
retrospective vindication of meritocracy. That is why Kenworthy, even more than
Hacker, pins his hopes on an expanded social democratic conception of the welfare state
that he contrasts with a strategy that he labels pre-distributionism. [Kenworthy, 2013a,
2013b]
Kenworthy accurately identifies a bundle of Center-Left social democratic
policies envisaged as paradigmatically pre-distributive in recent policy debate: more
investment in education; an expanded manufacturing sector; stronger trade (labour)
unions; minimum wage increases; the macro-economic goal of full employment;
mandatory codetermination arrangements in large companies; profit sharing; increasing
the number of workers in employment; finally, government intervention in the form of
more public goods and services. [Kenworthy, 2013b]
His evaluation of this raft of policies is ambivalent: some seem unrealistic, such
as increasing trade union representation (down to 5% - 7% in the US private sector)38 or
expanding the manufacturing base. A realistic minimum wage or the goal of full
employment seem unrealistic solely because of lack of political will39; by contrast, he

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thinks that co-determination or profit sharing are good policies, but only work at the
margins in developed economies. Together, they will have a limited effect on the
problem of inequality.
Kenworthy believes that we should resign ourselves to some of the social changes
of the last forty years and aim further to increase the number of secondary earners in the
workforce.40 Everyones quality of life can be improved by the provision of more public
goods, but the primary policy instrument we need is a working families tax credit: a
conditional earnings subsidy.
This is, obviously enough, a return to a traditional form of re-distributive
egalitarianism. Kenworthy is honest enough to admit that it produces its own moral
hazard problem: if the general taxpayer funds this re-distributive subsidy, then the
employers who have held wages stagnant for forty years face no pressure at all to change
their policy. This kind of approach to the problem of the New Inequality contrasts with
the kind of pre-distributionism I defend that is clearly more radical than the version that
Kenworthy criticises. My objection to Hackers proposals is that they do not go far
enough; my objection to Kenworthys revamped welfare state capitalism is that it leaves
the fate of the squeezed middle at the mercy of democratic politics. They are to be
assisted by re-distributive taxation so long as that political will exists. This is not a
structural reform: it leaves the incentives of employers to underpay untouched. Indeed, it
subsidises them to make that choice.
This point, it seems to me, reinforces the fact that neither Hackers predistributionism nor Kenworthys re-distributionism is likely to be effective in addressing
the problem of the squeezed middle. This is because neither of them aims at the

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comprehensive re-structuring of the relations between labour and capital that is

distinctive of Meades and Rawlss egalitarian property-owning democracies. Meade and
Rawls demanded nothing less than the reform of the basic wage-setting institutions of
society. Marginal changes brought about by a patchwork of particular policies will not
add up to a change of the scale required. Only such a macro-level restructuring will
provide an appropriate context for more local and restricted policies that may seem
attractive as stand alone initiatives, but which can lead to a damaging policy of the
second best if implemented piecemeal. In particular, Rawls makes the case that
vindicating meritocracy cannot even be a part of our normative goals.41 The aim is not to
ameliorate the conditions of those currently being harshly treated by the market, but to
remove structural sources of unfairness. In the envisaged just society prosperity is
diffused and no sector of society is squeezed at all because of a fundamental reform of
the basic economic structure of our societies.
I do not want to place any artificial distance between my view and Hackers. His
goal is a fair distribution of income and opportunity alone. The former shapes his
endorsement of a minimum wage; it is the latter that shapes his belief that increased
public spending should be on education. However, Hacker also focuses on the big
picture of encouraging macroeconomic stability overall, as he puts it, before the next
asset bubble. [Hacker, 2013] That was Meades goal, too; I have emphasized how a
property-owning democracy, combined with responsible attitudes to public debt and a
rigorous regime of financial regulation smooth out boom and bust capitalist cycles in the
economy.42

