New Results on the Exact Connection between Inequality and Justice

• In Event: 3453 - From Classic Questions to New Frontiers: Current Work in Mathematical Sociology

Abstract

What is the exact connection between inequality and justice? And why does it matter? Recent work underscores the importance of the inequality-justice link by, first, reviving the classic sociological idea that the sense of fairness is the first line of defense against inequality, and, second, showing that the direction and strength of the link depend, in part, on individuals’ ideas of the just reward. Thus, the immediate theoretical challenge is to establish the inequality-justice link across the vast catalog of sources of the just reward, followed by the empirical challenge of discerning the conditions under which individuals select particular sources of the just reward and these private ideas coalesce into what may be called cultures of just reward ideas. This paper contributes to the growing sociological understanding of the inequality-justice link in three main ways: First, it expands the set of just reward scenarios from the micro scenarios in the literature to include a new set of scenarios called macro scenarios; while the micro scenarios start with the individual’s idea of the just reward, the macro scenarios start with the distribution of everyone’s idea of the just reward, focusing on two aspects – whether the actual reward and just reward distributions are identical or different, and the direction and magnitude of their association – leading to six macro scenarios. Second, it expands the set of justice parameters to include the proportion underrewarded, analyzing its link to inequality in both micro and macro scenarios. Third, it carries out all analyses in three modeling distributions which together represent approximations to a wide range of real-world income distributions, including, for example, distributions with and without a minimum income and distributions with and without a maximum income. This sharper and more precise theoretical foundation for the inequality-justice connection clarifies the empirical challenges, and will make it possible to understand the conditions under which the sense of justice indeed awakens to fight inequality.

Author

• Guillermina Jasso, New York University