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There’s often a tendency, in discussions like this, for economically-minded commentators to want to narrowly focus on the goal of maximizing economic efficiency, even to the exclusion of practically everything else. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with caring about efficiency, of course, provided it’s one consideration among many – especially if the word “efficient” is being used in the normal colloquial sense of “productive” and “not wasteful;” striving to keep productivity high and waste low is often one of the best ways of making society as a whole better off. But there’s also a technical economic definition of the word “efficiency” which often gets conflated with the more colloquial definition – namely, having a situation where there’s no way to make someone better off without making someone else worse off (what’s called “Pareto efficiency”). And if your only goal is to maximize that kind of efficiency, then that’s no guarantee at all that you’ll actually be doing the most you can to help society as a whole – because all it means to adhere to that definition of efficiency is to not have any net economic redistribution; and there are certainly plenty of circumstances under which some redistribution could make a society better off. To repeat one more example from before, if you had one person who was a billionaire, and a thousand others who were on the verge of starvation, it would be silly to say that a policy that made the billionaire $10M richer and affected no one else would automatically be better than a policy that made everyone else $10,000 richer but reduced the billionaire’s wealth by $1 simply because the first policy was technically more efficient in the economic sense. As Harford puts it, the level of efficiency just isn’t the most important factor in every case; sometimes things like equity and establishing a decent standard of living for everyone matter more:

Remember that when economists say the economy is inefficient, they mean that there’s a way to make somebody better off without harming anybody else. While the perfectly competitive market is perfectly efficient, efficiency is not enough to ensure a fair society, or even a society in which we would want to live. After all, it is efficient if Bill Gates has all the money and everybody else starves to death . . . because there is no way to make anybody better off without making Bill Gates worse off. We need something more than efficiency.

(See also Cosma Shalizi’s compelling post on this point here.)

If all you care about is simply maximizing efficiency alone, then economics can certainly tell you all the best ways of doing that. But what economics doesn’t tell you is whether that actually should be your only goal; it simply describes how the world works, not whether those workings are morally desirable or not. The latter question, as Wheelan points out, is one we have to answer for ourselves, based on our own judgments of what’s morally acceptable:

Government redistributes wealth. We collect taxes from some citizens and provide benefits to others. Contrary to popular opinion, most government benefits do not go to the poor; they go to the middle class in the form of Medicare and Social Security. Still, government has the legal authority to play Robin Hood; other governments around the world, such as the European countries, do so quite actively. What does economics have to say about this? Not much, unfortunately. The most important questions related to income distribution require philosophical or ideological answers, not economic ones. Consider the following question: Which would be a better state of the world, one in which every person in America earned $25,000—enough to cover the basic necessities—or the status quo, in which some Americans are wildly rich, some are desperately poor, and the average income is somewhere around $48,000? The latter describes a bigger economic pie; the former would be a smaller pie more evenly divided.

Economics does not provide the tools for answering philosophical questions related to income distribution. […] Will a tax increase that funds a better safety net for the poor but lowers overall economic growth make the country better off? That is a matter of opinion, not economic expertise. (Note that every presidential administration is able to find very qualified economists to support its ideological positions.) Liberals (in the American sense of the word) often ignore the fact that a growing pie, even if unequally divided, will almost always make even the small pieces larger. The developing world needs economic growth (to which international trade contributes heavily) to make the poor better off. Period. One historical reality is that government policies that ostensibly serve the poor can be ineffective or even counterproductive if they hobble the broader economy.

Meanwhile, conservatives often blithely assume that we should all rush out into the street and cheer for any policy that makes the economy grow faster, neglecting the fact that there are perfectly legitimate intellectual grounds for supporting other policies, such as protecting the environment or redistributing income, that may diminish the overall size of the pie. Indeed, some evidence suggests that our sense of well-being is determined at least as much by our relative wealth as it is by our absolute level of wealth. In other words, we derive utility not just from having a big television but from having a television that is as big as or bigger than the neighbors.’

There’s no objectively “correct” economic answer to the question of how we should balance growing the economy versus ensuring that economic well-being is widely shared. The question is a moral one; it’s a question of what we value as a society. So then in that case, what kind of arrangement should we prefer? In my opinion, Alexander’s answer here is a good one:

I care less about economic growth than about where the money goes. That includes caring less about distortionary taxation, deadweight loss, and all those other concepts.

Suppose Alice is an effective altruist who supports whatever charity you think is most important and does a really good job of it. Every dollar she spends saves multiple lives. She lives in a town of 1000 people where nobody else is an effective altruist and everyone else just lives a pretty decent life and spends their extra money on, I don’t know, breeding virtual cats or something.

A demon places a curse on Alice’s neighbor Bob. Every time Bob pays a dollar in taxes, it destroys a random two dollars’ worth of wealth somewhere in the town.

The town elders meet and decide that for some reason they have to lower taxes either on Alice or Bob. The economic case for Bob is overwhelming – taxes on him are especially inefficient because of the extra wealth they destroy.

Still, I would want a tax cut for Alice. It seems like the only important thing that happens at all in this town is Alice’s charitable donations. The amount I care about this town’s utility focuses pretty much entirely on that. We could give the break to Bob, and have a nominally better economy, but it would just lead to more people buying virtual cats. It could be that the extra two dollars’ of wealth destroyed by Bob’s taxes was some sort of useful machinery, and so taxing Bob harms economic growth. Again, it is hard to care, except insofar as that hurts Alice, the only person in town whose wealth matters much for anyone’s utility.

I can imagine a world in which Bob’s curse was stronger, and every dollar Bob was taxed destroyed a million dollars in value, and soon any tax on Bob meant the citizens of the town were starving to death and all of them including Alice went bankrupt. But right now the tax on Bob isn’t big enough to be worse for Alice than a tax on Alice, and since Alice is the only important person in this situation, I don’t care.

I can also imagine a world where a wise economist comes to town. She says “Alice’s work is the most important thing in this town, but taxing Bob destroys wealth for no reason. Some of the town elders support tax breaks for Bob, and others support tax breaks for Alice. But we can give the tax break to Bob, and then all the people who saved $2 each from the curse not being activated can give $1.50 to Alice. That way Bob is better off, Alice is better off, and potential curse victims are better off.”

This is the best argument in favor of wealth creation instead of redistribution. But right now we’re not doing that. We just create the wealth and then don’t redistribute it, except through charity, which is a rounding error, and taxes, which [conservatives generally oppose]. If we actually had Pareto-optimal wealth redistribution, then of course, create as much wealth as possible and redistribute it Pareto-optimally. Since we don’t, we’re kind of stuck.

My takeaway from this story is that in societies with a lot of marginal-value-of-money inequality, economic growth is potentially less useful than working to keep the money with people who can spend it on higher-marginal-value things.

The Alice-and-Bob story is, of course, just an exaggerated analogy for illustrative purposes – but here in the real world, our choices about how we should have the government tax and spend often aren’t all that different. In many cases, we’ll be faced with a decision of whether we should, say, impose higher taxes on rich people and then use that tax revenue to help the needy (even though that’s not technically a Pareto-efficient thing to do, since it makes the rich people worse off), or keep rich people’s taxes low and not do anything to help the needy (which is technically more Pareto-efficient since it doesn’t actively make anyone worse off – but has the downside of not making anyone better off either). In these kinds of situations, it may be useful to at least be aware of the efficiency implications of either choice; but I don’t think efficiency can or should be the be-all-end-all. I think that regardless of whether it might be slightly more or less efficient, we have a moral imperative to ensure that everyone in our society at least has a bare minimum standard of living, and no one is just left to starve in the streets. And the reason for this doesn’t have anything to do with economics at all; it’s just a matter of what people are entitled to in terms of their basic human rights.

Of course, as we’ve discussed previously, the concept of rights can be a tricky one to define concretely – especially in the context of political and economic systems where different interests often have to be weighed against each other. As Atul Gawande writes:

The Oxford political philosopher Henry Shue observed that our typical way of looking at rights is incomplete. People are used to thinking of rights as moral trump cards, near-absolute requirements that all of us can demand. But, Shue argued, rights are as much about our duties as about our freedoms. Even the basic right to physical security—to be free of threats or harm—has no meaning without a vast system of police departments, courts, and prisons, a system that requires extracting large amounts of money and effort from others. Once costs and mechanisms of implementation enter the picture, things get complicated. Trade-offs now have to be considered. And saying that something is a basic right starts to seem the equivalent of saying only, “It is very, very important.”

