Fair Enough?

Fair Enough? proposes and tests a new framework for studying attitudes toward redistributive social policies. These attitudes the book argues are shaped by at least two motives. First people support policies that increase their own expected income. Second they support policies that move the status quo closer to what is prescribed by shared norms of fairness. In most circumstances saying the fair thing is easier than reasoning according to one's pocketbook. But there are important exceptions: when policies have large and certain pocketbook consequences people take the self-interested position instead of the 'fair' one. Fair Enough? builds on this simple framework to explain puzzling attitudinal trends in post-industrial democracies including a decline in support for redistribution in Great Britain the erosion of social solidarity in France and a declining correlation between income and support for redistribution in the United States.