The Rich, the Poor, and the Other: Distributional Consequences of Philanthropic Provisioning of Public Goods

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asli Cansunar
2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 527-543
Author(s):  
Robert E. Rodes

But let the brother of low degree glory in his high estate: and the rich, in that he is made low.—James 1:9-10I am starting this paper after looking at the latest of a series of e-mails regarding people who cannot scrape up the security deposits required by the local gas company to turn their heat back on. They keep shivering in the corners of their bedrooms or burning their houses down with defective space heaters. The public agency that is supposed to relieve the poor refuses to pay security deposits, and the private charities that pay deposits are out of money. A bill that might improve matters has passed one House of the Legislature, and is about to die in a committee of the other House. I have a card on my desk from a former student I ran into the other day. She works in the field of utility regulation, and has promised to send me more e-mails on the subject. I also have a pile of student papers on whether a lawyer can encourage a client illegally in the country to marry her boyfriend in order not to be deported.What I am trying to do with all this material is exercise a preferential option for the poor. I am working at it in a large, comfortable chair in a large, comfortable office filled with large, comfortable books, and a large—but not so comfortable—collection of loose papers. At the end of the day, I will take some of the papers home with me to my large, comfortable, and well heated house.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-207
Author(s):  
AN Ras Try Astuti ◽  
Andi Faisal

Capitalism as an economic system that is implemented by most countries in the world today, in fact it gave birth to injustice and social inequalityare increasingly out of control. Social and economic inequalities are felt both between countries (developed and developing countries) as well as insociety itself (the rich minority and the poor majority). The condition is born from the practice of departing from faulty assumptions about the man. In capitalism the individual to own property released uncontrollably, causing a social imbalance. On the other hand, Islam never given a state model that guarantees fair distribution of ownership for all members of society, ie at the time of the Prophet Muhammad established the Islamic government in Medina. In Islam, the private ownership of property was also recognized but not absolute like capitalism. Islam also recognizes the forms of joint ownership for the benefit of society and acknowledges the ownership of the state that aims to create a balance and social justice.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 349
Author(s):  
Ivana Gačanović

The issue of understanding, empathy and the relationship to the poor, the socially and economically marginalized segments of most contemporary societies, represents one of the most challenging political socio-economic, humanist, and scientific problems of today. The paper compares two ways of understanding and representing the urban poor - anthropological and cinematographic. The theoretical and practical achievements of Oscar Lewis and his idea of the "culture of poverty" are given as an example of the anthropological study and understanding of the poor. On the other hand, an analysis of the representation of the poor in Vittorio De Sica's film Miracle in Milan (1951) is given as an example of the cinematographic treatment of the issue. The aim of this comparison is the confronting of two viewpoints – one which aims to get to the scientific truth about poverty and the other – which gives a subjective artistic interpretation of the "old and romantic story about the rich man and the pauper" and the consideration of their cognitive and interpretative effects and potential for an anthropological theory and practice on the issue which would be "better" and wider in scope.


2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-307
Author(s):  
C J A Vos
Keyword(s):  
The Poor ◽  

This article focuses on the energy that must fill the homiletic space, in order for an effective sermon about reconciliation, to be created. Of concern is the liturgical situation in which, sermons about reconciliation take place – the  homiletic process through which a homiletic theory is established, the sermon as a work of art and its structure. All these liturgical and homiletic motivators release energy, which enables preaching about reconciliation to take place in a way that moves the listener. Reconciliation means to overcome the divide between the rich and the poor and looking at other people the other person through different eyes.


2016 ◽  
Vol 110 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
DENNIS C. RASMUSSEN

This article explores Adam Smith's attitude toward economic inequality, as distinct from the problem of poverty, and argues that he regarded it as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, as has often been recognized, Smith saw a high degree of economic inequality as an inevitable result of a flourishing commercial society, and he considered a certain amount of such inequality to be positively useful as a means of encouraging productivity and bolstering political stability. On the other hand, it has seldom been noticed that Smith also expressed deep worries about some of the other effects of extreme economic inequality—worries that are, moreover, interestingly different from those that dominate contemporary discourse. In Smith's view, extreme economic inequality leads people to sympathize more fully and readily with the rich than the poor, and this distortion in our sympathies in turn undermines both morality and happiness.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 781-789 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Liao

