Post 72: 1 September 2026

A right is a personal or collective claim that is grounds of a duty in others.1 That’s the tell. You have a right to the extent that the specific claim creates an obligation in others. The obligation can be private, like those created by contracts. Those are legally important but not my concern here. Instead, I want to focus on civil, political, and social rights.2 In these cases, the duty is a public one, an obligation on the whole community, acting through its public institutions. Here, I also do not want to focus on collective claims. “Group rights” can exist, but they are also not central to my inquiry now.3

So described, right is a label assigned to a specific claim. That’s helpful; it sets certain claims “above” the ordinary play of political negotiations and interest-based trading. We can think of established rights as a kind of “settled” politics, part of a collectively accepted framework of assumptions about our basic political relations with one another. But this describes an outcome. The label tells me something about the implications of a particular claim but nothing about why or how the claim rises to this level of importance. Why do some personal claims rise to the level of a right? Beyond this, we also need to know if rights are discovered or created. That is, should we think of them as having a natural origin, part of the human personality, or as the positive product of political processes? The weight of any particular claim ultimately rests on how we answer that. How established is the right?

Let me start with this working definition:

I want every word in this definition to count. Let’s start with necessary and essential. Both of these are strict requirements. Necessary means that the aims supported by the right cannot be achieved or maintained without the right. Essential means that the power or resource must be an intrinsic element of individual functioning across the three domains listed: private and public autonomy—which we understand as “liberty”—and personal identity. There could be other domains as well, but I mean this to be an exhaustive list. At least some aspect of liberty and identity cannot be achieved or maintained without securing the right.4

The Three Aims Are About Membership

My initial claim is that the fundamental justification for civil, political, and social rights is that individuals cannot achieve or maintain something essential to their individual well-being without them.5 This sense of well-being exists along three basic domains:

• Private autonomy refers to individual choice and conscience and the ability to pursue a good life, privately, on one’s own terms. Broadly, civil rights protect individuals in this domain. They guarantee people security in their own persons and personal choices, both physically and from the arbitrary or capricious actions of the state or of other private actors—what we understand to be the rule of law.

• Public autonomy refers to individual powers to participate in public life and the political process; that is, in the act of self-government. These powers are expressed as individual political rights and as arrangements and resources that safeguard the institutional integrity of the political process as well as the security of the community as a whole from external threats.

• Personal identity refers to expressions of individuality that are grounded in membership. These range from the basic sense of individual self-worth to the feeling of belonging in one or more communities.

These domains correspond to the three main functions of self-governing communities and, somewhat more sloppily, to three of our main ways of talking about politics. As public philosophies: traditional liberalism focuses on protecting individuals as private actors in society; civic republicanism on the requirements of self-government at both the individual and community level; and traditional conservatism on the development and protection of a sense of collective identity.6 A recurring theme in On Social Citizenship is that the liberal and republican approaches are complementary but that traditional conservatism is antagonistic to both. Because of this, a major challenge for both republicanism and liberalism is to foster the sense of collective belonging in constructive, inclusive, and egalitarian ways in order to counter the divisive and hierarchical tendencies of conservative identity formation.

The three domains reflect aspects of membership in a self-governing community or republic. We cannot be full and equal participants in the community unless we have the personal freedom to make choices in our private lives that are comparable to the ones others in our society have, to engage effectively in the public sphere as we see fit, and to be secure in our own sense of self both as individuals and as members in an expanding web of community reaching out from family, locality, nation, and even humanity itself.

If I bring this thought back to my working definition, I ought to be able to make this simple substitution and say that:

That’s as simple as I can make it. Members have rights and the rights they have are claims to exactly those powers and resources that are absolutely necessary for them to be full members, equal in status with every other member and able to fully participate in the community on those terms, as private individuals, as part of the public sphere, equal in dignity and respect to anyone else.7

Of Natural and Positive Right

This formulation nearly side-steps the question I raised earlier about whether rights are discovered or man-made. The concept of right is definitely grounded in the human personality. Rights are rights because every person must have these things to be rational free beings.8 This fact alone justifies them. There is nothing about it that requires a specific cultural context. It is universal. That makes rights natural: automatic and irrevocable. As Jefferson writes, people are “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”.

But the content of our civil, political, and social rights all relate to membership, a very contextual thing. I do not have a claim to one of these rights merely because it will enhance my well-being—lots of things would do that—but because I cannot be a fully participating, equal member of society without them. Again, the logical strictness is critical here. I am not saying it would be helpful to have the right; I am saying that I cannot achieve or maintain my ends without it.9 Necessity is intrinsic to any right.

