Christina M. Fong

Social preferences, self-interest, and the demand for redistribution

Preferences for redistribution may be influenced by values and beliefs about distributive justice as well as by self-interest. People may prefer more redistribution to the poor if they believe that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control. Therefore, beliefs about the causes of income may affect demand for redistribution. Alternatively, the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences may be spurious if they are correlated with income, and self-interest is not properly controlled for. They may also measure incentive cost concerns. Using social survey data, I find that self-interest cannot explain the effect of these beliefs on redistributive preferences.

Evidence from an Experiment on Charity to Welfare Recipients: Reciprocity, Altruism and the Empathic Responsiveness Hypothesis

This article investigates the determinants of generosity in an experiment on charity to real-life welfare recipients. It tests the effects of various measures of unconditional altruism and conditional or reciprocal altruism. The results show strong support for conditional or reciprocal altruism. However, people who are self-reported unconditional altruists make offers that are highly elastic with respect to the apparent worthiness of the recipient. One interpretation of this is that self-reported unconditional altruists have combined desires to help others and to reciprocate; unconditional altruism and reciprocal altruism may not be independent motives. I refer to this combination as empathic responsiveness. Economists have long argued that social preferences may play an important role in determining generosity from the rich to the poor. Two broad classes of fairness motives

Prospective Mobility, Fairness, and the Demand for Redistribution

People who believe that their society has few impediments to upward mobility tend to oppose governmental redistribution. This is true even among the poor. Is this because people with this belief expect to be well off in the future, and hence oppose redistribution on self-interested gounds? Or is it because they believe that the less well off have not made the effort to move up, and therefore are morally undeserving of support? This paper uses quantitative sensitivity analysis to examine the robustness of the evidence for each of these views. It finds that the effect of prospective mobility is sensitive to measurement error in current income. In contrast, there is robust support for the view that beliefs about moral worthiness matter.

Chapter 23 Strong reciprocity and the welfare state

Abstract We explore the contribution of reciprocity and other non selfish motives to the political viability of the modern welfare state. In the advanced economies, a substantial fraction of total income is regularly transferred from the better off to the less well off, with the approval of the electorate. Economists have for the most part misunderstood this process due to their endorsement of an empirically implausible theory of selfish human motivation. Drawing on anthropological, experimental, public opinion survey and other data we develop an alternative behavioral explanation for economic reasoning about sharing and insurance. In this alternative view, reciprocity motives are necessary for understanding support for and opposition to the welfare state. Modern citizens willingly share with those who uphold societal norms about what constitutes morally worthy behavior, while frequently seeking to punish those who transgress those norms, even when these actions are individually costly and yield no individual material benefit.