Question

New Directions for Egalitarianism

22. As discussed in a previous section, relational egalitarians may not see equality of wealth as their most desired outcome. They instead desire equality of social relationships. To them, equality of wealth has been the most direct path to achieve this desired end. However, new trends are developing.

23. There has been increased attention in the economics literature on the failings of policies that target economic growth and income in an effort to make lives better off. This argument has been the apex of the emerging literature on the economics of happiness. Ever since the publication of Richard Easterlin’s (1974) work, which popularized the Easterlin Paradox, some of the literature has set out to explain why increases in a country’s income do not correlate with higher levels of self-reported happiness among its citizens. Indeed, now even former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke argues that “GDP is not itself the final objective of policy” (2010). The better objective is well-being (happiness), and the egalitarian now has a new direction for policy in promoting equality of well-being. Many advocate augmenting the national measurement of gross domestic product with a national happiness accounting (Diener 2000).

24. In shifting the policy focus away from wealth inequality and toward inequality of well-being (Goff, Helliwell, and Mayraz 2016), a host of interventionist policies are opened up to the egalitarians’ disposal. Subjective well-being measures are regarded as
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comprehensive measures of quality of life, and they have many correlates. A nonexhaustive list of correlates (Dolan, Peasgood, and White 2008) includes variables such as income (Diener and Oishi 2000), education (Blanchflower and Oswald 2004), environment (Welsch 2006), materialism (Kasser 2003), mortality (Kawachi et al. 1997), employment (Stutzer 2004), personality (DeNeve and Cooper 1999), and even social capital and trust (Helliwell and Putnam 2004). The shift in focus away from income and toward a more broadly defined well-being measure can open up a Pandora’s box of progressive policy proposals.

25. However, the egalitarians’ search for policies to attain equality of well-being may in fact lead to the unraveling of well-being itself. A large literature demonstrates that autonomy of individual choice leads to greater subjective well-being (Ryan and Deci 2000; Verme 2009), and an ever-expanding literature links high economic freedom to greater subjective well-being (Veenhoven 2000; Gropper, Lawson, and Thorne 2011; Nikolaev 2014; Jackson 2016). The problems this literature presents for the goals of redistribution are in addition to the inherent difficulties in distributing such fundamental determinates of well-being as personality traits and psychological characteristics. Perhaps a more pervasive problem for proponents of policies for happiness is that of adaptation.

26. Adaptation in the happiness literature refers to humans’ innate ability to adapt to new circumstances. In fact, one explanation of the Easterlin Paradox is that increases in income can fail to create increases in happiness because people rapidly adjust to their higher incomes. Although there may be an initial temporal boost in happiness from increased income, the effects do not persist in the long run. Adaptation also explains why poor and impoverished countries sometimes report much higher levels of happiness than might seem reasonable (Graham 2010). People have a baseline equilibrium level of happiness, and any deviations from that baseline are short-lived. If well-being inequalities are taken to be meaningful, then any policies implemented with the intention of combating them must target an element of well-being that isn’t subject to adaptation. Among the correlates of subjective well-being, social capital is often referred to as a prominent candidate policy target that is immune to the problems of adaptation (Bartolini, Bilancini, and Sarracino 2016). Thus, if egalitarianism pursues equality in the domain of well-being, it will still find itself trying to accomplish an impossible task in determining the distribution of social capital.

Write an academic summary of between 110 and 120 words from paragraphs 22 to 26
“New Directions for Egalitarianism”.

Answer 1

The passage is an eye-opener for the policy makers in terms of defining New Egalitarianism as a movement that is concerned with the wellbeing, happiness and social relationship than the mere economic growth. It points out that a nations GDP shows the economic growth and international power of that country but it doesn’t correlate with the happiness and wellbeing of its citizens, instead it has increased the stress and broken the social relationships into pieces. It also proposes a comprehensive measurement to measure the quality of life. This measure should include the happiness and wellbeing in terms of people’s accessibility to basic things such as education, shelter, food and medicine.

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