Democracy in the mirror

Why is democracy something people should strive for? And how are we doing with ours?

Consider first the fundamentals. Why is there a role for democracy in any circumstances? Fundamentally democracy is a form of group decision-making. Political institutions are needed in circumstances in which decisions must be made that affect all members of a group. Each member of a group has his or her own set of preferences about choices that affect the group; so there needs to be a process for arriving at a set of social preferences -- a social choice function. Democracy requires designing a set of arrangements through which each person's preferences will have equal weight in determining the ultimate decision. Otherwise we would have a system in which one person decides (dictatorship) or a minority decides (oligarchy). So democracy represents a set of decision-making institutions that embody respect for the equal worth of all citizens when it comes to making collective choices.

In addition to the aggregation of individual preferences, democratic values consider as well the circumstances under which the members of a group form their beliefs and preferences. Narrow democratic theory takes individual preferences as exogenous. But broader versions of democratic theory attempt to bring democratic values into the social processes through which beliefs and preferences are formed. The theory of deliberative democracy emphasizes in particular the features of civility, mutual respect, and open-mindedness through which debate and critical examination of issues leads to a fuller understanding of issues and a more reflective set of preferences. This aspect of democracy is valuable because it corresponds to a society in which open and uncensored debate leads to the formation of individual and collective preferences and embodies the ideas of democratic equality among citizens. And less-privileged groups can exercise their voices in these forums to attempt to influence other citizens to support more just policies and choices.

There is another reason for cheering democracy: it is possible that democracy is more likely to protect the rights and needs of the relatively powerless in society; democratic institutions can function as a bulwark against the arbitrary power of elites of all kinds. If the powerless have political voice, they then have an ability to advocate for, and democratically support, the policies that favor their perspectives and interests. The fact that otherwise powerless people can express their preferences through democratic means is a substantial form of potential influence for non-privileged groups. (This political power is offset, of course, by the political power and influence wielded by elite minorities in most societies.)

The most fundamental reasons, then, to value democracy are its correspondence to the value of the moral equality of all persons and the capacity it creates for non-elite groups' struggles for fair treatment. Democratic institutions honor the equality of all persons in the fact that each person has an equal voice in deliberating upon and deciding collective policies. A democracy is morally preferable because it best embodies the more basic moral value of fundamental human equality and dignity and it provides a feasible mechanism for pursuing social justice.

So how does the US democracy measure up on these criteria?  Take the last point first: the idea that democracy empowers the powerless.  The role of money in politics takes a lot of the force out of this point in the US.  Corporations and wealthy individuals are able to influence legislation, regulation, and policy in ways that are vastly disproportionate to their numbers (link).  It is possible for a numerous group to exert political influence through the electoral process to defend its interests; but it is also possible for the powerful to quietly subvert these outcomes as well.

So how about the formative benefits of democracy?  Do we find that American citizens are involved in thoughtful debates that bring more facts to the discussion and result in clearer preferences and policies?  Here the answer is too often "no" as well.  The shouting and vitriol on the media outlets of the right set a tone that discourages or extinguishes respectful debate and clarification.  It's hard to see evidence that voters have gotten better at thinking through the issues, the facts, and the underlying values that can subsequently guide their political choices.

And how about the most basic function of democracy, its service as an institution that aggregates individual preferences onto a coherent social preference function?  Even here our democracy has challenges.  First, we don't seem to be trending towards "coherence" -- instead we have a Congress that mostly serves to block the formation of policy, from legislation to confirmation of appointment out of political opposition to the sitting president. And second, there is only a loose fit between the voting behavior of elected officials and the preferences of their constituents. Constituents have the ability to reject officials of whose voting behavior they strongly disapprove. But election campaigns have more to do with slogans and quick fixes than they do thoughtful efforts to align the candidate's platform with the diverse preferences of the electorate. Ideology and rhetoric drive electoral strategies, not honest discussion of the issues and the facts that surround them.

Take healthcare reform as an example. The reforms that the Obama administration fought for were plainly advantageous for a very large segment of the American population. Tens of millions of people stood to gain access to health insurance as a consequence of the reforms. And yet the voices of those tens of millions of people played almost no role in the bitter political conflict that ensued. Conservative theories and agendas, widely disseminated falsehoods ("death panels"), and purple rhetoric instead dominated the legislative and electoral process. Eventually a weakened version of healthcare reform became law, of course, but the process did a very poor job of embodying the interests of those most affected by the issue.  (Here is a good post by Barbara Ehrenreich that updates her insights in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Ehrenreich makes the importance of healthcare for poor people very clear.)

What American democracy is good at, by and large, is establishing government that is ruled by law. Legal and constitutional protections for citizens are a substantial bulwark against the arbitrary exercise of power by political or social elites. It doesn't need saying that these protections are incomplete, and that various groups in the US have suffered from illegal or unconstitutional treatment. (Consider, for example, the determined efforts being made by some state legislatures to deny partner health benefits to one specific group of citizens.) But by and large, US citizens have justified confidence that their rights will be respected and enforced. They have relatively extensive rights of speech and association, and it is difficult for government to curtail those rights for short term political or individual advantage. Citizens also know that they have the periodic ability to reject the men and women who rule them, which puts some constraints on the behavior of the elected officials.

It is possible that this is the most we can hope for from any government in a modern mass society. But it is also possible that a PhD student in comparative politics from Mars might classify our polity as "constitutionally regulated oligarchy with periodic elections of government officials and extensive infrastructures for managing elections to lead to outcomes that satisfy the elites" -- in other words, something rather different from idealized theories of "democracy" and political institutions well designed for establishing the common good.

(See Jack Knight and Jim Johnson, The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism, Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?, and Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America for different aspects of this issue.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy

A peaceful world?

Many people around the world are celebrating Christmas this morning.  A central wish around this holiday is "peace and good will for all." Why is enduring peace so difficult to achieve?  What are the prospects for us in the twenty-first century?

Peace and conflict are related, but they aren't precise opposites.  Conflict between individuals and groups can take many forms, and it is possible to manage or resolve conflicts without violence or hatred.  This village uses its pasture and forest for gathering; that village begins to encroach with its livestock herd.  The two villages have a conflict over the pasture.  This conflict may eventually escalate into violence between the villages, with armed groups from each waging small-scale war against the others.  But it doesn't have to work out this way.  Leaders of the two villages may negotiate a set of land use customs that do something to satisfy the needs and interests of both villages, and they may be successful in getting their constituents to honor those agreements.  Or there may be a state capable of establishing and enforcing property rights that are binding on both groups, while permitting each group to pursue its most important life activities.  Or, perhaps, the two groups may have normative and religious bonds of solidarity that lead each member of the group to possess a reservoir of good will that makes resort to violence impossible to imagine.

