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A
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Brian here. This event tonight is part of the Public Lectures program at the London School of Economics and it is also hosted and organised by the Hayec program here at lse. The objective, the Hayek Program, as the name suggests, to explore and advance the intellectual contributions of political economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek. You may Google it for more information or approach me after the event for more information. Our speaker for tonight is Professor Christopher Fryman, who has traveled all the way from the United States to be with us. The contents of his talk is based on his book Unequivocal justice, published by Routledge, which I'm sure you can assess online. Christopher Fryman is a professor in the Department of General Business in the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. Previously, Chris was an Associate professor of philosophy, William and Mary, where he received an Alumni Fellowship Award for Excellence in Teaching and The class of 1963 termed distinguished associate professor of Philosophy. He's the author of three books, most recently Libertarianism, the Basics, which Jessica Flanagan, and over 50 articles and chapters. Chris's writings have been featured in a variety of popular outlets including Washington Post, Reason Aon and Insight Higher Education. Joining us tonight is the chairperson and moderator, Professor Paul Kelly. He's a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and a former Pro Director of LSE. He's the author and editor of 16 books and edited collections and published numerous scholarly articles. His interests range across political theory and philosophy in the history of thought. Do note that this event is being live streamed and will be photographed. Our speaker will speak for approximately 50 minutes followed by a Q and A that will last until 8pm sharp. The question answer session will respond to both questions from the online audience watching and also those with us in person. So now, without further ado, let's put our hands to welcome our speaker, Professor Chris Fryman.
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Thank you. This is an incredible turnout for a talk on John Rawls. What is this, a Tuesday night? It might be the largest crowd I've ever spoken to that was not required to listen to me. So, so, so thank you for coming out. I really do appreciate it. All right, so I am a political philosopher by trade, but I want to start by talking about economics rather than philosophy. Public choice theorists and what you might call proto public choice theorists argue that a lot of traditional economics make very romantic assumptions about both the motivation and the ability of state actors to do good. Here we have Frank Knight. He was an economist at the University of Chicago in the early part of the 20th century. He argued that socialist objections to capitalism rested on an unrealistic picture of the state in which the state both knew how to do good and was motivated to do it. So here's Knight. Socialists believe that the state, conceived in the abstract as a benevolent and all powerful agency, essentially as God, rather than realistically as politicians, could order economic affairs rightly without generating new evils or incurring serious social costs. So one obvious flaw in the socialist analysis of capitalism, at least according to Knight, is that the state is neither benevolent nor all powerful. It's run by politicians rather than angels. Here's Knight again. There are very cogent reasons for believing that with men at all as they are, and with governments as they will be if staffed by such men, neither socialism nor anarchism in any approximation to the ideal pattern is a practical possibility. This is James Buchanan. He was a student of Knights. He was also the winner of the Nobel Prize. He had a similar sort of objection to socialism. Economists quote proper policy advice as if they were talking to a benevolent despot who stood at their beck and call. There's one problem with this analysis. Benevolent despots do not exist. Governmental policy emerges from a highly complex and institutional structure peopled by ordinary men and women, very little different from the rest of us. Once economists start working with the conception of the state that's run by politicians who are no smarter or more altruistic than the rest of us, we might become less optimistic about the ability of the state to do all of the good things that we might want it to do. Now, at the same time economists were working with the benevolent despot model of the state, political philosophers were doing more or less the same thing. One difference, though, is that philosophers were quite explicit that this is what they were doing. They were quite explicit that they were using an idealized conception of the state in their theories. Probably the most famous example of this is John Rawls. Here's John Rawls, most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. Rawls said he was theorizing about what the state should look like in, quote, ideal theory. What is ideal theory? He gives us different specifications in different contexts. So, for example, ideal theory is the study of the state in conditions where everyone, quote, fully complies with, with justice. It's the description of how the state works when it is working well, that is, in accordance with its public aims and principles of design. It's a theory of, quote, what a perfectly just society would be like. These all basically boil down to the idea that we should be theorizing about a perfectly just state for a perfectly just society. And it's not just academics who think about politics in this way. So you'll often hear people say things like, you know, ideally, politicians would care about the good of all their constituents instead of selling out to their wealthy supporters. But then they'll proceed to offer policy proposals on the optimistic assumption whether it turns out to be true or not. So in Rawls defense, he knew that his ideal theory was not realistic. In fact, Rawls knew Buchanan quite well. They corresponded with one another. But Rawls thought the infeasibility objection that people like Buchanan and Knight were making against socialism was not really a problem for his political philosophy, even though it might be a problem for economists. So economics is at least partly trying to describe how the world is, whereas political philosophy is trying to advise us on how the world ought to be. So if you're trying to describe the world as it is, then you probably want to make your theory as realistic as possible. If you're trying to describe the world as it should be, then maybe you should be less constrained by feasibility concerns. So here's a passage from Rawls. Much conservative thought is focused on criticizing the ineffectiveness of the welfare state and its tendencies toward waste and corruption. But here we ask, what kind of regime and basic structure would be right and just could it be effectively and workably maintained? So Rawls is doing normative theory, whereas Buchanan is doing something descriptive. Rawls is asking, what goal should we strive for? What would a state look like not in the actual world, but in an ideal world. And generally speaking, it seems okay to abstract away from real world imperfections when we're doing normative theory. So suppose I said criminal justice system should never convict an innocent person. It's unrealistic to think that this would ever happen, that we would ever have a perfect criminal justice system. Nevertheless, it seems true, like, the criminal justice system really should never convict an innocent person. And this is the ideal we would want it to strive for. And this is kind of similar to the Rawlsian ideal theory view. Second, it's not as though the idealizing assumptions that Rawls makes in his theory are completely unrealistic. So we might say that they are humanly possible in the way that flapping your arms and flying to West Virginia is not humanly possible. So we could do it. So it is sort of within human nature to be able to play fair all the time, to not cheat, to be more altruistic than we currently are, and so forth. So maybe we won't do it, but that's very different from saying that we can't do it in the way that we can't flap our arms and fly to West Virginia. Similarly, to say the criminal justice system should never convict an innocent person again, probably would not happen, will never happen, but it's humanly possible that could happen. It's an ideal. So one upshot of doing ideal theory when we're thinking about a perfectly just state for a perfectly just society is that it rules out public choice, worries about government failure by definition. So by definition we are doing ideal theory where there's no free riding on redistribution, there's no rent seeking, there's no regulatory capture, there's no corruption, and so on. The state always acts justly. So Buchanan type worries about the inefficiency of the state and failures of the state just don't have any force against Rawls theory because he rules them out by definition. So again, the question