The State by Anthony de Jasay (50 page)

expectation. (The coincidence of the two would permit the statement that the marginal utility of income was constant.) A related howler is to double-count the utility function and the attitude to risk, as in "he does not maximize utility because he has an aversion to risk," as if risk-aversion were not just a more colloquial term for characterizing the form of his utility function. Cf. Rawls's version of the argument in favour of maximizing average utility: "if the parties are viewed as rational individuals who have no aversion to risk" (p. 165, my italics), "prepared to gamble on the most abstract probabilistic reasoning in all cases"

(p.
166, my italics), but not otherwise, they will maximize themathematical expectation of utility calculated with the help of Bayesian probability. But in behaving at all sensibly, they must be doing this anyway! If they are averse to risk, they will take one gamble and if they are not, they will take another. If "refusing to gamble" is purported to be rational, it must be capable of being described as the gamble where the sum of the utilities of the possible outcomes, multiplied by their probabilities (which are all zero except for one outcome whose probability is unity), is the highest. It is virtually impossible so to describe the refusal to accept the very small probability of losing a very small sum for the sake of the remaining very high probability of gaining a very large sum, i.e. the requirement is not an empty one.

Probability, as the context should have made clear, is the "subjective" kind of which it is meaningless to say that it is unknown. Only "objective," frequency-type probability tolerates being described as "known" or "unknown," and it tolerates it badly at that!

There is one other way in which people can be represented as "refusing to gamble": we can suppose that they just sit down and cry.

1. This is analogous to the "fixed-sum game" of dividing a cakeamong n players where the nth player does the dividing and the n1 players do the choosing. The nth player is sure to be left with the smallest slice. He will try to make it as big as possible, i.e. divide the cake into equal slices. This is his dominant strategy. If the n-1 players are blindfolded, n has no dominant strategy.
   
 

1. With people knowing no more than that every lot has somenon-zero probability of being drawn and all the lots together have a probability of 1 (i.e. one, and only one, of the lots is sure to be drawn), any further logical inference being "discounted" (which is how Rawls expects his parties to reason) it is hard to see what will make their choice determinate, let alone unanimous. The plausible hypothesis seems to be that they will behave like particles in quantum mechanics, and never (short of eternity) reach agreement on a social contract.
   
 

2. If they were allowed to grasp a less inchoate conception of probabilities, e.g. if they could apply the principle of insufficient reason and suppose that failing any indication to the contrary, they were as likely to draw one lot as another, they would have a better chance of reaching agreement on a distribution-which would presumably be more inegalitarian than the one ruled by the maximin "strategy."
   
 

2. Unlike poker or business where a previous loss tends toworsen present chances, certain other risky choices may not be adversely affected. For instance, a low lifetime stipend may not worsen the odds against marrying the right person or having good children.
   
 

The very question whether Swiss families are happier than Russian ones is fatuous, although the person who has agreed to

draw lots for a place in Russian society does not get a second chance to draw lots for a place in Swiss society.

1. The prudent man's finding that risk-taking is difficult,especially if it is a risk of losing your stake, is not unlike Sam Goldwyn's celebrated profundity that forecasting is difficult, especially if it is about the future.
   
 

2. "Refusing to gamble" is itself a gamble, and "not making forecasts" is a particular forecast as long as it is unavoidable for today's future to become tomorrow's present. You do not avoid exposure to it by not adjusting to what it might or might not be like. Your adjustment may not be successful. Not adjusting is even less likely to be successful.
   
 

1. Anyone who has had his investments handled by a bank trustdepartment is probably familiar with the phenomenon of "managing wisely but not well." Anyone who has observed the functioning of financial markets dominated by institutions rather than by principals, knows what it means that paid portfolio managers "do not want to be heroes" and "do not stick their necks out," buying when everybody else is buying and selling when everybody else is selling.
   