This connection to membership dissolves most of the natural-positive confusion about rights. Rights are natural in the sense that every person, in every place and time, is necessarily a member of a society and therefore has the right to the requirements of full membership (see below). But the expression of that membership is culturally specific. In particular, the relative weight of the three domains of well-being introduced above will vary greatly. Even if each of these elements is always present, and I believe they are, their expression can be different to the point of incommensurability. Consider the gap between city-state republics that closely linked personal status to public spiritedness and our own liberal capitalist society with its extraordinary emphasis on private life. Cultural differences, as well as other contextual factors, will affect the specific content of rights as expressed in positive law.10

But while the cultural context is practically important, it never overrides the universal or natural grounding of rights. Underneath everything lies the universal, axiomatic assumption of human equality. That is why I keep returning to this theme in these pages.11 We need to understand exactly what we mean when we make the claim of equality because everything, and I mean everything, depends on it. We cannot allow the principle to be relaxed based on conservative appeals for order or on arguments about cultural relativism.

The First Principle and its Opposite: The Radical Part

Equal membership cannot coexist with status hierarchies. This is the deepest and most long-standing political conflict.

All civil, political, and social rights are grounded in the equality of full membership in society. Status hierarchies are inconsistent, not just with the notion of human equality—which should be obvious—but with the idea of a right as defined here. Status hierarchies are built and maintained through the ascriptive allocation of rights based on predetermined characteristics and/or on the arbitrary or capricious judgements of those currently enjoying a higher status.12 But equal membership is just that. There can be no second-class citizens.

You may find the absoluteness with which I make this claim off-putting. I am saying that we are either one another’s equals or we are not. And, if we are equal, hierarchies of human worth are wrong. The counterargument is that there are “many ways to be human”. We cannot apply our individualistic Western values to more traditional or collectivist societies. We cannot judge the hierarchical structures of inequality at the core of earlier cultures and societies. But this over-interprets human difference and confuses the effect of the cultural context on the specific and practical configuration of rights with the universal fact that all people have rights to the requirements of membership. Our cultural contexts vary widely but we are all still human and all have the same fundamental needs centered around membership. Rights emerge from this fact.

Through this lens, many common social structures are simply wrong. Slavery is wrong. It is not wrong now because we have a particular understanding of a highly contextual and individualized morality. It was always wrong because people have always been one another’s equals.

There is no need to be moralistic about this. My argument is about the constitution of society, not the character of individuals. People are, and always have been, “of their time”. Arguments about the relative virtues of Columbus or Jefferson as individuals miss the point. Focusing on the bad guys can even blind us to our own shortcomings. No society has come close to fully respecting the equality of persons. We are not an exception; it would be silly to conclude that we are now “egalitarian”. There are plenty of conservative hierarchies still embedded in our own society and we can be remarkably unaware of status distinctions made on “natural” bases like gender or that preserve the current social order and sense of collective identity.13 As I have argued before,14 we are all native speakers of the “conservative” political language. For all I know, it is natural for us to be susceptible to those ideas. They respond to real needs and fears and are often “correct”, at least when viewed on their own terms. We have to be clear-eyed about the fact that those reassuring tropes have always been and remain the main obstacle to progress.

That seems like a good place to finish for now.

My main concern today was to introduce the most fundamental, and also the most difficult, questions about the concept of a right. These comments did not come close to exhausting everything we could say about this. A full treatment would explore the nature of the duties that rights give rise to, the difference between negative and positive duties and between “public-facing” and “private-facing” rights. I expect to return to the topic again. It is important. American political discourse includes a lot of “rights talk”, but we are pretty fuzzy about what rights are. Sometimes we do treat them like I do here, as natural inalienable chits we can hold against the government. At other times we treat them as needs, things that would be nice to have and we think the government should guarantee but probably doesn’t. Social rights generally fall into that category. This approach can have the effect of emptying out the idea of right. I want to avoid that. Because rights are manifestations of principles, they provide the best way of organizing and motivating political action, which ultimately ought to be about our highest ideals.

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Today’s essay is a lot more pedantic than most and, let’s be honest, most of them are already too pedantic. Social citizenship has to be grounded in undeniable first principles, however, which means carefully articulating those principles and, more importantly, exploring their implications. Most of the time, we just accept a principle—that we are one another’s equals, for example—without thinking much about how true it is or what it means if it is true. What would that require of us? This is lazy in both an intellectual and moral sense, but defensibly so. We have to suppress this rational self-defense mechanism if we want to make progress. The second shoe, which I need to write about more, is that mastering our ability to make effective political talk about these matters also must be grounded in the commonsense acceptance of the underlying principles. I promise to focus more on the rhetoric soon.