is, what should the state look like in a world in which everyone is acting justly. Now, at this point, maybe you're asking yourself, well, why does this issue matter? So who cares whether we're doing ideal theory or not? Well, think about it this way. If we theorize for conditions where people are perfectly just and states always work well, it's natural to think that we would want a very active and powerful state that has a lot of power to do good. If, like many classical liberals and libertarians, we're theorizing for non ideal conditions where people are not fully just and governments frequently fail, we might want a subdued state that won't do too much damage when things go wrong. So here's an analogy. Suppose you own a delivery company. You just have one delivery, you can't fire her for whatever reason and you just know she is going to show up for work drunk. You can't stop her. So the question is this, do you want to have her do her deliveries on this or do you want her to do her deliveries with this? If the driver is just going to show up drunk no matter what you do, it seems like you should give her the scooter because she can do less damage. Now granted, if you know she was going to be an expert driver and always be sober, maybe you want the big truck that can carry lots of stuff. However, if things go wrong with the driver, it's going to be very, very bad. If this crashes and it will Be less bad if the scooter crashes. So what kind of tool you want to give her, what kind of vehicle you want to give her sort of depends on what you think she's going to do with it. And so this is analogous to the point that many classical liberals and libertarians make about the state. If you think that political power is likely to be misused for selfish purposes, short sighted purposes, and so on, then you have a good reason to reduce that power. So minimize the power to do bad rather than maximize the power to do good. Here's a famous line from Hayek about Adam Smith. I'm actually not sure this is like an accurate account of what Smith was doing, but I like the line anyway. Hayek says Adam Smith's concern was not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best, but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst. So I think that the ideal, non ideal distinction is a kind of fault line between egalitarian liberals like Rawls and sort of libertarian and classical liberals like Buchanan, Buchanan, Frank Knight, and so on. And other people have made similar sort of observations. So people like Thomas Sowell, Steve Pinker, John Tomasi have made similar observations about this being sort of a dividing line between egalitarian liberals and classical liberals. But if Rawls is unfazed by the realism objection of someone like Buchanan for the reasons I've already mentioned, do we have any reason to reject ideal theory and instead do a non ideal theory that allows for government failure? And I'll argue that there is. So the main problem with ideal theories of the state like Rawls is not that they are unrealistic, although they are. The main problem is that they're incoherent, by which I mean they fail to consistently apply their own internal assumptions. And other people have made similar observations, including Will Wilkinson, G. A. Cohen, Jason Brennan and Jacob Levy. And I want to systematically make that argument tonight. So I start with the observation that a society in which everyone does exactly what justice demands of them does not need a state. So I'll argue for this claim in more depth. I'll go through particular cases, but for now just consider that a perfectly just society would have no crime, crime, no cheating, an abundance of altruism, and so on. As GA Cohen puts it, if the right principles are, as Marx thought, the ones that are right for real everyday material life, and if they are practiced in everyday life, then the state can wither away. It's only when people are violent, exploitative, shortsighted and selfish that we need a state. But now we have to open up the possibility the state itself will be violent, exploitative, shortsighted and selfish. We lose the right to assume that the state is just. Another way of putting the point is that ideal theory faces A catch 22 is the COVID of catch 22. Do you read that in high school here? Is that like a thing that's commonly assigned? No, I had to read it in high school. I wasn't impressed. I was like, I thought it was overrated. That's neither here nor there. But a catch 22 is a situation where the solution to a problem is undermined by the very conditions that generate the problem in the first place. Here's a classic example, or at least here's an example that Google fed me when I asked for one. To get a job in show business, you need an agent. But to get an agent, you need a job in show business, maybe. So it goes like this here you spell it out a little more carefully. If you have a job, you can get an agent, but you don't need one because you got a job. If you don't have a job, you need an agent, but you can't get one. That's the catch point too. A similar sort of paradox applies to ideal theories of the state, or so I will argue. So if society is fully just, it can get a just state, but it doesn't need one. If society isn't fully just, it needs a just state, but it can't get one. So this catch 22 gives rise to a dilemma for ideal theorists like Rawls. We either can have an ideal theory of a stateless utopia, it's like the picture of the earth with the stick figures holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
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Or.
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You can have a non ideal theory of a state that is liable to failure. So the ideal assumption that entitles Rawls to rule out the possibility of government failure rules out the need for a state at all. So we can either have a consistent ideal theory in which there is no state, or he can have a consistent non ideal theory, in which case the state itself might fail in all of the ways that people like Buchanan are worried about. This is all abstract. So let me get to a case, Let me get to a case here. Public goods. One reason why Rawls thinks we need a state is to provide public goods. His diagnosis of this problem is just industry standard. Here he thinks there's going to be a free rider problem. So just to quote Rawls, there's the free rider problem where the public is large and includes many individuals. There is a temptation for each person to try to avoid doing his share. This is because whatever one man does, his action will not significantly affect the amount produced. So we can break this down a little bit more systematically. So you won't contribute to good G if one, your contribution to G does not affect whether G is provided, and you can benefit from G even if you don't contribute to it. So here's a standard case. Clean atmosphere. Clean air is a public good that will allegedly be under provided by the market. So first, your contribution to a clean atmosphere does not affect whether a clean atmosphere is provided. So you think of it like this. You're at a car dealership. You're deciding whether to buy an electric car, which is better for the environment, but let's say more expensive, or a gas guzzler, which is worse for the environment but cheaper. So you're thinking about what you should get. You might think to yourself, you know what, like, atmosphere is so big, there's so much air, one car is not going to make a difference. That's true. One car is not going to make a difference. And so you say, you know what? It makes sense for me to save the money and not buy the electric car. Second, you can benefit from a clean atmosphere even if you don't contribute to it. So here you're thinking, all right, you know, it's okay if I buy this gas guzzler even though it will pollute a little bit, because if enough other people buy, the electric car will have clean air. And so I can benefit from the clean air produced by others even if I don't contribute to it. I can be a free rider. The problem is everyone else at the car dealership is thinking the same thing. So nobody's buying electric cars. We have too few electric cars and we don't have a clean atmosphere. Again, this is just totally standard account of public goods. And the free rider problem. I'm sure most of you are familiar with it. And Rawls solution to the problem of public goods is also sort of the industry standard. It should be familiar. He says the provision of public goods must be arranged for through the political process and not through the market arranging for and financing public goods must be taken over by the state and some binding rule requiring payment must be enforced. Basically, we need the state to step in and provide the public good. And this can take a variety of different forms. So if we're thinking about the car case or the atmosphere case, maybe we say the state has to impose A carbon tax. Maybe the state has to impose cap and trade, who knows? The particulars aren't very important here. What matters is that the state has to come in and in some way correct the market's inability to secure the public good. But here's my question.
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How.
