Economic inequality and the long-term future
Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen) and Daan Juijn (CE Delft)
GPI Working Paper No. 4-2021, published in Politics, Philosophy & Economics
Why, if at all, should we object to economic inequality? Some central arguments – the argument from decreasing marginal utility for example – invoke instrumental reasons and object to inequality because of its effects. Such instrumental arguments, however, often concern only the static effects of inequality and neglect its intertemporal consequences. In this article, we address this striking gap and investigate income inequality’s intertemporal consequences, including its potential effects on humanity’s (very) long-term future. Following recent arguments around future generations and so-called longtermism, those effects might arguably matter more than inequality’s short-term consequences. We assess whether we have instrumental reason to reduce economic inequality based on its intertemporal effects in the short, medium and the very long term. We find a good short and medium-term instrumental case for lower economic inequality. We then argue, somewhat speculatively, that we have instrumental reasons for inequality reduction from a longtermist perspective too, because greater inequality could increase existential risk. We thus have instrumental reasons for reducing inequality, regardless of which time-horizon we take. We then argue that from most consequentialist perspectives, this pro tanto reason also gives us all-things-considered reason. And even across most non-consequentialist views in philosophy, this argument gives us either an all-things-considered or at least weighty pro tanto reason against inequality.
Other working papers
It Only Takes One: The Psychology of Unilateral Decisions – Joshua Lewis (New York University) et al.
Sometimes, one decision can guarantee that a risky event will happen. For instance, it only took one team of researchers to synthesize and publish the horsepox genome, thus imposing its publication even though other researchers might have refrained for biosecurity reasons. We examine cases where everybody who can impose a given event has the same goal but different information about whether the event furthers that goal. …
Maximal cluelessness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance…
Philosophical considerations relevant to valuing continued human survival: Conceptual Analysis, Population Axiology, and Decision Theory – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Many think that human extinction would be a catastrophic tragedy, and that we ought to do more to reduce extinction risk. There is less agreement on exactly why. If some catastrophe were to kill everyone, that would obviously be horrific. Still, many think the deaths of billions of people don’t exhaust what would be so terrible about extinction. After all, we can be confident that billions of people are going to die – many horribly and before their time – if humanity does not go extinct. …