Shue held that what we really mean by “basic rights” are those which are necessary in order for us to enjoy any rights or privileges at all. In his analysis, basic rights include physical security, water, shelter, and health care. Meeting these basics is, he maintained, among government’s highest purposes and priorities. But how much aid and protection a society should provide, given the costs, is ultimately a complex choice for democracies. Debate often becomes focussed on the scale of the benefits conferred and the costs extracted. Yet the critical question may be how widely shared these benefits and costs are.

Despite the complexities at play here, though, I think Shue’s definition of basic rights is a valuable one. There are certain goods like basic safety and sustenance that are so essential for human survival that I don’t think practically anyone would dispute that they should qualify as fundamental rights. And on top of these, there are also certain goods which may not be strictly necessary for survival, but are still important enough that, again, most people would agree that everyone should have a basic right to them – things like the right to an education, the right to legal protection and representation in court, etc. The economic term for this whole category of goods – things that everyone should be entitled to regardless of their ability to pay – is “merit goods.” And although the private sector might still be the primary channel through which most people obtain these goods, there will still always be a role for the government in maintaining a network of programs (including food stamps, public housing, Medicare/Medicaid, FEMA, Social Security, etc.) to serve as the proverbial safety net in the cases where the market fails to make these necessary goods universally accessible. Here’s Sachs on the subject:

Societies around the world want to ensure that everybody has an adequate level of access to key goods and services (health care, education, safe drinking water) as a matter of right and justice. Goods that should be available to everybody because of their vital importance to human well-being are called merit goods. The rights to these merit goods are not only an informal commitment of the world’s governments, they are also enshrined in international law, most importantly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as follows:

• Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Moreover, according to Article 28 of the Universal Declaration, “Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.”

Now, in response to this, a lot of anti-statists will agree that there are certain things everyone has a basic human right to, and will grant that it’s commendable to want to ensure that the disadvantaged are adequately taken care of, but will dispute the idea that the government should necessarily be the entity responsible for doing so. According to their view, if the government would just step aside and let private citizens keep their money (instead of collecting it as taxes), it would free up enough private wealth that the task of taking care of the disadvantaged could be handled entirely by private entities – churches, charities, wealthy philanthropists, and so on. There are a few possible counterarguments to this theory, but the simplest rebuttal is the plain fact that it’s just demonstrably not what happens in real life. There are plenty of places out there in the world right now where government services are lacking, and people are suffering from famine and poverty and deprivation as a result – and there are also plenty of incredibly rich people with trillions of dollars between them who could be using that money to alleviate the deprivation in those places – but they simply aren’t doing so; and consequently, the famine and poverty and deprivation continue. It’s not that the rich people can’t donate their money because it’s all being taxed away by government – they still have tons of disposable wealth even after taxes – and even if their tax rates were significantly higher, charitable donations are tax-deductible anyway, so any money they wanted to donate wouldn’t be subject to that taxation regardless. In other words, it’s not an issue of not having enough money to donate – the money’s already there – it’s just not being donated. What this means, then, is that the argument that just getting government out of the picture would free up the resources necessary for private philanthropy to completely take care of social welfare gets it precisely backward; if the private sector were willing and able to completely take care of social welfare, there wouldn’t be any need for government social programs to have been created in the first place. The whole reason those programs exist is because private efforts alone aren’t sufficient.

At any rate, despite the flaws in the anti-government argument here, it at least has the virtue of acknowledging that our ultimate goal should be to ensure that the disadvantaged are cared for, and simply disagrees as to the best method for accomplishing this. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of every argument made against government social programs; in many cases, anti-statists will get so wrapped up in inveighing against these programs that they’ll slip into a more cynical mode of arguing against the very concept of providing aid to the needy itself. This will often involve painting the recipients of government aid as undeserving moochers who could perfectly well take care of themselves but are simply too lazy to do so, and insisting that the government taxing away richer people’s hard-earned wealth and redistributing it to the poor does nothing but reward this kind of laziness.

