Mirror of Justice

A blog dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.
Affiliated with the Program on Church, State & Society at Notre Dame Law School.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Income inequality

By Rob Vischer

Reports show that income equality in this country has increased dramatically.  I know that MoJers disagree as to how much of a problem this is; at these extremes, I do believe that it is a problem of social justice -- not just in the traditional sense of distributive justice, but in the sort of participatory social justice of which John Paul II spoke regularly.  Income inequality also has a significant political dimension and far-reaching political implications, as Frank Pasquale argues.

https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/09/income-inequality.html

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Perhaps somewhat similar to, if not overlapping with the idea of "participatory social justice," is the traditional economic concern (going back to Adam Smith) with "relative deprivation," thus "being relatively poor in a rich country can be a great capability handicap, even when one's absolute income is high in world standards. In a generally opulent country, more income is needed to buy enough commodities to achieve the SAME SOCIAL FUNCTIONING [e.g., easy access to or possessing a computer]" (Amartya Sen, 'Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty,' in David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur, eds., Poverty and Inequality, 2006: 36). Sen also cites the related concept of "social exclusion," "now widely used,...pioneered by Rene Lenior [in 1974]."