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How's the state going to do that? So Rawls just stipulates that the state will provide public goods. He doesn't say how, he just treats the state as a black box. And to see why this is a problem, imagine that a free market enthusiast we have, you know, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher. I was talking about Margaret Thatcher the other day. I don't know if she's popular in this room or not. I don't know what that noise was. I don't know if that was a boo or a chair. So Margaret Thatcher says the market will provide public goods. That's the analysis. She doesn't provide any account of how the market will provide public goods. She just treats it as a black box. I don't think many. I don't know what you'd say. Market skeptics would find this to be a satisfying solution. It's like, lots of people will buy electric cars on the market. Problem solved. Like, nah, it's not so fast. So as we've seen, people won't contribute to a clean atmosphere because they have nothing to gain by contributing. This is why they're not going to buy enough electric cars. Here's the rub. The exact same analysis applies to the government provision of public goods. People won't contribute to good government because they have nothing to gain by contributing. And this is just the standard public choice account of voting. So remember Rawls's analysis of the public goods problem? You won't contribute to good G if one, your contribution to G does not affect whether G is provided, and you can benefit from G even if you don't contribute to it. But notice that both of these conditions are satisfied in the case of contributing to a good democratic government. I'll just focus on voting here. A single vote for a policy or politician, good or bad, won't make a difference to whether or not that politician is elected. So your good vote does not affect whether good government, good democratic government is provided, won't make a difference either way. Second, you can benefit from good government even if you don't contribute a good vote. So going back to the case of a carbon tax, suppose you don't vote for a carbon tax or the carbon tax candidate. Sorry about that, too many gestures. Even if you don't vote for the carbon tax, for whatever reason, and enough other people do, you will get a carbon tax and you will benefit from the carbon tax. So it is rational for you to free ride on the votes of other people. And you know, this could take a variety of forms. Maybe you just don't vote at all, or maybe you do vote, but you don't pay the costs of casting an informed vote. So it takes time and effort to figure out what a carbon tax is, which politicians promote it, going to the polls and actually voting for the politicians, these all come with costs. And so maybe you just vote for the candidate who you think tells the funniest jokes or something like that, rather than the one who actually will be good for the environment. But one way or another, you're not contributing to the election of the carbon tax candidate. Now the problem is, just as in the car dealership case, everyone is thinking the same way here. So you say my vote doesn't matter, and if other people vote for the carbon tax, I'll get the benefits of the carbon tax. So I'm not going to do it. Not going to bother. Everybody's thinking the same way. And so citizens aren't going to cast good votes in general. And so too few people vote for the carbon tax candidate. So what this suggests is that the state can't solve the public goods problem because the state itself is subject to the public goods problem. So how does Rawls try to resolve this problem? Well, he does it by inconsistently applying his own assumptions. So he assumes free riding to ensure that the state is needed. So you're free riding at the car dealership, but then he assumes away free riding to ensure that the state works. Works. He assumes that you are not a free rider when you're casting a vote. And this is the internal consistency that I was talking about earlier. So people are free riders when it's convenient for Rawls and they aren't free riders when it is not convenient for Rawls. And this is not a coincidence. So this is a kind of necessary move that he has to make to avoid the catch 22 that I was talking about earlier. Remember, if people were fully just and did not free ride, there would be no need for the state to intervene. If everybody was buying electric cars, then you wouldn't need the carbon tax. In the perfectly just world, you would do the environmentally responsible thing out of the goodness of your heart. You would donate your surplus income out of the goodness of your heart and so on. The state wouldn't have to force you to do these sorts of things. However, in an imperfect world where people do free ride, they're not going to do their fair share in a variety of ways. They're not going to always do the environmentally responsible thing voluntarily. And in this world, a carbon tax does have a role. It could help, but it also means that people won't put in the work needed to actually get the carbon tax. So my claim is that Rawls analysis has to be inconsistent. People are unjust in their private lives and their economic lives and their lives in civil society, and this gives the state a job to do. But then they somehow become just in their political lives, which ensures that the state does its job correctly. But this looks ad hoc. So Rawls specifically violates what Jeff Brennan and James Buchanan called behavioral symmetry. And this basically means you should consistently apply your behavioral assumptions across different institutions. You're the same person when you're shopping for cars and when you're shopping for senators. Now, to be clear, Brennan and Buchanan don't say this is always the case. So they acknowledge that sometimes you might behave differently, have different motivations in different contexts. However, they argue that the burden of proof rests with the people who would deny symmetry. So the default assumption is that you're the same person at the supermarket and at the polls. If we get very strong evidence to the contrary, then we can have that conversation. But they say this is the default assumption that we should be making. And to be clear here, I'm merely arguing that Rawls is inconsistent. To figure out whether people do or do not free ride in different institutional contexts is an empirical question. It's just not the sort of thing philosophers can figure out from the armchair. And I think that empirical work needs to be done. I actually think we have a decent amount of empirical work to substantiate, like certain claims about voter behavior. But the point is simply that we cannot resolve these kinds of institutional debates between libertarians and egalitarian liberals at the level of ideal theory, doing sort of a priori political philosophy. We actually have to see how the world works. What we want to avoid is this kind of weird Jekyll and Hyde split where you're like this sinner in the marketplace and a saint in politics. Or as GA Cohen put it, pile up your earthly goods on the mundane plane of civil society, but be a saint in the heaven of politics. So I talked about public goods. I want to look at a second case, political equality. So Rawls says that a just state will ensure substantive political equality. And the idea here is that, quote, citizens similarly gifted and motivated have roughly an equal chance of influencing the government's policy. And he says that the main obstacle to real political equality is that the rich use their wealth to buy political influence. And he proposes two solutions to this problem. One, reduce economic inequality generally via redistribution. Put it simply, if the rich have less money, they're less able to buy up political power. Second, reduce the influence of money in politics, specifically via campaign finance reform. So basically, he wants to stop private money from entering politics. And since a libertarian regime would not include either extensive redistribution or campaign finance regulation, he concludes that libertarianism, or as he calls it, laissez faire capitalism or the system of natural liberty is unjust, as he puts it. Quote, laissez faire capitalism, the system of natural liberty secures only formal equality and rejects both the fair value of the political liberty of the equal political liberties and fair equality of opportunity. So he says, yeah, you know, each person might only get one vote. And so in some sense there's formal political equality in a libertarian world. But Elon Musk is buying up the elections and so there's not substance. He wasn't. He didn't talk about Elon Musk. Obviously people talk about Elon Musk now. It won't have real political equality. So what should we make of Rawls claim here? Like, should we buy this idea that capitalism is unjust because it doesn't do enough to redistribute income or regulate elections? Well, let's look back at this catch 22 here. So if society is fully just, it can get a just state. If society isn't fully just, it needs a just state, but it can't get one. So applying this to the case of political equality in particular, if society is fully just, it doesn't need redistribution and electoral regulation to achieve real political equality. In ideal theory, the rich wouldn't buy state power. After all, they are perfectly just. So think of it this way. Morally upstanding billionaires won't try to buy off senators any more than morally upstanding baseball players won't bribe umpires. I got a bunch of sports references in this talk and they're all to American sports. I'm sorry, But by definition morally upset like billionaires who are committed to egalitarian justice are not buying elections, otherwise they wouldn't be committed to egalitarian justice. Are they umpires or referees in soccer? Football. The referees. Okay. On the other hand, in non ideal theory, where we're assuming not everybody's fully compliant with justice, the rich will, or at least they might buy state power. And so you say, okay, well perhaps there is room for redistribution and regulation. But in that case, the rich can subvert the equalizing measures by buying the state power unleashed to do the equalizing. And so there are a bunch of