Joseph Heath is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Trudeau Foundation, Heath is the author of several books, including Enlightenment 2.0 and The Machinery of Government.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Joseph Heath discuss the death of Western Marxism, approaches to equality, and how to create an equal society.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: One of the things I love about Substack is that sometimes the posts that do the best and go the most viral are the ones that may sound a little obscure to the uninitiated. Your most viral Substack piece is called John Rawls and the Death of Western Marxism, and it tells a broader story that you have been occupied with in your academic work and public writing for a long time. Why is it that the smartest academics who set out to vindicate Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s all ended up as boring old squishy liberal egalitarians? Why is it that this attempt to resuscitate Marxism didn’t work, and what does that tell us about people—from the likely next mayor of New York to many young writers and intellectuals around the world—who are trying to reclaim socialism today?
Joseph Heath: Yeah, actually, that Substack post was—I feel bad about this—a recycled undergraduate lecture. Whenever I was assigning Rawls to students, I found him a very unexciting writer. I was looking for a way to motivate them to get interested in it, so I came up with this line: this is the book that killed Western Marxism. On the one hand, it was a way of motivating students, but on the other, there is an element of truth to it.
The broader picture it came out of was that I’m now in my thirtieth year teaching philosophy as a university professor. When I started out, the twentieth century and Rawls were considered contemporary philosophy, and the history of philosophy ended in the nineteenth century. I remember at the end of the twentieth century, all the textbook publishers had to start revising their history textbooks to make the twentieth century part of history.
I was asked to referee or advise a number of these projects and say, okay, what do we say about the twentieth century? I also started revising my courses and teaching the twentieth century as history. Then I realized there is an incredible dilemma about teaching it—you have to explain what happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europeans went crazy and liberalism practically died out. Then there is this tale of its triumphant return in the 1970s with Rawls and American liberalism.
Once you start treating this historically, you realize you need about a twenty-minute explanation of what happened in the twentieth century for students who have no living memory of it. It’s a real challenge. So part of it was a story about how liberalism also adapted in the twentieth century. It’s not just that Marxism died out and was absorbed by liberalism; it’s that late twentieth-century liberalism became a far more robust doctrine, particularly because it had something to say about economic questions in a way that nineteenth-century liberalism really didn’t.
Mounk: Well, look, I love the article, and now I feel like I would love to take your undergraduate lecture. So walk us through this. Marxism emerges in the nineteenth century in response to the many depredations of capitalism that existed at the time—widespread immiseration of workers, deep economic crises, frequent bank runs. Marx concludes not only that this system exploits workers but also, perhaps more importantly, that it is destined to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Why is it that this set of ideas, as well as ideas on the far right—fascism and so on—put such pressure on liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century? Why is it that it then runs out of steam?
Heath: I used to think the nineteenth century was boring, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how much more interesting it was. There is a very clear sense in which our contemporary political thought is much closer to the eighteenth century. When students are assigned eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought—Rousseau, Kant, and so forth—it just seems a natural way to think about the world, whereas a lot of nineteenth-century theory feels quite foreign.
Mounk: That’s just because nineteenth-century thinkers were dominated by Germans, and Hegel and others were not particularly readable writers.
Heath: I mean, Kant was important in the eighteenth century, but there’s something natural about the way Kant approaches questions, I think, in a way that is not true of Hegel. The important thing to realize is that in the nineteenth century, liberalism was very much associated with doctrines of the social contract, and the social contract was really just a theory about the state. In particular, the egalitarianism and conception of rights that were so important to liberalism were really about political rights and about one’s status as a citizen in the state.
There was also the famous distinction between public and private, where in the domain of the private, one could do whatever one wanted. It is important to recognize, though, that the entire economy was classified as private. As a result, liberalism not only had nothing to say about the private, it actually insulated the private from any kind of political interference.
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That was fine in the eighteenth century, where basically everyone was a peasant or an aristocrat. There simply wasn’t an enormous private economy. But liberalism in part liberated the economic forces that generated the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, the economy started to become a really big deal. When dispossessed peasants began living in shanty towns next to factories, and the factory owner said, oh, you’re all laid off, there were suddenly hundreds of working-class people with no work and no way to get food. That turned into a riot. That was clearly a social problem, and there needed to be some way of addressing it. Liberalism, in its eighteenth-century form, didn’t have anything useful to say about it other than protecting property rights.
So people started shopping around for a theory that would tell them what to do about the radical economic transformations taking place. In the English tradition, the most powerful response was utilitarianism, which was a kind of comprehensive moral theory—but it wasn’t a liberal theory. It said that we should try to produce the most good we can. A lot of nineteenth-century socialism was actually a kind of applied utilitarianism, but that wasn’t part of the liberal tradition.
Again and again, liberals went from being the revolutionary class, to put it in Marxian terms, in the eighteenth century, to being a profoundly reactionary class in the nineteenth century. They kept insisting that collective power couldn’t be used to address the issues generated by capitalism. So you wound up with a reformist version of socialism, increasingly radical versions with Marxism, and a kind of proto-fascist reaction trying to defend the local community against capitalism.
All of those were completely outside the space of liberalism. To jump to the end of the story, the thing I say about Rawls—the big innovation in late twentieth-century liberalism—is that he articulates the social contract idea in a way that is much more abstract, allowing it to be applied to economic questions as well as political ones.
Mounk: Let’s backtrack here for a moment, because liberalism as it’s formulated in the nineteenth century starts to have these real problems where it’s basically saying, all right, all of these workers are immiserated. We keep having these bank runs. There are all of these problems. But those are all parts of a private sphere. There are these very extensive liberties that people should have in that private sphere. There’s really nothing we can do about that. We just have to grit our teeth from there.
So you have a rise of these alternative theories which try to conceptualize this in another way, the most famous and most influential of which turns out to be Marxism. That motivates, in some ways, the Bolshevik Revolution. It becomes a huge political force in the first half of the twentieth century. That itself starts to have some serious problems. One of the concrete problems is that it keeps saying that capitalism will collapse, but capitalism does not look like it is collapsing. The kind of historical predictions which Marx makes turn out not to be true.
There are all kinds of writers within Marxism that try to explain that away, like Antonio Gramsci, who says it is because the bourgeoisie somehow manages to maintain cultural hegemony and that is why workers do not acquire the kind of class consciousness they need in order to carry out all of these revolutions and so on. There is an immanent attempt within Marxism to try and explain this. There is also this group of people who show up in the 1960s, particularly within the field of philosophy, people like G. A. Cohen, Philippe Van Parijs, and others, who are saying, let’s rescue this tradition. Let’s look at how we can empty Marxism of the things where it has gone wrong, the things where it made the wrong predictions, and make it a really philosophically coherent idea that can then ground our politics.
