Equality and Efficiency (Okun)

Why it’s on the list: Okun, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, on the tension between a market that distributes by productivity and a democracy that distributes rights equally — and his “leaky bucket”: money carried from rich to poor arrives diminished, so the honest question is how much leakage you would accept. Short, and still the standard reference for the trade-off it names.

Where I heard about it

• Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, shared on X in March 2026, late in Capitalism, Morality, and Culture (in the Ethics, Morality, and Personal Growth part), after Veblen and Weber and before Storr and Choi on whether markets corrupt — the section’s most quantitative entry, the one that states the cost of equality as a cost rather than a slogan. Full transcription: The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

About this book

Okun does not pretend the answer is technical — he states his own tolerance and invites the reader to state theirs — and he is explicit that the market’s domain is bounded, defending the rights democracies deliberately keep off the market, such as votes, jury service and organs.

Connections

• Incentives — the channel through which Okun’s bucket leaks.
• Lessons from the Kibbutz on the Equality-Incentives Trade-off — Abramitzky’s empirical case study of the same trade-off, in McCord’s Institutions, Property Rights, and the Law section.
• John Rawls — the contemporaneous philosophical treatment of the same distributive question.
• Democracy — the equal-rights half of the tension.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.