Social Inequity Aversion
Fehr & Schmidt's IA model may partially explain the widespread opposition to economic inequality in democracies, although a distinction should be drawn between IA's "guilt" and egalitarianism's "compassion", which does not necessarily imply injustice.
Inequity aversion should not be confused with the arguments against the consequences of inequality. For example, the pro-publicly-funded health care slogan "Hospitals for the poor become poor hospitals" directly objects to a predicted decline in medical care, not the health-care apartheid that is supposed to cause it. The argument that average medical outcomes improve with reduction in healthcare inequality (at the same total spending) is separate from the case for public healthcare on the grounds of inequity aversion.
Read more about this topic: Inequity Aversion
Famous quotes containing the words social and/or aversion:
“Any one who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of little portraits stuck over a labourers fireplace ... will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which every day are sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world.”
—Macmillans Magazine (London, September 1871)
“When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (18601904)