Public policy for fairness and efficiency

Readings and class materials for Monday, June 12, 2023–Friday, June 16, 2023

Readings

• Introduction and 3.1-3.11 in Economy, Society, and Public Policy The CORE Team, Economy, Society, and Public Policy, 2019, https://www.core-econ.org/espp/.
• The Veil of Ignorance
• The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness
• Planet Money, “Retraining Day,” episode 750, January 27, 2017
• Planet Money, “The Bottom of the Well,” episode 640, July 22, 2015
• Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution: US vs. Europe” Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution: US Vs. Europe,” American Economic Review 95 (2005): 913–35.
  • Download the PDF here, or access it on iCollege.
  • This one is super mathy in the middle. Use your grad school reading skills to dig deep into the introduction, conclusion, and theory sections and not worry so much about the math.

Other useful resources

The equality/equity/justice meme that we talk about in the lecture is a helpful way of thinking about how to remove institutional barriers to fairness and justice, but it also isn’t completely adequate because of some of the underlying assumptions built into the graphic. Here are a couple critiques:

• https://fakequity.com/2017/04/28/can-we-stop-using-the-box-graphic-when-we-talk-about-racial-equity/
• https://culturalorganizing.org/the-problem-with-that-equity-vs-equality-graphic/

In any case, striving for justice (i.e. removing the institutional barriers preventing people from flourishing in the first place) is a noble and worthy goal for public policy.

Slides

Download PDF of all slides

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Economic models
• Pulling policy levers
• Power and efficiency
• Rawlsian fairness
• Fairness

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: