His book is really good and is imo the best defense of the sort of luck egalitarianism I’d endorse, but it’s a bit technical, his paper on the lockean proviso is excellent and not insanely long I’ll see if I can find a link
So I propose to look into the motivations of neoliberals - why do they explicitly favour inequality? My best guess it might be a carrott and stick move to just make people more productive and innovative, but I am not sure. It is a bit above my pay grade and requires a real economist. Still look at this part:
"the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work. "
My point is, then, it cannot be decided on a purely philosophical principles basis. Your argument is convincing on the level of purely philosophical principles, but things might be more complicated in "real life".
Also, there is a big problem: what is the desired level of inequality? If you say zero, you really do not sound very pragmatic. Don't Olympic medal winners deserve a bit more than the average? Our intuitive sense of justice and fairness might be fairly egalitarianish, but never 100% egalitarian. Think also Kurt Vonnegut here... If you say much lower than today, but not zero, then you completely have to abandon philosophy and get busy in the messy and boring wonky details of economic modeling.
Equity...
Have you read any of Jesse Spafford’s work?
I haven't, although apparently he follows me on twitter lol. Is there anything by him you'd recommend?
His book is really good and is imo the best defense of the sort of luck egalitarianism I’d endorse, but it’s a bit technical, his paper on the lockean proviso is excellent and not insanely long I’ll see if I can find a link
https://philpapers.org/rec/SPAWEA
Brad DeLong explicitly said: neoliberals explicitly wanted more inequality, and he more or less supports them, even though we all know he is not any kind of market fundamentalist: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/ask-a-neoliberal-an-interview-with-j-bradford-delong/
So I propose to look into the motivations of neoliberals - why do they explicitly favour inequality? My best guess it might be a carrott and stick move to just make people more productive and innovative, but I am not sure. It is a bit above my pay grade and requires a real economist. Still look at this part:
"the rich needed to be richer so they would be incentivized to create jobs, and the poor needed to be poorer so they would be incentivized to work. "
My point is, then, it cannot be decided on a purely philosophical principles basis. Your argument is convincing on the level of purely philosophical principles, but things might be more complicated in "real life".
Also, there is a big problem: what is the desired level of inequality? If you say zero, you really do not sound very pragmatic. Don't Olympic medal winners deserve a bit more than the average? Our intuitive sense of justice and fairness might be fairly egalitarianish, but never 100% egalitarian. Think also Kurt Vonnegut here... If you say much lower than today, but not zero, then you completely have to abandon philosophy and get busy in the messy and boring wonky details of economic modeling.
Lol