Tag

egalitarianism

Is Democracy Slipping Away?

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This essay by Charles Taylor draws from a lecture sponsored by the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy program, called "Ways Democracy Can Slip Away," on October 17, 2016, at Roosevelt House in New York City, and is copublished in The Democracy Papers. Taylor was the program’s 2016 Democracy Fellow. Speaking in the weeks before the 2016 US election, Taylor discusses the character of modern democracies and their vulnerability to what he call “spirals of decline.” He concludes with a reflection on the present populist moment.

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February 7, 2017

“The Nearer Your Destination, the More You’re Slip-Sliding Away”: A Comment on Charles Taylor

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Nancy Rosenblum’s Items contribution is based on her response to Charles Taylor’s October Roosevelt House lecture, "Ways Democracy Can Slip Away," and also appears in The Democracy Papers. A member of the Anxieties of Democracy program’s Advisory Committee, Rosenblum reflects on Taylor’s arguments through the lenses of history and political philosophy. She ends on a note of contingent hope, emphasizing that democracy’s contemporary vulnerabilities are related to genuine advances in the quality of democracy over time.

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February 7, 2017

Scales of Inequality: How Inequalities within and across Nations Shape Each Other

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In the latest essay on "What is Inequality?," Simon Reid-Henry begins by asking, “Where is inequality?” In doing so, he argues that separating out analysis of “within-country” inequality and inequality between nations obscures how they shape and reinforce each other. Reid-Henry suggests that the framing deep poverty as a problem of “international development,” rather than of one of global inequality, limits our analyses and finding prospective solutions.

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January 10, 2017

Normative Individualism and Research on Inequality

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Maximilian Kasy’s contribution to the “What is Inequality?” series adopts a perspective of “normative individualism,” which considers overall social welfare through the lens of individual welfare and acknowledges that policy changes inevitably create winners and losers in terms of inequality. Drawing from his open online textbook on inequality, Kasy encourages attention to welfare weights that reveal “how much social welfare changes when we change individual welfare,” particularly as different individuals affect the aggregate differently, and argues that egalitarian outcomes emerge when greater weight is given to the poor in the policymaking that shapes wealth distribution.

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October 4, 2016

Flipping the Script: From Inequality to Equality

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The current focus on inequality, argues Danielle Allen, makes it more imperative than ever to better understand the concept of “equality.” Allen’s essay focuses especially on political equality, which requires attention in its own right and in relation to other dimensions of (in)equality. Through a critical engagement with John Rawls’s work, she argues that public autonomy (“positive liberties”) is central to imagining and realizing political equality.

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September 20, 2016

Problems against Symptoms: Economic Democracy and Inequality

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In the latest contribution to our “What is Inequality?” series, Suresh Naidu argues that the recent focus on income redistribution as a remedy for inequality can distract from more fundamental limitations to the liberty of workers as economic actors. Naidu explores the nature of the labor contract in capitalist economies and other constraints on “economic democracy,” and suggests reforms that would make unions more effective in addressing these constraints.

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September 6, 2016
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