 

2. If parents thought that children were going to grow up lessable, less provident and less resilient than themselves, they might consider that a welfare state would be genuinely better for them than an inegalitarian state. The parents might then want to install it straightaway, either because they could not trust their children to recognize their best interests, or because the choice of state had to be made right now for all posterity. However, Rawls does not use this line of paternalistic argument.
   
3. Also called "Aristotelean equality." If the extension is denied,the rule becomes "equal pay for equal work as well as for unequal work," which seems contrary to the intention of the proposer. If he did not want proportionality, he would have proposed "one man, one pay" regardless of the quantity or quality of the work.
   
 

4. K. Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme," 1875, in K.Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, Moscow, 1968, pp. 320-1, italics in text.
   
 

5. F. Engels, "Letter to A. Bebel," in Marx and Engels, SelectedWorks, p. 336, italics in text.
   
 

6. Isaiah Berlin, "Equality," Concepts and Categories, 1978, pp.82-3.
   
 

7. Ibid.
   
 

8. Bernard Williams, "The Idea of Equality," in P. Laslett and W.
   

G.
Runciman (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society, 1962.

1. For example, the division of a God-given cake among peoplewho are absolutely equal to each other; they are equally God-fearing, have equal deserts, equal needs, equal capacities for enjoyment, etc., to mention only those "dimensions" of comparison which are usually thought to be relevant in the "division of the cake," though there are obviously many others.
   
 

1. Cf. Douglas Rae et al., Equalities, 1981. Rae and his co-authors, very sensibly, want us to ask, not "whether equality" but "which equality?" (p. 19). They develop a "grammar" for defining and classifying equalities, and to provide some light relief, by permutation find no less than 720 sorts of equality (p. 189, note 3). However, they adopt the position that one situation can often,
   
2. if not always, be diagnosed as more equal than another, i.e. that at least a partial ordering of social situations is possible, according to how equal they are. My view is that ordering situations characterized by alternative equalities is inevitably done according to some other, often occult, criterion (e.g. justice or interest) and cannot be performed according to the criterion of equality itself.
   
 

2. Some of the same effect is achieved, in a totally unintendedfashion, under one-man-one-vote by the phenomenon of electoral non-participation, providing it is correct to assume that those who abstain are less concerned in their legitimate interests by the result of the election than those who do vote. The unintended effect could be transformed into an intended one by making it difficult to vote. The Australian law punishing abstention by a fine should, of course, have the obverse effect.
   
 

"Concern" is an unsatisfactory explanation of why people bother to vote, but I am unaware of any more satisfactory rival ones; cf. the highly contrived "minimum regret" rule proposed by Ferejohn and Fiorina. For the basic statement that voting is irrational, see Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, 1957, p. 274.

Abstention is, however, only a rough-and-ready approximation to the rule of greater-concern-more-vote. In this respect, Professor Lipset's understandable mistrust of mass participation might find only very partial reassurance. For, although the extreme arbitrariness of one-man-one-vote is mitigated by the inclination to abstain of those who do not feel very concerned (and although their relative unconcern is a subjective feeling which need not coincide with the realities of their situation-perhaps they should be concerned) the fact that the unconcerned could vote if they felt like it, will still weigh in the political balance.

Suppose, for argument's sake, that it is the lumpenproletariat which habitually abstains. An electoral programme designed to attract the majority of the electorate minus the lumpenproletariat would always run the risk of being defeated by one designed to win over the majority of an electorate including the lumpenproletariat, in case the latter were so roused that it did bother to go to the polls, after all. Hence, all competing programmes might take greater account of it than would be indicated by the paucity of the votes it habitually casts, and indeed by its apparent unconcern.

1. This is Nozick's term for a distribution characterized bydependence on a single variable (as well as for a set of distributions which is made up of a small number of such subdistributions), cf. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 156. If all income from employment depended on the variable "work," under the rule of proportional equality "equal pay for equal work, more pay for more work," and all other income on one other variable, the distribution of total income would be "patterned." If many contradictory rules are simultaneously at work and some incomes do not obey any obvious rule, the total distribution is "patternless"; at least this is my reading of Nozick's use of this very suggestive and serviceable term.
   