This kind of blanket generalization, though, misses the mark in some pretty crucial ways. For one thing, it (perhaps willfully) misunderstands what government social programs are actually designed to do. They aren’t designed to just hand over money to anyone who decides they don’t feel like working; if a person is fully capable of supporting themselves, they’ll be expected to do so, and they won’t be eligible for most forms of government support. The social programs we’re talking about here are almost entirely aimed at supporting those who can’t fully support themselves, either because they’re too young or too old or too disabled or some other such thing. Granted, there are some forms of government support that are aimed at people who are capable of supporting themselves but are just temporarily unable to do so for whatever reason – e.g. unemployment insurance for workers who’ve recently lost their jobs – but even in these cases, the people collecting the benefits aren’t generally doing so because they’re just lazy; sometimes there simply aren’t as many job openings as there are job seekers, so unemployed workers need some short-term support to tide them over until new job opportunities become available. A report from 2014, for instance, describes just such a situation:

The total number of job openings in April was 4.5 million, up from 4.2 million in March. In April, there were 9.8 million job seekers […] meaning that there were 2.2 times as many job seekers as job openings. Put another way: Job seekers so outnumbered job openings that more than half of job seekers were not going to find a job in April no matter what they did.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crash (prior to which the economy had been at full employment), millions of workers suddenly found themselves in situations like this, forced out of their jobs and unable to find new ones. Was this mass unemployment just due to a sudden outbreak of laziness? Did millions of workers who’d previously been working full-time jobs suddenly change their minds all at once and decide that they’d rather spend all day sitting on the couch watching TV? Of course not. The reason why they were unable to find jobs wasn’t anything to do with their own personal work ethic; it was because jobs simply weren’t available anymore. These workers were more than happy to return to work once the economy recovered and jobs actually became available again. But to accuse them of laziness just because they needed some short-term government support in the meantime wouldn’t just be false, it would be adding insult to injury by shaming them for something that was wholly out of their control.

Having said all this, it’s certainly true that not every worker who gets government aid is in exactly this kind of situation; occasionally people really do collect government benefits simply because they’re lazy or dishonest and somehow figure out a way of cheating the system. That kind of fraud is always a risk, whether we’re talking about a government program or a private charitable organization; and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to minimize it as much as possible, so as to ensure that there are enough resources available for the people who really do need them. But this is very different from saying that the whole concept of redistribution itself is just one giant scam, or that taxing the rich to help the poor is just the equivalent of taxing the deserving to help the undeserving. The latter is unfortunately often just an expression of contempt for the lower class. (Case in point: The amount of money that the government gives to rich homeowners in the form of their mortgage interest tax deductions is often considerably more than what it gives to poor people in the form of subsidized housing vouchers – and yet it’s only the latter that are typically criticized for receiving undeserved “handouts,” despite the fact that the former are getting the same kind of support for their housing.)

In reality, the distinction between the “deserving” rich and the “undeserving” poor isn’t nearly as clear-cut as conservatives so often purport it to be. As Alexander points out, it’s often just as much a result of sheer luck as anything else:

[Q]: Government is the recourse of “moochers”, who want to take the money of productive people and give it to the poor. But rich people earned their money, and poor people had the chance to earn money but did not. Therefore, the poor do not deserve rich people’s money.

The claim of many libertarians is that the wealthy earned their money by the sweat of their brow, and the poor are poor because they did not. The counterclaim of many liberals is that the wealthy gained their wealth by various unfair advantages, and that the poor never had a chance. These two conflicting worldviews have been the crux of many an Internet flamewar.

Luckily, this is an empirical question, and can be solved simply by collecting the relevant data. For example, we could examine whether the children of rich parents are more likely to be rich than poor parents, and, if so, how much more likely they are. This would give us a pretty good estimate of how much of rich people’s wealth comes from superior personal qualities, as opposed to starting with more advantages.

If we define “rich” as “income in the top 5%” and “poor” as “income in the bottom 5%” then children of rich parents are about twenty times more likely to become rich themselves than children of poor parents.

But maybe that’s an extreme case. Instead let’s talk about “upper class” (top 20%) and “lower class” (bottom 20%). A person born to a lower-class family only has a fifty-fifty chance of ever breaking out of the lower class (as opposed to 80% expected by chance), and only about a 3% chance of ending up in the upper class (as opposed to 20% expected by chance). The children of upper class parents are six times more likely to end up in the upper class than the lower class; the children of lower class families are four times more likely to end up in the lower class than the upper class.

The most precise way to measure this question is via a statistic called “intergenerational income mobility”, which studies have estimated at between .4 and .6. This means that around half the difference in people’s wealth, maybe more, can be explained solely by who their parents are.

Once you add in all the other factors besides how hard you work – like where you live (the average Delawarean earns $30000; the average Mississippian $15000) and the quality of your local school district, there doesn’t seem to be much room for hard work to determine more than about a third of the difference between income.