Tell us a little bit about that attempt, whose intellectual spirit, I think, is quite nicely encapsulated by its name of “no-bullshit Marxism.”
Heath: Well, it is sometimes said that if Marx were to come back from the dead today, he would not be a Marxist. The reason is that when he was working at the time, he was drawing upon the most sophisticated economic theories that were out there and then giving his own particular sort of take on them. Paul Samuelson once described Marx as a “minor Ricardian.”
The crucial thing was that he was a Ricardian because Ricardo’s work at the time was the most sophisticated economics. So a lot of the impetus for the movement of analytical Marxism that you were describing in the late 60s and 70s was just to update Marx’s ideas. Imagine that Marx comes back to life and wants to pick up where he left off. The first thing that he would do is read the last hundred years of economic science and theory in order to see what the most up-to-date views were.
At the time he was writing, for example, the labor theory of value was the standard view among economists. Since that time, that view has become universally rejected among economists. So if one gives Marx credit for his intelligence, if he were to come back to life today, he would also abandon the labor theory of value.
So then the question is, Marx had certain key concepts like exploitation, which, the way he defined it, was deeply wedded to the labor theory of value. The question is whether, if you get rid of the labor theory of value, you could cleverly reconstruct the concept of exploitation using modern economic theory. Intuitively, it is not crazy to think you might be able to do that.
Mounk: The labor theory of value sounds like a very complicated thing. The underlying intuition is a relatively straightforward one, which is that I work really hard at my minimum-wage job. I make a real economic contribution by doing that. I can barely pay my rent, and yet here is the owner of the McDonald’s franchise or the owner of Walmart making huge amounts of money.
What seems to be going on here is that some of the value of the work that I’m doing is being taken away from me. I’m being exploited in order to generate these huge profits. That is fundamentally what is unfair about the capitalist system. That is an idea that continues to have a lot of straightforward intuitiveness. When I tell that story, it does not sound crazy. It sounds kind of reasonable.
So why is it that these people who believe in that idea, who want to rescue Marxism, who see themselves as part of this political tradition, end up concluding that this theory does not really make sense, that you cannot really make that hold up logically?
Heath: The way you told the story just now is the standard way it gets told, but it is important to recognize that it blends together two somewhat different moral concerns. It is important to the way you described it, for example, that the owner is making huge profits, not eking out a tiny little profit based on having a huge amount at risk or something like that. In the background, clearly, there is a concern about economic inequality.
Marx, in the nineteenth century, was writing in a period of growing skepticism about morality. It is also important to recognize that the nineteenth century was the first period in which one could be openly and avowedly an atheist and not immediately lose one’s livelihood or job. Marx was writing in a period of growing atheism. A lot of people thought of religion and morality as so deeply intertwined that both were going to fade away.
Marx was extremely reluctant to rest his critique on moral objections to capitalism. That was his famous complaint about the utilitarians and the utopian socialists—that they were naive moralists. Instead of complaining about inequality, he registered a much more technical objection to capitalism, and that was his concept of exploitation. That concept was that you have a kind of natural entitlement to the fruits of your labor, and if someone is taking it away from you, then you are exploited.
If you look at the world around you, typically people who are exploited are also poor, so the inequality objection lines up with the exploitation objection. You did not really have to be super clear about which one was the basis of your concern. Over the course of the twentieth century, one of the contributions of the analytical Marxists was to be more careful about these things, but also to produce models showing how you could pull the two apart. You could have a situation in which people were being exploited but there was no inequality, or situations where there was inequality but no exploitation. That really pressed the issue.
Mounk: One of the things that is intuitive about what you’re saying right now is that when you look at where labor unions have recently been thriving, they are often in upper-middle-class professions. The places where labor unions are now quite strong are often universities in the United States, journalism, even magazines, and so on. Writers, actors, and Hollywood directors in Hollywood have really strong unions.
Those might be places where there may still be inequality. All of these people may still have less money than the president of the university or the owner of a Hollywood studio, but they are certainly upper-middle-class. Most of them are making well more than the average citizen. So we start to see how these things come apart a little bit, and how perhaps what motivates people is this sense of exploitation, not the sense that they are somehow very poor or immiserated—though some of them shamefully claim that they are deeply immiserated when they really are not.
But give us some examples of how these two things can come apart analytically, in a way that helps motivate this concern.
Heath: The most famous example in philosophy is a sort of made-up story, which is Robert Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain” argument. This was part of a spectacular debate in the 1970s between Rawls and Nozick. Nozick’s example is that you imagine Wilt Chamberlain, the great basketball star, and the scandal was that Will Chamberlain wakes up one morning and decides that he is only interested in playing basketball if there is a surcharge added to the ticket price of everyone who comes to a game, a twenty-five-cent surcharge.
Nozick imagines that as a consequence of this twenty-five-cent surcharge, Wilt Chamberlain earns this eye-popping salary of, I think, $200,000 a year or something like that, which was considered at the time to be an extraordinary affront to economic equality. The point of the example was to show that you could have individuals who have these extraordinary natural talents, and if they go out and say, okay, well, this is how much I want to be paid for my talent, and other people are willing to pay it, what is the objection to it?
Nozick was making a kind of libertarian point. What he was trying to show was that this is going to generate a lot of inequality. But it concerned the Marxists because all that Wilt Chamberlain was doing here was getting paid for the exercise of his talents. If you were to start taking away the surcharge or taxing it or doing something like that, that looks like exploitation because you are not giving him the full fruits of his basketball-playing abilities.
That was the example that troubled a lot of philosophers—a case where giving people the full fruits of their labor produces massive amounts of inequality. It generated a lot of concern about what to say then about naturally-talented people and so forth.
Mounk: Nozick, when he is writing this argument, is not really talking about Marx, if I recall rightly. He may mention Marx somewhere in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, but he is arguing against a broader egalitarian tradition. Particularly, he is arguing against what he calls “patterned conceptions of justice” or “a certain kind of pattern of equality.”
Perhaps the pattern is one-to-one, we should all have exactly the same, or perhaps it is to say, well, it is fine for a CEO to earn twice as much money or three times as much money as a normal worker, but not more than that. Whatever the nature of a pattern is, Nozick says, the free function of a market is going to upset that pattern the moment you have achieved it, then let free exchange run again.
So even if, at the starting point, Wilt Chamberlain and the stadium attendant and the people in the stadium who are watching him all have the same amount of money, if you allow him to say, give me the twenty-five-cent surcharge, and there are thirty thousand people in the stadium and he plays once a week, within a few months he is going to be vastly richer than anybody else in the society. Where is the injustice? This is all the downstream result of free exchange. What can our objection be?
What you are saying is that even though he is not directly criticizing or addressing the Marxists here, it ends up being a problem for Marxists as well because they actually are invested not just in the idea of a pattern of equality. They are not just saying, we want a society where everybody earns the same, or earns at most one and a half times what the worker earns. The way that what has been at the core of the theory has always been something else, namely, you should keep the just fruits of your labor.
