On the Economic View of Equality

Abstract

Economics is known for its basic reservation against equality as rewarding desired behaviour appears necessary for system workability: Incentives pin down responsibilities and protect donors from deprivation. Extrinsic motivation for market performance requires inequality, whereas even competition can produce strongly uneven distribution and thus disadvantage society: a dilemma. A dogmatic hindsight onto economic and adjacent schools of thought will highlight quite divergent rationales of distribution: a tendency towards equalisation versus an automatism for guaranteeing performance justice, the possibility of getting richer due to the belonging to an economic class, the ostracism of pure income from wealth, the hope for economic growth that brings along more equality without active redistribution, governmental redistribution as a constraint on freedom versus a creation of freedom in the sense of equal rights, empowerment and risk minimisation. Equality does not fit into our conception of economy and society; rather, the distributive process is the aim. The economists’ task is to scrutinise empirically the social economic consequences of a distribution and incorporate findings into manifest system theories. Opportunistic politics disregards equal chances that mainstream economics assumes more or less tacitly but should investigate more thoroughly. Substantial policy change would require an essentially different culture of public communication and strategic procedure.