[Q]: The conventional wisdom among libertarians is completely different. I’ve heard of a study saying that people in the lower class are more likely to end up in the upper class than stay in the lower class, even over a period as short as ten years!

First of all, note that this is insane. Since the total must add up to 100%, this would mean that starting off poor actually makes you more likely to end up rich than someone who didn’t start off poor. If this were true, we should all send our children to school in the ghetto to maximize their life chances. This should be a red flag.

And, in fact, it is false. Most of the claims of this sort come from a single discredited study. The study focused on a cohort with a median age of twenty-two, then watched them for ten years, then compared the (thirty-two-year-old) origins with twenty-two-year-olds, then claimed that the fact that young professionals make more than college students was a fact about social mobility. It was kind of weird.

Why would someone do this? Far be it from me to point fingers, but Glenn Hubbard, the guy who conducted the study, worked for a conservative think tank called the “American Enterprise Institute”. You can see a more complete criticism of the study here.

[Q]: Okay, I acknowledge that at least half of the differences in wealth can be explained by parents. But that needn’t be rich parents leaving trust funds to their children. It could also be parents simply teaching their children better life habits. It could even be genes for intelligence and hard work.

This may explain a small part of the issue, but see [the next couple points], which show that under different socioeconomic conditions, this number markedly decreases. These socioeconomic changes would not be expected to affect things like genetics.

[Q]: So maybe children of the rich do have better opportunities, but that’s life. Some people just start with advantages not available to others. There’s no point in trying to use Big Government to regulate away something that’s part of the human condition.

This lack of social mobility isn’t part of the human condition, it’s a uniquely American problem. Of eleven developed countries investigated in a recent study on income mobility, America came out tenth out of eleven. Their calculation of US intergenerational income elasticity (the number previously cited as probably between .4 and .6) was .47. But other countries in the study had income elasticity as low as .15 (Denmark), .16 (Australia), .17 (Norway), and .19 (Canada). In each of those countries, the overwhelming majority of wealth is earned by hard work rather than inherited.

The United States, is just particularly bad at this; the American Dream turns out to be the “nearly every developed country except America” Dream.

[Q]: That’s depressing, but don’t try to turn it into a political narrative. Given the government’s incompetence and wastefulness, there’s no reason to think more government regulation and spending could possibly improve social mobility at all.

Studies show that increasing government spending significantly improves social mobility. States with higher government spending have about 33% more social mobility than states with lower spending.

This also helps explain why other First World countries have better social mobility than we do. Poor American children have very few chances to go to Harvard or Yale; poor Canadian children have a much better chance to go to to UToronto or McGill, where most of their tuition is government-subsidized.

[Q]: Then perhaps it is true that rich children start out with a major unfair advantage. But this advantage can be overcome. Poor children may have to work harder than rich children to become rich adults, but this is still possible, and so it is still true, in the important sense, that if you are not rich it’s mostly your own fault.

Several years ago, I had an interesting discussion with an evangelical Christian on the ethics of justification by faith. I promise you this will be relevant eventually.

I argued that it is unfair for God to restrict entry to Heaven to Christians alone. After all, 99% of native-born Ecuadorans are Christian, but less than 1% of native born Saudis are same. It follows that the chance of any native-born Ecuadorian of becoming Christian is 99%, and that of any native born Saudi, 1%. So if God judges people by their religion, then within 1% He’s basically just decided it’s free entry for Ecuadorians, but people born in Saudi Arabia can go to hell (literally).

My Christian friend argued that is not so: that there is a great difference between 0% of Saudis and 1% of Saudis. I answered that no, there was a 1% difference. But he said this 1% proves that the Saudis had free will: that even though all the cards were stacked against them, a few rare Saudis could still choose Christianity.

But what does it mean to have free will, if external circumstances can make 99% of people with free will decide one way in Ecuador, and the opposite way in Saudi Arabia?

I do sort of believe in free will, or at least in “free will”. But where my friend’s free will was unidirectional, an arrow pointing from MIND to WORLD, my idea of free will is circular: MIND affects WORLD affects MIND affects WORLD and so on.

