That choice of two gambles has switched the conversation from utility to money. Isn't diminishing marginal utility the reason that the higher expected value bet is worse, making it lower expected utility?Also, I wonder if refusing to accept an exceptionally small risk of a bad outcome is just a case of the human brain's tendency to irrationally overweight to very low probabilities (a phenomenon well documented by Kahnemann and Tversky).
Yes this is true. Matthew Barnett and I had an interesting conversation about this on Twitter. I guess it depends exactly how diminishing marginal utility is.
I have no very important objection to growth maximization. I do wonder if I should pass up that slice of pie just so a thousand generations from now people who will be far wealthier than I can be just a little bit more far wealthier.
However in the here and now I am much more concerned about about mistaking positive sum transactions for zero some transactions. People who oppose immigration, taxing net emissions of CO2, freer trade, or lower deficits, for example, do not seem to be aware that they are giving up growth in favor of some kind of "equity" at all.
No growth does not equal zero sum. If all technology were to stay the same and all factories would stay the same and all workers in same jobs, there are still embedded gains from trade that could be reversed. Invading China would still break the global supply chain leading to much lower output. Most wealth is still not in stealable resources, but instantiated processes that would be harmed by conflict.
I see what you're saying and agree that economic growth is possible without improvements in productivity/technology because of gains from trade. However, it is still tautologically true that no economic growth <=> zero sum because if you could get gains from trade, then the amount of value in the economy would grow.
That is not what I am saying. If all production is fixed, no further gains from trade could occur, because further specialization is disallowed, so there would be no growth. But the current fixed level of economic output depends on trade, and would be harmed by conflict.
I really hope the author responds to this comment. I agree with Josh here and can't see any way to rebut it but am curious if the author has something in mind that I'm not seeing.
Long comment incoming but this is a very interesting point that I want to respond to.
I think I understand now. We can imagine a desert island economy with 2 people and two natural resources: Fish and bait. Say they could each catch two fish each day working individually, 4 fish total, but when they specialize productivity increases to 6 fish total. The two people are better off when one of them specializes in bait collection, the other in fishing, so they specialize and trade. If we then take the 6 fish world and institute a 'no growth' policy, capping the production of fish at 6, the islanders would still cooperate because although they are capped at 6, production would fall to 4 if they started fighting. You are right that in this case 'no growth' =/=> zero-sum fighting. This is similar to the US and China today as you pointed out.
However, there are other ways in which cooperation breaks down in this no growth world. Imagine what happens when 2 more castaways wash up to the island. Now the total production capacity of the island is more than where it was capped. Even working alone they could produce 8 fish without the cap. So now, since 6 fish will be produced whether they cooperate or not, it becomes a zero sum game and the islanders have no reason to work together. An equivalent scenario would occur if it was just the 2 original islanders but they discover a new technology or technique which raises their individual productivities to 3 fish each (their cooperative productivity is raised above the cap). Since they get 3 fish either way now, the growth cap saps any reason to cooperate. When the populations or productivities of the US and China increase, their gains from working individually get closer to the gains from cooperatively producing the maximum cap and splitting it, as do the gains from producing individually and trying to steal from the other.
So you're correct that if we capped global production at our current maximum GDP, the incentives to cooperate and trade would basically remain the same. However, as soon as populations or productivities start growing, the gains to cooperation start shrinking. This is because each actor's individual production has room to grow, while the cooperative production has been capped.
So imposing a growth ceiling below an economy's actual maximum leads to breakdown of cooperation. However, if we reach a physical limit to growth, then your point saves our society from zero sum moral collapse. It would be impossible for individuals to benefit by not cooperating in this case because if they could get more than their share of cooperative production via individual production, this would necessarily imply that the maximum cooperative production exceeds the physical limit which is a contradiction.
Sorry for the long comment but I hope that makes sense. Thank you for your comment, you have helped me refine this idea!
In addition, the "experiment" assumed a starting point of maximum production. How, without conflict, did the additional two fish get distributed when they "decided" to cooperate?
Some interesting points here - I like the distinction between an artificial cap on growth vs a natural limit. Though I'm not sure an artificial cap causes the problems you are imagining in the fishing example. Wouldn't each party continue trading and utilizing comparative advantage but just work less?
Relative deprivation is a source of misery, irrational but very human. That certainly does not argue against growth, but it argues for a higher "floor" even at the cost of some growth.
