The Mysterious Easterbrook Justice Detector
From Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox:
Considering taxes, a person working full-time at the federal minimum would have to spend and entire days wages to buy a $7 Au Bon Pain sandwich combo for lunch each business week. This simply is not right.
I assume he means “each day of the business week.” Anyway, what a weird thing to say! $7 is a hell of a lot to spend each day for lunch. Not considering taxes that’s $35 a week, $140 a month, $1680 a year. Is it a baseline of justice that the daily $7 lunch be within reach of each and every one of us. $140 a month is a reasonable monthly food budget including breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My guess is that you can easily make a better than Au Bon Pain quality combo at home for way less than $3 a day. Should you be able to do it on $1.50? $.25? Where (oh where!) can one purchase an Easterbrook economic rightness-o-meter?
What else? A person working full-time at the median wage would have to spend an entire week’s wages eating every work day at the Outback Steakhouse, and that’s simply not right? Could be? But how do you tell!?
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Haven’t read Easterbrook, so I don’t know, but…
Maybe he’s appealing to (his) moral intuitions, as people most often do when complaining about the injustince of some state of affairs.
As for this specific right to eat every day at a trendy sandwich shop… perhaps his intuitions are not widely shared here.
On second thought, I don’t know what’s going on there. I can think of at least 3 interpretations of what is meant there by “This simply is not right.”
1) Some people are acting badly by not meeting their moral obligations. The minimum wage earners’ right to trendy sandwiches at affordable prices is being violated.
2) Let’s not say that anyone’s rights are being violated. Rather, we, as a society, should pursue policies that put trendy sandwiches within closer reach of the less well off. That would be a good/the right thing to do.
3) That sucks! E.g. “Did you see how those escaped rhinos trampeled that orphan shelter? That’s not right!”, “Some people can barely afford a nice trendy sandwich! That sucks!”