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A crucial factor for Hacker is the loss of organised labour as a countervailing

force in the market to organised controllers of capital. This is one of his three pillars of
mid-twentieth century America prosperity: the first is a neo-Keynesian macroeconomic
policy; the second a high quality education system; the third is the existence of the kind
of public-private partnerships that shaped a distinctively American welfare state.
However, the first two of those pillars remain even if the loss of the countervailing power
of organised labour has contributed to the loss of the third pillar of prosperity, namely, its
distinctive public-private partnerships at the service of social security, broadly
conceived. In my view the situation facing current egalitarians takes us straight back to
Meade and to Rawls: to a neo-Keynesian economic policy that targets underlying capital
and a derivative focus on education and the development of human capital. In particular,
an egalitarian strategy that does not focus solely on organised labour as its most effective
political vehicle of social change has become relevant once more.
I have throughout contrasted pre-distributive and re-distributive egalitarian
strategies in general terms, but David Singh Grewal makes a specific point about our
current circumstances with a direct bearing on this choice:
The question of whether ex ante or ex post mechanisms are more efficient assumes
that both are politically feasible and it may be nave to assume that after letting
the inequality-producing market runs its course there will be any agent left at the
end of the process capable of demanding redistribution. Indeed, on a more pathdependent conception of political action, it may only be through structural changes
to the economy which galvanize political coalitions while resurrecting distributive
questions that an electorate becomes capable of demanding higher tax rates.
[Grewal, 2014, p. 665, emphasis added]
I think it is undoubtedly true that, on this precise point, Grewal, Hacker and I are in
complete agreement. The political changes of the last forty years have been deliberately

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engineered to remove any agent for a redistributive politics, but the same is not true of an
agent of pre-distributive politics. Meade thought that an egalitarianism driven by
organized labour was counter-productive and so formulated a policy that made no such
appeal; that helps to explain the relevance of this egalitarianism when such an agent is
not even available.
When Meade first formulated his revisionist proposals in the 1960s and 1970s
they had some influence on Labour Party policy, but this was limited for two reasons.
The first was that it represented a shift away from an appeal to organized labour that was
difficult in a party created by the trade union movement. Secondly these policies could be
represented by political opponents as soak the rich policies that imposed taxes on
wealth with no positive proposal as to how that transfer of wealth would inform an ideal
of a just society. That was a misrepresentation at the time and it is a misunderstanding
now: if we face, in Pikettys terms, a tipping point in the emergence of a new, capitalist
form of feudalism in the guise of a society of unproductive rentiers whose interests lock
in place a fixed structure of class based social relations, then we also face an historic
opportunity to alter this course. Expanding the economic basis of citizenship for all
citizens through a property-owning democracy is just, efficient, and stable. I turn, now,
to the question of whether it is realistically utopian.

Conclusion Two Cheers for Capitalism?

This is, obviously enough, a large and complex subject and I can only end with some
general remarks.43 My suggestion that a property-owning democracy is a realistically
utopian egalitarian ideal is certainly open to misunderstanding: I am not suggesting that it

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represents an individualistic ideal of self-sufficiency that suits an American society of

conservative egalitarians (to invoke Jacobs and Pages well-known phrase). [Jacobs
and Page, p. ix, pp. 234] That idea has been, indeed, the province of the Right wing
version of the ideal that, far from inhibiting radical inequality, has played a role in
generating it. 44 (That which distinguishes that version of the ideal is its moral
individualism and its in principle anti-statism.)
By contrast, the grounds I see for limited optimism are, first, that the tradition
with which I am concerned here seems to me to have identified the correct targets and to
have dispelled some crucial legitimating myths in this debate over the sources and
remedies for inequality. By identifying the correct targets, I specifically mean directing
our gaze away from high gains in the financial sector or executive remuneration: we
know, collectively, how to deal with both even if in some jurisdictions political factors
mean that we do not do so (such as in the USA). Products of political action, they can be
reversed by political action: democratic determination of effective financial regulation
and corporate governance, plus a very high rate of progressive income taxation, plus an
acceptance that any financial institution too big to fail is too big to exist, ought to
eliminate these problems. Piketty, for example, is comparatively relaxed about the issue
of extensive rewards in the financial sector.45 [Piketty, 2014b] It has its special features
and it has certainly benefitted from regulatory drift from public policy being behind the
curve of industry change but the percentage of economic activity reflected in these
rewards is comparatively low.46 Focusing on hedge fund managers is as misleading as
focusing on sports stars or entertainment celebrities: in all three cases we are not baffled