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<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship are meant to connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

Notes

Post 71: 25 August 2026

“Democracy” can produce results that violate individual rights that ought to have priority in our liberal society. The dignity and autonomy of the individual must be respected, even against the whole of society. The point of constitutionalism, and of an institution like the Supreme Court, is to map out this frontier.1

But both sides of the conflict between individual rights and majoritarian democracy are ill-defined. Which powers or resources, exactly, are so bound to individuals that they give rise to duties in the rest of us? That is, what makes something a civil or political right? In the domain of social rights explored in this publication, the question is even more difficult. We can agree on a principle like “Everyone has a right to a home” but find it very difficult to make that commitment real. I will explore the concept of right in a separate post soon.2 For now, I want to focus on the democracy side of the conflict.

This ought to be easier to understand, but is it? What, exactly, is “democracy”? That’s a big subject. Today, I will focus on one element of this question and ask how the existence of community-defining borders, arbitrary in at least some sense, affects how we view democratic processes. This was, of course, the main issue in my most recent post about immigration and national borders. Now I want to get closer to home and ask: How much should local borders matter? This issue is most important for education and housing, my topic today.

Locally, the generic question is the same as in the international case: We want to resolve the tension that arises when a group of people living somewhere say to people who do not live in that place, “We don’t want you here.” On the one hand, the majority living in a place ought to have the ability to govern themselves; this is an ordinary expression of both their own private and public autonomy, their right to establish and preserve the character and identity of their community. On the other hand, the excluded people also have rights, which include being able to decide where to live.

The specific local twist is that the borders we are talking about—county lines, city limits, school district boundaries—are all partitions of larger polities—say a metro area or a US state. Members of these specific communities understand themselves to also be members of those geographically larger entities. Indeed, the larger entity probably has a stronger claim on their identities. Importantly, this broader membership tie exists both for those living in the smaller constituency—the excluders—and for most of those trying to move there—the excluded. Given that set-up, I want to ask again: how much should those local borders matter? Mostly, our instinct is to let local communities govern themselves with respect to their development choices (around both housing and business). We want those public choice processes to be democratic, which means everyone who lives in the community must be included, but by definition there is no way to include those who merely want to live in a place in these processes, at least not with voting power. But these folks are affected by these choices, in some sense more affected. This line of reasoning suggests that there ought to be limits on the powers of a democratic majority in one town to be able to enact zoning rules that exclude others within the broader (metropolitan) community. But how do we set those limits? Can a majority of voters in the larger geography override local choices? Can the simple assertion of individual rights, majority or no, override local majoritarian decisions?

I’m not sure I can answer these questions but let me start by talking about two recent Massachusetts cases.

Case 1: Section 3A

In 2021, the Massachusetts legislature passed new zoning requirements for communities served by the MBTA.3 The law, which affected 177 communities in some way, required that towns and cities create at least one zoning district near (walking distance from) transportation hubs that would permit multi-family housing.4

This was a small but important step toward producing more housing, which ought to be our main response to the housing shortage (I can’t believe that even needs to be said), and promoting a broader mix of housing options. An early review of the law described its impact as “real but modest” with (possibly) related projects emerging in 34 communities so far.5 To the extent that people know about the new rule, it is quite popular. Voters supported the measure 50-31% in a 2024 poll. An initiative petition circulated this year to place the new law on the 2026 ballot failed to gather the required number of signatures. Finally, 165 of those 177 cities and towns complied as of January 2026.

For most of the affected towns and cities, the new state requirement was helpful because it gave them a way to get around local anti-development interests that otherwise could block rezoning efforts like this. Many of these communities, like most communities in the United States, are zoned almost exclusively for single-family homes, often with large lot size requirements. The structure of local politics can make it very hard to break through opposition to rezone locally, so it is useful that the larger encompassing jurisdiction (in this case, the Commonwealth as a whole) set some basic guidelines. Importantly, these constrain but do not dictate local decision-making; the communities are not being compelled to build, only to make building possible. In this, there is likely a general lesson about how one majority ought to impose its will on another.6

The measure can be seen, especially in the dozen non-compliant towns, as a violation of basic principles of self-rule and democracy. In several places, official opposition to the law was backed by local referenda or town meeting votes. In defense of the people in these communities, I will say that these votes were often quite close. In Milton, 54% of voters chose to reject the town’s plan to comply with the law. In Marblehead, the vote was even closer, with 52.5% rejecting compliance.

