A robust solution to inequality, poverty, and economic immobility for progressives and conservatives
Read the book Find related publications, posts, and scholars
I want to insist on this point: the key issue is the justification of inequalities rather than their magnitude as such. —Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), 264
Joseph works as a researcher at Knology, focused on distributive justice and policy, program evaluation, as well as data analysis and visualization.
Hobbies include too much time fiddling with (breaking and repairing) his various digital devices, honing reproducible research techniques, and proselytizing philosophy, statistics, and privacy practices. Also soccer, tennis, and games in general.
PhD in Political Science, 2013
Rutgers University
BA in Government, 2002
University of Notre Dame
The typical story about poverty focuses on what fraction of individuals are poor. Economists are interested in more than this, however, and the classical ways of measuring poverty are the:1 incidence of poverty (what proportion of the population is poor?) intensity of poverty (how poor are the poor?), and inequality of poverty (how unequal is the distribution of mild, moderate, and severe poverty?
Economic justice is giving to each exactly what they deserve.
An R package to calculate, describe, and plot economic distributions that are just.
An RStudio Addin that enables templated commits for automated software release versioning.
A prose-free, peer-reviewed journal to better advance human knowledge and the use thereof.
Tools for Writing Reproducible Research in R
Frankfurt’s “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (1969) made an important intervention into the literature on moral responsibility via a classical Frankfurt-type example, arguing that “the principle of alternate possibilities” is false. This paper argues that classical Frankfurt-type examples fail due to the use of agentic counterfactual interventions who lack agency. Using finite state machines to illustrate, I show the models that classical Frankfurt-type examples must use and why they are incongruent with leeway incompatibilist beliefs—the motivating interlocutor for classical Frankfurt-type examples. I then argue that returning agency to the agentic counterfactual intervention also returns alternate possibilities to the actual sequence of events, undermining a core premise of Frankfurt’s. Lastly, I show why a number of potential counterarguments should fail to persuade the leeway incompatibilist.
This book develops a novel approach to distributive justice by building a theory based on a concept of desert. As a work of applied political theory, it presents a simple but powerful theoretical argument and a detailed proposal to eliminate unmerited inequality, poverty, and economic immobility, speaking to the underlying moral principles of both progressives who already support egalitarian measures and also conservatives who have previously rejected egalitarianism on the grounds of individual freedom, personal responsibility, hard work, or economic efficiency. By using an agnostic, flexible, data-driven approach to isolate luck and ultimately measure desert, this proposal makes equal opportunity initiatives both more accurate and effective as it adapts to a changing economy. It grants to each individual the freedom to genuinely choose their place in the distribution. It provides two policy variations that are perfectly economically efficient, and two others that are conditionally so. It straightforwardly aligns outcomes with widely shared, fundamental moral intuitions. Lastly, it demonstrates much of the above by modeling four policy variations using 40 years of survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
$
15 minimum wage will: - Increase wages: $
1.47 billion in new gross wages - Stimulate …