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when it comes to a policy response. From being behind the curve taxation and regulation
needs to be ahead of it.
Piketty takes as his target the underlying distribution of who holds capital and the
issue is not the current massive inequality in returns from income, but on what happens
next in a society such as the USA. America has always tolerated inequality tied to
individual circumstance, partly because it was assumed that it would dissipate over a
limited period of a generation or so. That which Americans have always resisted is the
recreation of an Old World neo-feudalism, with fixed relations of hierarchy based on
static social relations, fixed social classes, unproductive activity, rent seeking and a
significant role for inheritance.47 Yet that seems, if the historical pattern is not changed,
to be where the bad faith putatively autonomous logic of capitalism is taking the
USA over the next generation or so where todays personal fortune grounded on merit
becomes someone elses unearned inheritance.
When it comes to eliminating legitimating myths, I take it the real contributions of
the Meade-Rawls-Piketty tradition is to expose any argument that defends either income
or wealth inequality as a product of a fictional autonomous logic of capitalism or, for
that matter, of pure meritocracy. If we thought that the benign development of postWar capitalism represented by the Kuznets curve was, in fact, an historical anomaly then
the next question is how we can make this anomaly our new normal instead of the
contrasting normal with which we seem to be stuck. [Galbraith, 2014] The particular
version of the autonomous logic argument most cited in the recent literature is the
claim that extensive inequality is a product of globalization: this is, for various reasons, a
bad explanation.48 There is no reason to believe that the global context has, in any

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politically relevant sense, changed between 1970 and 2010 yet the US economy has
radically diverged from other Western economies when it comes to inequality of wealth
and income.
This leads to the vexed question of the agents of any future change towards the
implementation of a property-owning democracy. Here my view contrasts with that
expressed in David Singh Grewal in his very insightful review of Pikettys book.
Influenced by the neo-Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck and by the idea that political
action is path-dependent Grewals policies for addressing the New Inequality do not
aim to reconstruct the political conditions of the post-War neo-Keynesianism that formed
the context of Meades work. [Streeck, 2011, 2014; Grewal, 2014, pp. 664-667] Grewal
accepts Streecks diagnosis that neo-Liberal political action has taken us to a situation
comparable to the period before the trente glorieuses; it follow, then, by an argument
from analogy that our current political remedies should be analogous to those applicable
to the period before the exceptional times began. [Grewal, 2014, p. 665] These include
general strikes and labor activism, experiments with new forms of cooperative industrial
organization, and radical political and social movements. [Grewal, 2014, p. 665]
I simply note that a striking omission in Grewals otherwise insightful review
is that he does not place Piketty in the pre-distributionist, capital-egalitarian tradition of
Meade and Rawls where he belongs; Grewal takes him to be an orthodox ex post facto redistributivist. 49 But I hope to have shown here that the twentieth century neoKeynesianism of Meade and Rawls was considerably more innovative than that. I fully
accept that the decline of organized labour was no co-incidence, but the result of political
action, and any further strengthening of civic and organizational life will form part of a

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solution to the problem of inequality. [Hacker and Pierson, 2010, pp. 127-132] However,
as Kenworthy notes, that will not be enough in itself to reverse the changes of the last
forty years. [Kenworthy, 2013a, p.4]
But it is a resonant historical irony that Meade formulated his strategy to avoid
dependence on the traditional resource of organized labour as the basis for a conventional
form of social democracy: in his historical context he thought this would be counterproductive. That strategy remains available to us, not when this collective agency is not
one that we elect not to use, but when it has been rendered unavailable even if only for
a limited historical period. I have also noted that both Alperovitz and Grewal make the
point that the conditions for capitals politically successful assault on labour are about to
change: the shift in the basis of the US economy from manufacturing to services and the
slowing of both immigration and population growth will see the return of labour.50
In his own policy for the re-capitalising of American citizens Thad Williamson
argues that, given that Americans have never had it so bad when it comes to inequality,
this is an historically opportune moment to intervene to change the narrative.
[Williamson, 2012] Williamson, like Alperovitz, thinks that community wealth building
initiatives from the ground up are an appropriate path combined with political leadership
to bring about the re-distribution of wealth. [Alperovitz, 2005] After all, whatever one
might think of the justification for extensive wealth and inheritance taxes and steeply
progressive income taxes, it can hardly be objected that the one percent are going to live
substantially worse lives if this regime of taxation is implemented. We seem to be, then,
living through a crucial historical juncture: whatever the outcome, my argument in this
paper has been that we are not at a loss for a normative orientation for what ought to be