 

2. "Modern capitalism relies on the profit principle for its dailybread yet refuses to allow it to prevail. No such conflict, consequently no such wastes, would exist in socialist society.... For as a matter of common sense, it would be clearly absurd for the central board to pay out incomes first and, after having done so, to run after the recipients in order to recover part of them" (Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 5th edn, 1976, pp. 198-9).
   
3. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1960, p. 93.
   
 

4. Commutative justice has an agreed procedure, issuing injudgements of courts of law, for deciding which "demands of justice" should be granted. The demands of social justice, however, are not adjudicated in this way. Nobody's judgement in social justice entails a moral obligation for somebody else to have it executed.
   
 

5. Hal R. Varian, "Equity, Envy and Efficiency," Journal ofEconomic Theory, 9, September 1974. For a development of this approach by a widening of the criterion of non-envy cf. E. A. Pazner and D. Schmeidler, "Egalitarian Equivalent Allocations: A New Concept of Economic Equity," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 92, November 1978.
   
 

6. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 239-46.
   
 

7. Ibid., p. 245.
   
 

8. These were Alfred Marshall's highly suggestive terms fordistinguishing between what our current jargon calls "comparative statics" and "dynamics."
   
 

End of Notes
.

Anthony de Jasay, The State
:
NOTES, Chapters 4-5 Notes: Chapters 1-3 Notes: Chapters 4-
5

Chapter 4. Redistributio
n

1. Cf. the Rawlsian view of the state of nature as a society whichfails to produce the public good "distributive justice."
   
 

2. Looking back on his career as a statesman, Guizot (in the 1855Preface to his re-edited Histoire de la Civilisation en Europe) sees his role in government as an attempt to render the struggle between authority and liberty "avowed," "overt," "public," "contained" and "regulated in an arena of law." In retrospect, he feels that this might have been wishful thinking.
   
 

3. An outrageous yet masterly historian of the eighteenth-centuryFrench absolute monarchy describes royal power as "all-powerful in the spaces left by the liberties" of the estates and corporations (Pierre Gaxotte, Apogée et chute de la royautée, 1973, vol. IV, p. 78). These spaces-often mere interstices-seem analogous to the space allowed the state by constitutional bounds. The prerevolutionary privileges and immunities in most of Europe west of Russia, and post-revolutionary constitutional guarantees, both limited the prerogatives of the state. However, the former were upheld by, and shifted backwards or forwards with, the balance of forces in society between state, the nobility, the clergy, the commercial interest, etc. The latter were "fixed," and it is not at all clear what forces upheld them at any one time.
   
 

4. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1979.
   
 

5. In response to opposition claims that the bill wasunconstitutional, André Laignel, socialist deputy of the Indre, gave the reply which has since become celebrated, and might be preserved in future political science textbooks: "You are wrong in [constitutional] law because you are politically in the minority." Events proved him right.
   
6. The latter need not be the case. In the winter of 1973-4, theBritish coal miners proved to have enough clout to break Edward Heath's government; yet with respect to the inequalities which would be liable to figure in a redistributive offer, they would clearly count as have-nots.
   
 

7. I prefer naively to talk of "money" and leave it to otherswhether it is income or wealth or both that should be redistributed and what difference it makes.
   
 

8. If there were no such effects, taxable capacity would be equalto income, i.e. the very concept would be perfectly redundant. People could be taxed at 100 per cent of their income, for doing so would not adversely affect either their ability or their willingness to go on earning it.
   
 

9. With the same rules and the same players, Robert Nozick, inAnarchy, State and Utopia, 1974, pp. 274-5) reaches the contrary conclusion; he sees the rich party as the sure winner. Nozick's argument is that "a voting coalition from the bottom won't form because it will be less expensive to the top group to buy off the swing middle group than to let it form"; "the top 49 per cent can always save by offering the middle 2 per cent slightly more than the bottom group would." "The top group will be able always to buy the support of the swing middle 2 per cent to combat measures which would more seriously violate its rights."