Yes you're right especially when you consider possible societal backlash that could undo economic freedoms. This topic is understudied though. I think its possible and intuitive that a fast growing economy makes people more tolerant to high levels of absolute inequality but it's hard to gauge these things.
I prefer Nozick + Rawls: People like his contractarianism because it's an explicit, consensual process. In his thought experiment, we actually sign a social contract.
Rawls made into a process --> Nozickian liberal archipelago of voluntary communities
This is an interesting article, although you clearly have not read Rawls lmao. First, you (purposefully with an intent to cast blame on interest groups) misrepresent the philosophical justification for using the veil in the first place. Then, you move on to misrepresent maximin (it's a decision making principle, not a system that can be used for normative judgements). Also, you gloss over Rawls' nuanced justification for use of minimax in two sentences. Then, you completely ignore Rawls' philosophical justification for WHY the difference principle is chosen, instead asserting that because most people do not select the difference principle in experiments, the difference principle is not just. Some side points, you quite clearly are ignorant of the fact that Rawls' theory is, as stated by him, only meant to be applied to wealthy western liberal democracies, which are in a specific point of economic development. Also, Rawls does provide an answer to questions of how we should value economic growth and the ell-being of our descendants. I'm not sure how you can avoid even mentioning Rawls' position in this article. This is made all the more disappointing by the fact that I talked about you with all of this last week. I even offered you my copy of a Theory of Justice, and I pointed you to the specific chapters relevant to your argument!! SMH
"Rawls suggests that the reason Locke’s social contract results in this unjust outcome is that it transpires under unfair conditions of a state of nature, where the parties have complete knowledge of their circumstances, characteristics and social situations. Socially powerful and wealthy parties then have access to and are able to take advantage of their knowledge of their “favorable position and exercise their threat advantage” to extract favorable terms of cooperation for themselves from those in less favorable positions (JF 16). Consequently the parties’ judgments regarding constitutional provisions are biased by their knowledge of their particular circumstances and their decisions are insufficiently impartial.
The remedy for such biases of judgment is to redefine the initial situation. Rather than a state of nature Rawls situates the parties to his social contract so that they do not have access to factual knowledge that can distort their judgments and result in unfair principles."
This is exactly the motivation that I represented. Separate people from their particular characteristics to avoid "Socially powerful and wealthy parties" (interest groups) from distorting the social contract process.
2. "You misrepresent maximin (it's a decision making principle, not a system that can be used for normative judgements)"
I literally call it the Maximin decision rule 6 time throughout the text. I accurately define it as choosing the situation that maximizes the worst case scenario.
3. "you gloss over Rawls' nuanced justification for use of minimax in two sentences."
Here is the passage where I summarize Rawls' justification of the use of maximin:
"Although Rawls admits that maximin is not usually a rational decision rule, he asserts that the singularity of the social contact decision justifies its use. The law of large numbers tells us that the average of a sample of outcomes from a random event approaches the true mean as the number of samples increases. Applied to ‘lifting the Veil’ and assigning identities, the law of large numbers implies that if everyone was randomly assigned an endowment over and over again, eventually the average of each person’s endowment would approach the expected utility calculated at the beginning. However, this assignment happens only once, and there’s no way back. To see how this changes things, imagine you are offered two choices:
1. You flip a coin. On heads you get 10 million dollars, on tails you lose 2 million. Expected value = 4 million
2. You are given 3 million dollars outright
Since you can only play once and you probably don’t have 2 million dollars to lose, most people would choose option 2, even though option 1 has a higher expected value."
3. "you completely ignore Rawls' philosophical justification for WHY the difference principle is chosen"
This is true. As I said, I wasn't aiming to accurately summarize his work. I was only talking about the use of the maximin decision rule and its implications.
4. "instead asserting that because most people do not select the difference principle in experiments, the difference principle is not just"
This is not what I assert. The evidence from experiments is not about what principles of justice people select, but rather what decision rules they use. The entire point of the post is to propose a different decision rule, not to contest Rawls' derivation of his principles of justice from a given decision rule.
5. "Rawls' theory is, as stated by him, only meant to be applied to wealthy western liberal democracies, which are in a specific point of economic development."
I was ignorant of this fact, but if it's true then it undermines the entire thought experiment! The aim is to see how people would decide to organize society without knowledge of their particular characteristics, including material wealth. But sorry, only super rich westerns can participate! If the principles of justice that he derives aren't invariant to wealth then what was the point of making people ignorant of their wealth in the first place?
