We've been told, again and again, that life is unfair. But what if we're wrong simply to resign ourselves to this situation? Drawing on the evidence from our evolutionary history and the emergent science of human nature, this title shows that we have an innate sense of fairness.

With the eclipse of the New Right, politicians now admit that society is in crisis. Something must be done, but, explain the authors, governments will fail again unless they shake off the economic orthodoxy that is now one of the problems rather than the means to a solution. This book investigates the roots of the problem, both historically and theoretically. Dr Michael Hudson draws on archaeology and history, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia through Rome to Byzantium, to show how a destructive virus crept into the body politic. This led to a breakdown in man's relation to the environment and divided society into a wealthy ruling oligarchy and an impoverished majority.

Many in the United States feel that the nation’s current level of economic inequality is unfair and that capitalism is not working for 90% of the population. Yet some inequality is inevitable. The question is: What level of inequality is fair? Mainstream economics has offered little guidance on fairness and the ideal distribution of income. Political philosophy, meanwhile, has much to say about fairness yet relies on qualitative theories that cannot be verified by empirical data. To address inequality, we need to know what the goal is—and for this, we need a quantitative, testable theory of fairness for free-market capitalism. How Much Inequality Is Fair? synthesizes concepts from economics, political philosophy, game theory, information theory, statistical mechanics, and systems engineering into a mathematical framework for a fair free-market society. The key to this framework is the insight that maximizing fairness means maximizing entropy, which makes it possible to determine the fairest possible level of pay inequality. The framework therefore provides a moral justification for capitalism in mathematical terms. Venkat Venkatasubramanian also compares his theory’s predictions to actual inequality data from various countries—showing, for instance, that Scandinavia has near-ideal fairness, while the United States is markedly unfair—and discusses the theory’s implications for tax policy, social programs, and executive compensation.

Richard Rogers was born in Florence in 1933. He was educated in the UK and then at the Yale School of Architecture, where he met Norman Foster. Alongside his partners, he has been responsible for some of the most radical designs of the twentieth century, including the Pompidou Centre, the Millennium Dome, the Bordeaux Law Courts, Leadenhall Tower and Lloyd's of London. He chaired the Urban Task Force, which pioneered the return to urban living in the UK, was chief architectural advisor to the Mayor of London, and has also advised the mayors of Barcelona and Paris. He is married to Ruth Rogers, chef and owner of the River Café in London. He was knighted in 1991 by Queen Elizabeth II, and made a life peer in 1996. He has been awarded the Légion d'Honneur, the Royal Institute of British Architects' Royal Gold Medal, and the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour. Richard Brown is Research Director at Centre for London, the independent think tank for London. He was previously Strategy Director at London Legacy Development Corporation, Manager of the Mayor of London's Architecture and Urbanism Unit, and an urban regeneration researcher at the Audit Commission.

The concept of fair division is as old as civil society itself. Aristotle's "equal treatment of equals" was the first step toward a formal definition of distributive fairness. The concept of collective welfare, more than two centuries old, is a pillar of modern economic analysis. Reflecting fifty years of research, this book examines the contribution of modern microeconomic thinking to distributive justice. Taking the modern axiomatic approach, it compares normative arguments of distributive justice and their relation to efficiency and collective welfare. The book begins with the epistemological status of the axiomatic approach and the four classic principles of distributive justice: compensation, reward, exogenous rights, and fitness. It then presents the simple ideas of equal gains, equal losses, and proportional gains and losses. The book discusses three cardinal interpretations of collective welfare: Bentham's "utilitarian" proposal to maximize the sum of individual utilities, the Nash product, and the egalitarian leximin ordering. It also discusses the two main ordinal definitions of collective welfare: the majority relation and the Borda scoring method. The Shapley value is the single most important contribution of game theory to distributive justice. A formula to divide jointly produced costs or benefits fairly, it is especially useful when the pattern of externalities renders useless the simple ideas of equality and proportionality. The book ends with two versatile methods for dividing commodities efficiently and fairly when only ordinal preferences matter: competitive equilibrium with equal incomes and egalitarian equivalence. The book contains a wealth of empirical examples and exercises.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.