Hailed as the “foundation of the next industrial revolution,” nanotechnology is reshaping the landscape of technological innovation and creating hope around the world. Some believe that nanotechnology can address the critical needs of developing countries, but others are less optimistic. At one end of the spectrum, scientists predict that, among other accomplishments, nanotechnology can alleviate poverty, provide safe drinking water, and cure diseases. At the other end, skeptics warn that nanotechnology can further widen the gap between the rich and the poor, contributing to an already imbalanced global landscape. What can nanotechnology bring to the 21st century? How and in what ways should it intersect with law, public policy, and the plight of the developing world?This article argues that the international community can harness nanotechnology to create sustainable development, particularly in the field of water remediation and treatment, but it must learn from its past missteps and adopt a strategy that combines two competing theories: instrumentalism and contextualism. Instrumentalism is the concept that technology is superb and stakeholders can easily transfer it from one application to another. In contrast, contextualism places technology in a socioeconomic context and conditions technological success on the stakeholders’ ability to meet local needs.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-228
Author(s):  
Ali Yavuz Polat

We consider a model with two types of households; the poor with no initial endowment and the rich with positive endowment; and two types of assets; properties in a poor area and properties in a rich area. In the model, poor agents need credit to buy an asset whereas the rich can draw from their endowment. We show that credit-fuelled housing bubbles sometimes may improve welfare, making the poorer individuals better-off. More precisely, there exist two types of equilibria in both markets: One is a bubble equilibrium, and the other is an equilibrium where asset prices are stable over time. While the poor always obtain a positive surplus in the bubble equilibrium, this is not necessarily true for the rich. Our results suggest that there may be scope for market interventions aimed at sustaining the value of assets held by credit-constrained agents after the burst of a credit bubble.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Jan-erik Lane

<p><em>The COP21 Agreement harbours a conflict between Third </em><em>w</em><em>orld and First world countries that has cropped up in tensions in all meetings by the UNFCCC. On the one hand, there is the catch-up set of countries—emerging economies—that have recently “taken off” economically and that will not accept a trade-off between economic development and environmental need of cutting emissions. On the other hand, there is the set of mature economies that grow sluggishly and have started to cut back on fossil fuels, especially coal. The first set of nations want the second set to pay for their gigantic energy transformation in a few decades—decarbonisation. The first set claimed that they had not created the big problem originally, and that fairness requires that the rich help the poor. At the COP21 summit, a deal was struck, worth 100 billion dollars per year to fund a Stern (2007) like Super Fund. But will it really be put in place and made operational?</em></p>


Taxation ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 147-166
Author(s):  
Barbara H. Fried

Libertarians have long argued for a “benefits tax,” which sets tax rates to approximate the shadow market price for the public goods each taxpayer consumes. Libertarians have assumed that because consumption of explicit public goods does not rise as fast as income or wealth, a benefits tax would likely be regressive. That is to say, the rich would pay taxes at a lower marginal rate than the middle class and the poor. Chapter 8 argues that, contrary to the libertarian assumption, a benefits tax could yield almost any rate structure, including a quite progressive one, depending on the definition applied to “public goods” and the structure of the shadow market in which it is imagined polities operate.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (14) ◽  
pp. 3611-3616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Bechtel ◽  
Roman Liesch ◽  
Kenneth F. Scheve

Political polarization and extremism are widely thought to be driven by the surge in economic inequality in many countries around the world. Understanding why inequality persists depends on knowing the causal effect of inequality on individual behavior. We study how inequality affects redistribution behavior in a randomized “give-or-take” experiment that created equality, advantageous inequality, or disadvantageous inequality between two individuals before offering one of them the opportunity to either take from or give to the other. We estimate the causal effect of inequality in representative samples of German and American citizens (n = 4,966) and establish two main findings. First, individuals imperfectly equalize payoffs: On average, respondents transfer 12% of the available endowments to realize more equal wealth distributions. This means that respondents tolerate a considerable degree of inequality even in a setting in which there are no costs to redistribution. Second, redistribution behavior in response to disadvantageous and advantageous inequality is largely asymmetric: Individuals who take from those who are richer do not also tend to give to those who are poorer, and individuals who give to those who are poorer do not tend to take from those who are richer. These behavioral redistribution types correlate in meaningful ways with support for heavy taxes on the rich and the provision of welfare benefits for the poor. Consequently, it seems difficult to construct a majority coalition willing to back the type of government interventions needed to counter rising inequality.


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