1. "most moral and political disagreements aren’t about morals at all (X is not about Y), but rather are zero-sum elbowing matches between groups." This is what I critique and it is a generally ineffective and inaccurate summary.
2. "according to the maximin decision rule, our world is no better than it was thousands of years ago since there are still people living in hunter-gatherer tribes with the same low endowment of rights and resources." You're using maximin as a standard of normative judgement here, which it is not meant to do.
3. Note: only the first sentence describes what Rawls' justification is, and the rest explains what minimax is. He says more than that minimax applies only because it's only one choice.
4. The study you cite, and what you're arguing for, describes people choosing principles of justice, not principles of decision making. You either need to be more precise in your wording or reread SEP (since you clearly cannot bother to read a chapter of a book in print)
5. Your response is, again, indicative of your unwillingness to fully read arguments you disagree with. Rawls presents a two-fold method of theorizing. First, is generally what you understand. Then, after the principles of justice are decided upon, we then move to a method of deciding what the basic structure of the society shall be. Rawls calls this constitutional deliberation, however he doesn't expand upon what institutions this would lead to. (I mean, he does a bit. He argues at times for a "Property owning democracy," but it's one of the less developed areas of his corpus. So people would, at a certain point in deliberations, know the economic, social, etc. conditions of their society.
Also, you can situate a work of political theory in a time and place and have it intended to be used in that time/place and it still be valid.
2. The point still stands that maximin cannot tell the difference between the two worlds.
3. His other reasons are not worth bringing up. I'm trying to keep the article short and they aren't convincing. https://fakenous.net/?p=1824
5. "you can situate a work of political theory in a time and place and have it intended to be used in that time/place and it still be valid."
This may be true in general, but its not true when the entire point of your political theory is to separate people from any particular time, place, or allocation!
That is not the point of Rawls’ theory. He’s really engaged in the project of justifying the liberal state, albeit a more progressive one. There is a difference between the methods someone uses and their aims in using that method.
Still, you're missing the forest for the trees. Maximizing expected utility with floor constraints is more rational than a 'decision rule' that can't select situations intelligently, and when applied to principles of justice, it suggests that growing the pie is most important (after everyone has been guaranteed a sufficiently-sized slice). I don't know how anyone could object to this
Rawls stipulated for agents in the original position having 'plug-ins' of Econ 101, Politics 101 etc. However, Sociobiology 101 would tell you that
1) some purely genetic uncorrelated asymmetries are not effaceable behind the veil and this means, inter alia
2) likelihood of being a founding ancestor is highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, the Price equation will work differently for different agents.
This means that preference diversity is too great for a one-shot contract to be Muth rational. In other words, everybody (provided they have sufficient knowledge of Econ) would stipulate for incomplete contracts regulated by canons whose outcomes are not computable rather than for constrained optimization. In practice, fiscal policy is about canons of taxation and the art of administration. It isn't about substantive outcomes. Another way of arriving at the same result would be to emphasize 'regret minimizing strategies' to deal with Knightian uncertainty.
There are other reasons why Rawls was obviously barking up the wrong tree. Consider the concurrency problems, the agenda control problems, the aggregation problems, the problems of computability and complexity involved. The thing is simply foolish.
What of 'growth'? The problem is that we don't what is or isn't Income because we can't be sure we are reducing our stock of assets such that the thing is sustainable. Even if we could be sure that growth had occurred- as opposed to a bunch of White elephants having been accumulated- the fact remains that our progeny may have reduced reproductive fitness because of it. Hysteresis effects predominate in determining such outcomes- especially for men- so ergodicity has limited purchase.
The fact is, before you can have contracts, you have to a notion of 'commercium'. But this is not a 'universal' homonoia at all. It is essentially a mechanism which privileges the transactions of those who pay for the mechanism. There will be no universal rights under it. There will only be a separating equilibrium based on a costly signal. True, the pretense of the former might be kept up- like the notion that America was going to help Afghan women- but there is a quick entitlement collapse because providing the remedy to the rights violation is incentive compatible.
If Rawls et al. had kept abreast of developments in maths and biology and so forth, this foolish availability cascade would not have been allowed to trundle along for five decades.
A very interesting post, and the point about no growth = zero-sum world makes 'secular stagnation' all the more worrying
That choice of two gambles has switched the conversation from utility to money. Isn't diminishing marginal utility the reason that the higher expected value bet is worse, making it lower expected utility?Also, I wonder if refusing to accept an exceptionally small risk of a bad outcome is just a case of the human brain's tendency to irrationally overweight to very low probabilities (a phenomenon well documented by Kahnemann and Tversky).
