Rawls’ political philosophy principle, the Veil of Ignorance says that if you’re designing a society, you should do from the perspective that you will be randomly assigned a position in that society. For example: while Creative Anachronists all wish they were medieval nobles, in the real middle ages most people gathered muck for a living. It only makes sense to say “I wish I lived in the middle ages” if you were willing to bet at stiff odds that you’d be a noble instead of a peasant.

Krista pointed me to this study where some behavioural economists asked Americans to choose an income distribution from behind a Veil of Ignorance. I believe their quintile graphs are misleading, which invalidates the ideal they surveyed, so instead let’s consider if the population of the country were five people and their total wealth* was $100:

As behavioural economists, their interest is showing that Americans irrationally support government policies that maintain an income distribution they don’t prefer. However, from a rational perspective, all these distributions are equivalent! The expected payout from each bet is $20: in other words, Alice’s life is better than Bobs to the proportional chance of being Alice instead of Bob.

But in the real world people are not behind a Veil of Ignorance but rather they have incomplete information. The authors speculate that there are a number of reasons why Americans don’t support income redistribution:

• they don’t know how relatively poor they are
• they overestimate their chance of getting richer
• they disapprove of or can’t agree on mechanisms to redistribute wealth (eg: taxes)
• their political positions don’t reflect rational self-interest

* We’re talking wealth rather than income, so the reason Eve is so poor is that she has a lot of debt.