The problem of capitalism is that somebody is taking what justly should be the fruits of your labor and taking it away. So you can slightly repurpose this example, you do not have to change the example, you sort of change the rhetorical import of it and say, hang on a second. Another way of thinking about this is not just that Wilt Chamberlain is upsetting this preference for patterned distribution, he is upsetting all he wants, which is to keep the fruits of his labor, to not be exploited. To get equality, to preserve equality, we have to exploit him.
Heath: Marxism was a sort of collateral damage of the Wilt Chamberlain argument. That is, it is exactly as you say, the target was a Rawlsian pattern conception of justice, and the slogan was “liberty upsets patterns.” The collateral damage was due to the fact that libertarianism of the Nozickian variety starts with a self-ownership postulate that says, first of all, you have a natural right to your own body, and then, by extension, you have a natural right to the fruits of your labor.
The “Wilt Chamberlain” argument showed that if that is your conception of justice, you cannot really be concerned about economic inequality. So you can imagine the Marxists on the side saying, oh, wait a minute. That is the same postulate that we are starting with. Because there is a sense in which Marx was really very much like Locke. That is, he had a very similar view about self-ownership and about property, and exploitation was a kind of offense to self-ownership, which is that I worked hard, I produced all this stuff, and who is the capitalist coming and taking it away from me?
The Marxists then began to think, if we actually are heavily committed to this view about labor and self-ownership, then it seems like we cannot care about economic inequality. But we do care about economic inequality. So how do we reconcile those two positions?
Mounk: You say that one great analytical philosopher of the twentieth century, Jerry Cohen, who also was a wonderful man and a great wit—I had the luck as a graduate student to see his one-hour philosophical stand-up special performed for a group of us geeky philosophy and political theory graduate students—spends ten years trying to deal with this. He realizes that his tradition of “no-bullshit Marxism” is about to be collateral damage of Nozick’s example.
He is trying to figure out a response to Nozick from within the Marxist tradition, some way of rescuing this idea of exploitation as the key problem with capitalism that withstands the example of Nozick and other kinds of more systemic examples like those produced by John Roemer that go in the same direction. How is he trying to respond to this, and why does he ultimately decide, this is the wrong way to respond; I can respond much better by jumping ship, as it were, to the liberal tradition?
Heath: By the way, I do not want to hang too much on this one “Wilt Chamberlain” argument because, while it was important and exciting and it is the more accessible one, someone like John Roemer produced a set of more formal models that illustrate some of the same tensions in a much more rigorous way. So, on the one hand, there is this Wilt Chamberlain thing, but it is not like the fate of Western Marxism hinged on it. There was actually a lot of different work being done by people showing the same thing.
Mounk: I hope, by the way, that Wilt Chamberlain was a socialist. That would be a great irony of this whole story, but I assume it is not true.
Heath: I should say that a prominent Canadian philosopher, David Gauthier, also offered a version of it called the Wayne Gretzky argument. So, in Canada, we have debates about Wayne Gretzky. There is a whole tradition there. Wayne Gretzky is most definitely not a socialist.
This gets a little bit into academic esoterica, but among the people who felt that they could respond to the “Wilt Chamberlain” argument and rescue egalitarianism, it generated a submovement called left libertarianism. Some of Cohen’s most talented students became left libertarians. They were, in a sense, like the rump of Western Marxism, because these were the people who wanted to accept the premises of self-ownership and exploitation but then try to show that it does not necessarily produce the inequality that Nozick showed.
Cohen, at one point, decided it would be easier to cut the Gordian knot on that and just say, once you narrow it down and say, look, your whole argument about capitalism is hinging upon this intuition about self-ownership and owning the fruits of your labor, that is not a rock-solid intuition. As people have pointed out for about 150 years, once you start putting together a team of ten people working together in a typical corporate setting where they have computers, an office, and all kinds of support, the concept of my labor is producing this thing that belongs to me becomes very difficult to specify. It is a solid intuition when we are talking about Lockean states of nature, where people are picking apples from a tree and so on, but it is not a rock-solid intuition in a contemporary complex economy.
Mounk: Right. That is the response that, to me—perhaps because I am a product of that tradition to some extent—is much more intuitive. One thing that you can say about the Nozick example is, all right, where does the stadium come from? What kind of background legal structures allow there to be such a thing as an NBA team? What social protections are in place to make sure that people are able to travel to this stadium by car or by public transport? How are they safe enough to be in that stadium and know they are not going to be mugged on the way to the game?
In particular, when you think more systematically about the vast profits of corporations, that requires the legal fiction of a corporation. That requires society to absorb some of the risks of business enterprises so that you can start a company, rack up debts, be unable to pay them back, and not go to debtors’ prison, but be forgiven those debts since they are corporate debts, not personal debts, and go on to found another corporation that then perhaps goes on to be super successful and produce value for society.
Since all of this is reliant on laws and other things that we collectively agree to, we might have very good reason to create incentives. We might want people to be entrepreneurs who can create great value and then also become personally wealthy, since that might be what keeps this wonderfully dynamic enterprise going. But we also are perfectly justified in saying that, as one of the prices of all of these benefits you derive from things like having this corporate structure that insulates you personally from the debt you might incur, you have to pay taxes which then allow us to uphold a welfare state, etc.
Nothing I have just said—unless I have made a mistake—requires arguments about what the proper valuation of labor is or how it is that we restore the rightful fruits of labor to the workers and avoid this kind of exploitation.
Heath: Yeah, those reflections are exactly what are the seductions of the Rawlsian framework in a sense. What Rawls said was that, first of all, you are not going to be able to do a kind of bottom-up theory of justice. You cannot imagine individual entitlements like little Lego bricks that you can then piece together and build up from, because it is way too complicated.
The way to think about justice is to start by talking about the basic structure of society, which is that we have a whole bunch of big institutions. We have the state, the economy, the contract law system, the universities, and so on—a bunch of big institutions. The job of those institutions is to secure what he called “conditions of background justice,” which is to create a by-and-large just background structure that then allows individuals to transact in various ways—to create corporations, to hire labor, to borrow money, etc.
We cannot be popping the lid on every single one of those. Courts do that, of course, but abstractly, when we do political economy, we are not going to be popping the lid on all of those things because they are just far too complicated. So what we need to be in the business of, from the standpoint of political philosophy, is evaluating the basic structure and whether the basic structure does a good enough job at securing conditions of background justice.
What we need is a really abstract theory of justice to tell us what the basic structure should look like. That is the Rawlsian picture. A lot of different ways of looking at things lead you to that picture. I take it that the point you are making about the complexity of all of this is one of the reasons for the attraction of the Rawlsian way of looking at it.
