Could the answer to building a more just society lie in 50-year-old ideas? Our guest this week points to the ideas of John Rawls, one of the greatest political philosophers, as a blueprint of sorts for building a more equitable society. Daniel Chandler is the research director of the Programme on Cohesive Capitalism at the London School of Economics. He’s also an economist, philosopher and author of “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society.” He joins WITHpod to discuss how we might overcome some of the most devastating and escalating present day crises, what adopting Rawls’ liberal political framework could look like and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Daniel Chandler: I think maybe people have taken for granted the sort of basics of liberal democracy and not vocally defended them, not been willing to champion them as like a genuinely inspiring ideal of how to organize society, and not recognize also just how recent and how precarious these things are. So I think that’s, you know, part of the problem maybe is taking those things for granted and maybe part of the solution is to really vocally defend them. And I think that’s, you know, again, part of what you get from Rawls as a philosophy that can combine that, a really inspiring defense of a liberal, tolerant, pluralist society, with also a robust critique of capitalism as we know it.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. If you were born like I was, 1979, means you came of age like into kind of political consciousness right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you sort of came into your awareness of politics and particularly political philosophy at that moment. You were living in a moment where, in a sort of historically anomalous way, there was not a particularly intensely contested fight over the best model for governance, the best model to how to organize a society in the state. Fights over that have been happening for as long as humans have been organizing themselves in various different ways. And you could stretch back to philosophers across many different traditions, reaching back into the ancients, different ways of thinking about how to organize a society, how to best organize a society.
There was a strange interregnum, and we’ve interviewed Francis Fukuyama, who’s sort of most associated with this period, on the podcast before, in which there was a kind of sense of market democracy as a kind of consensus, an international and global consensus, a telos, a kind of end point that everything was sort of arcing towards. And I think it’s fair to say that has become profoundly disrupted, particularly over the last decade. And in my lifetime, the most intense debate I’ve ever seen that’s happening both academically about questions about the sort of best way to work society, but also even more honestly than academically, just in the political formations of the time. We’re seeing the rise of what people call illiberal democracies. People particularly identify Viktor Orban’s Hungary, but Erdogan’s Turkey, I think is probably in some ways, the best model of what you call a presidentialist dictatorship, essentially. They have elections, they have parties, they go through all the stuff that you would recognize as democracy, but it’s not really functionally a democracy. It is probably more of a democracy than Russia, which also has another model, which is even more sort of forthrightly and obviously autocratic than Turkey is.
Then of course you have the Chinese model, which is totally different than those other systems. It’s a sort of party force, authoritarian, explicit rejection, both in theory and in practice of liberal democracy. And then you’ve got all sorts of corrupt kleptocracies and you’ve got, you know, states like the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which are difficult to even describe. And I think the reason I do this preamble is that one of the things that’s pressing in these days is to actually join the intellectual battle at the level of first principles. So there’s the political phenomenon of people moving away from liberal democracy in different places and at the ground level. But I actually think the first principles debate is sort of under joined about what kind of society should we have? And that’s why I thought it’d be great to talk to today’s guest who is an economist and philosopher, research director of the program on cohesive capitalism at the London School of Economics. He’s worked in the U.K. government in the prime minister strategy unit, and he has a new book out. It’s called “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” which attempts to kind of go back to one of our greatest political philosophers as a starting point for building back up a model of what a just and equitable society look like. Daniel Chandler, it’s great to have you in the program.
Daniel Chandler: Thank you for having me.
Chris Hayes: First, what drove you to try to want to go back to this sort of first principles question about the sort of what is a just society, what does it look like?
Daniel Chandler: You know, I think probably for some of the reasons that you were getting to or a kind of similar analysis, I guess, of the state of political debate and where our societies are at that you were outlining in your introduction, I think that those, you know, genuinely big fundamental questions about whether liberal democracy will survive, what the shape of our society should be, feel like they’re genuinely back on the agenda. I think it feels like we’re at a real, you know, an inflection point or a turning point in the history of liberal democracy where one set of ideas, the ideas that have dominated since 1979, as you said before, broadly the ideas of neoliberalism associated with politicians like Reagan and Thatcher and thinkers like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. It feels like that way of thinking has really run its course. I think it’s widely recognized to be responsible for many of the problems that we face today. And into the kind of ideological vacuum that has been created has mostly entered quite dangerous and scary forms of authoritarian populism.
And I think what’s striking is that progressives have really struggled to articulate a genuinely coherent alternative. Obviously you have parties putting together specific kind of policy platforms that feel like, you know, the sort of tweaks to the status quo. But I think what’s missing is a kind of a broader philosophy to tie all of those different ideas together. And, you know, I guess the motivation for my book was a sense that part of the problem is a lack of intellectual reference points for progressive politics that, you know, whereas Thatcher and Reagan could look to Milton Friedman and Hayek. I think it’s not obvious where progressives should look today. You know, I think there’s been a resurgence of interest in democratic socialism in the last 5, 10 years. You know, Bernie Sanders in the States, Jeremy Corbyn here.
