Abstract
Because equality is the leading fetish of our time, because so many people endorse it as an obvious ideal, because so many have enlisted in it as a cause, without having considered its consequences, it ought to be scrutinised. This book offers a series of scrutinies, mainly sceptical, of equality as an ideal or equalisation as a practice.
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Notes and references
Historical explanations recently offered for the rise of egalitarianism are: Gerhard Emmanuel Lenski, Power and Privilege (New York, 1966); and Earnest Gellner, ‘The Social Roots of Egalitarianism’, Dialectics and Humanism, 4 (1979), pp. 27–43.
An ingenious analysis of American statistics reaches a similar conclusion: see Morton Paglin, ‘The Measurement and Trend of Inequality’, American Economic Review, 65 (Sept. 1975), pp. 598–609.
For the effect of chance on the outcome of investments and thus on the distribution of wealth, see E. Schwartz and J. A. Greenleaf, ‘A Comment on Investment Decisions …’, Journal of Finance, 33 (1978), pp. 1222–7.
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© 1983 Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Letwin, W. (1983). The case against equality. In: Letwin, W. (eds) Against Equality. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17175-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17175-0_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-35313-4
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