Mounk: That is not a coincidence. I was trying to lead into that. What is it that allows these people who are really invested in being Marxists and making Marxism work to say, you know what, actually the most important things that we wanted from that tradition, we can get out of a liberal egalitarianism? How is it that talking about questions of justice in that broadly Rawlsian framework allows somebody like Jerry Cohen and other people in that tradition to say, you know what, the more philosophically rigorous and the more realistic way to pursue a reasonably egalitarian society is to take on board those liberal assumptions?
In the last instance, that move allows them to become a little more comfortable with the idea of a market economy and some form of capitalism.
Heath: Once you turn to egalitarianism, you wind up being seduced by liberalism, in part because the liberal tradition is the one that historically has offered actual arguments for equality. If you look at the rhetoric of people who call themselves Marxists, most of the time what they seem to be complaining about is inequality and economic inequality. People are offended by inequality.
The first move out of Marxism is to say, okay, I am going to take that to be my central normative concern. I am not so much worried about exploitation; I am going to worry about equality. Jerry Cohen stopped at that point. He decided to be an intuitionist about it, which meant he said, I am not going to try to derive equality. Looking out at the world, you just kind of know that people should be equal or whatever, and I am not going to get into an argument for it. That is where he stopped.
A lot of people feel that you should be able to do a little bit better than that—that if you have somebody who does not care about equality, you should be able to come up with some kind of argument for it. The thing about the liberal tradition is that historically it has an argument. That is what the social contract argument is. The social contract argument says that in the past we used to think that social institutions were divinely ordained or imposed by tradition or whatever. We realized that all of that is indefensible and that there is no single correct way to organize things.
So what is the right way to organize things? It is what we can all agree to. You imagine a situation where we all have to get together and decide what the rules are going to be. The first thing that comes out of that is the requirement that we treat each other equally. If you and I are negotiating over something, I obviously cannot expect you to accept some compromise that I would not be willing to accept myself. There is a kind of symmetry and reciprocity built into coming to an agreement, and that generates a principle of equality.
Lots of people are egalitarian, but it is surprisingly difficult to come up with an argument for equality. When I challenge my students to say why, they get kind of angry, in part because a lot of people who are strongly egalitarian know they do not have a knockdown philosophical argument for equality. It is just something people care about deeply. If you challenge that, it is not as though there are dozens of different arguments for equality that you can pick from. There is actually a paucity of good arguments for equality, and the social contract argument is one of the few powerful ones.
Rawls then also wants to resuscitate that idea. When we think about justice, we have to imagine whether these institutions are ones that all of us could accept without gerrymandering them to benefit ourselves. If we were in this sort of abstract condition, would we agree to it?
That is where the last piece of the puzzle comes in. You start with equality, and you often get drawn toward liberalism because liberalism has a compelling argument for equality.
Mounk: To simplify vastly, one of the conditions here is that since this is a social structure that constrains all of us, it should in some meaningful way be to the benefit of all of us. Rawls then has a particular way of spelling out what that means for a distributive principle, which we do not need to get into deeply here. One interesting thing that comes out of this, and that you have touched on in a different post in your Substack, is that it leads to a very deep and broad discussion about what it is that we want to equalize.
To explain this, in part in response to a meme that many listeners to this podcast may know—it has gone very viral—which shows three people wanting to watch a baseball game. We seem to be keeping with the theme of American sports, though we have now changed from basketball to baseball. They do not have a ticket, and you can ask questions about whether that is an injustice, whether they are unable to buy a ticket, or whether they should be able to watch the game. The meme assumes that it is a moral good for them to be able to watch the game even if they did not have a ticket. They are trying to watch by looking over a fence.
One of them is tall enough that he can watch the game without any help. The second one is stepping on a medium-sized box in order to watch, and the third one, a very short child, is stepping on a tall box so that all three of their heads are roughly at the same level. They are all able to watch over the fence, and that is labeled “equity.” By contrast, “equality” is shown as each of them having a box of the same size, which means the tall person is unnecessarily tall and the other two cannot see. The meme suggests that what justice requires in this kind of situation is to equalize the outcome, and that the right term for that is equity.
One objection you have to this is that “equity” is a confusing term to use here, given what it has historically meant. When the meme was originally produced, it was labeled “equality of opportunity” versus “equality of outcome,” and it was really arguing for equality of outcome. That verbal point aside, what are the problems with that notion of equity, which has become very politically influential in recent years? Why is it that some of these people, including those in the tradition of “no-bullshit Marxism,” look at that and say, no, you are ignoring everything that we have been thinking and arguing about for the last fifty years?
Heath: The business about equity was frustrating to a lot of philosophers, simply because philosophy—political philosophy in particular—had been really dominated by what was called the “equality of what” debate. It ended about eight or nine years ago, but for most of my career, that was the dominant discussion in political philosophy. There was an incredibly intense debate about the correct way of understanding the principle of equality.
In a sense, the philosophers were talking to each other about this, and it was an incredibly intense debate, none of which seemed to have any impact on the broader public discussion. Part of the frustration with the equity idea is that it was disconnected from that long-standing academic debate that had already been going on.
Mounk: Perhaps we need to motivate the “equality of what” debate. When I talk to students, a lot of their instincts, understandably, are that they just want a society that is more equal, where people are treated fairly and equally, and where there are not vast disparities of wealth or treatment. All of that sounds like a good set of goals. But once you start to dig down a little bit, you start to realize that they are often in conflict.
The simplest way they are in conflict is that you might want to think people should be paid roughly the same per hour of work and also that they should be paid the same given the effort they put in. But those two things can come apart. If one person is running back and forth to do something and another person is taking some leisure or simply working less hard, you are going to have some kind of inequality of treatment either way. Either there will be inequality in the wage they receive in the end or inequality in wage rates where one person is effectively paid twice as much as another for each unit of work produced.
The question then immediately becomes, we are egalitarians, we want equality—what do we want equality of? Do we want strict equality of wages no matter the circumstances? Do we want equality of hourly wages, so that if someone chooses to work twenty percent more, they earn twenty percent more? Should we want equality of productivity, so that if one person works much harder than another, they should get more? What exactly is the right thing that we want to equalize?
You can then generalize this question beyond money to other things that might be desirable. Is that right? Why is it that this question becomes fifty years of philosophical enterprise?
Heath: It is actually even broader than that. Amartya Sen is often credited with having started the “equality of what” debate because he made the extraordinarily provocative observation that not only formally egalitarian views, but also basically all positions in political philosophy, are actually egalitarian. He argued that utilitarianism is a type of egalitarianism, libertarianism is also a type of egalitarianism—everyone is an egalitarian; they just disagree about what they are trying to equalize.
