Description: "This excellent volume offers an incisive, indeed, decisive, critique of modern egalitarian thought, whose intellectual strength remains weak even as its popularity becomes ever greater. No summary can do justice to the arguments presented, all of which are strong in the two dimensions that matter most in policy work--a clear sense of theory, and a clear empirical grounding that tests the theories in question. The book's individual chapters all share those characteristics. To be sure, there is, out of necessity some useful overlap in their content, but the overall conclusion is inescapable. Whatever the abstract appeal of egalitarian arguments they cannot survive the institutional, political, and economic pressures of any complex society"--
Brief description: Robert M. Whaples is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Co-Editor and Managing Editor of The Independent Review, Professor of Economics at Wake Forest University, Director and Book Review Editor for EH.NET, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center on Culture and Civil Society at the Independent Institute. He is the co-editor of the Independent Institute books Is Social Justice Just?, In All Fairness, and Pope Francis and the Caring Society. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. He has also served as Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Associate Editor of the Business Library Review, Chair of the Cliometric Society, and editor of EH.Net's Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History.
Review Quotes: "How, between the covers of a single volume, could one hope to illuminate the vast sea of moral, intellectual, and political failures that add up to modern egalitarianism? Only by combining the expertise and insights of historians, economists, political scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and more. With the book In All Fairness, the Independent Institute has done so brilliantly. Each author's contribution stands on its own and can be read with profit. Taken together, they complement each other to create a whole that far exceeds the sum of its parts."--Steven E. Landsburg, Professor of Economics, University of Rochester