Yes, it is ultimately the mind and nothing else that decides whether to accept or reject Islam or Christianity. But it is the world that shapes the mind before it does its accepting or rejecting. A man raised in Saudi Arabia uses a mind forged by Saudi culture to make the decision, and chooses Islam. A woman raised in Ecuador uses a mind forged by Ecuador to make the decision, and chooses Christianity. And so there is no contradiction in the saying that the decision between Islam and Christianity is up entirely to the individual, yet that it is almost entirely culturally determined. For the mind is a box, filled with genes and ideas, and although it is a wonderful magical box that can take things and combine them and forge them into something quite different and unexpected, it is not infinitely magical, and it cannot create out of thin air.

Returning to the question at hand, every poor person has the opportunity to work hard and eventually become rich. Whether that poor person grasps the opportunity comes from that person’s own personality. And that person’s own personality derives eventually from factors outside that person’s control. A clear look at the matter proves it must be so, or else personality would be self-created, like the story of the young man who received a gift of a time machine from a mysterious aged stranger, spent his life exploring past and future, and, in his own age, goes back and gives his time machine to his younger self.

[Q]: And why is this relevant to politics?

Earlier, I offered a number between .4 and .6 as the proportion of success attributable solely to one’s parents’ social class. This bears on, but does not wholly answer, a related question: what percentage of my success is my own, and what percentage is attributable to society? People have given answers to this question as diverse as (100%, 0%), (50%, 50%), (0%, 100%).

I boldly propose a different sort of answer: (80%, 100%). Most of my success comes from my own hard work, and all of my own hard work comes from external factors.

If all of our success comes from external factors, then it is reasonable to ask that we “pay it forward” by trying to improve the external factors of others, turning them into better people who will be better able to seize the opportunities to succeed. This is a good deal of the justification for the liberal program of redistribution of wealth and government aid to the poor.

[Q]: This is all very philosophical. Can you give some concrete examples?

Lead poisoning, for example. It’s relatively common among children in poorer areas (about 7% US prevalence) and was even more common before lead paint and leaded gasoline was banned (still >30% in many developing countries).

For every extra ten millionths of a gram per deciliter concentration of lead in their blood, children permanently lose five IQ points; there’s a difference of about ten IQ points among children who grew up in areas with no lead at all, and those who grew up in areas with the highest level of lead currently considered “safe”. Although no studies have been done on severely lead poisoned children from the era of leaded gasoline, they may have lost twenty or more IQ points from chronic lead exposure.

Further, lead also decreases behavioral inhibition, attention, and self-control. For every ten ug/dl lead increase, children were 50% more likely to have recognized behavioral problems. People exposed to higher levels of blood lead as a child were almost 50% more likely to be arrested for criminal behavior as adults (adjusting for confounders).

Economic success requires self-control, intelligence, and attention. It is cruel to blame people for not seizing opportunities to rise above their background when that background has damaged the very organ responsible for seizing opportunities. And this is why government action, despite a chorus of complaints from libertarians, banned lead from most products, a decision which is (controversially) credited with the most significant global drop in crime rates in decades, but which has certainly contributed to social mobility and opportunity for children who would otherwise be too lead-poisoned to succeed.

Lead is an interesting case because it has obvious neurological effects preventing success. The ability of psychologically and socially toxic environments to prevent success is harder to measure but no less real.

If a poor person can’t keep a job solely because she was lead-poisoned from birth until age 16, is it still fair to blame her for her failure? And is it still so unthinkable to take a little bit of money from everyone who was lucky enough to grow up in an area without lead poisoning, and use it to help her and detoxify her neighborhood?

[Q]: What is the significance of whether success is personally or environmentally determined?

It provides justification for redistribution of wealth, and for engineering an environment in which more people are able to succeed.

There’s a line from the Game of Thrones TV series, from the character Meera Reed, that goes: “Some people will always need help. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth helping.” I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that line. For better or worse, we live in a world where resources – not just financial resources, but things like social advantages and genetic predispositions and basic physical capabilities – are unevenly distributed. Some people enjoy the good fortune of having a lot, while others suffer the misfortune of having very little. But just because luck and circumstance happen to have favored the former doesn’t mean that the latter are any less deserving. Admittedly, it might not be feasible (or desirable) to make everyone perfectly equal in every way – but at the very least, we should want to ensure that everyone, regardless of their natural endowments, has the bare minimum of merit goods to live a decent life. Again, that’s not just a matter of economics; it’s a simple matter of respecting their most basic human rights – and importantly, it’s also a matter of deciding what kind of people we want to be ourselves.

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