Yes this is true. Matthew Barnett and I had an interesting conversation about this on Twitter. I guess it depends exactly how diminishing marginal utility is.
I believe Rawls called his preferred system "economic democracy", although I don't know how that was supposed to differ from democratic socialism.
"social contact decision"
You meant to write "contract".
Rawls called it a "property owning democracy"
You're right, my mistake.
I have no very important objection to growth maximization. I do wonder if I should pass up that slice of pie just so a thousand generations from now people who will be far wealthier than I can be just a little bit more far wealthier.
However in the here and now I am much more concerned about about mistaking positive sum transactions for zero some transactions. People who oppose immigration, taxing net emissions of CO2, freer trade, or lower deficits, for example, do not seem to be aware that they are giving up growth in favor of some kind of "equity" at all.
No growth does not equal zero sum. If all technology were to stay the same and all factories would stay the same and all workers in same jobs, there are still embedded gains from trade that could be reversed. Invading China would still break the global supply chain leading to much lower output. Most wealth is still not in stealable resources, but instantiated processes that would be harmed by conflict.
I see what you're saying and agree that economic growth is possible without improvements in productivity/technology because of gains from trade. However, it is still tautologically true that no economic growth <=> zero sum because if you could get gains from trade, then the amount of value in the economy would grow.
That is not what I am saying. If all production is fixed, no further gains from trade could occur, because further specialization is disallowed, so there would be no growth. But the current fixed level of economic output depends on trade, and would be harmed by conflict.
I really hope the author responds to this comment. I agree with Josh here and can't see any way to rebut it but am curious if the author has something in mind that I'm not seeing.
Long comment incoming but this is a very interesting point that I want to respond to.
I think I understand now. We can imagine a desert island economy with 2 people and two natural resources: Fish and bait. Say they could each catch two fish each day working individually, 4 fish total, but when they specialize productivity increases to 6 fish total. The two people are better off when one of them specializes in bait collection, the other in fishing, so they specialize and trade. If we then take the 6 fish world and institute a 'no growth' policy, capping the production of fish at 6, the islanders would still cooperate because although they are capped at 6, production would fall to 4 if they started fighting. You are right that in this case 'no growth' =/=> zero-sum fighting. This is similar to the US and China today as you pointed out.
However, there are other ways in which cooperation breaks down in this no growth world. Imagine what happens when 2 more castaways wash up to the island. Now the total production capacity of the island is more than where it was capped. Even working alone they could produce 8 fish without the cap. So now, since 6 fish will be produced whether they cooperate or not, it becomes a zero sum game and the islanders have no reason to work together. An equivalent scenario would occur if it was just the 2 original islanders but they discover a new technology or technique which raises their individual productivities to 3 fish each (their cooperative productivity is raised above the cap). Since they get 3 fish either way now, the growth cap saps any reason to cooperate. When the populations or productivities of the US and China increase, their gains from working individually get closer to the gains from cooperatively producing the maximum cap and splitting it, as do the gains from producing individually and trying to steal from the other.
So you're correct that if we capped global production at our current maximum GDP, the incentives to cooperate and trade would basically remain the same. However, as soon as populations or productivities start growing, the gains to cooperation start shrinking. This is because each actor's individual production has room to grow, while the cooperative production has been capped.
So imposing a growth ceiling below an economy's actual maximum leads to breakdown of cooperation. However, if we reach a physical limit to growth, then your point saves our society from zero sum moral collapse. It would be impossible for individuals to benefit by not cooperating in this case because if they could get more than their share of cooperative production via individual production, this would necessarily imply that the maximum cooperative production exceeds the physical limit which is a contradiction.
Sorry for the long comment but I hope that makes sense. Thank you for your comment, you have helped me refine this idea!
In addition, the "experiment" assumed a starting point of maximum production. How, without conflict, did the additional two fish get distributed when they "decided" to cooperate?
Some interesting points here - I like the distinction between an artificial cap on growth vs a natural limit. Though I'm not sure an artificial cap causes the problems you are imagining in the fishing example. Wouldn't each party continue trading and utilizing comparative advantage but just work less?
Relative deprivation is a source of misery, irrational but very human. That certainly does not argue against growth, but it argues for a higher "floor" even at the cost of some growth.
Yes you're right especially when you consider possible societal backlash that could undo economic freedoms. This topic is understudied though. I think its possible and intuitive that a fast growing economy makes people more tolerant to high levels of absolute inequality but it's hard to gauge these things.
