Human Services News

From EurekAlert! - Breaking News:

How much would you pay to live in an equitable society in which people get what they deserve and deserve what they get" Economists at Carnegie Mellon University and the Free University of Berlin have developed a mathematical model to measure the value that people place on distributive justice -- whether goods are distributed fairly among all members of society.

Applying their model to pre-existing survey data, the authors found that, on average, people are willing to sacrifice about 20 percent of their disposable income to live in an equitable society -- but they also found that the value a person places on equity is substantially affected by their race and educational background.

Whites place a higher value on equity than non-whites, and equity is valued more by those with high levels of education than those with less education.

The paper was written by Giacomo Corneo at the Free University of Berlin and Christina Fong at Carnegie Mellon, and it is being published in the Journal of Public Economics.

Since governmental redistribution is costly for society, some knowledge of society's willingness to pay for distributive justice is required in order to evaluate whether that public good is efficiently provided," the authors write.

Corneo and Fong analyzed data from the 1998 Gallup poll titled "Haves and Have-Nots," which gauged respondents' attitudes toward wealth and poverty as well as government welfare policies.

The Gallup poll included questions about why the respondents believed that people became rich or poor, and whether government should redistribute wealth.

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