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the outcome. In that sense, I think, we are entitled to a limited degree of optimism about
the future.51

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Perspectives on Politics, vol. 7. No. 4, pp. 731751.
Wolin, Sheldon [2008] Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter
of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton University Press.

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1 Professor of Ethics, Tilburg University. a.thomas@tilburguniversity.edu The material in
this paper re-capitulates some of the central arguments of Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-owning Democracy, to be published in 2016 by Oxford
University Press.
2 Krouse,

Richard and MacPherson, Michael [1998] Capitalism, Property Owning

Democracy and the Welfare State in Guttmann, A [1988] pp. 79-106; Richard Arneson
[1986]. See also Arneson [2011].
3

The publication of ONeill and Williamsons anthology [2012] may yet mark a change

in the fortunes of property-owning democracy.

4

From 1979 until the eve of the Great Recession [2008] the top one percent received

36 percent of all gains in household income . Economic growth was even more skewed
between 2001 and 2006 the share of income gains going to the top one percent was
over 53 percent . the top 0.1 percent one out of every thousand households received
over 20 percent of all after-tax income gains between 1979 and 2005, compared with the
13.5 percent enjoyed by the bottom 60 percent of households. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010,
p. 3] Hacker and Pierson largely rely, in their 2010 book, on the data supplied by Piketty
and Saez from 1913 up to 2007. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, p. 14, p. 312, fn. 1] This is
supplemented by data from the Congressional Budget Office. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010,
p. 21] It is noteworthy that this is income data and that the wealth data is even more
skewed. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, p. 32] See also Atkinson, Piketty and Saez [2011];
Saez and Zucman [2014]; Saez [2015].
5

[Freeman, 1996/7]

6 Regarding

the latter, Hacker and Pierson argue that The precipitous fall in union

membership occurred even though workers continued to voice strong and after 1984,
increasing public support for unions and their goals. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, p. 142]

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7 [T]he Great Recession has been particularly hard on those at the bottom, and even
those in the middle, and this is typical: ordinary worker face higher unemployment, lower
wages, declining house prices, a loss of much of their wealth. Since the rich are better
able to bear risk, they reap the reward that society provides for compensating for the
greater risk. [Stiglitz, 2012, p. 91, emphasis added]
8 As

Hacker and Pierson memorably put it Recessions, it turned out, were for suckers,

not bankers. [Hacker and Pierson, 2010, p. 292]

9 The

rising share of national income captured by the richest Americans is a long-term

trend . Moreover, that is not obviously related to either the business cycle or the
shifting partisan occupancy of the White House. [Pierson & Hacker, 2010, pp. 17-18]
10 Hacker

and Pierson are also drawn to the metaphor of drift as government regulation

and tax/transfer regimes fail to adapt to new economic realities step by step, as it were
and leading to governmental sins of omission at the behest of special interests. [Hacker
and Pierson, 2010, pp. 52-3]
11 Two

of the most insightful interpreters of Thomas Pikettys work, Brad DeLong and

Suresh Naidu, argue that the major flaw in the argument of Capital in the Twenty-First
Century is a lacuna on precisely this connection between wealth inequality and the
politics of oligarchy. See DeLong [2014] and Naidu [2014a, 2014b] So extending the
argument from neo-classical economics into political economy and back again greatly
strengthens Pikettys conclusions. I defer a full examination of DeLongs and Naidus
arguments to another occasion. That the equation r > g is meaningless in itself as a
critique of inequality is acknowledged by Piketty in his recent [2016], but the relevant
connection with the politics of oligarchy is, it seems to me, clearly present in Piketty
[2014a].
12