The relatively poor don’t favor redistribution particularly strongly however.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/why-are-relatively-poor-people-not-more-supportive-of-redistribution.html
Yes I was thinking of this study but I couldn't find the source, thanks for linking
I prefer Nozick + Rawls: People like his contractarianism because it's an explicit, consensual process. In his thought experiment, we actually sign a social contract.
Rawls made into a process --> Nozickian liberal archipelago of voluntary communities
This is an interesting article, although you clearly have not read Rawls lmao. First, you (purposefully with an intent to cast blame on interest groups) misrepresent the philosophical justification for using the veil in the first place. Then, you move on to misrepresent maximin (it's a decision making principle, not a system that can be used for normative judgements). Also, you gloss over Rawls' nuanced justification for use of minimax in two sentences. Then, you completely ignore Rawls' philosophical justification for WHY the difference principle is chosen, instead asserting that because most people do not select the difference principle in experiments, the difference principle is not just. Some side points, you quite clearly are ignorant of the fact that Rawls' theory is, as stated by him, only meant to be applied to wealthy western liberal democracies, which are in a specific point of economic development. Also, Rawls does provide an answer to questions of how we should value economic growth and the ell-being of our descendants. I'm not sure how you can avoid even mentioning Rawls' position in this article. This is made all the more disappointing by the fact that I talked about you with all of this last week. I even offered you my copy of a Theory of Justice, and I pointed you to the specific chapters relevant to your argument!! SMH
1. "you misrepresent the philosophical justification for using the Veil."
From the Stanford Encyclopedia. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/#VeiIgn
"Rawls suggests that the reason Locke’s social contract results in this unjust outcome is that it transpires under unfair conditions of a state of nature, where the parties have complete knowledge of their circumstances, characteristics and social situations. Socially powerful and wealthy parties then have access to and are able to take advantage of their knowledge of their “favorable position and exercise their threat advantage” to extract favorable terms of cooperation for themselves from those in less favorable positions (JF 16). Consequently the parties’ judgments regarding constitutional provisions are biased by their knowledge of their particular circumstances and their decisions are insufficiently impartial.
The remedy for such biases of judgment is to redefine the initial situation. Rather than a state of nature Rawls situates the parties to his social contract so that they do not have access to factual knowledge that can distort their judgments and result in unfair principles."
This is exactly the motivation that I represented. Separate people from their particular characteristics to avoid "Socially powerful and wealthy parties" (interest groups) from distorting the social contract process.
2. "You misrepresent maximin (it's a decision making principle, not a system that can be used for normative judgements)"
I literally call it the Maximin decision rule 6 time throughout the text. I accurately define it as choosing the situation that maximizes the worst case scenario.
3. "you gloss over Rawls' nuanced justification for use of minimax in two sentences."
Here is the passage where I summarize Rawls' justification of the use of maximin:
"Although Rawls admits that maximin is not usually a rational decision rule, he asserts that the singularity of the social contact decision justifies its use. The law of large numbers tells us that the average of a sample of outcomes from a random event approaches the true mean as the number of samples increases. Applied to ‘lifting the Veil’ and assigning identities, the law of large numbers implies that if everyone was randomly assigned an endowment over and over again, eventually the average of each person’s endowment would approach the expected utility calculated at the beginning. However, this assignment happens only once, and there’s no way back. To see how this changes things, imagine you are offered two choices:
1. You flip a coin. On heads you get 10 million dollars, on tails you lose 2 million. Expected value = 4 million
2. You are given 3 million dollars outright
Since you can only play once and you probably don’t have 2 million dollars to lose, most people would choose option 2, even though option 1 has a higher expected value."
again sources from the Stanford Encyclopedia: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/#ArgMaxCriTJSec262
3. "you completely ignore Rawls' philosophical justification for WHY the difference principle is chosen"
This is true. As I said, I wasn't aiming to accurately summarize his work. I was only talking about the use of the maximin decision rule and its implications.
4. "instead asserting that because most people do not select the difference principle in experiments, the difference principle is not just"
This is not what I assert. The evidence from experiments is not about what principles of justice people select, but rather what decision rules they use. The entire point of the post is to propose a different decision rule, not to contest Rawls' derivation of his principles of justice from a given decision rule.
5. "Rawls' theory is, as stated by him, only meant to be applied to wealthy western liberal democracies, which are in a specific point of economic development."