examples of this. I'm just going to give you one case. In a non ideal world, attempts at redistribution can actually worsen political inequalities. So for example, high marginal tax rates on the rich brought about by redistribution could encourage the rich to buy state power. So the higher the tax burden, the more valuable the tax loophole. Give you another analogy here. Suppose you have a hundred dollar again dollars baseball, get pulled over by a traffic cop and you're deliberating. Should I bribe this traffic cop? We're doing non ideal or yeah, non ideal theory here, you're not fully compliant with justice, you're willing to bribe the traffic cop. Will you do it? Well that partly depends on how high the ticket is. So if the ticket is $50, it wouldn't be rational for you to spend $100 to bribe your way out of it. If the ticket is $200, then it would be rational to bribe your way out of it with $100. So the idea is like the higher the fine or the higher the tax, it becomes more cost effective to try to evade that tax or fine. What about electoral regulation, like spending limits? So the reason why we need it allegedly is because the rich control political life. But notice, if the problem is that the rich effectively write legislation, then shouldn't we expect legislation designed to regulate elections also be controlled by the rich? And what we find actually is that a lot of rules governing political advocacy do in fact benefit the wealthy. So here's an example from the US Advocacy groups in Washington state are subject to grassroots lobbying regulation if their monthly expenditures exceed $500. Groups can be fined up to $10,000 for each regulation violation. Now it's pretty clear how these sorts of regulations favor the wealthy. If you have a million dollars to spend, you can absorb the $10,000 fine fairly easily. If you only have $5,000 to spend, then you probably can't risk it. So poor people and poor groups have a strong incentive to drop out of the lobbying process altogether. The point is that electoral regulations can actually make political inequalities worse because they can compound the advantages of the rich. And here again, we should not be surprised by this. So if the rich control the political process, which is Rawls assumption, then we should predict that they will also control the electoral legislation produced by that political process. So this is you don't read catch 22. You watch south park, you got south park here. It's better than catch 22. Like, I don't know. Rawls kind of reminds me of a famous episode of south park, the underpants gnomes. Familiar with this episode? No. What are they teaching in schools. Anyway? So the idea is we start out with the assumption that the rich control the state. Then something happens, which again is like, unclear. And then somehow we get to this point where the state controls the rich. But we gotta know what's happening in phase two, and it's not clear what's happening in phase two. All right, I want to consider a final objection to kind of classical liberalism libertarianism that Rawls makes. So he says open competition for jobs in a free market doesn't take the ideal of equal opportunity far enough. For example, children born into the Walton family will have better opportunities than children born into my family. And it's not because the Walton kids earned their inheritance. They just got lucky. And luck just plays a very, very big role in people's economic opportunities. You know, it can determine or at least play a very big role in where you go to school, what sort of connections you have, what sort of jobs you get. It just seems unfair that your parents checking account should dictate your chances of landing a good job. And some egalitarians want to go even further. So just as you don't have a say in your parents wealth, you don't have a say in your natural talents, how marketable they happen to be. So I could just pour blood, sweat and tears into practicing my jump shot. No one will ever pay me a dime to watch me play basketball. Never going to happen. My natural talents are better suited for like a PowerPoint, I think. LeBron James, on the other hand, 6 foot 8, 260 pounds, he works very hard. Like he does work harder than I do at basketball. Nevertheless, even if I were to work as hard as LeBron James, nobody would pay to watch me play basketball. And he's earned, I don't know, probably over a billion once we're counting endorsement deals. But egalitarians say, like, why? Why should LeBron James make all this money simply because he was gifted with these natural talents? Doesn't seem fair. Here's Rawls again. Free market arrangements must be set within a framework of political and legal institutions which regulates the overall trends of economic events and preserves the social conditions necessary for fair equality of opportunity. So we gotta level the playing field a little bit. What does this involve? Redistributing wealth and income, probably inheritance taxes. We have to regulate the economy to reduce barriers to entry. We have to break up monopolies, we have to prot. Provide more funding for public schools, et cetera. Time for one last dilemma. Do ideally just citizens, in Rawls terms, voluntarily abstain from the exploitation of the contingencies of nature and social circumstance. At least in places. Rawls says that they do. So like an ideal theory, if you're fully just, you won't unjustly exploit your good fortune for your own gain. And here again that makes sense. You wouldn't be ideally just if you did that sort of thing. But if this is the case, then it seems like the redistributive and regulatory framework is not needed. So here's another line from GA Cohen. He says perfectly just people internalize a social ethos that inspires uncoerced equality supporting choices. So the idea here is if you're really committed to equal opportunity, you're not going to need the state to force you to not exploit your good fortune. So you know Microsoft will voluntarily choose to pay its software designers and its window washers the same hourly wage. So the Waltons will donate what would have been their heirs inheritance to underfunded schools. You don't need an inheritance tax. LeBron James will voluntarily split his Nike endorsement check with hard working philosophers. What a world is a dream world. So people will do the equality supporting thing essentially out of the goodness of their hearts. We wouldn't need to force them to do it. But of course in non ideal theory the fortunate do exploit their good fortune. But then we should expect them to exploit their good fortune in the market and in politics. I'll say a little bit more about why this is in a minute. But if the fortunate capture the redistributive and regulatory framework, the result will actually be greater inequality. So empowering the state to regulate the market would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. So the key claim here is that people who are equipped to do well in the market are also equipped to do well in politics. One reason for this is a reason Rawls himself gives, which is being rich is in itself a political advantage. You're better equipped to hire lobbyists, donate to campaigns, and so forth. And another reason is that many of the causes of economic power are also causes political power. I'll just run through a few. Having rich parents gives you many advantages in the labor market and in politics, helps you get into better schools, gives you access to a more powerful social network, and so on, so on. Speaking of education, getting an elite education, even at an early age, helps children get a leg up on college admissions. This improves both future economic and political opportunities. Elite university attendance is an important factor in your lifetime income and your success in the political process. So I no longer remember the exact statistic on this, but at one point, something like, for like eight consecutive elections in the U.S. the two major party candidates either went to Yale or Harvard. That's crazy. Maybe not crazy, but notable. So one reason why an elite education matters in both business and in politics is that it can plug you into an influential social network, gives you connections. Looks also matter for labor market and political success. Better looking job candidates are more likely to get hired and better looking politicians are more likely to get elected. There's also the halo effect of good looks. This is true. People are more persuaded by your arguments the better looking you are. This is why you find me so persuasive tonight or not. You can see how this would have implications for political influence. Racial and gender bias also play a role in both the market and political competitions. In brief, being a white male is an advantage in both. Height also matters. You make more money and you're more likely to get elected if you're taller, to oversimplify. And all of these things, again, they're just like matters of luck. And the upshot is that economic power and political power tend to concentrate in the same hands. So people with more economic power tend to have more political power. And this means that people with influence over the regulations or are going to be the very people we are trying to regulate. So if the rich and powerful control the regulation of the economy, they can use these regulations to actually increase their advantages over the poor. And this is often what we see in the real world. So regulation often serves the interests of the rich rather than the poor. I'll give just a couple of examples. Occupational licensing. So if you're not familiar with this, in many professions you have to acquire government approval before you can do the job. And this costs time and money to get the government approval. And not everybody has the time and money. I don't know what it's like here, but in the US these are things that you need a license to do. Sell caskets, thread eyebrows, give massages, arrange flowers professionally. I guess you can arrange flowers and give it away for free, but if you ask for money, you got to get away. License, work as an interior decorator, shampoo hair. You can shampoo your own hair without a license, but you can't shampoo another person's hair. And you can See how these sorts of