Equal Pay for All: An Idea Whose Time Has Not, and Will Not, Come

The proposal on offer is a radical form of egalitarianism. Under it, each citizen receives the same income, regardless of profession or indeed whether he or she works or not. This proposal is bad for two reasons. First, it is inefficient. It would eliminate nearly all incentive to work, thereby shrinking national income and leaving all citizens poorly off (albeit equally poorly off). I illustrate this inefficiency via an indifference curve analysis. Second, the proposal would be regarded as unjust by almost everyone. The empirical work on justice makes this plain. Equal pay for equal work is desirable; equal pay no matter what is something else entirely. It is an idea not likely to find adherents

Critical political economy, free movement and Brexit: Beyond the progressive’s dilemma

The progressive’s dilemma suggests that a trade-off exists between, on the one hand, labour and welfare rights underpinned by solidarity and shared identity and, on the other hand, open immigration regimes. With reference to debates on free movement in the UK, it is argued: (1) that a progressive European critical political economy literature of the Left has a tendency to accept this dilemma and resolve it in favour of a the former; (2) that it does so because it erroneously conflates the free movement of people with the (increasingly neoliberal) free movement of goods, capital and services; and (3) that it could and should treat human mobility as qualitatively different and, consequently, need not accept the terms of the progressive’s dilemma. The argument has important implications for a progressive politics in general and for the Left’s (particularly the Labour Party’s) position in the UK on free movement (and, by extension, on Brexit)

Global residents in urban networks: the right to asylum in european cosmopoleis

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the limitations of our current political structures in incorporating the cosmopolitan principles that may be emerging in the normative developments of our global order. The perspective that I take is explicitly cosmopolitan, although it is elaborated out of an exercise of immanent criticism from within our existing institutional order. This analysis confronts spaces of the incipient articulation of cosmopolitan realities with political models of international legitimacy. This scenario constitutes an example of the incapacity of national state democracies to give a proper account of their foreign duties through national or supranational institutions. We briefly examine two emerging political sites that partially realize cosmopolitan realities in defiance of the national system. The first case is the political space of our metropoleis and their distinctive disposition towards refugees in Europe. The second case is the emergence of a cross-border network of urban connectivity and the alternative characterization of the refugee flows as a constitutive part in this transnational social fabric.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio