ECON 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Thought Experiment, Homo Economicus, Pin-Up Model
Document Summary
How to decide what someone is due: merit, entitlement, fairness, merit, distribution according to the desert of a person / contribution to society. People who do good things should deserve more. Appeals to the common sense notion of justice / seems intuitively right. Those who contribute more should get more. Problems: measurement (problematic to measure social contribution) Idea: measuring social contribution by using the market price. But: market isn"t perfect (existence of market failures) and therefore there isn"t always a price for everything (especially socially valuable things often have no market price: exclusion. Distributing resources according to one"s personal contribution would exclude those people, that aren"t able to contribute something to society (no fault of their own) Responsibility: no one should be disadvantaged by things he is not responsible for, effort should be rewarded, luck shouldn"t, example: children of einstein & pin-up girl. Usually combination of luck and effort: not always equal starting positions (like e. g. twins)
