Paths to Equality

With few exceptions—among them Robert Kuttner, whose book I here applaud—everyone who has been taught that remarkable mixture of cognitive crippling and liberating illumination called economic theory “knows” that equality and efficiency are at odds with each other. No society, they believe, can go far down the road toward distributive justice without losing incentives and the other efficiencies sustainable only through inequality. They so believe because the efficiency-equalit...