E-Mich - "Gerrymandering distributive justice"

Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Speranta DUMITRU

This paper argues that methodological nationalism distorts Rawls’ understanding of justice. Methodological nationalism assumes that nation-states are the relevant units of analysis, and so does Rawls. This choice is, however, a source of bias for various reasons. One of them is that framing distributive justice in national terms is a way to increase the “citizenship rent”. The economist Branko Milanovic (2016) defined the concept of “citizenship rent” as the revenue people reap only by being ‘citizens’ of rich countries. He calculated that the citizenship rent in rich countries is higher for the lowest incomes than for the median incomes. The aim of this paper is to address a different question: how rich and poor people all over the world could be “redistributed” in countries in order to minimize the citizenship rent?