Thus I agree entirely with Gar Alperovitz: until the foundational question of whether

some other way to reduce inequality is confronted and resolved, it is unlikely that the
democratic question of how to curb the influence of money in politics can be effectively
dealt with. [Alperovitz, 2005, p. 52]
13

In particular, Gilens and Page falsify the median voter theorem [Hotelling, 1929]; that

theorem has, as a corollary, Melzer and Richardss derived thesis that the median voter

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will inhibit substantial inequalities. [Melzer & Richards, 1981] For some empirical
assessments of the general Melzer and Richards model see Lind [2005] and Milanovic
[2000]. The median voter theorem seems, in any case, currently to be empirically false
for the USA.
14

It excerpts some of the central arguments of Republic of Equals: Pre-distribution and

Property-Owning Democracy to be published in 2016 by Oxford University Press (USA).

15 The

extent to which the view I call liberal-republicanism is a friendly amendment to,

or re-interpretation of, Rawlsian political liberalism is discussed in Republic of Equals

chapter one.
16

As Bohman also puts it: Hegels claims about the modern state only make sense if it

fulfills the central republican demand: that the capacity of others to dominate is not just
currently absent, but structurally impossible. [Bohman, 2010, p. 440, emphasis added]
17 I

argue that a property-owning democracy is normatively prior to liberal market

socialism in Republic of Equals, chapter 8, in partial agreement with the arguments of the
arguments of Arnold [1994] and Bob Taylor [2013]. See also Thomas [2012].
18

Although in theory the difference principle permits indefinitely large inequalities in

return for small gains to the less favoured, the spread of income and wealth should not be
excessive in practice, given the requisite background institutions, [Rawls, 1971, p. 536,
emphasis added]
19 One

version of this argument is that the US paid the price of inequality for superior

growth compared to, for example, European states. Hacker and Pierson effectively
debunk that particular myth. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, pp. 26-7]
20 Hacker

and Pierson note the popularity of this argument with some US based

economists: unfortunately, it fails to explain the pulling away of the very top and the
effect of education is to avoid the devastatingly slow growth at the bottom. The
economic impact of being a college educated knowledge worker are minimal.
Furthermore, this explanation fails to generalize; why didnt workers in other advanced
economies suffer the same fate? [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, p. 35-7]

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21
The main consolation for those worried about this enormous concentration of power is
that, like the rest of us, even these very privileged individuals will eventually die. But
Pikettys point is that their fortunes dont. [Grewal, 2014, p. 641]
22 Hacker

and Pierson cite both Mankiw and DeLong as arguing that, since inequality in

income is in pre-tax income, its explanation cannot significantly involve political factors,
but it is the market bringing us the bad news. Hacker and Pierson point out that this
argument ignores the political context of markets as well as the role played by tax and
transfer policy in allowing these income inequalities to become wealth inequalities to
help to convert these income inequalities into unproductive rent seeking. [Hacker &
Pierson, 2010, p. 43-44, citing Mankiw, 2008; DeLong, 2006]
23

Any Europeans who complacently think that Pikettys focus is the woes of

contemporary America are right to a limited extent: he thinks that very high executive
remuneration is a culturally explicable local phenomenon. However, on the issue of
inheritance, European social democrats have more reason to be more concerned than their
American counterparts. See Piketty [2014a], p. 378, 381. I think Brad DeLong is correct
to note that, in spite of the unremitting hostility of North American commentators to
Pikettys work, his primary focus is understandably not America, but France.
[DeLong, 2014] For sympathetic treatments of Pikettys central argument see DeLong
[2014], Grewal [2014], Krugman [2014], Naidu [2014], Milanovic [2014] and Solow
[2014].
24

We have to multiply the capital-income ratio by the rate of return, and the same law of

diminishing returns suggests that the rate of return on capital will fall. As production
becomes more and more capital-intensive, it gets harder and harder to find profitable uses
for additional capital, or easy ways to substitute capital for labor. Whether the capital
share falls or rises depends on whether the rate of return has to fall proportionately more
or less than the capital-income ratio rises. [Solow, 2013]
25

[O]ther advanced industrial countries with similar technology and per capita income

differ greatly from the United States in inequality of pretax income (before transfers), in
inequality of after tax and transfer income, in inequality of wealth, and in income
mobility. These countries also differ greatly from the United States in the trends in these

