ABSTRACT
In 1975, the Brookings Institution published a little book by Arthur Okun entitled Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, which will likely come to be considered a classic in its field. I highly recommend the book, not because I take exactly the same position on all the issues as does Okun, but because it is as good a book as I know to help people think about some of the issues. Okun is a reasoning and reasonable person. The book is not spent shooting down the straw man of complete equality. Okun is instead talking about the potential trade-off between efficiency, as measured largely by the market, and lesser degrees of inequality than markets tend to produce. If I understood him correctly, he does see an equity problem, but in the end he thinks we should not worry too much about trying to get as complete a solution to that problem as some others would advocate.
