ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews a contribution of John Harsanyi; Abba P. Lerner’s argument from ignorance for redistribution, then the ideas of John Rawls himself and finally a modest literature that has attempted to construct an economics that combines Paretian welfare economics with a somewhat Rawlsian understanding of a “fair” distribution of income. For Rawls, as noted, decisions are fair if they are made as if behind a veil of ignorance. For Rawls, rational choices are not the choices of instruments to attain some given wants, but rather the wants themselves are rational, and rationality is goodness. For Rawls, unlike Hobbes, the principles agreed on at the original position can be stable only if they are usually followed without compulsion. Non-envious allocations are often linked to Rawls’ use of the max-min operator. Varian compares “fairness” in this sense to the social welfare function approach and to Rawls, and asserts that the fairness approach solves problems with both.
