Until I come across John Rawls’ book, I have never thought the word Theory can be associated with Justice (公正).  I was reluctant to commit my leisure time to reading “theories” (my job gives me plenty already), but my better judgement was overridden by the charisma of the loaded buzzword of our time.  Don’t get me wrong: the book is worth reading.  However, getting through five hundred pages of hard (and dry) reasoning and argument—with few stories or quips to catch a break—was quite a mental exercise.  Well, here is what I have learned.

A theory of justice is a set of principles designed to resolve the conflict of interests arising from human cooperation.  These principles form the basis for regulating social behaviors and arranging political institutions.   Rawls’ theory, which earned him the reputation as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, is dubbed “Justice as Fairness”.   It consists of three principles. The first principle (A) guarantees an equal right to “most extensive” basic liberties.  The other two state social and economic inequalities are just if and only if they (B) are attached to positional goods open to all under conditions of equal opportunity, and (C) maximize primary goods enjoyed by the least advantaged members of society.  The three principles follow a lexical order: the equal liberty principle (A) takes priority, followed by the equal opportunity principle (B) and the difference principle (C).

At first glance justice as fairness seems decisively egalitarian.  Rawls advocates compensation for the “undeserved inequalities” from birth and natural endowment.  Under the difference principle (C), “society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions”.  An example is spending greater resources on “the education of the less rather than the more intelligent”.  In fact, Rawls has gone so far as to assert the willingness to make an effort is also contingent upon social circumstances. In other words, even inequalities caused by laziness may be undeserved and thus warrant social redress.    To be sue, Rawls does not support eradicating inequalities all together. Instead, inequalities are to be tolerated in so far as they benefit everyone, especially the most disadvantaged.    Moreover, positional goods should be distributed based on the equal opportunity principle, and if doing so leads to inequalities, so be it.  Thus, Rawls seems to prefer meritocracy to equal-outcome when it comes to positional goods. There is a catch though: everyone must “have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed”.  Needless to say, compensations are necessary to meet such a requirment.

Rawls contends justice as fairness is preferred by moral persons at the original position.   He assumes moral persons know what is right (i.e., have a sense of justice) and what constitutes their own good.  As such, moral persons are entitled to equal justice. As Rawls puts it, “those who can give justice are owed justice”.   The original position, on the other hand, wraps everyone with a veil of ignorance. From behind this veil, nobody knows their social status or natural asset.  As a result, they cannot and will not tailor the principles to their own advantage.   Rawls’ moral persons are not altruistic, but mutually disinterested and rational.  This means they (i) strive to maximize their own good, as defined by the rational plan of life, and (ii) are indifferent to the good of others, in both absolute and relative terms.    Rawls’ faith in the better angels of our nature is admirable, but I am not sure our cravings for justice can resist the incessant onslaught of envy, vanity, and self-serving biases.   A society built on justice as fairness may be ideal, even optimal. But will it be stable?  Perhaps that’s what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he proclaimed, “A republic if YOU CAN KEEP IT!”

Rawls staunchly opposes utilitarianism, the idea that a society is property arranged when its institutions maximize the net balance of welfare.  He believes “each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”   Therefore, justice “denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”   These words ring so true as I am, like many of my friends are, trying to understand what the heck is going on in Shanghai.

To the heatedly debated nature vs. nurture question, Plomin’s Blueprint gives an unnuanced answer: it is the nature that makes you who you are.  According to the book, DNA explains half of the differences among us, in both physical and psychological traits.  At first glance, this verdict seems to leave at least the other half to the impact of nurture or the environment.  But here is the catch: the environmental effects are not only strongly correlated with DNA, but also unsystematic and unstable.  In other words, there is very little we can do about them. Your weight, for example, is almost 70% heritable (i.e., 70% of the differences in weight among a population come from genetical differences).   To cite another example that many might dismiss as a reductio ad absurdum, even your likelihood of getting a divorce has a heritability of 40%.

These findings have fascinating implications for society at large, especially parenting and education.  For one thing, those who are obsessed with getting their kids into Ivy League should know schools contribute only 2% to educational achievements.   In other words, excellent students produce excellent schools, not the other way around.  More importantly, parents have much less systematic impact on their children’s outcomes than they are led to believe.   Tiger moms should not expect their kids to be “blobs of clay that can be molded however they wish”.   In fact, kids are not even quite a blank canvas on which you can paint your favorite pictures. They are more like a canvas with a blueprint that your paint brush could either refine or ruin.

The book is an easy and enjoyable read, and the DNA literacy it tries to provide is well delivered and much appreciated.  Yet, I was sometimes taken aback by the tacit fatalism in the book. and wondered how it might undermine our commitment to good parenting.  I am also deeply troubled by the prospect of using genomes as a scientific fortune teller, to label and classify human beings at birth.

Nevertheless, the book does convince me that we are all fundamentally shaped by our DNA, more so than any other factors.  To me, this means life is like a constrained optimization problem for which we may choose the objectives but not the constraints.  That is, your free will can still decide where you land, so long as the target is within the feasible set.

Professor Sowell’s contempt for “intellectuals” is remarkable.  In his telling, intellectuals create and promote ideas that often harm society gravely; they pretend to master subjects on which they have no more expertise than a layman;  they advocate radical societal  changes to whose disastrous consequences they are neither accountable nor susceptible;  they demand society treat their lofty visions “as axioms to be followed, not as hypothesis to be tested”; they are self-righteous narcissists whose primary preoccupation is to gain and maintain moral hegemony over the mass.  In a nutshell, intellectuals are the “enemy of the people”, to quote Mr. Trump. Or in the words of the Dear Leader from another time, they are the filthy ninth (臭老九) who deserve to be condemned to the lowest rung of society and be continually reeducated by proletariat.

While Sowell’s sweeping denunciation apparently applies to all intellectuals, you need not to read between the lines to understand his real target is left-leaning liberals.  Conservative intellectuals—the likes of Friedman and Hayek—are the good ones.  To borrow a cliché from the gun advocates, only the good guys with ideas can stop the bad guys with ideas.

To be sure, Sowell’s harsh critiques of liberals contain more than a grain of truth. However, as a lifetime intellectual himself, his completely lopsided approach is still puzzling, and sometimes feels personal.   Shockingly, Sowell cannot even bring himself to praise liberals’ support for Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against his fellow African Americans.  “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” is how he shrugs off the only good thing he has to say about liberals in the book.

Fred Hirsch was no big-time economist.  His brief academic career was cut short by ALS, the same disease that killed Tony Judt. Yet, his Social Limits on Growth is a masterpiece, probably not a book you could read for fun lying on the coach, but definitely worth the time and effort.

According to Hirsch, capitalism is doomed to trap everyone in counterproductive competition for positional goods such as Ivy League education and elite jobs.  This phenomenon may be best described as “involution” （内卷）, to borrow a popular Chinese Internet Meme.   Economic growth cannot solve the involution trap. On the contrary, growth is bound to fortify it, by fulfilling the ever-increasing demand for material goods. Nor could redistribution overcome the scarcity of position goods. As Hirsch noted, “there is no such thing as leveling up” when reward is set by the position on the slope, because “the slope itself prevents a leveling”.    Therefore, the image of “a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats” is an illusion because the tide cannot keep rising and not all boats could stay above the water at the same time.

Hirsch seems rather pessimistic about finding any operational solution to the social limits on growth. In the end, he wonders whether the belief in incremental progress itself is but a pipe-dream, “a nonfiction version of the happy-ending”, or “a faith that is as utopian as the Utopianism it seeks to replace”.