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four variables over time. If markets were the principal driving force, why do seemingly
similar advanced industrial countries differ so much? Our hypothesis is that market forces
are real, but that they are shaped by political processes. [Stiglitz, 2012, p. 52, emphasis
added] See also footnote 10.
26

In strict logic, it could be otherwise, but the forces pushing in this direction are

extremely powerful. The inequality r > g in one sense implies that the past tends to
devour the future: wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even
without labour, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved. Almost inevitably
this tends to give lasting disproportionate importance to inequalities created in the past,
and therefore to inheritance. [Piketty, 2014a, p. 378]
27

As Grewal notes, Crosland also wondered if these societies were indeed still accurately

to be described as capitalist and his answer was no. [Grewal, 2014, p.657, fn, 103 ;
Crosland, 2006, p. 46]
28

This is where the distinction becomes pertinent between ballooning executive pay and

the workings of r > g; a return to a top rate of tax of over 80 percent solves the first
problem as it was only a politically motivated departure from a high top progressive rate
that incentivized bargaining for his executive remuneration. So that is one problem that
social democratic politics had already solved before the UK and the US decided to
unsolve it once again. See Piketty [2014], pp. 512-514.
29 Lane

Kenworthy, whose views I will discuss in the next section, proposes that the USA

increase spending on social programs from 37% to 47% of its current ($17 trillion) GDP.
[Kenworthy, 2013a, p. 11]
30

Kenworthys relative optimism is grounded on his belief that Americans are

pragmatists and they like institutions that work: the major institutions of the social
democratic tradition do work. [Kenworthy, 2013a, pp. 1213] (This represents the kind of
efficiency argument, as opposed to redistributive arguments, for such institutions
defended by Joseph Heath. [Heath, 2011]). A separate, and open, question is the
historical success of this tradition in bringing inequality within a permissible range. Cass
Sunstein, for example, argues that it was not Roosevelts New Deal that ended the
economic depression of the 1930s, but WWII. [Sunstein, 2004] That is consonant with

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Pikettys argument that the only effective shocks to capital that have prevented
extensive wealth inequality is the experience of world war. These arguments are not
encouraging for the social democrat.
31 Virtually

stagnant as the modest average gains per household are negated by the

increase in hours worked by all the earners in a household. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, pp.
22-3, p. 26] By comparison the household after tax income of the 0.1 percent rose from
$4 m to $24.3 m between 1979 and 2005. [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, p. 24]
32 This

reflects the importance to Rawls of his two claims that, in a just society, the

expectations of all groups are both close-knit and chain-connected. If these two
assumptions hold, then arguments grounded in justice and solidarity produce the same
outcome as arguments grounded in efficiency, but the theory of justice cannot assume
that these exogenous assumptions are true. By implementing justice as an integrated
whole we thereby make them true. I discuss this crucial argument in Republic of Equals,
chapter 2.
33

For the truly extraordinary story of Americas current capital gains taxation regime see

Stiglitz [2012] pp. 713.

34 This

is, of course, one aspect of their undue influence on austerity policies part of

that which Mark Blyth calls a creditors paradise of positive real interest rates, low
inflation, open markets, beaten-down unions, and a retreating state. [Blyth, 2015]
35 For

a very helpful complementary discussion of changing attitudes to inequality see

Adair Turner: If the worlds of celebrity, fashion and media generate very high pay, and
if there are more highly paid corporate lawyers and investment bankers than there once
were, and if there are some businesses (e.g. fashion retailing) in which a star CEO can
make a big difference and get highly rewarded, then the sense among highly paid people
of what is normal and justifiable shift. [Turner, 2012, p. 22, emphasis added] The
superstar hypothesis a special version of the meritocratic argument that great gains
are going to the most talented in intense winner takes all competitions that have mass
audience appeal (whether in sports or entertainment) may work well as a legitimating
myth, but as Hacker and Pierson, Rosanvallon and Piketty all note, sports stars and
celebrities form only a small percentage of the very wealthy (Hacker and Pierson put the