regulations might benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. So, you know, one particularly salient example of this is dental services. So you go to the dentist and you get your teeth cleaned and the hygienist does all the work. And the dentist, they like poke their head in for like 12 seconds and leave. Has anybody had it? Yeah, this is my experience. And like, well, okay, here's a good idea. You're a dental hygienist. You get together with other dental hygienists and you just set up a tooth cleaning clinic. That's all you do. You're not doing root canals, nothing like that. You're just doing tooth cleaning because you're the one who's doing it anyway. And you charge a lower price for it than the dentist would. Like, this seems like a win, win extra business for the hygienists and you get a cheaper teeth cleaning. And so you might ask yourself, oh man, that's a great idea. Why don't we have it? Well, in the US at least you're not allowed to do it. So only dentists can clean your teeth. And I'd say, huh, well, who is this good for? That's good for the dentists because it keeps the competition out. And this is bad for the relatively poor in two ways. One, hygienists don't make as much money as dentists. So it makes hygienists poorer than they otherwise would be, and it makes dentists richer than they otherwise would be. And it also drives up the cost of tooth cleaning services. And so it's bad for consumers as well. There are lots of other policies that exhibit the same sort of pattern. So housing regulation, this is like the biggest nightmare in politics right now. I've heard it's a problem here, It's a big problem in the United States. It's really just almost impossible to build housing. And this causes a million problems. Now, housing regulation does benefit particular groups, namely existing homeowners, because it increases their housing wealth, but it makes it harder for poorer people to buy housing. And just to give you a sense of the impact of regulations on this, housing in San Francisco is about four times what it is in Tokyo. The price is four times more expensive due to different regulatory standards. It's just much, much harder to build housing in the US Compared to other countries. And it's also not just that housing is difficult to afford. There are indirect costs to high housing prices as well. So it's going to reduce labor mobility. So maybe you get a Great job offer in another city and you would be much more productive working in that job and you would make more money. If you're not able to buy a house in that area, you're not going to be able to take that job. Subsidies are another case that's pretty straightforward, more or less sort of direct payments to wealthy and connected groups. Trade restrictions are another case here where we see regulation is done primarily to benefit particularly well connected groups and they disperse the costs on the rest of us. And trade restrictions are particularly bad for the poor because they spend a disproportionately large share of their income on food. Now, I was going to talk a little bit about Paul Krugman. You guys know Paul Krugman? Is he okay? I think he won the Nobel Prize at one point, but I'm actually going to skip that. I want to end by talking about how we should rethink our approach to public policy analysis. So I've argued that it doesn't really make sense to argue for a perfectly just state. That always works well. Instead we have to allow for the possibility that governments will fail and make things worse because it might be run by unjust people. But once we allow for the possibility of government failure, it becomes clear that a so called market failure isn't enough to justify government intervention. That intervention might actually make things worse. To put it another way, markets might be imperfect, they might be bad, but they might nevertheless be our best option. So to make this clear, basketball, Let me give you an analogy. Steph Curry. Familiar with him?
- [49:51]
A
Yeah.
- [49:52]
C
I don't know. Is that a dumb question? It is kind of dumb. All right, fair enough. I'm learning. That's Steph Curry. I want to propose a theory of Steph Curry failure. So Steph Curry shoots about 45% on his three point shot attempts. This means he misses more than half the time. And so from this we should infer that Steph Curry is a bad player and should be cut from the Warriors. Correct. He misses more than half the time. It's very bad. Obviously not. So even though missing more than half your shots is pretty bad in absolute terms, it turns out that that's pretty much the best that anyone in the history of basketball has ever done. I think he's probably the best three point shooter ever. So if the warriors did decide to cut him from their team, his replacement would be even worse. And that seems like the relevant comparison. The general point is that perfection shouldn't be our standard of judgment for basketball players or for institutions. And this is what Harold Demset an economist called the nirvana approach. You compare an institution to perfection and if it falls short, conclude that it's flawed and should be replaced. But this seems like an obviously mistaken way to think about institutions and many other things because it implies that we should replace Steph Curry because he falls short of perfection. However, this is sort of what Rawls does. He kind of wants to cut Steph Curry. So he says, look, the free market allows the Walton children to. To exploit their advantages, and that's unfair, so we should replace the market with something else or regulate it in certain sorts of ways. But that's like saying Steph Curry misses most of his shots, so we should replace him with someone else. But in both cases, the replacement very well might be worse. And so that's the relevant question. Will the replacement under the same conditions be better or worse? And this brings us to what Demsatz called the comparative institution approach here. The standard for judging institutions is not perfection. It's whether it does better than the available realistic alternatives. So when we're doing public policy, the task is always one of choosing the least bad option, and this should always be your goal. So not picking the thing that's good in absolute terms, but you should pick the thing that is the least bad. Don't put that in your wedding vows, though. So I think that markets are flawed and imperfect in all sorts of ways, but I also think that they're probably the least imperfect of nothing but imperfect options. Thank you.
- [53:14]
D
Thank you very much, Christopher. Plenty of plenty to get our teeth into. Hope we can all just cheer and go home. I'm now going to ask you to indicate questions, so we'll bring a microphone to you. I'm going to take a couple, two or three at a time. If you would briefly introduce yourself. Is that just a name? If you're from lse, not your life story, but if you just introduce yourself for the benefit of those who are on live stream and aren't able to see you. So I have first question over there in the corner. Like to hack on the microphone, please. You have to wait till the microphone comes because it's got to go to the.
- [54:06]
B
Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [54:33]
E
My name is Felix. I'm 23, not a student. Just here to find out more about this kind of thing. I have two questions. One was about what you most recently said about market failure versus government failure. I just wanted to know why the assumption is that the government would fail. I think if we had a government that wanted to nationalise transport, healthcare, housing, education, then people would have a better quality of life. My second question was about the free riders thing. I believe that there are a lot of free riders in my generation. That is to say that there are many young people that don't feel represented by the state and don't feel that they have a stake in their communities. And so they see no reason contributing in the way that people did a few generations ago. Like, for example, I think. But the reason for that is that as a young person living in a major city, not only can people no longer afford to, say, buy an apartment, but even afford to buy good food. I was wondering what your solution beyond this is the less bad thing beyond that, you know, I think we should be aspiring to things that are better, not saying things could be worse.
- [55:50]
A
Thank you.
- [55:51]
C
So, I'm sorry, could you repeat the last question? It was how we can do better with respect to making contributions. Was that.
- [56:02]
E
About the free riders?
- [56:03]
C
Right.
- [56:04]
E
It's just that young people, I feel the reason that there are, there's a growing number of quote unquote, free riders is that we don't feel that we have stake in our local communities nationally. I don't know. I personally have toiled with the fact of whether I can proudly call myself English or a Londoner. And as time goes on, I find myself being less and less proud about that, with that label, because I don't feel that the state represents me and represents people like me, you know, young people trying to do their best, but there really isn't enough opportunity for us.
- [56:49]
D
What to do about the sources of disengagement.
- [56:52]
C
Yeah, thank you.
- [56:54]
D
Anything else before we go on.
- [56:57]
C
Here?
- [56:57]
D
And then one at the front. So I'll take three. Sure, you can do them in whatever order.
- [57:01]
B
Thank you. Hi, I'm Donya. I'm an MPA student here at lse. My question is about your first argument and the inconsistency in Rawls so that if I free write the provision of public goods, I must also free right in voting. Are you not maybe discounting the fact that the cost in the provision of public goods is much higher than the cost of voting? So if you think about defense as a public good, if I wanted to contribute, I would have to Enlist, I would have to risk my life. That's a much higher cost than just voting, which I would almost argue also has benefits, not just costs. So if I don't agree with that premise, then I feel like the rest of the arguments kind of fall short.
- [57:48]
D
Okay, so voting versus other things. And then gentlemen at the front end and I'll come back for some more afterwards. Okay, so. Hello?