That was a really provocative idea. Traditionally, people had thought of egalitarianism as one school of thought in opposition to all these other schools of thought. Sen said, no, everyone is an egalitarian—they just disagree about the what. Part of the reason people liked that was because, as I said earlier, we do not have many high-powered arguments for equality. What Sen suggested is that we do not need a high-powered argument for equality, because actually everyone is an egalitarian. All we need is a really great argument for why our preferred objective of equalization is the correct one.
Mounk: Utilitarians say, roughly, that we should act in such a way—or have social policies designed in such a way—as to maximize the balance of happiness over pain in the world. There are different formulations of this tradition, but that is the most straightforward version. Libertarians, on the other hand, say that there are certain kinds of natural liberties that we have as individuals, and the most important thing about a political system is that it does not interfere with the exercise of those liberties. One of those liberties is economic. So, if Wilt Chamberlain wants to charge twenty-five cents extra on his ticket, who are we to tell him that he cannot do that because we have a strange, irrational preference for a particular patterned distribution of resources?
How is it that these two views, according to Sen, and perhaps according to you, are actually egalitarian?
Heath: Utilitarianism was the case he used. In the eighteenth century, utilitarianism was shockingly egalitarian. Bentham had this famous line that “pushpin is as good as poetry.” The purpose of it was to show that this traditionally more sort of aristocratic sense that there were higher and lower pleasures was incorrect, and that all there is, is pleasure.
Part of that important idea in the utilitarian calculus was that all pleasures are equal and everyone’s pleasures count for the same amount. That was thought to require the famous utilitarian aggregation that maximizing the sum of pleasures is grounded in this Sen-claimed egalitarian intuition that no one’s pleasures are better than anyone else’s. Many people found that eye-opening.
Utilitarianism is not egalitarian in the specific way that it doesn’t care about the distribution of happiness. It only wants to maximize the sum. But it is insistent on the egalitarian premise that everyone’s pleasure counts equally. Similarly, with libertarianism, one can argue that what it’s trying to do is ensure that everybody winds up with exactly the same system of rights.
It simply wants to insist that the basic equality of rights and their exercise not be compromised. That was what started the debate—the provocative claim. It made everybody think that we might be able to treat this as a technical problem: what to equalize. That led people to want to reframe all these traditional debates. For example, there’s this intuitive distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.
That was seen as a question about when you want to be equalizing—at the beginning or at the end. With this new Sen lens, people said it’s not about the time. Time is a consideration outside of egalitarianism. The Sen position says it’s not about time; it’s about what you want to be equalizing. Anything that can be articulated as an outcome can also be articulated as an object of equalization.
For example, a lot of economists are habituated to think about welfare and efficiency and optimization in terms of welfare. Sen said you could also think about equality in terms of welfare. An obvious and attractive—though problematic—position is to say we should try to equalize welfare. That’s going to look a lot like equality of outcome, but don’t talk about outcome; talk about welfare. That was the suggestion.
Mounk: So, helping to tie this back, how is it that all of this debate is important to understand if you want to think intelligently about equality, and why does it seem to undermine the implicit premise of that meme, which argues for equality of outcome or equity, whatever you want to label it?
Heath: The people who were inclined to equalize welfare would be the closest to being a kind of equality of outcome view. They realized almost immediately that to the extent individuals are making choices that give them differential outcomes, you can’t seriously be expecting to equalize that.
An example that came up in the literature would be a monk who swears a vow of asceticism and therefore eats only 1,500 calories a day or something like that—clearly is nutritionally deprived compared to the average American. But we’re not offended at that outcome because that’s an obvious product of a choice that this person has made.
One strategy is to hang on to the welfare idea but modify it and say, well, we’re trying to equalize welfare, but if the welfare you wind up with is a consequence of choices you’ve made, then we’re not trying to equalize. It’s only if it’s a consequence of things outside your control that we’re going to try to equalize it.
That led to the position called responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism. It was the idea that we’re going to try to equalize stuff if you can’t be held responsible for the differences, but we’re not going to equalize if you can be held responsible. That position was called luck egalitarianism. People with that position were proud of it because they thought they had disarmed the most obviously correct conservative objection to crude egalitarianism, which is that if you give somebody some food and they throw it in the garbage, it’s not an offense to equality that the person then has no dinner.
The problem with the kids on the boxes is that that kind of crude equality of outcome is committing the mistake conservatives have complained about forever, which is trying to equalize an outcome without paying attention to what kinds of choices people have made and how much responsibility they bear for it.
Mounk: One of the things you say about this is, what are the circumstances here? Is this a tailgate in which everybody was told to bring their own box? Is it that one of these kids just doesn’t have the resources to bring a box because there’s deep historical injustice that makes them incapable of procuring one? Or is this particular kid just irresponsible and didn’t choose to bring a box even though they have lots of boxes at home that they could have carried ten yards to the field?
Obviously, in real-life situations, our moral intuitions differ depending on what the background story is. Is this the kid who grows up in a deprived neighborhood where the school was really bad and they didn’t have much of an opportunity to develop their talent, and so now they’re working in minimum wage jobs? Or is it somebody who had all the same opportunities and never applied themselves, or quit a job in a huff and now they’re in a worse job? Those make a moral difference in how we assess real-life situations, and it’s all flattened away in this kind of example.
Heath: Egalitarian philosophers, perhaps hubristically, felt that they had learned to draw the sting from that criticism. While it is the case that people make poor choices in life, there are also all kinds of things that are obviously beyond people’s control—structural factors that contribute to injustice. Economic factors, race, and gender are all unchosen and have clear and demonstrable effects on the kinds of outcomes people get.
The slightly hubristic egalitarian position was that we can have an egalitarian doctrine that picks out specifically the factors affecting people outside of their control. Then we can develop an institutional response that tries to equalize on those dimensions but does not try to achieve a comprehensive equality based on the improvident choices people have made. They thought they had the ultimate response to the classic conservative objections to crude egalitarianism.
Mounk: One of the attractions of the tradition, as you alluded to, is this line that it had somehow incorporated within the arsenal of the egalitarian left the most historically powerful arguments of the right: those of choice and responsibility. Now, we are going into philosophical depths here, but let’s do it. Bear with us.
I thought about luck egalitarianism somewhat incidentally as part of my PhD dissertation. I am also aware of some of the reasons we might want to criticize it. The starting assumption is powerful—that we don’t just want an equal outcome or equal patterns in society. What activates our intuitions about inequality is when somebody is poor for reasons beyond their control. Somebody who grew up in a neighborhood where the schools were terrible, who suffered malnutrition as a child, and then as an adult lacks marketable skills and remains in poverty seems to face something clearly unfair. There was no choice that put them into that subordinated position; something is wrong there.
The powerful insight of the luck egalitarian tradition is to express that without committing itself to full outcome equality. You take two kids from good families, growing up in affluent suburbs, going to prep schools, and one ends up getting a great job while the other never did a day of work in their life and now lives in poverty. That doesn’t seem like a stark moral injustice. Fair enough.