And I think that is a rich tradition that has been seriously undervalued in our political discourse, at least in mainstream discourse in recent decades. But, you know, I think that the socialist tradition tends to be better on what’s wrong with capitalism as we know it rather than what exactly should replace it. And I also think that, you know, the language of democratic socialism, and I think this is probably more the case in the States even than in the U.K., I think immediately positions those ideas as somewhat outside of the political mainstream. So I guess what I wanted to do in my book was to look to Rawls, as you mentioned in the introduction, who, you know, I think in Rawls we kind of find the ideas that we need. I sort of think those ideas are lying in plain sight in a way. In plain sight, because Rawls is, you know, widely considered to be —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: — you know, the towering figure of 20th century political philosophy.
Chris Hayes: Not an obscure figure.
Daniel Chandler: No, this is someone who’s routinely compared to people like Plato, Hobbes, Kant, John Stuart Mill, the greatest thinkers in the history of political thought. And yet, kind of oddly not that well known, I think, or not widely used in kind of contemporary political discourse, and not thought to be a kind of a very relevant reference point.
Chris Hayes: It’s astute, I think, to note that people have been sort of looking around, right, to kind of get out of the neoliberal box. And we could talk, we’ve talked a lot on this podcast about what that means and there’s a whole bunch of different contrasting fights over what the terminology refers to, to the point where I think the word’s been kind of over deployed so much that it’s kind of stretched past any coherent meaning.
That said, people are looking for alternatives. And it is true that particularly in American culture, like the resurgence of socialism as a tradition to embrace particularly American democratic socialism, Debs being a sort of key cornerstone figure that, but my joke has always been that, you know, Bernie Sanders is really just a Rawlsian liberal. And, you know, I always refer to myself as just a boring Rawlsian liberal. But if you take Rawls seriously, the level of redistribution that his theories would call for are just far beyond anything remotely within the political horizon in the United States. I mean, they’re way past anything.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And he’s approaching it from an explicitly, I would say liberal tradition, sort of small L term, right, in the kind of line of thought that he’s inheriting and relying on the sort of originary kind of thought experiment about fairness and justice, which we’ll get to. But I just think it is notable that despite the fact that at a kind of aesthetic frisson level, people don’t want to be like, I’m Rawlsian and they want to say I’m a democratic socialist.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: When it all cashes out, what I think Rawls would call for, what Rawlsianism calls for, or theory of justice calls for, is a society that looks what we would call online or in other terms, like pretty darn socialist.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah, I think I had similar feelings in a way part of my motivation for writing the book was also, you know, hanging around with friends who consider themselves democratic socialists, who have a kind of knee-jerk reaction against anything associated with the word liberalism and thinking how strange that is because, you know, Rawls is not just the most important political philosopher of the 20th century, he’s also the leading liberal philosopher. He reshaped political philosophy in this kind of progressive egalitarian image. And yeah, it’s just odd that that’s not seen as a resource to this and, you know, I think as you put it, Rawls is sort of seen, it’s like you’re a boring Rawlsian.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Daniel Chandler: That feels like that’s the way that people think about rules. And I guess part of the aim of my book is to persuade people that rules is not so boring, that rules offers something that I think is very rare in the history of political philosophy. It’s a sort of a genuinely systematic, forward-looking, hopeful, constructive agenda. I think that’s something that you would struggle to find in a lot of the recent socialist tradition. And, you know, I think it’s something that we really need right now. So part of the aim of the book was to try to drag Rawls’ ideas out of the academy where I think they’ve got a bit stuck and into our public discourse, and to sort of use them to make an agenda that I hoped might be able to bridge some of the divides that exist within the broadly progressive family, between democratic socialists and more centrist liberals.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about Rawls. I would imagine there’s a wide range of people’s familiarity with his ideas to people that are, you know, might be on, you know, political philosophers, academic faculty right now, to people that have never heard of him, to people that are like vaguely recall a theory of justice, to people that are quite familiar. But let’s just start, who was John Rawls?
Daniel Chandler: So Rawls was an American political philosopher born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1921. He spent most of his life as an academic, particularly at Harvard. He’s best known for his book called “The Theory of Justice,” which was published in 1971, and which was instantly recognized, I think, as a pretty monumental contribution to political philosophy. Those comparisons to people like Plato and John Stuart Mill came about, you know, right away. He then spent the rest of his life at Harvard. His life was very much an academic’s academic, and I think, you know, in a way that’s part of why his ideas haven’t had more impact on our political discourse. I think both, you know, personality wise, unlike Milton Friedman who’s recording hugely popular political programs and TV programs.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: Proselytizing.
Chris Hayes: An evangelist. Yes.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah, exactly. Rawls was the opposite. Rawls had a very severe stutter. He was an intensely shy person. He did not want to play the role of public intellectual, very rarely commented on topical political issues. So he really stayed out of the limelight. And he was also a real philosopher’s philosopher. He devoted his time to developing a set of principles that, you know, I think are actually incredibly useful and practical as a framework for thinking about what a just society would look like. But he didn’t really say much about what the institutions would be that would put those principles into practice. And I think that’s another reason may be why his ideas haven’t had that much purchases that, you know, if you’re in politics and you want to look to a book that will tell you the kind of policy direction that we should be moving in, you’ll be a bit disappointed from Rawls’ own writing. And I think Rawls hoped that other people would do that work, that social scientists and political scientists would do that. And I think that largely hasn’t happened in the way that he had hoped. And that’s, you know, as both economist and philosopher and as someone who’s worked in government and public policy, that was, you know core aim again of the book was to, in a sense, to kind of pick up where Rawls left off and really think through what it would look like to put these ideas into practice.
Chris Hayes: So, I guess we have to kind of do a theory of justice 101 here.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah, rules 101.
Chris Hayes: Which is fun. You know, part of what makes Rawls really exciting when you first encounter him, I think for anyone, is that he’s doing, you know, in some ways similar, I think, to Descartes and some others. Also similar to what Plato does in the cave allegory, he’s kind of starting ex nihilo, right? So he doesn’t start with like, I’m going to draw on all these traditions. He’s actually starting with like a thought experiment that’s incredibly accessible and just tries to sort of generate from there. So you don’t have to have read prior philosophers to understand what he’s driving at. You don’t have to know what Kant was saying. You just start where he starts, which is why I think he’s partly so influential and also so fun. So let’s start where he starts. So he wants to sort of start from scratch, right? We want to make a just society. He thinks justice is sort of the prevailing virtue that he’s most interested in.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah, exactly. So he has this idea of justice as fairness. In a way, justice and fairness are the two core concepts. And so his starting point is the idea that society should be fair, which I guess is an idea that not many people would disagree with. But obviously he realizes that different people, different political traditions have radically different ideas of what fairness would look like in practice. And so he came up with this thought experiment, which he called the original position, which is basically the idea that if you want to know what a fair society would look like, you should imagine how you would choose to organize that society if you didn’t know what your position in it would be. So whether you would be rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, Christian, Muslim.
And, you know, I think that’s immediately, it’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness. It’s kind of similar to how, you know, someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which slice they were going to get. And I think it’s also, you can think of it as a kind of secular version of the golden rule that you should treat others as we would have them treat us. And I think that’s another reason why the thought experiment has such resonance with people from very different political and cultural traditions because the basic essence of the idea is actually one that’s quite familiar from different cultures around the world. But what Rawls does, where his ideas start to become more practical, is that he uses this thought experiment to identify two fundamental principles, one to do with freedom, one to do with equality, hence the title of my book, “Free and Equal.” And those principles then give us a kind of framework for thinking about how to organize the basic structure, that’s what he calls it, the basic structure, the core political and economic institutions of a democratic society.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So the cake-cutting example, which is the most sort of basic version of the kind of what Rawls calls the veil of ignorance, which is in the original position, we’re behind a veil of ignorance, meaning we don’t know what we’re going to be. I don’t know if I’m going to be a straight white man who hosts a cable news show, or I’m going to be a child in Nicaragua in a neighborhood that is besieged by gun violence, right?
Daniel Chandler: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Now that’s a globalist version. We could bring that down to sort of a national community. I don’t know if I’m going to be what I am or I’m going to be a Arab-American in Dearborn, Michigan, who’s blue collar, right? And I don’t know if I’m going to be a trans woman in Mississippi, right?
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I don’t know what my positionality will be.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So I want to make sure, like in the cake cutting example, one kid cuts the cake, the other gets to choose a slice. That enforces fairness on the kid slicing. They’re going to slice it in half, knowing that if they make one size bigger, the other one gets it. The veil of ignorance is a way of doing that across a pluralistic and complicated society. It’s a cake-cutting hack for that, right?
Daniel Chandler: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: And so once you get behind that original position, he enunciates two principles, you were saying. What are those principles?
