Public policy for fairness and efficiency

Content for week of Monday, February 1, 2021–Friday, February 5, 2021

Readings

Other useful resources

The equality/equity/justice meme that we talk about in the lecture is a helpful way of thinking about how to remove institutional barriers to fairness and justice, but it also isn’t completely adequate because of some of the underlying assumptions built into the graphic. Here are a couple critiques:

In any case, striving for justice (i.e. removing the institutional barriers preventing people from flourishing in the first place) is a noble and worthy goal for public policy.

Slides

Download the slides from today’s class.

First slide

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:


  1. The CORE Team, Economy, Society, and Public Policy, 2019, https://www.core-econ.org/espp/. ↩︎

  2. Alberto Alesina and George-Marios Angeletos, “Fairness and Redistribution: US Vs. Europe,” American Economic Review 95 (2005): 913–35. ↩︎