Predistribution and redistribution are distinct political paradigms – they have different philosophical underpinnings and recommend different policy solutions

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 63-67, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

When political philosophers think about egalitarian public policy, and about what states need to do in order to deliver social and economic justice, their attention has most often naturally been drawn to questions of redistribution. They typically consider how states can create more equal outcomes through standard fiscal mechanisms, as when more advantaged members of society are taxed by the state, which then uses those fiscal flows to fund transfer payments and to provide public services. It is illustrative here that, when G. A. Cohen launched his powerful and influential critique of Rawls’s account of social justice, the totemic practical issue on which he focussed was the level of the top marginal rate of income taxation.1

While this predominant concern with questions of redistribution as being central to thinking about justice and equality generally still remains, it is noteworthy that more recent work in political philosophy increasingly brings questions of predistribution to the fore. As T. M. Scanlon puts it in his 2018 book Why Does Inequality Matter?, ‘[a]nother way of promoting equality, or avoiding inequality, is through what has been called predistribution, that is to say, through the laws and policies that determine individuals’ pretax incomes’. 2 This shift of attention to the broader set of laws and policies that produce inequality aligns with a general broadening of concern with the normative assessment of a range of socioeconomic institutions, and away from an artificially circumscribed focus on only a particular subset of the ways in which institutions can either foster or reduce economic inequality.3 This broader focus could encompass, for example, concerns with minimum wage levels, or the regulation of trade unions and wage bargaining processes, as well as issues of financial and corporate regulation, the regulation of important sectors such as the housing or energy markets, and the use of national and local government procurement spending in shaping the structure of markets.

A similar broadening of concern can be seen in recent work by leading economists, with Joseph Stiglitz also using the language of predistribution to describe his 2016 proposals for ‘Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy’. 5 As Stiglitz puts it in his 2019 book, People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, ‘If we succeed in making market incomes more equal, there is less of a burden on redistribution. This emphasis on pre-distribution is important. It highlights that getting a fairer distribution of income is not just a matter of redistribution, of taxing the rich to give to the more needy’. 6 The idea here seems to be a straightforward one, at least at first acquaintance: predistribution is about the role of government in changing market outcomes, and thereby creating fairer distributive outcomes without the need for directly engaging in redistribution.7 Thomas Piketty, meanwhile, has stressed the need to pursue redistribution and predistribution in combination, with the two being ‘complementary, not substitutes,’ 8 while also questioning the conceptual distinction between the two categories: an issue that will be explored in detail in what follows here.

This increasing academic concern with predistribution runs parallel with developments in the world of practical politics. Traditional models of social democracy have come under pressure as support for welfare state institutions have weakened, leaving a scepticism about familiar forms of redistribution, together with a lack of clarity about what the most promising alternatives to such policies might be. Moreover, with runaway levels of inequality within the rich industrialised countries, it seems increasingly implausible that familiar forms of redistributive, tax-and-spend centre-left politics can any longer be adequate to the task of creating a more just and equitable economic settlement. The lack of clear ideas to animate a new centre-left vision of the role of the state has been associated, in many countries, with a fall in support for mainstream social democratic parties, as we see with the travails of parties such as the French Parti Socialiste, or the German SPD.9

While the US Democratic Party has its own distinct history, placing it at some distance from the mainstream currents of global social democracy, ideas of predistribution have also gained some purchase within that party, especially on its more radical wing. A January 2019 New York Times article by Steven K. Vogel, a political scientist based at UC Berkeley, explains the economic policies at the centre of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s policy platform for her 2020 Presidential bid as itself being organised around an idea of predistribution. As the NY Times headline puts it, ‘Elizabeth Warren Wants to Stop Inequality Before It Starts: Redistribution is important, but comes too late’. 10

The idea of predistribution has therefore been seen as offering a way forward for progressive and social democratic parties of the left and centre-left, finding a way of moving beyond political strategies that seem to have run out of steam. Patrick Diamond and Claudia Chwalisz of the think tank Policy Network, which brings together social democratic parties across the globe, go so far as to describe predistribution as offering ‘a new governing prospectus for the centre-left’. 11 The idea has, indeed, been taken up by politicians from a range of European social democratic parties, as well as by politicians from the Australian and New Zealand Labor Parties.12 Perhaps most famously, or notoriously, the idea of predistribution was invoked by former UK Labour leader Ed Miliband as a central organising theme of the Labour Party’s economic policy during his leadership, with a focus on reforms to corporate governance (with worker representation on boards) and government procurement practices (to drive up wages and incentivise private sector investment in skills development).13 Although the idea became somewhat muted in the run-up to the 2015 general election in the UK, the idea of emphasising underlying institutional changes to the economy, rather than relying on fiscal redistribution, has retained its currency as pointing a path forward in the achievement of more just societies in the decades after the end of the social democratic era.14