There are two problems with this, as I understand it. One is an argument made by Elizabeth Anderson, who has been on this podcast a couple of times. She argues about the way the state would need to treat the people at the bottom of this kind of society if it were being honest. Instead of saying, we don’t really know why you’re in this position—perhaps you had a tough break, perhaps you haven’t fully applied yourself—but you’re starving and we’re going to help you because we don’t want people to starve, it would have to say something like, we have carefully assessed your particular case and recognize that you’re not poor because of any choices you made. You’re not poor because you failed to apply your talents. You’re poor because you simply have no way of making money. No matter how hard you would have tried, you’re so untalented that we are willing to give you this help.
Even as victims of that kind of bad luck might be helped in a luck-egalitarian state, they would also be in a deeply subordinate position because that help is premised on the recognition that they cannot make a productive contribution to society. They are in this terrible position for reasons fully outside their control, and there seems to be something demeaning about it. That is one line of objection.
The other line of objection, which I find powerful, is that it entangles us in deeply metaphysical debates about what a choice actually is. It sounds simple to say, if you’re poor because of your own choice, then we won’t help you. If you’re poor because there’s nothing you could have done, then we will help you. That sounds plausible, but you might ask whether actual states and welfare bureaucracies are the right kinds of entities to determine that. Is it ever possible for a caseworker to know why you are in your position? Would this require agents of the state to make decisions well beyond their competence?
Even if you set aside this real-world concern and stay within the realm of ideal theory, asking only what the abstract principles of justice should be, what people deserve still depends on your answer to the debate about free will. If you believe in free will, then some people may have made bad choices, and it is fine that they have less than others. If you believe there is no such thing as free will, then this tradition of luck egalitarianism actually commits you back to strict equality. After all, if nobody truly makes a choice and we are committed to compensating for all effects of bad luck—everything beyond your control—then any inequality is beyond your control because nothing is under your control.
Suddenly, whether we have a society more egalitarian than any in history or one that is vastly unequal depends on your view of whether there is free will, which seems quite implausible.
Heath: Yes, to clarify, I’m not a luck egalitarian. Some of my friends are, but I was never committed to this. I’ve been explaining it to you, but I don’t endorse it. That’s to say, luck egalitarianism wasn’t the only game in town. Luck egalitarianism was, in a sense, the most left-wing position because it started with the most expansive commitment to equality, which was equalizing people’s welfare, making everyone equally happy. That was subject to obvious objections. So they worked back from that by saying, okay, except when it’s a consequence of choices, or except when this, or whatever. They took this comprehensive equality and introduced a bunch of exceptions.
Specifying when those exceptions occur becomes problematic for exactly the reasons you described. Another approach would be to start with a more modest conception of where you’re going in an egalitarian direction. You can find that in Rawls, which is that equality arises from systems of cooperation. Rawls famously characterized the basic structure as a system of cooperation. If you and I don’t need to cooperate, we can do whatever. There’s no reason for us to treat each other as equals. But if we need to cooperate, that means we need to agree on a set of ground rules, and that’s where equality springs up.
Equality pertains not to the universal human condition but specifically to the benefits of cooperation. That position started out on its back heel because it seemed miserly and less virtuous, so it was easily dismissed in the very left-wing academy as a right-wing position. But one can take that view and build it up to get a more robust conception of equality.
In a sense, the luck egalitarians start with rhetorically strong egalitarianism but then take away from it, whereas the more contractualist or Rawlsian approach starts with a modest conception but tries to build up. I think many of the problems with luck egalitarianism can be sorted out by starting from the more miserly “benefits of cooperation” perspective.
Mounk: Let me quickly speak to that. I think that’s really interesting. One of the things I find strange about the luck egalitarian tradition, and a lot of philosophical thought in ethics more generally, is that it assumes a strange structure to our ethical obligations. It assumes that nature has done a terrible job and that our role as humans is to remedy every inequality and every injustice that nature has created.
One way you can see that is that this luck egalitarian tradition ends up taking positions, at a time in the 1990s before there was such a thing as a manosphere or a social discourse of incels, that sound weirdly incel-like. For example, if you’re saying we have a responsibility as humans to remedy any inequality that isn’t the result of your choices, one thing you might say is that some people are more attractive and more charming than others. That leads to big inequalities. The ability to find a loving life partner who is deeply invested in your well-being and wants to start a family with you is a really important thing. Some people have a much easier time doing this than others because of unfair, unjust factors—being born attractive or not, or having charm or not. Shouldn’t we remedy that in some way?
Philippe Van Parijs, one of the main thinkers in this tradition, ends up saying yes. We shouldn’t have a right to particular partners—that would go against freedom rights—but we should have what he calls “an equitable, tradable share in partnerships.” If you have the same right to a partner and can’t procure one because of bad luck, you should be compensated in other ways. I think this whole way of thinking about the subject is really strange, and the weirdness of it stems from this idea that we, as individuals, have the task of making the world just—as though God did a bad job and our responsibility on earth is to play a pseudo-divine figure who rights the ills of the world.
By contrast, as you point out, something like the Rawlsian perspective starts from a simpler and more intuitive view. We are humans in the world, each with strengths, weaknesses, advantages, and disadvantages, and that’s fine. But we are engaged in social cooperation, and social cooperation involves coercion. If I disobey the laws of a country in which I’m born, I might end up in jail or face serious consequences.
An old question of political philosophy is what justifies that. When the tax collector says, you owe some money from your lemonade stand, give me a third of that or I’ll put you in jail, by what justification are they doing that? When they say, here’s a law about how loudly you can play music after a certain hour, and if you violate it we’ll fine you or jail you, what justifies that? The answer is that what legitimizes this whole scheme is that the terms of cooperation are fair so that everybody meaningfully benefits from it.
What we need to reflect on is the conditions under which it is fair in that way. That seems to me a much more sensible way not only of answering questions about equality but of thinking about what gives rise to those moral questions in the first place.
Heath: Yeah, I agree entirely. Those points about marriage and sexual relations go back to an old provocation from Nozick, who argued that there’s an analogy between the marriage market and the capitalist market. He said that in both cases, it’s just people getting together. In the case of romantic partnerships, you meet somebody, you get together. Similarly, with capitalism, you have something you want to sell, somebody else wants to buy it, you get together, you exchange goods.
In the case of the marriage market, this had some fairly toxic implications. He said that in the marriage market, nobody cares about equality or inequality of results. Beautiful people marry beautiful people, and we don’t have a government program to fix that. But it’s also one of the last domains of permissible racial discrimination, since people often express racial preferences over their partners, and that is still more or less permissible.