So conflict of interests and wants doesn't necessarily lead to a breaking of the peace.  But these conflicts have the potential to do so.  And political theorists in the social contract tradition since Hobbes have held that this is the key role of the state -- to establish an acceptable set of rules for property and person that determine clear rights and obligations for everyone, and clear procedures for punishment if rights are violated.  Only through a system of law can we avoid the state of nature which is a state of war of all against all.

Other theorists, notably Elinor Ostrom, have argued that populations have solved the problems of conflict over resources in non-state ways, through "common property resource regimes" (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action).  The conditions under which a CPRR is stable are more complex than those of a state -- essentially, the CPRR needs to be supported by normative and cultural elements that give all participants a reason to honor the rules -- but Ostrom and fellow researchers have documented many successful instances.  And, of course, a common property resource regime needs to have some kind of processes for addressing and resolving conflicts among participants -- fishermen who disagree about the catch, water users who disagree about the management of upstream resources.

So what are some of the large causes of breakdowns of peace in populations of people?

A key source of sustained violent conflict on a large scale is perceived unresolved injustice.  One party or nation blocks access to resources or opportunities to which another party believes it has a moral right; demands are made; the situation persists; and violent acts begin to occur.

Another important source is conflict over access to important natural resources -- water, oil, minerals.  Conflicts over resources may occur at the local level, or they may rise to the level of inter-country armed conflict and war.

We can't overlook the religious and ideological origins of much conflict in humanity's history.  The prolonged conflict, often violent, between Hindus and Muslims over the Babri Mosque in India is a good example.  The site has religious importance for both communities; leaders are able to mobilize their followers in defense of their claims; violence ensues.

So what can humanity do to improve the prospects for peace and good will?

Sustained efforts at conflict resolution are a good place to start.  People of good will can often enough find the resources they need to bring down the degree of conflict and hostility between groups, and to find procedures that make resort to violence less likely.

Recognizing and addressing injustices between peoples and nations will help.  Justice and peace are intertwined.

Promoting the universality of human needs and the value of inter-group tolerance and respect is a very good step.  And spiritual leaders of all faiths are sometimes very committed to this work.  (Others are not, of course!)

So, this fine Christmas morning in 2011, let us all work for peace and justice for our grandchildren!

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Posted in: CAT_policy

Structural adjustment for the middle class?

Working people in the US have suffered big economic losses in the past four years.  Losses of jobs in the economy have pushed many working people from high-wage to low-wage jobs, and as we all know, many people have been pushed out of jobs altogether.  The national unemployment rate was 8.6% in November, and very much higher in urban areas and African-American and Latino communities.  Michigan's rate was 10.6% in October 2011 (link).  White non-Hispanic households fell from $55,360 in 2009 to $54,620 (-1.3%), while black households fell from $33,122 to $32,068 (-3.2%) (Table 1).  These differences in household income across race are stunning: black households started out at only 63% the level of white households in 2009, and they fell by more than double the percentage rate of loss from 2009 to 2010.

Here is a report from the US Census Bureau,  Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, that sheds some light on the changes of the past several years.  Here are a few important summary findings:

• Real median household income was $49,445 in 2010, a 2.3 percent decline from 2009 (Figure 1 and Table 1).
• Since 2007, the year before the most recent recession, real median household income has declined 6.4 percent and is 7.1 percent below the median household income peak that occurred in 1999 (Figure 1 and Tables A-1 and A-2).3
• Both family and nonfamily households had declines in real median income between 2009 and 2010. The income of family households declined by 1.2 percent to $61,544; the income of nonfamily households declined by 3.9 percent to $29,730 (Table 1).
• Real median income declined for White and Black households between 2009 and 2010, while the changes for Asian and Hispanic-origin households were not statistically significant (Table 1).
• Real median household income for each race and Hispanic-origin group has not yet recovered to the pre-2001 recession all-time highs (Table A-1). (5)

Here is what real median income looks like, broken down by racial group, since 1967.

Now consider the poverty statistics the report contains.  Here is a summary graph:

The national poverty rate reached a forty-year low in 2000, at about 12%.  Through the decade, however, the national rate has grown to 15.1% in 2010, representing 46.2 million people.  Here again there is a stunningly wide gap between white and black populations.  The poverty rate in 2010 for white non-Hispanic households is 9.9%, while the rate for black households in 2010 is 27.4% (Table 4).

We've tended to think of this period as a difficult economic time that will eventually come to an end.  But perhaps that's too optimistic.  Perhaps what we are witnessing is a structural adjustment of the US labor market, with a permanent downward shift in income for middle and low income people.  And perhaps these shifts will be most extreme for African-American households.  (The past decade seems to bear this out.  From 2000 to 2010 white non-Hispanic households had declined 5.5%, while black households declined 14.6% during that same period (8).)

Here the concern is that maybe Bruce Springsteen was right -- "these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back to your hometown."  Jobs with decent wages -- manufacturing jobs, union jobs, professional service jobs -- have declined precipitously in the past twenty years (not just since the recession).  And that means that the opportunities for many workers to have "middle-class" incomes have become much more restricted. Here is a sober report from Chemical and Engineering News --

The severe national recession of the past several years is having a negative impact on the employment and the starting salaries of chemists and chemical engineers. The latest data from the American Chemical Society on graduates from 2009 found that median starting salaries fell about 5% for those receiving bachelor’s and doctoral degrees compared with the previous year. New graduates with master’s degrees appeared to have gotten a jump in pay.

Even the banking and financial sector has contracted (link):

The financial services industry, hammered by job cuts and record losses, is in for an even bigger contraction as the global recession deepens, said Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report. 

“The financial sector will contract and it will contract much more than we’ve seen so far,” said Faber, who was in Tokyo to speak at an event hosted by CLSA Ltd. Financial professionals have “been in paradise for the past 25 years.”

More than 275,000 jobs in the financial industry have been lost in the last two years, according to Bloomberg data, while losses and writedowns at global companies exceeded $1 trillion in the past year. Faber said the contraction could rival declines seen in the 1970s following the collapse of Bernard Cornfeld’s Investors Overseas Services that shook confidence in the industry for a decade.

So the financial industry isn't providing ready opportunities for young MBAs; many of them too will need to find other, less well-paying jobs.

