(In)Equality and (In)Justice

• Activity Number: 82
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 3, 2014 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Guillermina Jasso*+
• Companies: New York University
• Keywords: inequality ; justice ; fairness ; inequality measures ; probability distributions

Abstract

For all of recorded history, philosophers, theologians, and social thinkers have posited a connection between inequality and justice. This paper shows that the received insight linking inequality and justice is not merely an assertion but rather the logically necessary consequence of the operation of the human sense of justice. Working from the process by which individuals assess the fairness or unfairness of the material goods that they and others receive, and using inequality measures and probability distributions, we obtain two main results: First, as economic inequality increases, the average of the distribution of justice evaluations moves leftward, deeper into the territory of unjust underreward. Second, as economic inequality increases, the distribution of justice evaluations stretches outward in both the underreward and overreward directions. Thus, there is a dual effect of economic inequality - pushing the center of gravity of the justice evaluations ever deeper into the underreward region and widening the gulf between the underrewarded and the overrewarded. The ancient insight linking inequality and justice is now on a firm foundation, and new work can build on it.