Daniel Chandler: Sure. So the first principle is what he calls the basic liberties principle. It’s basically a kind of defense of liberal democracy. So the idea is that there’s a set of truly fundamental freedoms and the first priority of the state is to protect those freedoms. So they include personal freedoms, so freedoms of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of sexuality, broadly the freedoms that we need to live our life according to our own beliefs. Alongside those personal freedoms are then political freedoms, which for all is not just the right to vote, but all of the freedoms that we need to play a genuinely equal part in the political process. And I mean, that may be something we can come back to, but his idea of what political freedom or political equality demands is really, it’s a very demanding ideal that I think would lead to a very different political system to the one that we have today. So that’s the sort of first principle, which, you know, that’s the most familiar part of Rawls’ theory. That’s the kind of liberal democratic core. Then Rawls’ second equality principle, it’s actually got two parts. The first is what he called fair equality of opportunity. So that’s not just the absence of discrimination, but everybody having a genuinely equal chance to develop their natural abilities and to apply and use them in life and society. And again, equality of opportunity is a familiar liberal ideal.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: I think when you take it seriously in the way that Rawls does, it’s much more radical than I think people give it credit for.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: I think particularly on the left, there’s a tendency to think equality of opportunity, that’s the not very ambitious, that’s the sort of cop out, which I think, you know, even on its own equality of opportunity taken seriously is very radical.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s one of the subjects of my first blog. Yes, I agree.
Daniel Chandler: Okay.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. So, but, you know, for Rawls, Rawls is clear that on its own, it’s not enough that we need to think about both fair opportunities and fair outcomes. And that’s the sort of most original distinctive and radical aspect of his philosophy is what he called the difference principle, which is the idea that inequalities in society can be justified, but only if they provide benefits to everyone and specifically to the least well-off. He argues that we should try to organize our economic institutions more broadly in such a way that the least well-off are better off than they would be under any alternative economic system. It’s a way of balancing a recognition that markets can be very important and beneficial, that they rely on a degree of financial incentives in order to work well, but they ultimately need to serve the common good everybody needs to share in the benefits that can come from a kind of dynamic and productive market economy.
And I think Rawls is very clear that’s not something that’s going to happen automatically. There’s nothing inherent to how markets work in theory and definitely not as we’ve seen in practice that means the proceeds of economic growth will be widely shared. Definitely not that they’re going to maximally benefit the least well off in society. So that’s the really radical bit of his theory, or at least the most original part. And actually I might just add, those are really Rawls’ two core principles, but there is actually a third principle, which he called the Just Savings Principle. And it’s a principle of intergenerational justice, of justice between generations. And I think the basic idea of it is that we should treat future generations as we would have them treat us. And the most minimal requirement of that principle is that we maintain the ecosystems and the basic ecological mechanisms on which any decent, let alone just society, depends. And I think it’s just worth highlighting that because I think any political philosophy that didn’t have a way of thinking about sustainability and the climate crisis right now. would have a serious gap in it.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Daniel Chandler: And I think that’s part of what’s exciting to me about Rawls and what makes his ideas different is that there’s like this amazing breadth of scope, basically, as I guess those principles give a bit of a sense of.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, we should note we’re doing a short conversion because there’s a lot of very meticulous reasoning to get from sort of first principles —
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — through the kind of the logical steps to these and even a little bit of sort of like game theory about how people would approach basically their risk calculation when they’re behind the veil of ignorance.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Why they would produce these sort of principles because of the way that we think about how bad off do we want to be, how much —
Daniel Chandler: Exactly. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — do we want to gamble on being super-rich.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. No, it’s an extremely meticulous and sophisticated theory.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: I think that’s what’s lovely about it is there’s all these complicated mechanisms going on in the background. But ultimately, the payoff is intuitive and simple and very practical.
Chris Hayes: And, I mean, of the main three principles, I mean, the first two really are recognizable, right? The idea that this sort of freedom, liberty interest is that no matter where you are behind the veil of ignorance, there are certain freedoms that you want to be able to do. You know, you want to be able to like dress however you want to dress. And you know, you want to say what you can say and you want to express yourself in all sorts of ways and sort of these core ideas of freedom that are embedded particularly in the American tradition and the both the Bill of Rights and then the 14th Amendment, particularly these political rights. And then this idea of equality of opportunity, which I do think it’s worth pausing on how radical an idea that is. I mean, the idea that any modern society today has that, I think, there’s not a society on earth that really has it.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. And we have like enormous amounts of data to back that up. I think it’s —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Daniel Chandler: — you know, the idea that we live in meritocratic or, you know, societies that have equality of opportunity is just completely false.
Chris Hayes: And then the difference principle I think is probably worth spending just a little more time on because it is the most radical and it is kind of the most leftist part of this agenda. I mean, it is the most frankly and obviously redistributive. It’s sort of derives from first principles, a logic for redistribution other than the notion because it goes one step beyond the idea of equality of opportunity is fairness, right? So if you thought equality of opportunity, if you get that, that’s fairness. Everyone gets starts the race at the same place, wherever you end up, that’s a fair race.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So it goes one step further. And the difference principle is, you know, the notion, and this is how I’ve always sort of understand it and I’m going to throw it out and then you can tell me how this falls short. But if you’re talking about, well, we want a certain amount of people to become doctors, and it’s a very difficult thing to do. So we’re going to pay them a bit more than the median salary because it’s really important that we have doctors so that those doctors can look after all kinds of people who might end up in the emergency room. Now, if you did that, you would say, you would probably incentivize under that rule, right? This sort of, which would be kind of a socialized system.