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figure at 3%). [Hacker & Pierson, 2010, p. 45; Rosanvallon, 2013, pp. 241-2] The classic
paper on the economics of superstars is Rosen [1981]. As Dew-Becker and Gordon
point out: superstars and other market-driven occupations have their incomes chosen by
the market, whereas CEO compensation is chosen by their peers in a system that gives
CEOs and their hand-picked boards of directors, rather than the market, control over top
incomes. [Dew-Becker and Gordon, 2008, pp. 445]
36 Addressing

the question of whether inequality is the (unfortunate) product of a fair

employment market and increased demand for skilled labour David B. Grusky responds
that the monopolizing of educational advantage has produced bottlenecks: These
bottlenecks create inequality by changing the relative size of the college-educated and
poorly educated classes. Because bottlenecks generate an artificially small collegeeducated class, its wages are inflated and its unemployment rate suppressed. Because
they generate an artificially bloated class of poorly educated workers, its wages are
suppressed and its unemployment rate inflated. This crowding at the bottom has helped
build a massive reserve army of unskilled labor evocative of mid-nineteenth century
England. [Grusky, 2012]
37

Piketty observes that the empirical data are not encouraging: [E]ven with the

considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth
century, earned income inequality did not decrease. [Piketty, 2014a, p. 484] Turner adds
that The vast majority of jobs in a rich developed economy are in non-traded sectors of
the economy retailing, wholesale distribution, leisure, health, education. [Turner,
2012, p. 86]
38

For a wholly political explanation of American exceptionalism when it comes to the

decline of trade unions see Hacker and Pierson [2010], pp. 58-61.
39

Once again Piketty supplies valuable empirical data: In the United States, a federal

minimum wage was introduced in 1933 . in terms of purchasing power, the minimum
wage reached its maximum level nearly half a century ago, in 1969, at $1.60 per hour (or
$10.10 in 2013 dollars, taking account of inflation between 1968 and 2013) . At the
beginning of 2013 it stood at $7.25 an hour. [Piketty, 2014a, p. 309]

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40 I am grateful to Maura Priest for pointing out to me the optimistic assumption behind
the very possibility of this response; this is one place where gender and race can play a
role in magnifying the effects of inequality.
41

In this respect Piketty marks a departure from the Meade-Rawls tradition because of a

certain ambivalence in his attitude to meritocracy (perhaps reflecting the meritocratic

strand in French republican culture). In some cases he debunks not meritocratic claims
per se, but false claims made to support them; in other places he seems to identify Our
democratic societies [as] resting on a democratic worldview. [Piketty, 2014a, p. 422]
Elsewhere he straightforwardly rejects meritocracy. [Piketty, 2014a, p. 416] His
ambivalence seems to reflect a conception of the modern meritocrat as representing a
second best: not as admirable as the just, but better than the unproductive petit rentier.
42

Adair Turner points out that chronic instability produces an imperative to grow that

doesnt otherwise exist . Without growth, debt servicing and debt reduction require
expenditure reductions and tax increases, which impose resented and resisted setbacks to
peoples existing income and wealth. [Turner, 2012, p. 75] This argument complements
those of Stiglitz [2012] and Galbraith [2012]. The point is crucial to Turners larger
argument that given that marginal gains to wellbeing from adopting the goal of constant
growth in already affluent societies are low, while the costs to wellbeing of recessionary
setbacks are comparatively high, we have a (broadly consequentialist) argument for
trading less growth for more stability in our macroeconomic policies. [Turner, 2012, p.
76, p. 82]
43 I

discuss these issues more fully in chapters 11 and 12 of Republic of Equals.

