Links are DAs – predistribution doesn’t critique policy types, but policy aims and effects

Martin O’Neill, “Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice,” Philosophy, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 85-87, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/power-predistribution-and-social-justice/02449FCC840979032236220D38D11A4F.

Does this mean that we have simply been on a wild goose chase in thinking through the idea of predistribution, seen as an alternative to traditional forms of redistribution? Thankfully this is not the case. What we have shown is that, insofar as there is an important distinction here, it has to be with regard to the aims and effects of policy, rather than in terms of the nature of the policy tools or mechanisms that are used. The content of these policy aims and effects has already been touched upon above, in imagining the new USanian healthcare or Medicare service, and its potential twin roles in both reducing objectionable inequalities of power within market relationships, and giving individuals a secure standing outside of the market transactions in which they may otherwise be potentially vulnerable to a troubling degree. To get a clearer sense of these predistributive policy aims, I want very briefly to revisit a thinker whom one can see as a highly significant theorist of predistribution avant la lettre: the Nobel Prize winning economist James Meade. In seeing what was at stake Meade’s critique of redistribution, we can hope to get a clear fix on what is at stake between advocates of predistribution and redistribution, now reconceived as aims or objectives of policy, rather than as distinct kinds of policy.

8. The Pre-History of Predistribution: James Meade on the Twin Aims of Predistribution

In his important 1964 book, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership of Property, James Meade advanced a compelling account of how wealth should be treated by institutions tasked with creating a more egalitarian economy.37 This work has been influential both on political philosophers – especially in John Rawls’s ideas of a ‘property-owing democracy’ – and on Meade’s fellow economists, in particular through the work of Anthony Atkinson and Thomas Piketty, the latter of whom describes his own work as ‘following in the footsteps’ of Atkinson and Meade.38

Meade is an interesting figure in the development of thinking about predistribution not least because he was in fact sceptical about the central form of ‘labour predistribution’ that would be involved in bidding-up the bargaining power of labour unions through having politically stronger unions – what he described as enacting a ‘Trade Union State’. His argument was that the costs in overall aggregate economic efficiency of bidding up the price of wages were unjustifiable, and hence an egalitarian economy would have to be sought by some other means.39 His alternative to ‘labour predistribution’ was to change the character of the overall economic distribution, and therefore also the social relationships and distribution of power to which it would give rise, via mechanisms of what we might call ‘capital predistribution’. He saw the role of the state not in merely ameliorating the poverty of those who did not inherit any of society’s wealth, but in making sure that all citizens within a society would benefit from capital returns. This ‘capital predistribution’ would be achieved by a mixture of private means – the creation of ‘a property-owning democracy’ in Meade’s terms – operating simultaneously alongside a ‘socialist state’ that would expand the collective, public ownership of capital through institutions akin to contemporary sovereign wealth funds (or, as Meade put it ‘a national asset’ or ‘Citizens’ Trust’). Meade described the combination of these public and private forms of capital predistribution as together bringing about a form of ‘liberal socialism’. 40

In terms of getting to the normative heart of the predistributive ideal, though, what is most striking in Meade’s book is not so much the detail of his institutional proposals for ‘capital predistribution’, as the content of his critique of existing forms of welfare state redistribution. He did not for a moment think that redistribution was unnecessary, or that predistributive measures should entirely replace traditional tax-and-spend or tax-and-transfer policies, but his worries about the limits of the familiar mid-twentieth century welfare state are powerfully expressed, and make a clear case for why it is that a concern only for the distribution of income cannot be sufficient to create an egalitarian economic settlement, and why ‘capital predistribution’ must be a necessary element of a just institutional structure. Here is the key passage:

‘Extreme inequalities in the ownership of property are in my view undesirable, quite apart from any inequalities of income which they may imply. A man with much property has great bargaining strength and a great sense of security, independence and freedom; and he enjoys these things not only vis-à-vis his propertyless fellow citizens but also vis-à-vis the public authorities. He can snap his fingers at those on whom he must rely for an income; for he can always live for a time on his capital. The propertyless man must continuously and without interruption acquire his income by working for an employer or by qualifying to receive it from a public authority. An unequal distribution of property means an unequal distribution of power and status even if it is prevented from causing too unequal a distribution of income’. 41

The predistributive ideal involves seeing that individuals who sell their labour within the market need to be given (a) more equal bargaining power within the labour market, and (b) greater security, independence and freedom outside the labour market. Significantly, these goods have to be secured against both other people and against the state. And ultimately these goals are best understood with regard to our underlying egalitarian interest in social relations of status and power.