Who cares about distributive justice?

EDUCATED white people do, according to a new paper [pdf] by Giacomo Corneo at the Free University of Berlin and Christina Fong at Carnegie Mellon forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics. In "What's the Monetary Value of Distributive Justice," Mr Corneo and Ms Fong whip up a model that, when fed with survey data about attitudes toward wealth and poverty, estimates that, on average, "the monetary value of justice for US households amounts to about one fifth of their disposable income".

What exactly does this mean? Nevermind, for now. For my monetary value, the most interesting thing in this paper is the fact that this average is so uninformative, since the willingness to pay for justice--construed as the distribution of material rewards more or less according to effort, and not luck--varies so greatly across groups:

For any given income and beliefs about the fairness of market outcomes, white individuals with at least some higher education display a remarkably higher willingness to pay for justice than the rest of the population. ...

Despite this heterogeneity in the value of distributing income according to desert, differences in demand for governmental redistribution turn out to be mostly driven by differences in the beliefs about the fairness of the market system. We find that differences in those beliefs are not only more powerful than differences in preferences, they are also a stronger determinant of political attitudes than the pre-fiscal income of individuals.

What this says to me is that there is no primordial conception of justice lurking in each breast. We are ideological and doctrinal beings, coached into our moral views. That is to say, John Rawls' "A Theory of Justice" is more likely to give you ideas than it is to reflect ideas you already had.

This is also another blow to the beleagured self-interested voter hypothesis. People vote their beliefs, not their pocketbooks.

And this is why the ideas racket is deadly serious. The demand for redistribution rises and falls with a belief in the fairness of the system. Thus the elite's philosophical differences over redistribution require proxy wars for the hearts and minds of the volk. Anything at hand may be a weapon. The self-interested voter hypothesis, for example, is a useful fiction for pro-redistribution ideologues like Paul Krugman, since it fits snugly within a narrative of a system rigged against the common man. That the narrative is nonsense is less important than reinforcing the sense of unfairness (not the battered self-interest) that gets voters hopping mad.