- [57:56]
B
Yeah, hi, I'm Edward.
- [57:59]
C
I'm currently in year 12, which is great.
- [58:01]
B
Grade 11, studying economics at City of London School.
- [58:05]
C
You mentioned earlier in how in the.
- [58:07]
B
Non ideal scenario you would have economic power and political power concentrated in the same hands.
- [58:13]
A
I want your opinion on, like, if.
- [58:15]
B
We had an ideal political system, what kind of characteristics would that system have to address that problem?
- [58:22]
C
Okay, so how do we address the problem of economic and political. Yeah, okay, good. So thank you for these questions. So as to the first question, I don't want to assume that governments fail. I merely want to make the case that given the sorts of assumptions that Rawls makes about people's motivations, he should assume that they'll fail. So if he thinks people will free ride under certain sorts of conditions and governments happen to instantiate those sorts of conditions, then by his own lights, he should think governments will fail. Unless he can give us a good argument for thinking that people will have different motivations in the different contexts. So maybe one thing I should have said in the talk is really, ultimately what I'm after here is just a kind of institutional agnosticism. So it could be the case that Rawls is like, right about all of his prescriptions. Like, maybe we really do want a really powerful regulatory and redistributive state. But we can't know that a priori just by doing ideal theory. What we have to do is say, let's look at the real world and see how these things play out. Rawls wants to try to rule out something like classical liberalism, free market libertarianism, just at the level of the philosopher's armchair. And I would say, no, no, no, you can't do that because in order to do that, he has to do this kind of, kind of inconsistency that I talk about. So I wouldn't want to assume that governments do fail. I just want to say by the lights of his own analysis, he should assume that they will in terms of the, you know, low engagement. I don't know. I do think there is this thought that, you know, if the government isn't truly representing your interests, then you will become less engaged. You might just feel like it's futile, why bother? Although I suspect the problem is deeper than that. And this sort of goes to the other question about the cost of voting being lower than the cost of other contributions. So, I mean, the basic reason why I think people. It's not just that people don't vote. That's not really the issue in my mind. The issue is that when people vote, they don't research their vote and they certainly don't try to debias their vote. And the reason why they don't is just because it's not rational for them to do so. For the same reason why Rawls thinks it's not rational to, you know, buy an electric car or something like that. It's because it's basically all costs and no benefit. So you could spend, you know, hours, days researching different policies, researching different politicians and saying, okay, this person supports the policies that are the best for the country. And here again, information acquisition is actually cheaper than trying to process that information in an unbiased way. So in other words, if you're reading the newspaper and you're acquiring all this information about what's going on in the country and you just say, oh, yeah, well, look, all of this tells me that my side is good and the other side is bad. I knew it all along then. The information actually hasn't improved your epistemology, systemic condition. You've just used it to confirm your biases. So, like, if you really want to vote well, you have to acquire information and try to process it in a way that's impartial and unbiased. And virtually no one does that. And this is one. So I sort of mentioned that we do have relevant empirical work on voter behavior. And this, this is just borne out like this is what in fact voters actually do. So most voters are in fact, really uninformed. And voters who do acquire information just tend to use it to confirm their partisan biases. And the reason why, though, that we do that is in some sense it's. So if you're familiar with the term rational ignorance or rational irrationality, the idea is that it is rational to be ignorant about certain things when the cost of acquiring information about those things exceeds the benefit. And that's true about political information in most contexts. And so I would say it's fundamentally just a problem with the insignificance of a single vote. And so as to the point about the cost, yeah, so I think that's right, that voting is lower cost than contributing to other sorts of public goods. But we have to remember that the cost of a vote is not simply the pressing of the button. The real cost of. So it's not enough to cast a vote. If we want good government, we need good votes, by which I mean informed votes, votes that are genuinely aimed at the public good. And so you sort of, again, have to be unbiased in a sufficient way. And to achieve that is pretty costly. So, and here again, this is one of those things where it just does turn out that people aren't willing to pay the costs of, of casting a good vote, like the vast majority of voters, like in the US I'm sure the data is similar here, but it's like, you know, only 30% of citizens, like, know, like, I don't know who the vice president is. Not something like. But they're like, just crazy, crazy stuff. Like, voters just really have very low information. And again, it's not because they're irrational, it's because they are rational. It's because there's really no benefit to politics paying the cost of acquiring this information. And when you do ask highly informed voters about their opinions on these issues and politicians, it turns out they're pretty much just hardline partisans. And so it just does turn out to be the case that people aren't willing to contribute to the public good of good democratic governance. And then as to this question about the problem of concentrating economic power and political power in the same hands, I mean, one response. This is Robert Nozick's response, which I think is pretty compelling. He just says, look, the reason why people want to capture state power is because state power is valuable. So when you look at what people are actually trying to acquire in the political process, it's control of the redistributed functions of the state and the regulatory functions of the state. And Nozick, who was a libertarian, said, look, my state doesn't have either of those. And so it's just much less attractive as a target. And so I think that is a pretty compelling argument, which is, look, if you really scale back the state, scale back what it can do, you just have far less incentive to try to capture it.
- [64:59]
D
More questions. So I'm going to move to this side. So two hands, I see first. And then keep them up. And then the gentleman on the edge of the aisle here, the centre bar. Okay, so 1, 2, 3. No, 3. And then I'll come further.
- [65:16]
C
Hi, my name is Zachary, LSE alumni. My question is twofold. One is to do with the notion of what's conceivable is, or could be possible if you could just double down on that and you know, perhaps if this is ultimately what ideal theory rests on as an assumption, if we were to do away with this assumption, does the whole argument for ideal theory falter? And the question number two is, you know, say we have complete information, no asymmetry, we know exactly what the vote count is. So it's 50, 50 for two candidates. And I decide to step in only then to. To tip the scale for one side or the other. Is that reason enough for me to vote or not? Yes, but I can say more. I can say more behind.
- [66:07]
A
Hi, my name is Jonathan from the MPA program. I was thinking about the core of your argument, the catch 22 problem. And I feel like this could not only be applied to roles theory, but basically could be applied like, could be a counter argument for everything that is based on ideal theory. So like, do you agree A and B, do you think, as a matter of fact, there is no benefit from anything that is developed based on ideal theory.
- [66:46]
D
So question please.
- [66:48]
A
Hi, Damien Mercier, independent economist. I just wanted to make a comment rather than a question on to defend the book Catch 22, because it actually contains the best, I think almost the best example of irony that I can think of really. So Milo is his character who is this just spot on amazing, crazy guy who steals everything and sells it to the enemy and nobody realizes that he's selling it to the enemy. And then Yasarian, who is the lead character, the whole Katarina, I won't go through the whole Katarina too. But they don't want to fly because half the people who fly die. Right? So Yasiran's in the plane and the plane is shot down and the plane is descending and he lunges for the parachute bag. In the parachute bag is a share certificate for Milo Enterprises. And that alone makes it a world class book. That's a profound definition of irony, by the way. In terms of roles, irony is a perfectly valid response to state failure.
