Samuelson against “Rawls’s gratuitism”: some lessons on the misunderstandings between Rawls and the economists

Abstract

Soon after the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls found himself swept up in the huge wave of enthusiasm his work had elicited from economists, while also having to respond to major critiques. Among the latter we find a largely unknown piece by Samuelson, a giant in the world of economics, devoted to a central question of Rawls’s framework, namely the maximin, which he supplemented with several virulent letters strongly attacking Rawls’s notions of justice or fairness. A few years later, in a paper written in response to Arrow’s 1985 Tanner Lectures, Samuelson would dedicate a section to “Rawls’s Gratuitism,” caustically remarking that “if something true by definition is a ‘truism,’ then we may perhaps call something gratuitous a ‘gratuitism’.” Focusing on the dialogue between Rawls and Samuelson after A Theory of Justice, paying special attention to their correspondence, the paper aims to shed light on the reasons for Samuelson’s furore against Rawls’s maximin, and to draw some lessons concerning the complex dialogue between Rawls and the economists, both as regards the attitude of the economists towards Rawls and as regards Rawls’s position towards economists and the economy.

Keywords:

• Rawls
• Samuelson
• maximin
• welfare economics
• Pareto principle

JEL CODES:

• B21
• B31
• D60
• H21

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three editors of this special issue, as well as two anonymous referees, for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the participants in the special session “History of Public Economics” at the 2022 Eshet conference (Padua, June 2022) and in the workshop “From Public Finance to Public Economics” (Graz, September 2022) for their remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Indeed, Samuelson’s tone is often vehement against his interlocutors (whether in correspondence or in his papers) when he considers them to be wrong. See, for instance, his fulsome expression of disagreement with Kemp and Ng’s condition of neutrality, using terms such as “speechless,” “monstrous,” “odd,” “foolishness,” “stupid” (see Samuelson 1977, 1981).

2 For instance, Amadae (2003) has relied on Rawls’s papers in her wonderful portrait of rational choice liberalism after WWII; Peart and Levy (2008) have published some of Rawls’s correspondence with James Buchanan; Hawi (2016) has notably used some books annotated by Rawls to explain his economic influences; Galisanka (2017) has examined the impact of game theory on Rawls’s work in the fifties; Coker (2021ab) has examined the influence of Knight on Rawls; Jackson and Stemplowska (2021) have documented the relationship between Buchanan and Rawls; and Igersheim (2023) has made extensive use of the correspondence between Rawls and various economists after 1971 to shed light on the (complementary) elements which might explain Rawls’s intellectual evolution. Note that other books and papers have also relied on Rawls’s papers, but with no real focus on his relationship with economists and economic theory: see for instance the special issues of the Journal of the History of Ideas (2017) and Modern Intellectual History (2021) as well as Forrester (2019) who has focused on the reception and influence of A Theory of Justice, and Galisanka (2019) who has done the complementary work of studying Rawls’s intellectual development as it led to A Theory.

3 This interview has been translated and published in French: see Foisneau and Munoz-Dardé (2014).

4 As stressed by Walraevens (2023) and contrary to Samuelson’s results, Atkinson (1973, 404) is surprised by the fact that even with a Rawlsian-maximin Social Welfare Function, the optimum tax rates are “nonetheless lower than one would expect from such an apparently egalitarian objective function,” in comparison with the “egalitarian prescriptions of Pigou and Edgeworth.”

5 In his 1985 Tanner Lectures entitled “The Unknown Other,” Arrow defines interpersonal comparisons on the basis of extended sympathy comparisons as follows: “an individual’s well-being for a given social state is determined by both the social action and the individual’s type. Therefore, it is suggested, let us permit as meaningful comparisons between different pairs, each of which consists of a social action and a type. The form of these comparisons is action a for a type t better than action b for type s” (KJAP, typescript “The Unknown Other,” 4–5).

6 In fact, Referee A, i.e., Arrow, points out in his report regarding the section Samuelson devoted to Rawls that “this argument is hardly a refutation of Rawls, who does not even consider random choices […]. Rawls could well argue without logical difficulty that (6,6,6) is superior to any particular allocation with the given unequal distribution” (PASP, Maskin to Samuelson, 16 January 1986). We will come back to this point in the next section.

7 See notably Walraevens (2023) on the way the literature on optimal taxation has absorbed Rawls’s theory.

8 On this point, see also Duhamel (2006, 2012), and the closely related idea of an “apocryphal Rawls” which amounts to describing Rawlsian economics.

9 To avoid ambiguities concerning the argument developed here, it must be recalled that the maximin criterion does respect the weak Pareto principle.

10 “Although I did not know this at the time, I believe a number of other scholars have independently made this same point – Sidney Alexander perhaps being one?” (PASP and JRP, Samuelson to Rawls, 24 July, 1985). Indeed, a closely related idea can be found in Alexander’s 1974 review when he claims that “the main argument Rawls advances in support of maximin weighting is based on the ‘strains of commitment’: “How hard will it be to stick by the agreement? […] Even theoretically, is it easier to stick by an agreement that takes a great deal off one’s welfare for a tiny gain for someone less advantaged, or one that takes a tiny bit off one’s welfare for a great gain for someone more advantaged? Rawls assumes that all would choose one way. He does not even mention the possibility that a test-creature might expect to regret his commitment if forced to sacrifice a huge benefit to one less advantaged. […] Practical considerations of commitment would argue most heavily against the maximin.” According to Rawls, the strains of commitment correspond to the following: “[parties] cannot enter into agreements that may have consequences they cannot accept. They will avoid those that they can adhere to only with great difficulty. Since the original agreement is final and made in perpetuity, there is no second chance” ([1971] 1999, 153).

11 “As you note, people focus on risk aversion and maximin far too much and seem unaware of the main features of the theory” (JRP, Rawls to Buchanan, 25 February, 1975).

12 Note that this not the case when the scheme is not perfectly just, as stressed by Rawls himself.

13 In his 1974 Quarterly of Economic Journal book review, Alexander also points out this crucial feature of A Theory: “Rawls claims that justice is the first virtue of social institutions. Such parental pride may be pardonable in an author, but the claim is overstated. Certainly, effectiveness is the first virtue, unless a necessity is not to count as a virtue” (Alexander 1974, 605). It should be further added that an anonymous reviewer disagrees with our interpretation of the long quote from A Theory of Justice: according to him/her, the issue at stake here is not the priority of justice over efficiency, what Rawls is saying is that if we start at a suboptimal point, then we might recommend a change which does not make everyone better off, i.e., a change that is not a Pareto improvement. In his/her opinion, Samuelson would agree with this general point.

14 Note that this hypothesis on close-knitness is able to solve the debate on the interpretation of the difference principle in terms of maximin or leximin (on this, see notably Sen 1970, 138; Rawls 1971, 72; and Mongin 2020, 35).

15 Note that in the final version of the paper, Samuelson would eventually change the term “indifference principle” to “difference principle”!