Does this mean that everyone in the US economy is facing downward pressure on wages and salary? Not exactly.  There is a segment of the American economy that is doing very well indeed. Here is a graph provided by Lane Kenworthy demonstrating the growth in income of the top 1% (link).  (Kenworthy's discussion is very good.)  The top line is the median household income of the top 1%.  The lower lines, showing virtually no growth, represent the median of the middle three quintiles and the median of the bottom quintile of households.

source: Consider the Evidence (Lane Kenworthy)

So here are two important questions.  Is the US economy on a path towards a shift to lower-paid jobs for a large segment of its working population?  And are there policies that could be chosen that would result in an outcome that looks more fair than this graph of the recent past, with reasonable growth of income for all American workers and less extreme growth at the very top?

(Here is an interesting Google resource, the Public Data Explorer, that provides visualization tools for basic US economic and demographic data. This particular screen shows the growth of personal income per capita since about 1930, across the regions of the United States.  (This is money income, not adjusted for inflation.) The second graph shows personal income per capita for selected metropolitan areas.  The third graph shows the unemployment rates for Wayne County and Oakland County in Michigan.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,employment,poverty

David Graeber on the anarchist movement

Progressives seem to be confronted with some real conundrums (or is it conundra?), here in the early part of the 21st century. We want to see a world that is genuinely committed to some basic principles of social justice, equality, and personal freedom. And we generally acknowledge the point that the modern world can only function on the basis of social, political, and economic structures that have a degree of authority over individual conduct. These two framing ideas are in tension, once we recognize the permanent likelihood of "institutional capture" of social structures by privileged individuals and groups. Capture may result from the access a privileged party has to the sources of wealth and power (the CCP in China) or the astronomically disproportional influence that corporations and private interests have in the legislative and regulatory process (lobbyists in France, the UK, and the US). So is it possible to create a society in which organizing structures exist, but that are genuinely governed by the constraints of justice,equality, and democracy? Can democratic institutions be established and defended that genuinely embody the interests and dignity of poor and working people? In a word, is social democracy actually a feasible outcome in the conditions of the 21st century?

There is a strand of radical thought that answers these questions in the negative.  The "autonomist" theories and practices within the labor movement of the 1950s that were described in an earlier post represent one thread in this world. Another is the body of thinking, rhetoric, and action that is involved in the anarchist organizations associated with current anti-globalization activism.  David Graeber has done an important service to the rest of us by offering an extended ethnography of this loosely connected movement in Direct Action. The book is the first I've seen to offer a nuanced description of the thinking, practices, and networks that have emerged within this movement over the past fifteen years or so. Unlike much of the journalism that this movement has produced, it resists both caricature and polemic. Graeber is a participant within the movement as well as an observer, and his voice helps to make sense of the thinking and actions that have surfaced in Seattle, Washington, Quebec, Madrid, and London in the past 15 years. And it certainly helps to put voices and faces into the OWS movement. Graeber is, by the way, an unusually appealing writer, so the book is a very engaging read.  (It is also very long -- 538 pages of text.)

The first half of the book provides a detailed chronological ethnography of the preparations that several Direct Action groups made to engage in demonstration and resistance at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec in April, 2001. Graeber gives a textured understanding of the personalities and debates that unfolded. (Here is an activist-produced video of the protests; link.)  As his description makes clear, this was a transnational network from the start, with alliances and affinities extending from Chiapas to Italy to Spain to Switzerland to the Mohawk Nation spanning the US and Canada border.

The second part of the book is a more analytical exposition of direct action and anarchism.  He offers a clear description of what these activists mean by "direct action" (chapter 5), and attempts to capture something of the culture of anarchist activism (chapter 6). Here is an interesting observation about the social composition of anarchist networks in the US, which may also shed some light on OWS:

Speaking broadly, it seems to me activist milieu can best be seen as a juncture, a kind of meeting place, between downwardly mobile elements of the professional classes and upwardly mobile children of the working class. (252)

The groups that Graeber describes include various Direct Action Networks (DAN), including the one based in New York in which he was involved, NYC DAN. Another is Ya Basta!, also anarchist but with a decided taste for performance.  These groups conduct their discussions, planning, and decision-making according to egalitarian, consensual practices: no leaders, no executive committees, no authority. These practices are described in the principles endorsed by one of the oldest Direct Action groups, the Peoples' Global Action (PGA) (link). Here is how Graeber describes the principles of consensus:

DAN employed a formal consensus process with rotating facilitators, an elaborate system of “stacking” designed to ensure no small group of voices dominated the conversation. Smokey and Flamma hated DAN. Like a number of other anarchists in New York—I’ll call them the “hardcores,” for lack of a better name, the sort that were likely to have more experience in Black Blocs, tree sits, or the squatter scene, or anyway used to working in small, intimate collectives—they saw DAN’s formal structure as itself stifling and oppressive. (20)

But the ideal of consensus doesn't imply inability to act as a group. In fact, Graeber describes an extended process of brainstorming, planning, and decision-making leading up to coordination with the Mohawk Warrior Society, Ya Basta!, the International Socialist Organisation (ISO), and other sympathetic groups, and execution of complex actions in Quebec. (Graeber and other DAN participants seem to find the socialist ISO activists particularly annoying because of their apparent opportunism and vanguardism; and yet their egalitarian principles make it impossible for them to exclude them.)

The detailed notes about the tactics and actions in Quebec once the demonstrations began read like an urban combat novel: anarchist groups approaching the fence surrounding the core Summit area, police firing tear gas and water cannons, many injuries and arrests, molotov cocktails from a variety of Blocs against water cannon.  Graeber's narrative gives a vivid depiction of what must have been similar actions and tactics in Strasbourg, London, and Seattle, with activists learning new tactics (and equipment) from one siege to another.  (The horrendous video and photos from UC-Davis of police methodically pepper-spraying seated demonstrators give another current exposure to the potential for police violence in circumstances of protest and resistance.)

I find some interesting affinities between the movements and ideas that Graeber describes and the views of economic development advocated by Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Escobar articulates much of the radical critique of globalization and its effects on poor people that lies at the core of the worldview expressed by the anarchist movement Graeber describes.  Escobar's position is strongly anti-neoliberal, taking issue with foundational development ideas about growth and the general beneficence of markets. He too favors a view of the future in which people exercise continuing control over the processes that affect them. And he too likes a future built around fairly autonomous communities, cooperatives, and non-market institutions.

Also resonant are new ideas about deliberative and participatory democracy being developed by Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright under the rubric of "empowered deliberative democracy"-- for example, in Deepening Democracy. Here is a representative statement of their view of the challenge facing existing democracies:

As the tasks of the state have become more complex and the size of polities larger and more heterogeneous, the institutional forms of liberal democracy developed in the nineteenth century—representative democracy plus techno-bureaucratic administration—seem increasingly ill suited to the novel problems we face in the twenty-first century. “Democracy” as a way of organizing the state has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices. Yet, increasingly, this mechanism of political representation seems ineffective in accomplishing the central ideals of democratic politics: facilitating active political involvement of the citizenry, forging political consensus through dialogue, devising and impleenting public policies that ground a productive economy and healthy society, and, in more radical egalitarian versions of the democratic ideal, ensuring that all citizens benefit from the nation's wealth. (3)

There are quite a few political values and perceptions embodied in the Direct Action movement that many progressive people can relate to. It isn't surprising that OWS has caught the attention of many young people. But are the mini-movements of activists that Graeber describes really a potential solution to the conundrum mentioned above? Can we get to a more just world through this kind of activism? Seattle and Quebec can claim some successes in achieving negative goals -- discrediting the IMF, challenging the World Bank, exposing a latent violence in democratic societies through excessive police force and brutality. And perhaps OWS will be successful in pushing back against over-greedy financial institutions.  This kind of effect can plausibly come about through spontaneous popular protest. And as Graeber makes clear, these large anarchist actions are organized and planned, even if they are collective and mass-based.

But this just delays the problem, because it doesn't give a basis for creating institutions and structures that really work from the point of view of social justice and participatory democracy.  The kinds of activism Graeber describes might be compared to an "immune system" for the periodic disorders of imperfect democracy: activists and their organizations (lymphocytes) swarm around important causes of distress (infections, inflammation), provoking repair responses within the society. But the movement doesn't contribute to the basic metabolism of society and politics. "Direct Action" isn't really a prescription for organizing society in its routine work; the approval of food and drug safety, the plans that states make for energy production, the creation and maintenance of social safety nets. The voice of the people can demand these protections. But then we need institutions that actually do the work. And the funny suits of Ya Basta! and spokescouncils don't fill the bill for this task.  In the end, I am more attracted to the kind of work begun by Fung and Wright, which is aimed at creating sustainable institutions of participatory democracy.

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Posted in: CAT_policy,globalization

Health disparities in the US and China

Health disparities across a population are among the most profound indicators of social inequalities that we can find.  And the fact of significant disparities across groups is a devastating statement about the circumstances of justice under which a society functions.  These disparities translate into shorter lives and lower quality of life for whole groups of people, relative to other groups.

Both the United States and China appear to display significant health disparities across their populations. Here are a couple of studies that draw attention to these facts.

United States

Here is an important new study on the question of health disparities in the United States by public health researchers at Harvard and UCSF.  The study is "Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States". And the answer the researchers provide to the question above is that the US possesses very significant health disparities across segments of its population. The study is worth reading in detail.

The authors analyze mortality statistics by county, and they break the data down by incorporating racial and demographic characteristics. The data groups fairly well around the eight Americas mentioned in the title:


Here is how they describe their findings:

The gap between the highest and lowest life expectancies for race-county combinations in the United States is over 35 y. We divided the race-county combinations of the US population into eight distinct groups, referred to as the “eight Americas,” to explore the causes of the disparities that can inform specific public health intervention policies and programs.

And here is their conclusion:

Disparities in mortality across the eight Americas, each consisting of millions or tens of millions of Americans, are enormous by all international standards. The observed disparities in life expectancy cannot be explained by race, income, or basic health-care access and utilization alone. Because policies aimed at reducing fundamental socioeconomic inequalities are currently practically absent in the US, health disparities will have to be at least partly addressed through public health strategies that reduce risk factors for chronic diseases and injuries.

For example, their data show that "the life expectancy gap between the 3.4 million high-risk urban black males and the 5.6 million Asian females was 20.7 y in 2001." This is an enormous difference in longevity for the two groups; and it is a difference that tags fundamental social structures that influence health and risk across these two populations.

Here is a time-series graph of the behavior of longevity for the eight Americas:
So what are the factors that appear to create these extreme differences in mortality across socioeconomic and racial groups in America? They consider health care access and utilization; homicide; accidents; and HIV as primary potential causes of variations in mortality for a group. Most important of all of these factors for the large populations appear to be the health disparities that derive from access and utilization.  And here they offer an important set of recommendations:

Opportunities and interventions to reduce health inequalities include (1) reducing socioeconomic inequalities, which are the distal causes of health inequalities, (2) increasing financial access to health care by decreasing the number of Americans without health plan coverage, (3) removing physical, behavioral, and cultural barriers to health care, (4) reducing disparities in the quality of care, (5) designing public health strategies and interventions to reduce health risks at the level of communities (e.g., changes in urban/neighborhood design to facilitate physical activity and reduce obesity), and (6) designing public health strategies to reduce health risks that target individuals or population subgroups that are not necessarily in the same community (e.g., tobacco taxation or pharmacological interventions for blood pressure and cholesterol).

These findings are squarely relevant to assessing the justice of our society. The country needs to recognize the severity of the "health/mortality equity" issue, and we need to make appropriate policy reforms so that these disparities begin to lessen.

China

Several research papers address these issues for the case of China.  One is a World Bank working paper by David Dollar called "Poverty, Inequality, and Social Disparities During China's Economic Reform" (link).  Dollar notes that China has dramatically reduced its poverty rate over the past 25 years, whereas its income inequality measures have increased sharply during the same period. (Albert Park and Sangui Wang review the poverty statistics for this period in China Economic Review; link.)  They conclude that these inequalities between rural and urban populations, and between well educated urban professionals and the urban working class, have also resulted in significant inequalities in health status and outcomes for the various sub-populations.

Shenglan Tank, Qingyue Meng, Lincoln Chen, Henk Bekedam, Tim Evans, and Margaret Whitehead review the current evidence available on health equity in China in "Tackling the challenges to health equity in China" (link).  "Although health gains have continued, concern for the equitable distribution of social benefits of economic progress has grown" (25).  Further:

Disparities in income and wealth between the urban and rural areas, between the eastern and western regions, and between households have widened substantially. In 1990, the richest province had a GDP per person more than seven times larger than the poorest province, but by 2002, the same ratio had grown to 13 times greater.41The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality,42increased for China as a whole from 0·31 in 1978–79 to 0·45 in 2004. The level of income inequality in China is now similar to that in the USA, roughly comparable to that in the most inequitable Asian countries—Philippines and Thailand—and approaching the notoriously inequitable levels in Brazil and Mexico. (29-30)

The authors quote Amartya Sen on health equity (Amartya Sen, Why health equity"; link):

Health equity cannot be concerned only with health in isolation. Rather it must come to grips with the larger issue of fairness and justice in social arrangements, including economic allocations, paying attention to the role of health in human life and freedom.  Health equity is most certainly not just about the distribution of health, not to mention the even narrower focus on the distribution of health care. Indeed, health equity has an enormously wide reach and relevance.

And inequalities in personal income in different provinces lead to highly different levels of ability to fund public amenities in these provinces, with large effects on public health in poor provinces:

Living conditions differ greatly between areas of different affluence. Safe drinking water is available to 96% of the population of large cities but to less than 30% in poor rural areas. Differences in access to effective sanitation are even larger, 90% of residents in large cities have adequate sanitation, compared with less than 10% in poor rural areas (figure 6).

Two graphs capture the big picture:

In figure 1 the data demonstrate a strong correlation between life expectancy and average income for China's provinces and municipalities, from just about 65 years for the poorest regions to 78 years in Shanghai region.  Figure 2 demonstrates major inequalities in child health between rural and urban locations.  The authors further report that infant mortality also varies dramatically across regions: "Rural infant mortality rates are nearly five times higher in the poorest rural counties than in the wealthiest countries -- 123 versus 26 per 1000 live births, respectively" (26). One important source of data on these issues that these researchers use is the Chinese National Health Service survey of 1998; link.

The most detailed analysis of health disparities in China I've been able to find is a paper published in 2010 by Feinian Chen, Yang Yang, and Guangya Liu, "Social Change and Socioeconomic Disparities in Health over the Life Course in China: A Cohort Analysis" (link).  They make use of the China Health and Nutrition Survey to allow for a longitudinal study of health in several segments of China's population. (Here is a description of the CHNS.) Their conclusion:

Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we find significant socioeconomic status (SES) differences in the mean level of health and that these SES differentials generally diverge over the life course. We also find strong cohort variations in SES disparities in the mean levels of health and health trajectories. (126)

It would appear that studies of health status in China disaggregated by population segments are not yet as fully developed as one would wish.  The CHNS appears to have limited data coverage (much more limited than the national census, for example), and none of the studies mentioned in these articles appear to disaggregate down to levels lower than the province.  But the summary findings of all three of these articles point in the same direction: it is probable that there are significant inter-regional and inter-sectoral inequalities in health outcomes for the sub-populations corresponding to these segments.

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Posted in: CAT_policy,health,justice

The Racial Equity dividend

Racial justice organizations around the United States are struggling to find the resources from the corporate and foundation worlds needed to support their continuing work. One part of the problem seems to be that business leaders simply aren't convinced that racial inequalities are a fundamental and debilitating problem in the United States that presents a concrete threat to their own business activities. The issue has fallen off the first page of the priority list. This suggest that we need to revisit some of the costs that the structures of racial inequity are imposing on regions and cities.

The social costs of persistent racial inequity come in many dimensions. But particularly persuasive is the issue of the actual economic costs that these inequities impose on a region. We might put the point this way: racial inequities are an economic drag on a region, blocking the production of wealth and income and slowing down economic growth. Is it possible to estimate the magnitude of these hidden economic costs of continuing racial inequity?

Let's think about this problem in the context of southeast Michigan and its major city, Detroit. What would southeast Michigan look like if the racial gaps of the region were erased? The gaps that exist between white and black citizens in the region are well documented. Residential segregation is extreme. Unemployment levels are dramatically higher for African-American youth and adults. Health disparities are large and debilitating. Educational outcomes are significantly worse for African-American young people, including high school graduation rates and college attendance. And, of course, family and individual incomes and wealth levels are substantially different.

So imagine a different scenario: a region in which residential segregation has ended. Schooling outcomes are equal for white and black students. Health disparities have disappeared. Employment rates have equalized. And average incomes, wealth holdings, and employment rates have converged across races. Plainly this would be socially desirable outcome; it would be a great improvement in social justice. But what would the economic effects be? How much new income and wealth would this scenario represent over the present situation?

We might approach this question directly, by estimating the aggregate income created by bringing 40% of the population up to the per capita income of the majority population. Likewise we could estimate the aggregate wealth that would be needed in order to equalize the wealth gap. Nationally black households in 2010 earned only 58% of the income of white households (link). I don't have full data for Wayne County at hand, but if the ratio is roughly similar, this implies roughly a $20,000 gap in Wayne County household income between white and black households, which aggregates to almost $6 billion in lost income as a result of racial inequity. If the social factors leading to this inequity were eliminated, this would add $6 billion to the county's income, consumption, and savings. (These are back-of-the envelope estimates, of course, and should be taken only as illustrative of the magnitude of the problem. Here are some basic demographic and income data for Wayne County based on census results; link.)

This scenario presupposes economic growth and jobs growth, but this assumption is supported by the large increase in the talent and education level of the population. We would also need to estimate the economic benefits associated with improved health status for the African-American population -- likewise a large number that public health researchers have probably already estimated. It is well understood in the field of global public health that improving a population's health status also improves its productivity. (Here is a study sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation that tries to estimate these costs and benefits. Nationally the costs associated with racial disparities in health are estimated in the trillions.)

Another approach to this issue would be to follow the lead of CEOs for Cities in attempting to estimate the "talent dividend" (link): do an econometric study of cities measuring degree of racial difference and per capita income. This would be the "racial equity dividend." I don't know if there is a recognized metric that already exists for measuring racial gaps in metropolitan regions, but it shouldn't be hard to construct. It should include components reflecting segregation, income, schooling, and health -- kind of a Human Development Index for Regional Racial Equity. We could then plot racial inequity against per capita income to see whether there is a relationship between these variables. I don't know the answer, but I'd bet there is such a relationship. This would be a genuinely interesting piece of social research. And it might help communities realize the core importance of attacking their regional issues when it comes to racial equity. (I would love to know from Richard Florida whether there is any work available on this question in his research on cities.)

This whole line of thought depends on a hidden premise: that the racial gaps that exist in the metro regions of our country derive ultimately from racialized social and economic institutions that systematically produce and reproduce these racialized outcomes. This is what we once referred to as "institutionalized racism", though the term now sounds dated. It represents the systemic ways in which African-American people are tracked into lower social outcomes in health, education, employment, and income and wealth. Justice requires that we at long last dissolve those institutional tracks. But the economic health of the country demands no less as well. And it is in the best interest of corporations and foundations to support these efforts in their home cities and regions.

(Here is a series in the Detroit News on the costs of segregation; link.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,justice,race

A jobless future?

Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio wrote a pretty gloomy book in 1994 with the striking title, The Jobless Future. Here is a Harvard Educational Review discussion of the book (link). What is most discomforting in reading the book today is the degree to which the factors they identify seem to be today's headlines. What does jobless mean here? In a word, it means that the US and other OECD countries will never recover the number and quality of jobs they need in order to regain the middle class affluence they had in the 1950s and 1960s. The future will involve work -- but not enough jobs to ensure a low unemployment rate. Here is their assessment in 1994:

For there is no doubt that we have yet to feel the long-term effects on American living standards that will result from the elimination of well-paid professional, technical, and production jobs. At the same time, nearly everyone admits that many of these jobs are gone forever. (xi)

The central structural factors they identified in 1994 are still key parts of our economic environment today: technology innovation replacing labor, rising productivity producing persistently flat labor demand, shifts in the structure of the economy towards finance and service sectors, and internationalization of production.

Technological progress and capital accumulation seem to disrupt the social fabric in the United States. A weakened position in the international economy demands that American industry increase its productivity and cut its unit labor cost. As Carl G. Thor, president of the American Productivity Center in Houston, says, "The trick is to get more output without a surge in employment." Technological change and competition in the world market guarantee that increasing numbers of workers will be displaced and that these workers will tend to be rehired in jobs that do not pay comparable wages and salaries. Women and minorities will suffer the most as the result of these changes; the increased participation in an occupational sector by women and minorities is often an indicator of falling wages in that occupation. (3)

The second explanation, more sobering, emphasized the role of huge federal and consumer debt accumulated beween the late 1970s and the early 1990s that has drained public and private investment, inhibiting recovery and growth. (5)

This, in brief, is the context within which a severely reduced job "market" began to take shape, not only for U.S. workers, but potentially for all workers. In this book we argue that the progressive destruction of high-quality, well-paid, permanent jobs is produced by three closely related developments. (8)

The implication they draw is stark: new jobs will never be created at a rate to satisfy rising demand for jobs.

Our first argument—that the Western dream of upward mobility has died and it is time to give it a respectful funeral—may have at long last seeped into the bones of most Americans, even the most optimistic economist. The dream has died because the scientific-technological revolution of our time, which is not confined to new electronic processes but also affects organizational changes in the structure of corporations, has fundamentally altered the forms of work, skill, and occupation. The whole notion of tradition and identity of persons with their work has been radically changed. (15)

They've also got a vision of what the future could look like: satisfying lives with a decent standard of living, based on a combination of paid work and guaranteed social income.

The aim of this work is to suggest political and social solutions that take us in a direction in which it is clear that jobs are no longer the solution, that we must find another way to ensure a just standard of living for all. (xii)

Accordingly, if unwork is fated to be no longer the exception to the rule of nearly full employment, we need an entirely new approach to the social wage and, more generally, "welfare" policy. If there is work to be done, everyone should do some of it; additional remuneration would depend on the kind of work an individual performs. (353)

They are as interested in the "satisfying" part of the question as the "standard of living" part. They want to know what sources of meaning, worth, and value are possible for a whole civilization in which work and career are no longer the primary focus? It is an existential question as much as it is an economic one -- which takes us back to an earlier post on income and wellbeing.

But here is someone else who has a vision of a jobless future: William Gibson. His pictures of the Sprawl (an urban agglomeration extending from Atlanta to Boston) and the Bridge (the improvised "off the grid" community living on the earthquake-damaged Oakland Bridge) offer a grim picture of life for people scraping by in a cyberpunk world. There is talent, technology innovation, wealth, economic competition in Gibson's world -- but there's nothing that looks like a middle class life for ordinary people. (Here are a couple of the novels: Neuromancer, All Tomorrow's Parties.)

It seems inescapable that the rising inequalities of income and wealth we have experienced for thirty years are strongly linked to the jobless state of 15% to 20% of us (counting discouraged workers and underemployed workers) and the fairly stagnant living standards of another 50%. By tolerating this acceleration of inequality, our society is also silently sanctioning the end of social solidarity and the compact that we've had according to which everyone benefits from economic activity. Our graph seems to be pointing more in the direction of Gibson than Aronowitz. But maybe this is the fundamental goal of right wing rhetoric after all: to decisively break the bonds of social solidarity and mutual obligation altogether and to allow privilege to have its way unconstrained by social obligations. Surely we owe each other more than this.

So far the strategies on the table about employment are either about job creation (Democrats) or providing even more tax relief for business and the wealthy (Republican). None of these voices consider the more radical implication: we may need to consider a dramatically new way of thinking about income, work, social distribution, and lifestyle in the future. And that's what Aronowitz and DiFazio proposed almost 20 years ago.

(Philippe Van Parijs' recent contribution to Boston Review on a universal basic income is a really interesting start on some serious alternative thinking (link).)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,inequality

Low income and wellbeing

source: J. G. Speth, The Bridge at the End of the World

A recent post on Rawls's critique of capitalism closed with an intriguing mention of a contrast Rawls draws between economic growth and human wellbeing. He is particularly critical of the consumerism that is enmeshed in the social psychology of a growth-oriented market system. This point is worth focusing on more closely.

We seem to work on the basis of a couple of basic assumptions about income, lifestyle, and community in this country that need to be questioned. One group of these clusters around the idea that a high quality of life requires high and rising income. High income is needed for high consumption, and high consumption produces happiness and life satisfaction. Neighborhoods of families with high income are better able to sustain community and civic values. And symmetrically, we assume that it is more or less inevitable that poor communities have low levels of community values and low levels of the experience of life satisfaction.

All these assumptions need to be questioned. As any social service agency can document, there are ample signs of social pathology in the affluent suburbs of American cities. These suburban places aren't paragons of successful, happy human communities in any of the ways Robert Bellah talks about (Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Good Society). And there is little reason to believe that the consumption-based lifestyles that define an American ideal of affluence really contribute consistently to life satisfaction and successful community.

But here I want to focus on the other end of this set of assumptions: the idea that non-affluent people and communities are necessarily less happy, less satisfied, and less integrated around a set of civic and spiritual values. So here is the central point: people can build lives within the context of low income that are deeply satisfying and rewarding. And communities of low-income people can be highly successful in achieving a substantial degree of civic and spiritual interconnection and mutual support. It doesn't require "affluence" to have a deeply satisfying human life and a thriving community.

There are many reasons for thinking these observations are likely to be true. One is the example of other societies. Consider village life in Spain or Italy, for example, where many families still live on incomes that are a fraction of American affluence, who incorporate gardens into their regular lifestyle and household economy, and who enjoy admirable levels of personal and social satisfaction. Or think of stable farming communities in India or Africa that have successfully achieved a balance of farm productivity, a degree of social equality, and a strong sense of community. Or consider examples of communities in the United States that have deliberately put together lives and communities that reject "affluence" as a social and personal ideal.

Of course it's true that extreme poverty is pretty much incompatible with satisfaction and community. Malnutrition, illiteracy, and untreated disease are counterparts of extrme poverty and destroy happiness and community. But "non-affluence" isn't the same as extreme poverty.

What everyone needs, at every level of income, is decent access to the components of a happy life: healthcare, nutrition, shelter, education, dignity, and security. These are what an earlier generation of development thinkers called basic needs. And it is self-evident how these fit into the possibility of a decent and satisfying life. But access to these goods isn't equivalent to the American dream of affluence.

So here is a fairly profound question: what steps can be taken to promote the features of personal wellbeing and robust community relations that can make "non-affluence" a sustainable social ideal? And how can we help poor communities to strengthen their ability to nurture these positive values according to their own best instincts?

This line of thought converges closely with the striking arguments made by James Gustave Speth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. The graphs at the top represent Speth's summary of the environmental catastrophe associated with the idea of permanent economic growth. Much of Speth's critique of consumerism and growth is summarized in this account of a talk he gave at McGill in 2008. Speth argues that a radical rethinking of well-being is necessary if we are to achieve a society that is environmentally sustainable.

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Posted in: capitalism,CAT_policy,environment

The moral basis for an extensive state

A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism.  The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today.  I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John Rawls (link, link), expressing a liberal democratic view of the good society.  These posts remind me how important it is to have some fairly specific ideas about how we would want society to be organized in the future, so we can also have some ideas about current reforms that might take us in that direction.  And today we don't seem to have a lot of clarity about this kind of vision, especially on the progressive side of the political spectrum.

The ideal that seems to lie behind the conservative Tea Party political philosophy is simple but alarming:

1. Citizens should have maximum possible liberties of activity and use of property.


2. Citizens have no positive obligations to other citizens, beyond those associated with respecting liberties and property rights.


3. The state exists only to secure the liberties and security of citizens; this means the state needs to have funds to provide for national defense, enforcement of property rights, and maintenance of public order.


4. The state has no legitimate basis for creating more extensive regulations on the exercise of liberty and property (FDA, EPA, regulation of banks, …).  Such regulations represent an unjustified interference with the exercise of private property rights.


5. The state has no legitimate basis for using tax moneys to provide a social safety net (unemployment payments, welfare payments, food and housing subsidies, …).  Such transfer programs represent an unjustified system of redistribution of wealth and income that violates the property rights of anyone who is taxed more extensively than a fair share of the costs of providing for national defense and maintenance of public order.

This political philosophy is familiar from Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974).  At the time Nozick's vision was considered extreme from a philosophical point of view; it took to a logical limit the very limited assumptions about individual rights that were a part of the Lockean tradition of political philosophy, and arrived at what was then a very startling set of conclusions about the limits on legitimate state action.  Nozick referred to this conception as the "minimal state".  Nozick's philosophy expressed a form of libertarian conservativism, with no inclination towards the "social values" of more recent conservatism.

If this political philosophy were to be enacted through legislation, it would imply a number of things: abolition of mandatory social security, abolition of regulatory agencies like EPA and FDA, abolition of unemployment benefits and poverty-based welfare programs, and dramatic reduction of taxes on the affluent.  This is a vision of the minimal state with a vengeance; and it seems rather familiar from much of the rhetoric offered by Tea Party activists and Republican presidential candidates alike.

We could spend time thinking about the deficiencies of this political philosophy from a number of points of view.  Here my interest is different; I'd like to consider what components might go into a political philosophy that expresses a moral justification for the more extensive state that a great many Americans would want to have. First, what are the institutional arrangements that might be considered?

A strong alternative to the minimal state is the Nordic model -- essentially the political and economic system associated with Scandinavian democracies in the 1960s through the 1980s.  Here is an interesting monograph on the economic and social characteristics of the Nordic model: The Nordic Model: Embracing globalization and sharing risks (Torben M. Andersen, Bengt Holmström, Seppo Honkapohja, Sixten Korkman, Hans Tson Söderström, Juhana Vartiainen; published by the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy); link.  The authors describe the key economic and social commitments of the Nordic model in these terms:

• a comprehensive welfare state with an emphasis on transfers to households and publicly provided social services financed by taxes, which are high notably for wage income and consumption;


• a lot of public and/or private spending on investment in human capital, including child care and education as well as research and development (R&D);


• and a set of labour market institutions that include strong labour unions and employer associations, significant elements of wage coordination, relatively generous unemployment benefits and a prominent role for active labour market policies. (13)

A key goal of the study is to assess the economic performance of the Nordic model over the past fifty years.  The study's summary conclusion is very favorable: contrary to anti-tax, anti-government ideology, the Nordic economies have performed very well.

The Nordic countries have, according to many indicators, succeeded relatively well in fulfilling their social ambitions. Recently, this has been combined with a satisfactory economic performance in terms of employment and productivity levels as well as growth of GDP per capita. Also, the macroeconomic balance is good and public finances are strong. There is indeed a Nordic success story in the sense of a favourable combination of economic efficiency and social equality. 

True, the Nordics went through a period of low productivity growth in the 1970s (like most other OECD countries) as well as a major financial and macroeconomic crisis with very high unemployment rates and large fiscal imbalances in the early 1990s (somewhat earlier and less dramatically in the case of Denmark). But even so, the Nordics have more or less managed to keep up with the US in terms of PPP-adjusted GDP over the last 25–30 years, which is more than can be said of most other EU15 countries. The longterm performance is mainly recorded as a high rate of total factor productivity growth. This indicates that technical progress, notably in the area of information and communication technology (IT), has played in important role in growth. More importantly, it also shows that the Nordics – contrary to popular belief – demonstrate a high degree of economic flexibility and capacity of structural change. The macroeconomic crises have helped the process by inducing growth-enhancing changes in structural policies (and, for a while, through the improvements of competitiveness caused by large depreciations in the early 1990s). (15)

These are social and economic arrangements that establish an active state, a state with broad responsibilities to the welfare of its citizens, and a state that calls upon a significant fraction of the wealth of society to do its work.  What are the moral principles that might underly such a conception of a good society?  Here are a few axioms that seem to be worth considering within such a political philosophy.

1. Society is a system of interdependency and mutual benefit for all citizens. Everyone benefits from being part of a just society.


2. The moral situation of individuals in society includes several important components:


1. Individuals within society have rights, liberties, and needs for personal security.


2. Individuals have obligations to each other to help prevent hardship and to facilitate full human development. These obligations derive from at least two sources: (a) the benefits we all enjoy as a result of social cooperation in a functioning society; and (b) the moral recognition we have of the equal human worth and dignity of fellow citizens.