44 Hacker

has highlighted the role played by Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation in

transposing key elements of Margaret Thatchers version of a property-owning

democracy into a parallel American personal responsibility crusade: Butler was . a
conservative free market enthusiast who nonetheless believed that government could and
should play a positive role in peoples lives, albeit an indirect one . A keen student of
Margaret Thatcher, Butler believed that the only way to cut back governments role in
providing economic security was to offer voters an attractive alternative vision of
governments role that was rooted in the self-interest of powerful private actors . [to]

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create the institutional means to put the government out of the insurance business down
the line. [Hacker, 2006, p.55]
45 From

what we know finance is about 10 percent of GDP, and it's about 20 percent of

the top 0.1 percents income, which is a lot. That's twice as much as the share of GDP,
but that still leaves 80 percent of the 31,000 outside finance. So finance is important, but
I think the rise of top managerial income in the US is broader than just the finance issue.
[Piketty, 2014b]
46 Some

of these distinctive features are discussed by Adair Turner who notes that: The

financial system collectively, via its own intra-financial system trading activities, tends to
create volatility against which the non-financial economy has to hedge, paying the
financial system for the service: an initially zero-sum activity (proprietary trading against
one another) which them becomes positive-sum for the financial industry and negativesum for all others. [Turner, 2012, p. 59] His summative conclusion is: What then is the
balance between the real value added and the distributive rent extraction? We dont
know. But we do know that there is more potential for finance to generate redistributive
rents than exists in most other sectors of the economy . And a lot of those rents stick to
the highly skilled employees, [Turner, 2012, p. 58].
47 As

Pierre Rosanvallon notes of early nineteenth century American attitudes: the rapid

circulation of money meant that temporary inequalities did not congeal into privileges,
monopolies or perpetual advantages. [2013, p. 67]
48 Grewal

notes that, if our goal is to reconstruct the political conditions that underpinned

the stable and benign growth path of the post World War Two trente glorieuses, then it is
not true that political conditions at that time had not reckoned with the forces of
globalization; on the contrary! Citing the work of Ruggie, Grewal notes that the midcentury international order of embedded liberalism was constructed as a deliberate
policy response to the highly globalized world of the early century and the chaos and war
into which it descended. [Grewal, 2014, p. 664, citing Ruggie, 1982] Grewal also notes
that The relative volume of cross border flows [of capital] is not, after all, incomparably
greater than it was in the early twentieth century. [Grewal, 2014, p. 664] Ruggie
succinctly summarises the post-World War II consensus of embedded liberalism as

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built on the theory that multilateralism and domestic stability are linked to and
conditioned by one another, [Ruggie, 1982, p. 405] Unsurprisingly, Meade is in
complete agreement his Nobel prize in economics was, after all, for work in the theory
of international trade.
49 Grewal

does endorse both a Universal Basic Income and Ackermann and Alstots

stakeholding scheme as limited measures in the current situation that would have middle
class support, but does not think such policies are radical enough. [Grewal, 2014, p. 666]
I agree with this assessment, but I have argued here that Meades and Rawlss project is
far more radical than either a UBI scheme or a limited demogrant scheme taken alone.
50

In this paper I have generally shared Hackers pessimism about organized labour as a

countervailing force against the New Inequality. However, one of the features that David
Singh Grewal identifies in the trente glorieuses of the mid-twentieth century
democratic control of capitalism is relative labor scarcity and that is, potentially, a
counter-balancing factor in the emergence of patrimonial capitalism. Piketty is concerned
about the next stage in the development of r > g. The main factors that balance the
(diminishing) returns to capital are technology and population growth. Grewals insight,
then, from the trente glorieuses are that with population growth and technological
innovation slowing, the bargaining power of labor will comparatively increase. [Grewal,
2014, p. 659]
51 This

paper summarises some of the central arguments of Republic of Equals: Pre-

distribution and Property-Owning Democracy and I am grateful to those who have given
me feedback on that work: Elvio Baccarini, Zlata Boac, Thom Brooks, Lisa Herzog,
Waheed Hussain, Victor Invankovi, Annabelle Lever, Man Kong Li, David Owen, John
Tomasi, Thad Williamson and Stuart White. An earlier version of this paper was
presented at the University of California at San Diego and at the Australian National
University and I am grateful to the participants in those discussions: Dick Arneson,
Christian Barry, Amy Berg, David Brink, Gerald Doppelt, Bob Goodin, Gil Hersch, Seth
Lazar, Emily McTernan, Samuel Rickless and Lachlan Umbers. I am also grateful to Jim
McCollum and Maura Priest for their comments on a previous draft of this paper. Special
thanks for comments on both the book and the paper are owed to Kathryn Brown.