The distributional preferences of an elite
Abstract
A weighty scholarly tome has sparked a year-long public discussion of the unevenness of income and wealth distributions in the United States. In essence, a few people have a lot of both. Moral philosophers and economists have argued for centuries about the tradeoffs in life strategy that might explain wealth imbalance: between fairness and selfishness, and equality and efficiency. Fisman et al. describe the preferences of a group of elite students at Yale Law School. These elites lean toward selfishness and efficiency more than the average American, and these preferences are reflected in their job choices.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Sep 18, 2015
- Source ID
- 10.1126/science.aab0096
Entities
People
- Daniel Markovits
- Pamela Jakiela
- Raymond Fisman
- Shachar Kariv
Organizations
- Boston University
- Columbia University
- National Science Foundation
- UCB
- University of Maryland
- Yale University