PAF 340 Lecture 8: The Market and the Polis, Equity, and Efficiency
Document Summary
1-3: the market and the polis, equity, and efficiency. The polis community: greek word for city-state, collective will and collective action, public interest and self-interest, mutual aid among members, insurance as a bond among community members, sharing, caring, and relationships as a motivator. Goals: big ideas that we agree about in the abstract, but tend to disagree on when we make them concrete, sometimes in conflict, today: equity and efficiency, next: welfare, liberty, and security. Equity: there are competing visions of what constitutes an equitable distribution, remember - stone distinguishes between equity and equality, equality sameness, distribution that contains uniformity, equity distributions regarded as fair. Item process recipients: distributions have three important dimensions: the item, the process, and the recipients. Each of these can be modified to create more or less equitable outcomes. Efficiency: getting the most out of a given input, comparative, assumes, limited resources, agreed upon objectives, usually associated with market models.