In the capitalist market, Nozick therefore says, how is it any different? If I don’t want to serve you at my lunch counter, why should I have to? At the time, it was such an obnoxious argument that it wasn’t taken seriously enough, until later on people like Van Parijs and others accepted it and said, yes, he’s right—there’s a strong analogy, and therefore maybe we should have corrective justice in the marriage market.
The correct way to respond to that is to observe a huge difference between the two. The marriage market—or whatever we call the sexual relations market—is not cooperative in the way the capitalist market is, because two people can get together and develop a relationship without requiring anything from anyone else in society. It’s an independent, dyadic interaction. In contrast, in the market, my ability to specialize in producing philosophy requires complementary specializations from millions of other people to provide my clothing, food, and so on.
The market is a vast system of cooperation, which raises the issue of justice. This point goes in the Rawlsian and against the luck egalitarian direction. You can’t just look at it and say, that’s bad. What’s problematic about the inequality generated by a market economy is that the market institutionalizes a system of cooperation. Whenever we are cooperating with others, it’s reasonable to ask how we should divide up the fruits of that cooperation.
The cooperative standpoint is the more compelling position, and it allows us to respond easily to Nozick’s provocation about the marriage market. A lot of what’s going on in luck egalitarianism is, I think, a misguided attempt to understand insurance. This has been the focus of some of my work. One of the things about luck egalitarianism is that it doesn’t really have a view on insurance.
Insurance is a terribly neglected feature of modern societies and specifically of the welfare state. Paul Krugman famously described the U.S. federal government as “a large insurance company with an army.” It’s a great line that captures how we should think about the welfare state: first and foremost as a set of insurance programs. These are some of the major systems of cooperation in our society, where we pool risks. As systems of cooperation, we can ask how the benefits and burdens of that system are divided. There are many interesting issues of justice that arise around these insurance systems.
Mounk: Help motivate that view. The obvious example is unemployment insurance. In many countries, the state requires you to pay a contribution to a fund as part of your salary. As a result, when you lose your job, you can claim unemployment benefits. The structure of that is straightforwardly like insurance.
You don’t want to be unemployed or hope to lose your job, but there’s a compulsory scheme where you pay a small share of your salary each month. As a benefit, when this terrible thing happens—when you suddenly don’t have a job and can’t pay your mortgage—you aren’t starving on the street. Hopefully, you can still pay your mortgage for a while because the unemployment benefit arrives.
It’s similar to car insurance. I don’t hope to have a car accident, but every month I pay a small premium, and when I do have an accident, I get a payout. I can cover the damages I caused to another car and hopefully repair my own.
What about retirement benefits or child benefits? There are many elements of the welfare state that don’t seem as obviously structured like insurance as unemployment benefits.
Heath: There’s a great book by David Moss called When All Else Fails, which tries to work through the logic of all these systems, showing how there’s a kind of implicit insurance logic to a lot of them. So there’s a whole way of reading the development of capitalism in the 19th century and the rise of the welfare state as a set of dramatic changes around the way in which we pool risks as a society.
Many of us are habituated to the broadly Marxian way of reading the conditions of the 19th century. If you think of the condition of the working class in the 19th century, the specific lens that Marx and the socialists brought to it was to say that it was a product of inequality and exploitation. That’s why their living conditions were so poor. There’s a great book that I’m a big fan of by François Ewald called L’État Providence, which has been partially translated into English.
He argues that that’s the wrong way of seeing it. The way to see it is that the institutions of feudal society in Europe had a variety of different risk-pooling mechanisms. That allowed people protection and gave people protection against the major risks of life, which included being widowed, being disabled, but also outliving one’s savings. Not being able to work in old age is actually one of the major risks.
Traditional medieval society had all kinds of institutions that essentially offered people low-level but adequate protection against those risks. What happened with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism was that capitalism destroyed most of those institutions. So what you see in the condition of the working class of the nineteenth century is actually not a distributive inequality but rather the consequences of exposing large segments of the population to risks that people historically were not exposed to.
The reason you wind up with so many beggars and orphans and widows and so on is that all of the community support mechanisms have been disabled. The drama that Ewald tells of the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century is about the rise of insurance, both the private insurance industry and the welfare state. The example of pensions is a really good one. A pension is a type of life annuity.
A life annuity is a slightly esoteric financial product whereby you pay a certain amount of money upfront, and in return, what you get is a fixed periodic payment from retirement until death. An annuity is an insurance product because what it offers people is protection against the risk of outliving their savings. Most people don’t know about them because there’s very significant market failure in private markets for annuities.
If you’re under the age of 50, for the most part, if you go to a bank and say, I’d like to buy an annuity, they simply won’t sell it to you because they don’t sell annuities to people under a certain age. So there’s a market failure. One of the things that the welfare state does is it provides collective public pensions so that when you’re 30 and working, you have a mandatory contribution to a state pension scheme that is essentially an annuity.
Mounk: Right, so in a way, there’s something counterintuitive here that I want to explain. You drive a car, you take out car insurance, and you don’t want to have a car accident. Your preference—unless there’s something wrong with your insurance and it gives you far too generous benefits—is to never have a car accident. That’s not a good thing to have. But when this bad event happens, your car insurance compensates you in a way that hopefully makes you more or less financially whole.
There’s something counterintuitive here. You probably want to live a long time. Your preference is to live a long time rather than die early. But in financial terms, if you retire at 65 and have savings that will last you 15 years, and you die after five years, that’s good luck since you died while your savings were still intact. Whereas if you live another 25 or 30 years and your savings run out, that’s bad luck from a financial perspective.
The pension scheme protects you against this financial bad luck by making sure that even if you live longer than statistically expected, you’re still able to have a decent income and live in dignity in old age.
Heath: Yeah, all of this can be hugely confusing. The first confusion arises with pensions, when people take a snapshot of them and say, what’s going on here? There’s this redistributive lens that imagines the welfare state is always promoting equality by redistributing. It looks at pensions and says, look, this is young people transferring money to old people. Then you could have a debate about why we should be giving them money. It used to be that old people were poor, so it’s thought to be a program designed to promote equality.
That’s the wrong way of thinking about it. If you take a yearly snapshot, it looks like redistribution from young to old, but over the course of people’s entire lives, it’s not redistribution between young and old. It’s my younger self distributing to my older self. The actual redistribution happens between people who die young and people who die old. People who die young save money into Social Security or the Canada Pension Plan, and that money tacitly gets transferred to those who live a long time.
People might ask why we should have that transfer. I like to use the example of car insurance. If you look at car insurance, it seems like a redistribution scheme where good drivers are redistributing wealth to bad drivers. People think, why does justice require that? The answer is that justice doesn’t require it—it’s the logic of an insurance system.
Certain kinds of events are, for the most part, bad luck, though people can contribute to them. If each of us had to face that bad luck alone, it would be highly inefficient because you’d have to save enough money to buy yourself a new car in a pinch. Instead, you pool those savings with others because, on a population level, it’s quite predictable how many people will have accidents. You’re pooling your savings against certain kinds of risk.