You wouldn’t be like giving a lot more money to plastic surgeons necessarily, right? Or people that do like sports medicine. You would probably be doing a lot more for the kinds of medicine practiced on the poorest communities and that tends to be general practitioners and emergency care and things like that. So the way that our market system in the U.S. particularly, which is a very different healthcare system, distributes doctor incomes, has very little to do with the difference principle. But you can imagine if you were sort of organizing doctor incomes from the perspective of different principles, the reason that you would want some kind of financial incentive for people to do the kind of work that takes a lot of hard work and study to be able to really good emergency medical practitioners because that work will benefit the most marginalized and the least well-off.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah, exactly. I think that is a great description of the sort of logic of the difference principle. Just a couple of things. One, you know, this analogy about the race, you know, giving everyone a fair start in the race.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: I suppose what Rawls is saying is that, you know, a fair start, that’s fundamentally important, but we also need to make sure that the prizes are fair. There’s no reason that we should ignore what the rewards at the other end of the race are.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: These are not things that are necessarily in conflict with one another. They just address different aspects of society. There’s having a fair chance to compete for different positions, and then there’s the rewards that are attached to those positions —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Daniel Chandler: — and those also need to be justified. And I think his justification for some inequality is exactly along the lines that you outlined, that people need, that we all benefit from living in an economy where people have an incentive to train, to become doctors or architects, to do socially useful things. And I think also, as you were suggesting, I think there’s a kind of superficial similarity to trickle-down economics in the both ways of thinking recognize the incentives can benefit society as a whole. But you know, whereas trickle-down economics is, you know, is first assumes that some of the benefits will find their way down rather than thinking that we need to design institutions to make sure that that’s the case. And then is just satisfied with, you know, a bit trickling down, you know, it’s in the name trickle-down is not expecting a lot to find its way to those at the bottom. And the difference principle kind of reverses that logic, it says that —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: — our priority should be to make sure that the least well off, the people who have the most reason to resent their position in society, we need to genuinely do everything we can to make sure that they feel that society is working for them too. And the justification that it’s partly moral, but it’s also pragmatic. Rawls wrote a lot about the idea of stability, of a society that’s able to generate its own sources of support amongst citizens. And he worried that in a society where the least well off are neglected or where their interests are sacrificed just for the greater good or to raise GDP, that would lead to unrest. And I think we’re basically living in that world right now. Just one other thing on the difference principle. I think, as you mentioned, it’s often interpreted as a justification for redistribution. And that kind of makes sense. You know, you think you sort of grow the economic pie and there’ll be inequality and then you tax the rich and redistribute to the poor. And interestingly, I think that’s actually not how Rawls thought about it.
Chris Hayes: No.
Daniel Chandler: And that’s part of —
Chris Hayes: It’s pre-distribution.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. And I think that’s something that’s really been overlooked in, you know, in people who’ve studied Rawls. He’s almost always been interpreted as a defender of a quite traditional model of the welfare state, but kind of just taken up a couple of levels. And I think to me what’s really exciting about Rawls and actually one of the sort of the moments when I realized I wanted to write this book was really understanding how his ideas differ from that way of thinking. And the reason Rawls doesn’t just want to defend redistribution is that when it comes to economic justice, he thinks we need to worry not just about the distribution of money, but of the distribution of power and control. So that, you know, the way that we structure companies, the balance of power between workers and owners. And also what he called the social basis of self-respect, basically how our society does or doesn’t give people, create a social world in which people can feel a sense of self-respect and he sort of breaks that down. It’s got a few different aspects to it. It’s to do with social recognition, feeling part of a community. It’s to do with having access to meaningful work and activities that use our distinctively human capacities. And it’s about having a sense of agency and independence. And so his theory is just so much richer than I think is —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: — often given credit for. And I think that’s what makes it such a useful kind of injection into progressive thinking where we’ve been obsessed with redistribution and kind of, you know, taking this kind of narrow approach to economic questions, which I think has left a lot of people cold.
Chris Hayes: Well, that’s a perfect segue to what a lot of your book has taken up with, which is trying to sort of cash out how you think taking this seriously would reshape the debates we have about actual policy, how our states function.
