Centerfield

Econ 000.2 What is "FAIR?"

So, as noted below, I was reading this story that stuck in my craw(and I'll give a link later if I can track it down, but I can encapsulate.) I'm going to blockquote my summary for better layout, and use blockquotes from time to time to call extra attention to certain things:

According to the Boston Globe, it seems that our state university had instituted a new fee to be used to pay increased administration costs for overseeing international students. Unsurprisingly (to me anyway), the fee is charged only to international students. Naturally, international students were refusing to pay the fee, and were quoted variously about the unfairness and discriminatory nature of such a fee. In their view, it would be much more "FAIR" to pay for these extra costs by charging a fee to ALL students.

Note that the feeling of the new policy being unfair was diminished not a whit by any recognition that administering the education of international students might cost more money than that for domestic students. Now there are lots of ways different people are going to want to go with this story, including complaining about naive young liberal students, and yelling about stupid commies, and defending the virtue of international students against heartless selfish econocrats. But what I really want to hone in on is the very idea of fairness. What is "fair," really?

I can't help but notice that the idea of fairness is one that children latch onto with great moral righteousness from a very young age. And I'm suggesting here that this might be a clue for us, although to what exactly, I can't yet say.

I think that a problem with partisan rhetoric on economic policies (although not JUST econ policies) is that where partisans are involved, discussion seldom if ever rises above the level of "that's not fair" and "this discriminates against group x." Isn't this sort of pointless? Isn't it in the nature of any tweak to the government's economic policy that any given change is probably beneficial to one group at the expense of another group? The money goes out of one pocket and into another. The group that benefits thinks things have been made more fair, and the group that suffers thinks it's been made less fair.

And I realize that this may not be perfectly true, and that it may be more true in some cases than in others.

All I really want to suggest is that it's true often enough that we try to talk about economic policies at a level that's a TINY bit higher, in terms of which groups benefit and which ones suffer by a given policy change, and why it's superior in a given instance to expect some group to bear a greater burden in order to lessen another group's burden.

And I'm begging that we not detour into an argument about the merits of the idea that tax cuts create a rising tide that raises all boats. It may be true and thus somehow a valid ccounterexample. I'm not trying to suggest that economics is composed solely of zero-sum games and fixed pies, only that when they are, fairness gets dodgy. One more fairness story:

A few weeks back the Globe (them again) had a front-page above the fold Sunday story about how a new program proposed by our Republican governor discriminated against students from poorer towns (and thus minorities too, I believe they implied...). Why? Because the program granted scholarships to students solely on the basis of their performance on a state test. And white kids from rich towns score higher.

Now I'd be the VERY first to admit that the merits of a state's overall scholarship policy are worthy of discussion, and that programs that target low-income/disadvantaged students are absolutely worthwhile. But that's WAY different from GOP GOVERNOR SCREWS POOR KIDS AND BLACKS, ya know? And again, what is FAIR? Is it somehow fairer to expect a middle class white kid from a household with income of 70k to score, say 50 points higher on a test than a black kid from a family with a household income of 30k ? Is it really "discriminatory bias" to awards scholarships via a simple program of "excel on this test, get a scholarship?"

So I submit that when cries of unfairness and discrimination arise, especially in economic policy, at the very least, our centrist BS detectors automatically turn on, and we ask "whose ox is being gored?" and "whose ox is being fattened?"

Posted by Brian Keegan at March 24, 2004 09:15 PM