I was ignorant of this fact, but if it's true then it undermines the entire thought experiment! The aim is to see how people would decide to organize society without knowledge of their particular characteristics, including material wealth. But sorry, only super rich westerns can participate! If the principles of justice that he derives aren't invariant to wealth then what was the point of making people ignorant of their wealth in the first place?
1. "most moral and political disagreements aren’t about morals at all (X is not about Y), but rather are zero-sum elbowing matches between groups." This is what I critique and it is a generally ineffective and inaccurate summary.
2. "according to the maximin decision rule, our world is no better than it was thousands of years ago since there are still people living in hunter-gatherer tribes with the same low endowment of rights and resources." You're using maximin as a standard of normative judgement here, which it is not meant to do.
3. Note: only the first sentence describes what Rawls' justification is, and the rest explains what minimax is. He says more than that minimax applies only because it's only one choice.
4. The study you cite, and what you're arguing for, describes people choosing principles of justice, not principles of decision making. You either need to be more precise in your wording or reread SEP (since you clearly cannot bother to read a chapter of a book in print)
5. Your response is, again, indicative of your unwillingness to fully read arguments you disagree with. Rawls presents a two-fold method of theorizing. First, is generally what you understand. Then, after the principles of justice are decided upon, we then move to a method of deciding what the basic structure of the society shall be. Rawls calls this constitutional deliberation, however he doesn't expand upon what institutions this would lead to. (I mean, he does a bit. He argues at times for a "Property owning democracy," but it's one of the less developed areas of his corpus. So people would, at a certain point in deliberations, know the economic, social, etc. conditions of their society.
Also, you can situate a work of political theory in a time and place and have it intended to be used in that time/place and it still be valid.
2. The point still stands that maximin cannot tell the difference between the two worlds.
3. His other reasons are not worth bringing up. I'm trying to keep the article short and they aren't convincing. https://fakenous.net/?p=1824
5. "you can situate a work of political theory in a time and place and have it intended to be used in that time/place and it still be valid."
This may be true in general, but its not true when the entire point of your political theory is to separate people from any particular time, place, or allocation!
That is not the point of Rawls’ theory. He’s really engaged in the project of justifying the liberal state, albeit a more progressive one. There is a difference between the methods someone uses and their aims in using that method.
Still, you're missing the forest for the trees. Maximizing expected utility with floor constraints is more rational than a 'decision rule' that can't select situations intelligently, and when applied to principles of justice, it suggests that growing the pie is most important (after everyone has been guaranteed a sufficiently-sized slice). I don't know how anyone could object to this
Rawls stipulated for agents in the original position having 'plug-ins' of Econ 101, Politics 101 etc. However, Sociobiology 101 would tell you that
1) some purely genetic uncorrelated asymmetries are not effaceable behind the veil and this means, inter alia
2) likelihood of being a founding ancestor is highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, the Price equation will work differently for different agents.
This means that preference diversity is too great for a one-shot contract to be Muth rational. In other words, everybody (provided they have sufficient knowledge of Econ) would stipulate for incomplete contracts regulated by canons whose outcomes are not computable rather than for constrained optimization. In practice, fiscal policy is about canons of taxation and the art of administration. It isn't about substantive outcomes. Another way of arriving at the same result would be to emphasize 'regret minimizing strategies' to deal with Knightian uncertainty.
There are other reasons why Rawls was obviously barking up the wrong tree. Consider the concurrency problems, the agenda control problems, the aggregation problems, the problems of computability and complexity involved. The thing is simply foolish.
What of 'growth'? The problem is that we don't what is or isn't Income because we can't be sure we are reducing our stock of assets such that the thing is sustainable. Even if we could be sure that growth had occurred- as opposed to a bunch of White elephants having been accumulated- the fact remains that our progeny may have reduced reproductive fitness because of it. Hysteresis effects predominate in determining such outcomes- especially for men- so ergodicity has limited purchase.
The fact is, before you can have contracts, you have to a notion of 'commercium'. But this is not a 'universal' homonoia at all. It is essentially a mechanism which privileges the transactions of those who pay for the mechanism. There will be no universal rights under it. There will only be a separating equilibrium based on a costly signal. True, the pretense of the former might be kept up- like the notion that America was going to help Afghan women- but there is a quick entitlement collapse because providing the remedy to the rights violation is incentive compatible.
If Rawls et al. had kept abreast of developments in maths and biology and so forth, this foolish availability cascade would not have been allowed to trundle along for five decades.