Daniel Chandler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And let’s start on that redistribution question because I think that’s an important one. Like, my understanding of Rawls, and again, I sort of went back and read a little bit in preparation for this, but it’s my recollection is not the sharpest. When I say pre-distribution, it really is a much more question of sort of institutional design, right? What are the mechanisms that you’re building as opposed to, well, just whatever happens, we’ll just tax people and we’ll distribute, which is a much more neoliberal idea and something that even Milton Friedman and Hayek in various portions of their writing could support for certain reasons. This is much more about setting up a society, setting up institutions, market institutions, legal institutions, social institutions that have the difference principle in mind before you get to whatever market incomes are produced.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. So, I mean, I think there’s three core elements to what kind of economic system that lives up to Rawls’ principles would look like. The first is a very strong focus on good jobs. So rather than relying on redistribution, genuinely trying to raise people’s wages, particularly the wages of lower income workers. The second is a much more equal distribution of wealth and the profits that come through ownership, which currently flow to a very small group of people. Wealth is much more unequally distributed even than market earnings. And then the third component is basically a much more democratic way of organizing work. So that’s something I look at in quite a lot of detail in the book and I argue that we should be following something like the kind of German model of what’s known as co-management or co-determination, where workers and owners share power on much more equal terms. So those are the kind of three big pictures, big picture pieces.
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s talk about the co-determination. Co-determination is a really interesting idea.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It intrigued a lot of people in America, liberals leftist. My friend Tom Gagan, who’s a brilliant, brilliant guy has written about this a bit. He spent some time in Germany. Just walk me through the co-determination, co-management idea they use in Germany.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. And I also think the bit of this discussion that’s been most left out of the debate, particularly amongst liberals, you know, there’s a long, socialist tradition of worrying about the organization of work and I think socialists have rightly criticized a lot of liberal thinkers for ignoring it. And I think Rawls’ philosophy really helps us to fill that gap. So, you know, the idea of co-management, at least the way it works in Germany, is that in companies with more than 500 workers, workers have a right to elect a third of the members of the board. And then in the largest companies with more than 2000 workers, they have half of the seats on the board.
So the first thing is that you have workers playing a decision-making role in questions about company strategy at the highest level. And then employees also have the right to elect a works council, which is usually a more kind of workplace, kind of more local, smaller. So, you know, I suppose the board is like at the highest level in big multinational companies. In smaller companies, this distinction doesn’t matter so much. But anyway, works councils are more about looking into the detail of working conditions and what work looks like on a day-to-day basis, like a union. And I think the advantage of a works council type system over the traditional union model is that it’s fully democratic. There’s two advantages. One is that it’s built into just the legal structure of our economy.
Chris Hayes: Yes, you don’t have to organize your union. It is a fact of the workplace by law, by default, embedded into the institutional design of German employment and markets.
Daniel Chandler: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: You don’t have to like go around and make sure that you are. Well, here in the U.S. you can be union or non-union. It’s incredibly hard to organize a union. There’s enormous reason for that. This is the default. This is how companies work.
Daniel Chandler: Exactly. And it also means that you don’t have this situation where, you know, union members who pay their fees, get some say over how the workplace is organized and then lots of people who are not union members —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Daniel Chandler: And you can have this kind of division within the workplace that seems less than perfectly democratic. So I think this whole system recognizes, you know, it comes back to what you were saying about the aim of or the sort of gist of Rawls’ theory being about redesigning the structure of our institutions, not just leaving things to individual bargaining, but really trying to think seriously about how to build a concern with justice and fairness into the structure of our economic institutions. And to be clear, it’s not in a similar way to how some inequalities of income can be justified because they provide people with incentives to work hard and to innovate. A degree of workplace hierarchy can also be justified. It’s not the rules are saying we need to move towards flat companies where everybody works in a cooperative. People should be free to do that. But I think Rawls recognizes that there are benefits that come to everyone from some kind of division of labor. It means we can all benefit from economies of scale.
But those hierarchies, they need to be justified. We shouldn’t just take them for granted in the way that we do. I think we tend to think about the extreme concentration of power in the hands of shareholders that exist in countries like the U.S. and the UK as sort of like a factor of nature. And it’s odd that that’s the way that I think our discourse tends to treat these things, because as we’re discussing, you don’t actually have to look very far to find very different ways of doing things. And part of what the book is doing is also trying to, you know, point to models in this case, and also in other cases in the book, of how different kinds of institutions actually work well in practice. You know, there’s now loads of economic evidence on how co-management has actually functioned in Germany and contrary to the fears expressed by lots of economists, you know, these companies, I think economists worried that if you give workers power, they’ll basically pull all of the profits towards them, investors won’t want to invest and companies will go bust and everyone will end up much worse off.