3. Individuals within society have universal needs to facilitate their full human development and functioning, including education, health care, housing, and adequate nutrition.


3. Certain core functions for the state follow from these moral ideas:


1. The state is obligated to create a system of law that protects the rights, liberties, and security needs of all citizens.


2. The state is obligated to serve as one of the important vehicles through which our positive obligations to other citizens are honored. 


1. The state needs to ensure that all citizens have access to education, healthcare, and the essentials of life.


2. The state needs to provide a safety net for citizens whose earnings within the market economy leave them unable to provide for a decent standard of living.


3. The state is obligated to protect the public from the harmful effects of private activities, including regulations concerning health and safety, conditions of labor, and environmental harms.


4. A handful of moral constraints surround the policies and laws the state may adopt:


1. The state is authorized to collect taxes to efficiently perform its functions of protecting rights, securing welfare, and regulating harmful activities.


2. The state is obligated to be procedurally just and economically efficient in its administration of public programs.


3. The policies and laws of the state need to be adopted through a democratic process in which all citizens have equal voice.

This formulation highlights a cluster of values that can potentially gain wide support within a democracy: the equal worth of all individuals, the importance of liberty, the importance of a range of social obligations all citizens have to each other, and the idea that the state needs to be articulated in such a way as to embody these moral ideas.

If the theory of the minimal state owes much of its content to John Locke, the more extensive state described here owes much of its moral rationale to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Rousseau brought the moral perspective of the "individual within community" into the foundations of political philosophy.  Josh Cohen's Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals provides an excellent discussion of Rousseau's political theory; link.

(Gosta Esping-Andersen has studied the politics and policies of social democracies through a lifetime of writing. Especially important are The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism and Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,inequality,justice

Global justice

There is a clear and reasonably uncontroversial basis for a simple theory of justice that all nations/cultures can accept. This is grounded a few core values about human development and is expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Millenium Development Goals, and other founding documents of the United Nations. This conception emphasizes several key values:

• equal worth of all persons


• value of freedom


• value of democracy and self-determination


• the injustice of hunger, lack of education, lack of healthcare


• the injustice of capricious arrest and state violence (illegality)

These values provide a basis for steering our core institutions and practices in the direction of greater justice: whenever it is possible to reform institutions and practices in ways that enhance one or more of these factors, we should do so.  Policy makers and legislators can ask the question, how will this or that change to a set of institutions affect the well-being of individuals and populations affected; how will the change affect the freedoms and opportunities for self-determination of the people affected; how will it work to increase the effective scope of law within various societies?

John Rawls drew a strong distinction between ideal justice and imperfect justice, and noted that his contributions were directed to the formulation of a theory of ideal justice (Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 13).  He did not believe that the ideal theory of justice would suffice to provide a road map for creating a more just society.  When we consider the complexity and difficulty of improving the justice of fundamental international institutions and relations, the program of arriving at an ideal theory seems unappealing.  Instead, we need to have some plausible and action-supporting principles that allow for practical improvement in the overall justice of the global system. We need to have some concrete ideas about how to get from here to there.

This approach -- the idea that we can improve justice in a piecemeal way -- spares us the heroic pretense of offering a general, universal theory of justice that we hope or expect all people can be persuaded to accept. It works from the point of view that injustice is more specific and more widely agreed upon. We don't need to engage in irresolvable debates about whether there are universal human rights in order to agree that the world will be more just if fewer people are forced into famine conditions.

This is the approach taken by Madison Powers and Ruth Faden in their study of the ethics of global public health in Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy (link), and it has the clear advantage of pragmatism.  It is pragmatic on the side of moral agreement, in the sense that it makes no strong claims about abstract moral theories that may be controversial across perspectives.  And it is pragmatic on the side of policy, in the sense that it provides an incremental strategy for improving the conditions of justice in the world.  And in fact, the premises mentioned above conform fairly closely to the six dimensions of personal well-being that Powers and Faden highlight: health, personal security, reasoning, respect, attachment, and self-determination.

One of the greatest advocates for justice in global development is Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom).  Sen's major contribution is the idea of the importance of creating conditions in which people can fulfill and actualize their human capabilities.  Sen's most recent work on global justice topics is his The Idea of Justice, in which he offers an alternative to Rawls's approach to the problem.  Here he gives primacy to the value of full human development as a benchmark for global justice.

I turn now to the second part of the departure, to wit the need for a theory that is not confined to the choice of institutions, nor to the identification of ideal social arrangements. The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live. The importance of human lives, experiences and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate. (17)

Tom Pogge's work on global justice provides a good bridge between abstract moral theory and practical, real-world issues of justice in a developing world.  Pogge has sought to engage these issues in ways that have real, substantive engagement with the issues of poverty, hunger, and maltreatment that continue to set the stage for the majority of the earth's population today.  In an important recent volume, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge have pulled together an extended working group of scholars and activists concerned with global justice.  The volume took its origin at a conference in Oslo in 2003.  (Here is an article by Pogge on global justice and poverty (link), and here is a video interview with Pogge on the consequences of the global economic crisis on poverty; link.)  Pogge and his colleagues focus closely on the actual workings of international institutions to attempt to measure the degree to which they disadvantage the people of the less-developed world.

Consider for example a long-term contract concerning the exportation of natural resources which the government of some African country concludes with a rich Western state or one of its corporations.  Within the traditional philosophical framework, it is self-evident that such an agreement must be honored: "People are to observe treaties and undertakings" says Rawls's second principle of state conduct, and the third one adds: "Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them" (Rawls 1999). But here is the reality. The African government is corrupt and oppressive, and its continuation in power depends largely on the military.  The sales it conducts impose environmental harms and hazards on the indigenous population. Yet, most of these people do not benefit, because the revenues are partly siphoned off by the small political elite and partly spent on arms needed for military repression. (These arms are suppled by other rich Western states in accordance with other contracts executed, without coercion, between them and the African government.) (5)

Why should gimlet-eyed policy makers take these arguments about global justice seriously?  What does justice have to do with the nuts and bolts of international economic policy reform?  Why should self-interested nations and their leaders adjust their policies to the demands of justice? The humanitarian and moral reasons are self-evident.  But it is also true that there is a powerful reason to care about justice that is based in self-interest.  This is because systemic injustice is itself a threat to national security.  Governments are destabilized, insurgencies are supported, cities experience riots, and anti-liberal violent movements flourish in conditions where masses of people are enmeshed in circumstances of injustice.  Barrington Moore, Jr. made these arguments in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978), and his conclusions seem even more compelling in the world today.

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Posted in: CAT_policy,globalization,justice