- [68:11]
C
Okay, so I appreciate that defense. Like I said, I was forced to read it in high school. I was probably resentful. So maybe I need to revisit it. Maybe I need to. I'm very low brow. So the conceivable versus possible question. So I do think that there. So I mean, one move I think that Rawls wants to make in defense of an ideal theory, is he saying like, what I'm describing is humanly possible. And so here again, it's not like saying, flap your arms and fly to the U.S. it's like, no like, we can easily imagine human beings who always play fair, they don't cheat and so on. And like, I, I think I agree with him on that. So it, it's not just like, we can conceive of this. Like, I think it is, like, possible that we could live this way. And, and, and so what I'm about to say, I think will apply to, to the other question about, like, is there any benefit to ideal theory? I mean, maybe. So maybe you think, and this is like kind of what GA Cohen does is he's, he's sort of like, I'm just gonna, like, I am gonna theorize for a fully just society. And this kind of looks like a sort of anarchistic, like, commune sort of deal. Like, all right. And like, and maybe that's the idea we have to strive for. I would not want to live on an anarchist commune. Sounds horrible. But if CH wants to do it, like, that's fine. Now I've lost my train of thought. But yeah, so it's like, I do think there's something to be said for like, we want to have an ideal because we need to have a target. And my point would merely be, let's be aware, if you're consistently applying the idealizing assumption, it is going to look more like this kind of anarchist thing where there is no state. And like, maybe we should strive towards that, but it's not going to look like Rawls is kind of social democracy on the tiebreaker case. Yeah. So I think the issue with the irrationality, the practical rationality of voting is precisely because, and this depends on each particular election. But for something like a presidential election in the United States, your vote has no chance of making a difference. You can persuade me that it might be rational to vote in certain swing states in the U.S. so I think in the last, like, I forget the details here, but like, for certain states, your chance of flipping the outcome of the election might have been like 1 in 10 million. You're like, oh, that's not great. But like, it's, you know, a big, big deal if you can flip it. And so maybe 1 in 10 million is a decent enough chance to make it rational vote. So like, if you're in a swing state or in certain elections, maybe I'll, maybe I'll let you off the hook if you decide to vote. But you know, in like, Washington D.C. it was like, it was something like 1 in 225 trillion. This is like, don't vote in Washington D.C. it's irrational. But so certainly in the case where you're gonna make or break a tie. You should, you should definitely vote. Oh, and on the point. Yeah. That the catch 22 maybe applies to all ideal theories. I think that's right. I think that's right. Or at least all ideal, you might call them ideal statist theories. So you do have people like Cohen who are essentially ideal ants, anarchists, where they say, yeah, in an ideal world, the state would wither away. We would be anarchist. All right, he's off the hook. But for people like Rawls and there are a few others who think, no, no, no, there will still be a state in ideal conditions, I think the catch 22 is going to get them as well.
- [71:50]
D
Thank you, Brian. You're going to give me a question or two from the, from those who are watching online.
- [72:01]
B
All right, we have a question from a member of the online audience, his name is Roland. He says, would you agree that we need more market based allocation in some areas? Example and regulation prevents competition, whereas we need more government intervention in other areas, even when the state is not perfect example on climate change.
- [72:25]
C
Jay, just go ahead with the answer.
- [72:28]
D
I'll take some more.
- [72:29]
A
Okay.
- [72:31]
D
Gentleman, glasses.
- [72:36]
A
I'm Jasper, I'm doing the MSc in Political Theory here at LSE and I think you posed a very powerful criticism of ideal theory. And Indeed you spent 50 minutes on it, but then you spent only 50 minutes on your counter proposal. And I think you made yourself, your life very easy there because I think how can we compare two different options without having a common criterion of comparison that is an ideal theory. What does it mean to have a just society? For example, the difference principle, just taking that at face value, you could say, yeah, the market system, the free market system is just the best to serve the worst off. And in this sense we need the difference principle. We need the ideal theory to make this precise statement. Hi, I'm Shankar, I'm from, I'm in year 12 school called Wilson's in Wallington. So my question kind of relates to the Steph Curry analogy used at the end about market failure and government failure. So you have a player like Steph who can shoot threes at a very high rate, but maybe that's how do you weigh up, for example, that if you cut Steph Curry you can get a different player who can give you something different, like Magic Johnson who can give you more assists. So how do you, how do we weigh up different options and whether to replace an institution if, although it's going to lead to a detriment in one impact, we're Going to get improvements in another.
- [74:06]
D
I think we'll have time for some more questions.
- [74:08]
C
Okay, great. So as to the question, you know, do we maybe want market allocations in some contexts and government and others? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that's, that's got to be right. But I, so I think it gets more complicated than again, somebody like Rawls makes it. So I will say I think there is an extraordinarily strong presumption that the market should provide private goods. So, and even essential private goods. So the market should provide food, the market should provide clothes, the market should provide shelter. And so like this idea, this is like a debate now that's occurring in the US Is like, oh, should we have the government run grocery stores? It's like, no, we should not have government run grocery stores. We should have, you know, private supermarkets. But if there are issues with access. So if you say, you know, there might be people who aren't able to afford groceries, you address that with income, income supplementation. So food stamps, cash, whatever. But I want market allocations for private goods. And so the case for government allocation gets a lot stronger when we're talking about public goods. But so the. I just think we need to be cautious. So Rawls goes from. Markets have trouble. And it's not just Rawls. Like most people who think about public goods think about them in this way. They say, look, market has trouble providing public goods. Like, there's this free rider problem, problem, and therefore the state should step in and like, fix the market failure, provide the public good itself and so on. I say maybe like, that's a, like there's much more reason to think that we want the government involved with public goods than private goods. We have to be aware of the issues that I talk about in the talk, which is if you think that people in their roles as government, government officials, voters and so on are the same people as they are in their roles as, you know, shoppers and workers and things like that, then it just becomes less clear how the government will efficiently or how it can efficiently provide public goods. And here again, I think if you actually look at government attempts to provide public goods, they don't have a great track record. So like, we've known about global warming for, I don't know, 60 years, 80 years, who knows, a long time. And like, we've known that something like a carbon tax would be pretty good. And like, what's our product? Like, our progress has been very low on this. And so here again, it's like, why it's like you can tell all sorts of stories about how self interested, short sighted politicians are not motivated to do this. And so like, as a matter of principle, I'm totally fine with the government providing public goods. I would just say let's be a little bit skeptical about how well it will actually do it given the actual incentives and information of human beings in government. Yeah. So then there's this question, well, like we need a standard of comparison to judge different regimes and how do we do this if we don't do ideal theory? My answer to that would be, and Rawls draws this distinction as well. He draws a distinction between basic principles of justice. I forget what he calls the other like principles of institutional design, something like that. And so I'm sort of kind of with Rawls on this idea that we need to do a little bit of idealizing when we're thinking about basic principles of justice. So just to get. So the difference principle, I don't know, you guys know the difference principle. He's basically is, you know, one of his principles of economics, justice, it says, you know, justice requires that we, you know, maximize the material well being of the poorest members of society. That's a principle of justice. That is a standard for judging the justness of an economic regime. But then there's the second question, what sort of institutional regime will in fact maximize the material welfare of the poorest members of society? And Rawls, he's doing this ideal theory thing. He's like, oh, it's my welfare state capitalism, or you know, maybe it's socialism or something like that. And he's doing all this institutional work a priori. He's doing it in ideal theory. And what I want to say is. No, no, no, if you think that that's the correct or a correct principle of justice, that's fine. But then at the level of philosophy, you should just be agnostic about what economic institutions actually do best by that standard. So it could be the case, as an empirical matter of fact that something approximating free market capitalism does the best by the poorest members of society over the course of their lifetime. Maybe, maybe not. But that's an empirical question. And so the way we judge the justice of regimes is by reference to the basic principles of justice. And we can do some idealizing stuff there, but, but when we're looking at institutions themselves, we should just do non ideal theory is my view. And then. Yeah, so maybe I'm misunderstanding the Steph Curry question. So. Right. We evaluate players based on things other than I'm not sure who Asked that. Oh yeah, we evaluate players based on statistics other than mere three point shooting. And so it could turn out that Steph Curry is worse, all things considered than his replacement. I think that's, that's fair capture.
- [79:27]
A
So what I was kind of trying to get as you can have a player like Steph Curry who's great at three pointing but at three points. But is it not, Is it. How do you like weigh up? For example, his potential replacement is just a lot better at other things, whereas it's just that one particular thing that he's not good at. And that's the same kind of with institutions. Maybe there's one thing the institution is really good at, but you can replace it with something that can cover all the other bases that it does that this institution doesn't.
- [79:53]
C
Yeah, good. So I don't think I have a particularly well thought answer to that except to say, I think it's going to depend on the specifics of your theory of justice. So if you're a Rawlsian, you've got like sort of civil liberty stuff going on, you got economic justice going on and like, you know, Rawls says, you know, their priorities between these certain things. And so like you're gonna have to. So like, you know, if a society does better by, you know, this principle, but worse by this principle, I would just say for the purpose, for like my purposes of this talk, I would just be agnostic about that and say it's, it really is going to depend on the particulars of your theory. So you could just be a pure utilitarian and say there is just kind of one measure. And so it's like, maybe not easy but in some sense like straightforward to think about how one society compares to the other. But once you start having multiple principles involved, it's going to get complicated.
- [80:53]
D
Excellent. Right, one, two, three. So I've got. You still have a question? Yeah, let's take three more.
- [81:03]
A
My name's Anthony. I'm a student from the University of Greenwich studying criminology. I just wondered really in terms of politics, is when we look at governments offering consistent failure across different areas of public services, wouldn't it be better to have a kind of increase in the criminal code and actually make it more beneficial to people in positions of power and influence to then not, you know, offer up such failure that they do.
- [81:38]
D
Thank you.
- [81:39]
C
So what is that?
- [81:43]
D
Using the criminal code to change the balance of ac.
- [81:50]
B
Hi, my name is Tina.
- [81:51]
E
I'm a master student at lse. My question is around your kind of.
- [81:58]
B
Proposal for choosing public policy, going with.
- [82:01]
E
The least available option based on what, sorry? Judging policy by the standard of whether.
- [82:07]
B
It'S better than the closest realistic available option. What I was hoping you could expand on is where is the space for.
- [82:14]
E
Innovating and imagining a better future in.
- [82:18]
B
That particular approach, the danger I see is perhaps that it would keep perpetuating similar policies because it's only looking at things that have already happened and are available. And by doing that, it might perpetuate structural injustice.
- [82:37]
C
Okay.
- [82:42]
A
Thank you. I'm Tice. I am an MPA student at plc. If I can understand it correctly, the Rawls argument could still possibly hold if there is a fundamental difference between the spheres of the market and the state. And I think we've alluded already in some ways, in some ways that they are different. For example, we are not as rational because it's like good government is a public good, and often if we vote, it's due to identity reasons and politics is just like a form of organized combat. Could you then say that. Yeah, that there is an argument for Rawls's ideas if you say that certain areas are just better solved by organized combat than in a market? Because what you're assuming with the behavioral symmetry is that individually, on all levels, we are selfish, but the institutions can just be different. And then on a state level, for, for example, what you could design is good checks and balances where there is, for example, like a judge and a parliamentarian are both very talented politicians, very talented people, but they are put up against each other in a way that hopefully just serves the common interest.
- [84:05]
D
Okay, that was rather a long question, so I'm afraid I'm going to have to apologize to the two at the back. And we'll stop there. Thank you.
- [84:13]
C
Yeah, thanks for these. So if I'm understanding. So, like, could we use the criminal code to sort of reconfigure incentives for the. Yeah, so I'm open to that for sure. Although my concern here is whether or not the reconfigurations of the criminal code would themselves be done with an eye towards the interests of those doing the reconciliation configuring. And so here again, I wouldn't rule that out, but this would be a reason for caution. And here again. So I guess it sort of maybe comes off that I have a very cynical take on human nature, which I don't really mean to be the case. It is more about consistency. So it's like, if we're very cynical about how humans behave in the market, in civil society, then we should Be cynical about how they behave in legal context, governmental context. But if we're like human beings, like, we're pretty good, okay. But then I think that's less. That gives us reason to be less skeptical of how they'll behave in the market, in civil society. So this question about where's the space for innovating, that's a really interesting question. My short answer would be that I think that gives us reason to be very careful when we're trying to determine what the least bad option actually is. So I would say, like, you know, we should try to choose the least bad option, but we might be sort of overly conservative in what we think the least bad option actually is. And so we might rule out feasible alternatives that would, in fact, be better. So how we avoid that kind of tendency towards the status quo, I'm not totally sure because I do think this is, like, there's, you know, interesting work on, like, status quo bias and things like this. And so we might decide to forego better alternatives just because we're irrational in a certain way, not because they're not actually better. So I would say that that's a worry we should have when we're trying to institutionalize the choose the least bad option principle rather than the principle itself. Yeah. So. And then the. So I think you're right. I think if there is, in fact, an asymmetry, Rawls can kind of wiggle out of it. But so. But the way he would have to show that there's an asymmetry is not just by stipulating it the way he does. He would actually have to say, all right, we're doing the dirty work, and we're actually looking at the way people behave in the market in politics. It just turns out people behave differently in politics rather than the market. And maybe they do, and in some cases, maybe they do. But then he's already leaving ideal theory behind. He's coming back down to earth and he doing non ideal theory. And it might just turn out that, yeah, there is. That behavioral asymmetry holds in this case, and he can proceed from there. I will say I do, like, talk about the case of voting. I do think we know enough about voting to know that people do free ride in elections. I think that's right. But like you said, maybe we can kind of like constrain some of the bad stuff in politics by structuring the incentives. And like, this is like sort of a. I don't know, like a Madisonian thing, I guess. I don't know where you get you know, factions fighting factions like that. That sounds pretty good. But I think what's interesting about that too is, I mean that is a very like, that's a non ideal way of doing politics is you're like, let's not idealize, let's really figure out how people operate and try to constrain those behaviors for the public good. I like that. I mean that is sort of like the Smithian view of markets too, where it's like we have finite amounts of altruism, so how do we get selfishness to work for us? And let's make institutions do the work really, rather than rely on people being more benevolent or generous than they actually are.
- [87:59]
D
Thank you very much. And as we're coming up, up to the end, I think it's time to thank you all very much for coming to this event and hope you all have a safe trip home. And those who've joined us online and have engaged with us through this podcast and then finally join me in thanking Christopher who for his lecture and presentation and for the careful way in which he's dealt with all of these broad range of questions. Thank you very much.
- [88:46]
C
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events.
- [88:49]
A
Podcast on your favourite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit lse.ac.ukevents to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.