And that just doesn’t happen. You know, companies with co-management perform as well, if not better actually, as their kind of traditional shareholder owned counterparts. And actually, there’ve been some great recent studies looking at the German system. And you actually find that companies with workers on boards invest more than companies without. And I think that just reflects also our evolving understanding of economics, that there are benefits that come from putting workers on boards because you get better cooperation and information sharing between workers and owners when they can trust one another because there’s an institution that makes sure that real information is shared. So for companies facing difficulties, you don’t have workers worrying that this is just an excuse to sack them. They actually know that the company is in difficulty and then they’re more likely to try to come up with some mutually agreeable solution. So there are lots of reasons like that make sense of why this kind of system works better and which I think reflect a more modern understanding of how economics actually works.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You also write about the notion of some kind of universal income distribution, universal basic income, universal inheritance.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Now that’s an idea that I think will probably be more familiar to people than co-determination. There’s interesting because it has a certain currency in lots of different spaces.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: This idea has had some currency here in the U.S. Annie Lowrey wrote a book about it. Natalie Foster has a book out now called “The Guarantee,” that’s about it. How do you see this both fitting in the Rawlsian framework and how it would function?
Daniel Chandler: Yes, I’d see the universal basic income is really tied to, actually not so much to the difference principle but to an idea that’s kind of hidden in Rawls’ first principle, which is a commitment to making sure that everybody can meet their basic needs. It’s a more fundamental requirement than just the inequality should be fair. For Rawls, making sure that people can meet their basic needs and participate in society is sort of on a par with our most fundamental personal and political freedoms because, you know, basically those freedoms don’t have any value if you can’t feed yourself, if you don’t have somewhere to live.
So that’s the sort of starting point is that we always need in a just society some way to make sure that people can meet their basic needs. There are obviously lots of different ways of doing it. And, you know, the traditional approach is that you have means tested benefits. And that’s the kind of economically efficient way to meet people’s basic needs because you target resources on the people who are at least well off. And I think that’s again, typically the model that it’s assumed that Rawls’ principles justify. The reason why I think a basic income is worth looking at comes back to the discussion we were having earlier about the importance of self-respect. I think if all you cared about was money, then you would have a means-tested welfare system because it would be the cheapest way to make sure that everybody has enough money.
The reason I think a basic income is preferable to that is that means-tested welfare systems subject people to intrusive and often very demeaning forms of sort of inspection and surveillance. They often need to, you know, to mental health problems and leave people sort of feeling trapped in the safety net basically. And the idea of a basic income is that it’s a floor on which everybody can stand and which gives people a sense of agency and independence and the ability to go about their lives with a sense of dignity and self-respect. And I think that the other way in which a basic income would support a kind of concern with dignity and respect and meaningful work is that, you know, if workers have universal basic income, you know, they have this outside option when they’re bargaining with their employers. It means that people can say no to employment, you know, to like an abusive employer or employment that’s degrading.
And I think it would have a big impact on the labor market too, that it would lead to jobs that are more meaningful in all the ways that people want. You know, there’s no top-down way to make jobs more meaningful. What’s meaningful to people differs from one person to the next, from one company to the next. And what we need is decentralized mechanisms that might have an impact there. And I think, you know, in that sense, basic income works alongside forms of worker voice and democracy, which we were talking about earlier. It’s a sort of exit voice. You know, there’s this typology from Albert Hirschman, who distinguishes between exit and voice as two ways of changing organizations that you have. The threat that you can leave and then you can try to shape it by staying inside. And I think these proposals for a basic income and for workplace democracy work together in that way.
Chris Hayes: The example I always think of in these sort of questions of universal benefits is when I was a kid, I went to public school in New York City in the Bronx. And at that time, they had means tested free or reduced lunch, which had the very weird effect of like everyone knowing everyone’s family’s income. Because it was like you would line up like free lunch here, reduced lunch here, full lunch here.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So you knew. It’s like, oh, there’s that kid, there’s that kid. And it was in the school that I was in the vast majority of kids were either free or reduced lunch. So it wasn’t particularly stigmatizing, but it does create this like demarcation that is a little insidious to like democratic equality even at the tender age of seven.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And one of the things that’s happened in a lot of places, including New York City now is, and these are particularly large public school systems in which my kids attend, you know, in a large urban school system, the kids not getting free lunch is essentially kind of a rounding error. So they just said, look, everyone gets free lunch. And at one level you can say, well, that’s just giving free lunch to kids like my kid who could afford it. But at another level, what it’s doing is it’s just totally reducing stigma, right? It’s just creating a universal benefit so that my children aren’t having the experience of knowing exactly which families are making which money that we had, which was a weird thing. I remember us thinking and commenting on the time. That is a weird thing. So that’s —
Daniel Chandler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — just one small to me example of how that can work and has worked. Actually, that’s a real policy changes to happen in my time. One of the things that you argue in the book, and I think people tend to make this argument and I find myself slightly skeptical of these days and it might just be because of how screwed up so many things. There’s an argument that goes roughly of this form. The neoliberal revolution created this world of sort of increased inequality. This increased inequality led to a lot of frustration, alienation, disenfranchisement, that started looking for scapegoats and forms of illiberal authoritarian right-wing populism, you know, xenophobia, particularly anti-immigrant sentiment has come in to sort of absorb the frustration, alienation and anxiety produced by the inequality and deindustrialization that neoliberalism bought, particularly just what we might call first world, like OECD wealthy developed democracies.
