IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/ecnphi/v38y2022i1p71-107_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The half life of economic injustice

Author

Listed:
  • Miles, David

Abstract

This paper addresses a question which is fundamental to the perceived legitimacy of the distribution of resources today: to what extent does unfairness in how assets came to be acquired in the past affect incomes and wealth now? To answer that question requires two things: first, a principle to determine what is, and what is not, a just acquisition of wealth or a just source of income; second, a means of using that principle to estimate what fraction of wealth and income is now unjust. I use a principle put forward by Robert Nozick to provide the first of these things and then use a model of wealth accumulation and economic growth to illustrate its implications for the scale of unfairness today. The greater is depreciation of assets, the higher are saving rates out of labour income and the less important is human capital the more transient are the effects of past economic injustices. I use data on the perceived unfairness of economic outcomes to see if there is any evidence that those features which the model implies should influence the durability of injustice help explain cross-country differences in attitudes towards unfairness.

Suggested Citation

  • Miles, David, 2022. "The half life of economic injustice," Economics and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(1), pages 71-107, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:71-107_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0266267121000031/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Piazzesi, M. & Schneider, M., 2016. "Housing and Macroeconomics," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1547-1640, Elsevier.
    2. Morris A. Davis, 2010. "housing and the business cycle," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics,, Palgrave Macmillan.
    3. Miguel A. León-Ledesma & Peter McAdam & Alpo Willman, 2010. "Identifying the Elasticity of Substitution with Biased Technical Change," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(4), pages 1330-1357, September.
    4. Brent Neiman, 2014. "The Global Decline of the Labor Share," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 129(1), pages 61-103.
    5. Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson & James A. Robinson, 2002. "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(4), pages 1231-1294.
    6. Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh & Pierre-Olivier Weill, 2010. "Why Has House Price Dispersion Gone Up?," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 77(4), pages 1567-1606.
    7. repec:oup:qjecon:v:129:y:2013:i:1:p:61-103 is not listed on IDEAS
    8. Lawrence E. Blume & Steven N. Durlauf, 2015. "Capital in the Twenty-First Century: A Review Essay," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 123(4), pages 749-777.
    9. Andreas Hornstein, 2009. "Problems for a fundamental theory of house prices," Economic Quarterly, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, vol. 95(Win), pages 1-24.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Grossmann, Volker & Larin, Benjamin & Löfflad, Hans Torben & Steger, Thomas, 2021. "Distributional consequences of surging housing rents," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 196(C).
    2. Volker Grossmann & Thomas Steger, 2016. "Das House-Kapital: A Theory of Wealth-to-Income Ratios," CESifo Working Paper Series 5844, CESifo.
    3. Miles, David & Sefton, James, 2017. "Houses across time and across place," CEPR Discussion Papers 12103, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Gabrovski, Miroslav & Ortego-Marti, Victor, 2019. "The cyclical behavior of the Beveridge Curve in the housing market," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 361-381.
    5. Grossmann, Volker & Larin, Benjamin & Steger, Thomas M., 2021. "Das House Kapital," FSES Working Papers 523, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland.
    6. Grossmann, Volker & Schäfer, Andreas & Steger, Thomas & Fuchs, Benjamin, 2017. "Reversal of migration flows: A fresh look at the German reunification," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 1-15.
    7. Gabrovski, Miroslav & Ortego-Marti, Victor, 2021. "Search and credit frictions in the housing market," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    8. Luigi Bonatti, 2017. "Land, Housing, Growth and Inequality," DEM Working Papers 2017/01, Department of Economics and Management.
    9. Steger, Thomas & Grossmann, Volker & Larin, Benjamin & Löfflad, Hans Torben, 2019. "Distributional Effects of Surging Housing Costs under Schwabe`s Law of Rent," VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy 203613, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    10. Volker Grossmann & Benjamin Larin & Hans Torben Löfflad & Thomas Steger, 2019. "Distributional effects of surging housing costs under Schwabe's Law," CESifo Working Paper Series 7684, CESifo.
    11. Jaccard, Ivan, 2021. "Leveraged property cycles," Working Paper Series 2539, European Central Bank.
    12. Dongya Koh & Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis, 2017. "Countercyclical Elasticity of Substitution," Working Papers 946, Barcelona School of Economics.
    13. Charles Ka Yui Leung & Joe Cho Yiu Ng & Edward Tang, 2020. "Why is the Hong Kong Housing Market Unaffordable? Some Stylized Facts and Estimations," Globalization Institute Working Papers 380, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
    14. Andrew Glover & Jacob Short, 2020. "Demographic Origins of the Decline in Labor's Share," BIS Working Papers 874, Bank for International Settlements.
    15. Akaev, Askar & Devezas, Tessaleno & Ichkitidze, Yuri & Sarygulov, Askar, 2021. "Forecasting the labor intensity and labor income share for G7 countries in the digital age," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    16. Davis, Morris A. & Palumbo, Michael G., 2008. "The price of residential land in large US cities," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 352-384, January.
    17. Alvarez-Cuadrado, Francisco & Long, Ngo & Poschke, Markus, 2017. "Capital-labor substitution, structural change and growth," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(3), September.
    18. Sebastian Gechert & Tomas Havranek & Zuzana Irsova & Dominika Kolcunova, 2022. "Measuring Capital-Labor Substitution: The Importance of Method Choices and Publication Bias," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 45, pages 55-82, July.
    19. Marwil J. Dávila-Fernández, 2018. "Alternative Approaches to Technological Change when Growth is BoPC," Department of Economics University of Siena 795, Department of Economics, University of Siena.
    20. Nobuhiro Kiyotaki & Alexander Michaelides & Kalin Nikolov, 2011. "Winners and Losers in Housing Markets," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 43, pages 255-296, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • O15 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration
    • P14 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Property Rights
    • P26 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - Property Rights
    • P48 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Other Economic Systems - - - Legal Institutions; Property Rights; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Regional Studies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:ecnphi:v:38:y:2022:i:1:p:71-107_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/eap .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.