Just Economics: Inequality and Political Culture in Cross-National Perspective

Abstract

Economics is widely viewed as a key participant in the construction of the pathologies of market societies. Critical scholars in fields such as Science and Technology Studies (STS) see it as the black sheep of the social sciences. Economics is characterized as promoting a view of society entirely through the prism of markets, individual self-interest and the imperative of growth at the expense of other values such as equality or human rights. In this dissertation, I look at the work of inequality economists at the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), World Inequality Lab (WIL), and the Delhi School of Economics to portray a different picture of the field. These subsets of economists are explicitly committed to values of tackling poverty, reducing inequality and promoting human rights and social development, but they define the problem of inequality differently and propose very different solutions for it. It remains a puzzle how—despite these cross-national differences—economics, a field long seen as promoting efficiency over equality, comes to be accepted as a source of solutions to the problem of inequality. I argue that economists gain legitimacy to address inequality by constructing a field of expertise that I call “just economics.” This economics is just in three ways: it gets the right answers (as in the French expression, c’est juste!); it aims toward normatively desirable (i.e. just) ends; and it is “just” economics, providing neutral policy advice that leaves citizens free to make their own normative decisions. Just economics taps into cross-national differences in what makes for good evidence and morally desirable outcomes in the eyes of experts and lay citizens in a given political culture. I draw on co-productionist scholarship in STS to show how just economics appeals to culturally-embedded understandings about whose responsibility it is to taking on problems of inequality, the extent to which the problem is one of social structure or individual agency, and the appropriate institutional channels through which responses should be coordinated. I develop this argument in thematically connected chapters. Chapters 1-2 take up economists’ own disciplinary self-awareness, showing how the discipline has adopted different thought styles to get at right answers, specifically, causal, historical and experiential approaches. I describe how economists draw on experiments, statistics and experiences in order to satisfy their reflexive questions about their own expertise. Chapters 4-6 are country case studies of approaches to inequality in the United States, France and India, as a question of opportunity, distribution, and rights, respectively. In the United States, a privatized welfare model focuses on unlocking “poverty traps” and making the poor into good entrepreneurial capitalists. In France, the system of social welfare is oriented toward reducing the potential for class conflict, and focuses on the use of expertise to inform reasoned public debates about inequality. In India, the rights-based approach is rooted in the country’s constitutional “Directive Principles,” realized through contemporary efforts in activism and legislation to secure socioeconomic rights. Chapter 7 explores how these different thoughts styles synergize with distinct constituents of the social compact—markets, states and (civil) society—while Chapter 8 looks at education as a specific policy domain where these styles are mobilized to implement visions of a just society. Inequality, I conclude in Chapter 9, is more than a statistical property to be studied by expert social scientists: By comparing approaches to inequality cross-nationally, I show that how we address inequality through policy rests on disparate understandings of science, politics and faith in society.