And I think you’ve seen this story told about Trump’s victory, you’ve seen the story told about Brexit, and there are some real ways that, if you map deindustrialization on the map of the U.K. to Brexit votes, you get a pretty stark picture. If you do that with Trump counties, you get a pretty stark picture, particularly in that 2016 race. There’s a lot to this idea. But I do think it’s worth pushing back on a bit because even countries like Germany has the works council and they have a pretty good welfare state, all things considered. The Scandinavian countries are probably the most equal, have the lowest, what we call the Gini coefficient, which is the sort of technical economic measure of inequality. They probably have the lowest Gini coefficient of any market democracy.
And you see the same political story happening there. Populist right-wing parties gaining ground at the expense of the center left, particularly born of really resentment towards immigrants and resentment towards a multicultural society. And it just seems to me that like, it is worth considering that the growing movement against pluralistic multicultural societies, it would be nice if it was an outgrowth of economic inequality that was neatly solved by it, but it could just be driven by their stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with that.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. No, I think you’re right. And I think what that story ignores is the role of politics. You know, I think that the rise of right-wing populism is also a product of active strategies —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: — pursued very successfully by people with those kinds of views —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Daniel Chandler: — people who want to exploit the conditions that you described that maybe arise from economic inequality, have used a kind of —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Daniel Chandler: — have successfully exploited those opportunities. It’s not something that was inevitable. I don’t think there is generally such a kind of one-to-one connection between economic conditions and how that plays out in politics. And so I think that way of thinking just ignores the importance of politics and maybe, I don’t know, I’m thinking a bit out loud here, but I think it reflects what liberals need to do is also recognize that just appealing to reasons and facts and the effectiveness of different policies is not enough in politics. You know, what people respond to are appeals to identity, to values, to stories about where a country is and where it ought to be going. What I’m getting at is that there’s a kind of technocratic mode of centrist liberal politics, which I think is not grounded in a realistic idea of how people actually behave in politics. I think from what we know from studies in psychology. They’re not thinking through policies in a rational way and then —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Daniel Chandler: — coming to perfectly rational conclusions. They’re responding in much more emotional, intuitive ways. And I think that liberal politicians need to find a way to appeal to people on those terms as well. I suppose the other thing that I was also thinking is that I think this is where the liberal aspect of Rawls’ philosophy comes into play. I think maybe people have taken for granted the sort of basics of liberal democracy and not vocally defended them, not being willing to champion them.
Chris Hayes: Agree.
Daniel Chandler: That’s like a genuinely inspiring ideal —
Chris Hayes: Totally agree.
Daniel Chandler: — of how to organize society and not recognize —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Daniel Chandler: — also just how like, how recent and how precarious these things are. So I think that, you know, part of the problem maybe is taking those things for granted and maybe part of the solution is to really vocally defend them. And I think that’s, you know, again, part of what you get from Rawls is a philosophy that can combine that, a really inspiring defense of a liberal, tolerant, pluralist society, with also a robust critique of capitalism as we know it.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, you’re singing my tune. I think my view on this is that, you know, multicultural, pluralistic liberal democracy is a genuinely heroic undertaking and extremely difficult, very, very hard to pull off, very rarely achieved. A kind of dynamic process that has to constantly be tended like a garden, you know, just like, you know, throw the seeds in and then it just do walk away and then it’s set. It’s the constant, the work of it. And that work can feel like tedium, but it’s actually when it’s done together, I think it can be quite beautiful.
Daniel Chandler: Yeah. And I think, you know, it’s also not just the question of better political rhetoric. It’s also a question of like redesigning institutions again. You know, our education system has a really fundamental role to play in the degree to which people grow up with a sense of the history of liberal democracy, the value of liberal democratic values, also, whether they come into contact with people with different views that is, you know, is key to developing a respect for pluralism and difference. And, you know, so I think the education system is important, you know, forms of kind of national celebration, things that build a sense of inclusive patriotic identity I think also have an important role to play. So, yeah, I think there’s also a kind of practical policy agenda that comes from taking this kind of stuff seriously. And I think that if we want liberal democracy to survive, we need to be doing that. We need to be taking that stuff seriously.
Chris Hayes: Daniel Chandler is an economist and philosopher. He’s the research director of the program on cohesive capitalism at the London School of Economics. He’s author of “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society.” Daniel, that was great. Thanks so much.
Daniel Chandler: Great. Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Daniel Chandler. I really enjoyed that conversation. We’d love to hear from you and what you thought about it. You can email withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can follow me on Threads, what was formerly known as Twitter and Bluesky, all with the handle @chrislhayes.
Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.