In a fascinating guest spot over at The Atlantic’s new Brave New Deal blog, my friend Bart Wilson — an actual economic scientist — digs deep into the question of the meaning of a “fair” distribution in the experimental economic games he studies. Drawing on the work of linguist Anna Wierzbicka, Bart reports that the English word ‘fair’ doesn’t really translate one-to-one into any other language. I did not know that! And he argues that fairness judgments are made relative to an implicit or explicit set of customary rules:
No matter how much we may feel that fairness is a pure principle, it’s really a regular social rule, a custom. (Another surprispingly revealing word: you have probably seen the words “customary rates” applied to gratuities and sales commissions). Fairness really boils down to an issue of agreement: can we agree on what rules this particular context calls for? In a future post, I’ll expand on what this means for markets and public policy.
Remember, Bart’s not riffing from the armchair. He’s run a mindnumbing number of experimental games meant to elicit judgments of fair distribution. If he’s right, this is pretty interesting. One thing it seems to me to imply is that a “theory of justice” built on intuitions about fairness is likely to be pretty conservative, echoing the conventional rules underlying fairness judgments, and at best ironing out their inconsistencies. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on what kind of work you would like a theory of justice to be do.
Anyway, Bart’s work is an outstanding example of what economics looks like when it is also science.
So true! I am such a big fan of his work, which makes all other economics look like either bullshit statistical cherry-picking or meaningless theoretical jabbering.
He may have an aspect of fairness, but “fairness” disputes in other primates certainly capture something else.
(Reviewing google hits for 'fairness primates' I'm not sure I should even quote the second “fairness” above.)
Anyone with kids knew this already.
Bart Wilson should run this study by some linguists before he proceeds further- I would suggest the fine people at Language Log. Judging from his somewhat breathless ‘finding’ that the English word for fairness is not directly translatable into one single word in another language, he seems to be falling for some version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that thesis that language itself somehow shapes people’s cognition. Otherwise, what’s the point of bringing this up?
And, before I proceed further, I’d just like to point out that his (or Wierzbicka’) assertion that ‘fairness’ does not translate directly into any other language sounds just plain made up. Did anyone actually study how the word is used in the (I’m estimating here) over five hundred languages with a written tradition? I doubt it. And even if it’s true that the word does not translate perfectly into one single word in German, that does not mean that your average German would necessarily react differently from us to an outcome we see to be unfair. We see people from other cultures in the US all the time, and most all of them seem to assimilate quite nicely into our notions of fairness, which just points to the centrality of the social construction of meanings and the irrelevance of culture.
On his assertion that “No matter how much we may feel that fairness is a pure principle, it's really a regular social rule, a custom,” well, that’s true. Trivially true, it seems to me. Most all linguists whose works I read do not say anything contrary. Means of words, yes, it’s true, are shaped by the social and institutional settings in which they are used. And that is PRECISELY why this stuff about how the word translates into other languages or cultures (whatever culture is supposed to mean here) should be brought in at the very end of the analysis, after fully accounting for the institutional and social arrangements which give a word like fairness its power.
To sum up, I he seems to be flirting with some culturalist-determinist nonsense instead of focusing on the institution and rules. And, yes, it’s true that the word fairness is socially constructed. So what?
I would be careful with the word “irrelevance”. It can be very relevant depending upon your perspective, though certainly learning intricacies of an individual culture is not likely to lead you to some grand truth about the universe. But, if you're a migrant, a diplomat, or a tourist, it can be incredibly relevant.
Other than that, I agree mostly with the spirit of your comment.
Science? Really?
But how can you ever make stable generalizations about human behaviour or cultural assumptions based on evidence derived from one group of people in one place? Are we atoms? Do we all think the same irrespective of circumstance and belief systems?
And what if the prevailing agreement on what is fair is wrong or unjust?
Nicely put.
Fairness is a social construct…
Is this news? Have we not already had this discussion? This is why economics (of which I am a strong adherent) should not be so strongly divorced from the discussions in other academic circles.
Monkeys reject unequal pay
SARAH F. BROSNAN & FRANS B. M. DE WAAL
Nature 425, 297–299 (2003); doi:10.1038/nature01963
Yeah, science Nature is one of the more prestigious journals in the scientific community. This is actually a very funny journal article for the description of monkeys reaction to unequal pay.
The point about translation, even if it's true (which seems doubtful), does not, contra Wilson, “suggest[...] that the concept of fairness is not necessarily ubiquitous to human cultures.” What would suggest that would be if we had empirical evidence of a human culture in which a concept of fairness appeared to be lacking.
Shooting from the hip, I'd speculate that the fact that different individuals have different intuitions as to what outcome is fair in a given situation indicates that the concept has a quasi-aesthetic character, a bit like judgments of whether a piece of art is good or not.
In the ultimatum game, you might imagine someone making the following argument as to why the $5/$5 split is fair: “Because there's no reason why that person has the money to start with rather than some other person (since he was given it randomly), so he doesn't deserve any more of it than I do.” But that's only one possible construal of the principle underlying fairness, and once reasons come to an end here they'd seem to be based only on a raw preference. Reminiscent of an argument as to whether a flat income tax is more fair than a progressive one: one side will say “The fair thing to do is to tax everyone the same proportion”; someone else will say “The fair thing is to impose a similar burden on everyone.” I can't see anything other than a quasi-aesthetic preference underlying such a disagreement.
Acknowledging that when shooting from the hip one often misses.
Urdu definitely has a word for fair ADEEL/ADIL.
In Hindi the word would be Uchit.
Urdu definitely has a word for fair ADEEL/ADIL.
In Hindi the word would be Uchit.