Aye. It's a largely arbitrary concept. Rawls tried to get at a good definition with “Would you want to be randomly born into society [X] ?”, but even here he relies on the silly notion that there are cosmic Mulligans. I will not, AFAICT, be reborn as somebody who will end up with crappier skills. What's “fair” about my paying as if I might be?

Sure, I'll make that argument. Europe was trashed after the war and remains, to this day, poorer on a per capita basis. They should have converged and continued converging. Instead, we continue to attract capital that, all else being equal, should be able to find more productive homes elsewhere. But everything else hasn't been equal since the 70s; the Europeans have, one way or another, throttled back growth such that they have not converged but, rather, remained static relative to us.

“It is impossible to look at the growth in inequality (which now mimics the graphs of the 1920s) and not see this as an affront to basic fairness unless you are writing or speaking from ignorance.”

The important point here seems to be “fairness”. The Right looks at a policy and says “Policy X advances fairness” while the Left sees the same policy and denounces it- “policy X is the veritable acme of unfairness!” In this situation, it seems easy to conclude that the other side of the debate could only be motivated by idiocy or malice. Neither side has time to ask “what is this fairness thing?”

If we replace “fairness” with its definition, as defined by each party, then the two statements cease to contradictory, and become merely tradeoffs. A little reductionism can go a long way here. KJ is right, failing to see the monstrous unfairness in the Gini coefficient is simply ignorant…. provided, of course, that you share his definition of “fair.”

We'd probably see a dramatic increase in the quality of discourse about inequality if we could ban the use of “fairness” as a descriptor for policies and distributions.

KJ- would you say this is accurate? Some of the people with whom you disagree have shiny degrees from fancy institutions and work full-time in this very field- their ignorance would seem to be unusually narrow in scope and deep in effect. Or are we all somehow unusually evil? It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the disagreement is definitional.

p.s. glad you're back, Will. My condolences on moving to Iowa.

Look at the world through the lens of GDP growth per capita, and you'll find yourself looking at a radically different world. European and American growth rates are about the same. Brazil and Japan look to be roughly on the same trajectory. China's growth spurt looks ever more impressive, India's becomes much less so.

Now, I don't think GDP per capita is everything, because I think people tend to underrate the effect that population has on consumer choice, and thus economic well being. Even though Oslo is “richer” than New York, as a consumer you're much better off in the city. Even though Cambodia and Uzbekistan are both tremendously poor, I'd much rather live in Cambodia (yes, I have been to both places; no, probably not long enough to get a completely informed perspective).

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/08/…

Will, I think a good example of your premise is the abortion debate. Abortion proponents show a marked tendency to argue that anti-abortionists secretly wish to control the sex lives of chattel women. Abortion opponents, to be fair, have a tendency to argue that abortion proponents condone murdering babies. Both sides tend to discount the other's position on whether and when a fetus is a human being — not just to disagree with it, but to ignore the fact that the position even exists in good faith subjectively.