Pensions have exactly the same structure as car insurance. There’s a bad thing that can happen—outliving your savings. You pool your savings with other people to make sure none of us outlive our savings. None of it is redistributive. It’s all just a system of cooperation.
Mounk: Well, I think the trouble of understanding insurance for some people, though I trust not for listeners of this podcast, is even more basic. A surprising amount of the time, you see on social media—and I believe there was somebody on The View, perhaps Whoopi Goldberg—who recently voiced a similar thing on air, saying, if I have health insurance and I don’t go see a doctor or go to the hospital all year long, why doesn’t it pay me back my premiums? That is an even more fundamental misunderstanding.
To return to the broader strand of the conversation: If we are thinking of the welfare state as inherently an insurance scheme, what does that tell us about the nature of a welfare state? More broadly, with all of these interesting, subtle philosophical distinctions we have been making for the better part of an hour, how should we argue for some form of equality today?
For members of my audience who believe that they are rightly worried about inequality in our capitalist system, who think it is a problem that many people are quite poor while some people have vast riches, and who want some forms of social policy that might insure people against bad outcomes or perhaps redistribute—what ultimately do you take to be the argument that is convincing for that? Why is it that the resurgence of socialism, the resurgence to some extent of communism, and the resurgence of people saying we should reject the capitalist system altogether are unlikely to lead to their desired outcomes?
Heath: This insurance thing came out of nowhere, but the reason I brought it up was because when I look at the problems of American society, I see America as being, first and foremost, a kind of underinsured society—largely because of fear of state power. Once you understand that most of what the welfare state is doing is not running around taking money away from Peter in order to give it to Paul, it becomes clear that it does a little redistribution, but most of what looks like redistribution is actually insurance. These are mechanisms offering people protection against certain kinds of risks.
The weakness of the welfare state in the classic sense in America has left Americans more exposed to all kinds of risks that they reasonably would like protection against, but that constantly gets seen through the lens of redistribution. This is a bit dated, but I remember Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. She worked as a waitress and low-wage employee in America to do an ethnography and report on what it was like. The media coverage in the United States focused on poverty and low wages, but when I read the book, I thought the whole thing was about health insurance. All of the drama was about health and sickness—falling ill, not being able to miss work, not being able to pay for procedures, and so on.
Americans sometimes fail to see how much the absence of comprehensive health insurance, and of welfare systems more broadly, affects all aspects of society. Looking at inequality in America, I feel that the focus on the top 1% and people like Jeff Bezos is a kind of shiny object. The real economic inequality and its problems lie in the fact that the people in the lower 30% form such a sticky category. It is extraordinarily difficult to move out of the lower 30% of the population economically in America compared to an average European country or even Canada.
A lot of that has to do with insurance, the lack of a safety net, and the absence of programs that adequately give people a start in life. That does not need to be articulated in zero-sum, redistributionist language. Much of it can be articulated in terms of the positive-sum logic of insurance—offering people protection against negative effects. A lot of luck egalitarianism was a poor way of articulating that. Luck egalitarianism identified the issue around risk but immediately turned it into a debate about equality rather than a debate about risk.
Mounk: That’s a really interesting observation, because what luck egalitarianism is saying is that we have some abstract obligation to right the injustices that naturally occur. The way it proposes to do that is by figuring out, for each person, whether they are poor because of their choices or because of something beyond their control. For all of the people who are victims of bad luck, it seeks to completely equalize outcomes. All of this is radically foreign to the intuitions and ways of thinking of most people.
Whereas if what you are saying is, look, most Americans work hard and play by the rules, as Barack Obama used to say, and they deserve to have a life of material dignity and opportunity. Sadly, sometimes horrible things happen in life—you have a work accident, you become disabled, or you develop a sickness that makes you incapable of work. In our society, we don’t sufficiently protect against these risks, most of which are outside people’s control. It’s not your fault you got sick. It’s not your fault you had a work accident. Wouldn’t it be better to have a society that protects people against those risks?
That framing highlights that such protections could also make people more able to take risks. It might make them more able to quit a job and start a business that could do wonderful things for the country without having to worry about health insurance. This would actually have positive effects for everyone. That is a much more palatable set of arguments with which to win electoral majorities in the United States.
Heath: Yeah, one of the many mysteries of American society is this tendency toward normative maximalism—taking on these hugely demanding normative commitments in a social context in which not only does nobody support that stuff, in terms of the democratic polity of America, but also there are not even the institutions to get you anywhere near achieving these outlandishly utopian commitments and ideals.
I think some of it has to do with the disenfranchisement, or the kind of isolation and alienation, of academics and intellectuals in America. The thing about Europe is that if you are a university professor and you do some work on economics and politics, it is quite likely that someday someone in government will call you and say, look, I want to put you on a committee, and I want you to advise on policy, or something like that. That kind of thing acts as a real corrective to this normative overkill—wanting to create total equality among everybody.
When somebody sits down and says, OK, but what should we do with the tax code right now? then suddenly the value of having a more achievable and modest normative commitment becomes apparent. I think, in part, it is certainly something I saw while studying in American universities: university professors in America—nobody cares about their opinion. In a sense, that allows them to develop these very outlandish positions.
My thought on luck egalitarianism is that you do not need that heavy-duty and controversial normative commitment to get the kinds of outcomes that would generate obvious and significant improvements in people’s lives. I started in all of this with a kind of commitment to normative minimalism, which is to think about what policy you want and then pick a norm that is just strong enough to give you that policy, but not any more controversial than is absolutely necessary to justify the policy you are currently trying to achieve.
Some of my intuitions about this came in Canada, in debates over healthcare in the late 20th century. In the late 20th century, when healthcare was starting to get expensive, people were seriously talking about privatizing the public healthcare system in Canada. The Conservative Party at the time actually was, broadly speaking, committed to privatization. Nowadays, nobody wants to privatize, for obvious reasons, but there was a live debate about it.
The thing that I noticed about that debate was that everyone who was defending the healthcare system was defending it entirely on egalitarian grounds. They were saying the reason why it has to be public is so that everybody can have absolutely equal healthcare. Other people were saying it would be much more efficient to have a private system. Nobody was defending the middle ground of saying, look, there are enormous benefits to having an insurance system for health insurance in the public sector. So there was this insurance argument for a single-payer healthcare system that was, at the time, a political orphan.
This is how I got involved in all of this, in terms of arguing about the welfare state. I wrote a book defending the Canadian healthcare system on efficiency grounds because nobody had been making that argument. The basic principle generalizes: do not pick a norm that is more controversial than the one you need to achieve the outcomes you are trying to achieve.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Joseph discuss the difference between the United States and Canada, from the impact of gun violence on society to how a lack of mobility entrenches poverty. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