The Marblehead case led to an interesting internet moment, recommended for all. After the defeat in the local referendum, the town planning board chose to “comply” with the state requirement by rezoning a local golf course for multifamily housing. The golf course has been in operation for more than 100 years, so the chance that the owners decide to redevelop it as housing is practically nil. This prompted one local resident, David Modica, to call out the board (really, the town) in a public hearing: “So this is a way of complying with 3A without doing any of the 3A stuff?”, he asked. Dave summed up the situation nicely when he asked,

This ought to be enshrined among the great American slogans.

The Marblehead outcome is obviously not ideal, but it was democratic. But so was the action of the state legislature. As a practical matter, the new zoning requirements are slight, often requiring rezoning only about 50 acres. For the densely populated communities in the MBTA catchment area, compliance required only a simple designation of land already zoned for multifamily development. Many of the projects will rezone commercial and industrial areas and not affect the single-family sector at all. Some of the opposition likely recognizes the regulation as a sort of camel’s nose, with more stringent rules to follow. It is hard to know where this will go.

Case 2: Rezoning in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The big fights in Cambridge city politics for the last few years have centered around housing development. Majorities, though not always overwhelming ones, have favored city policies that promote the construction of more rental units. After years of debate, the Cambridge City Council finally changed zoning regulations in 2025 to eliminate exclusionary single-family zoning city-wide. The Council was nearly unanimous, a rare moment of consensus. The new law allows developers to build multifamily housing (up to four stories) anywhere in the city and up to six stories if the project is on a larger lot and includes affordable units.

A little background is in order. The city is already mostly zoned for multi-family housing (sometimes in a grand-fathered way). The American Community Survey (ACS) for 2024 found that only 8% of the housing stock here can be classified as single-family detached.7 Across America, that share is 61%. Presently, 40% of all units are in buildings with 20 or more apartments; that’s nearly four times the U.S. average, though the city, like older Boston-area cities generally, presents as a community of triple-deckers (18% of all residential buildings here but only 4% nationally). Consistent with this, Cambridge is a city of renters, with 70% of residents paying rents, compared to only 35% nationally. One reason for lower ownership rates, aside from the naturally transient student and young professional population, is that real estate is ridiculously expensive. The median value of a home—that is any owner-occupied housing unit—was $1.15 million in 2024, compared to a U.S. median of $360,000. Well more than half (58%) are valued above $1 million; nationally, only 8%.8

This high price point has two big implications. First, it affects rents. The median rent paid by residents in 2024 was $2,746, 85% above the U.S. median of $1,487. These figures will strike anyone looking for a place as very low, but they include those in favorable long-term tenancy situations. New movers into Cambridge today should expect to pay $4,000 for (an admittedly much nicer) unit. That said, the burden of paying rent is not especially high in Cambridge because incomes are also high. Nation-wide 42% of renters pay more than 35% of their incomes on rent, but only one-third of Cantabrigians do. The old standard was 25% of income: almost half of locals here keep below that threshold, but only 37% nationally.9 Politically, I suspect that the cost of new rentals is front of mind for most.

The high value of residential units also naturally fires up the NIMBY instincts of the owning class of Cambridge. This instinct is strong in any case, but the stakes are higher here. The new law will allow homeowners (with adequate lot sizes)10 to sellout and build small apartment buildings on their land—a nightmare threat to neighbors with multi-million-dollar homes. This will happen, but probably not that often, not that many have enough land to contemplate the move. My honest reaction to my nervous neighbors is that they should relax, but I admit that—even if one is okay with the eventual outcome—no one wants to live next door to large construction projects for the years it takes to complete them.

Pro-development ought to be the democratic outcome here. A large majority rent and regularly face sticker shock when they look to move. The ones most affected by the high price of new rentals disproportionately include non-residents looking to move in. They do not have a vote in the matter, but the renting majority can serve as a kind of proxy vote, something wannabe Marbleheaders do not have. The actual split is not 70/30, of course; the huge renting majority is diluted at the polls. I don’t have data on this, but owning minority likely turn out at much higher rates, as do long-term residents (including renters) who are most invested in maintain the character of the community.

Concluding Thoughts

Our local Cambridge case has the appearance of a straightforward democratic dispute about the direction the community ought to go. It does not appear to present any deep problems of democratic theory. Indirectly, it reveals the power of NIMBYism: the city population is disproportionately in favor of new building, but it still took years to relax zoning even a little bit. Arguably, the city needs much larger projects close to major transportation hubs11 but there remains strong opposition to anything resembling high-rise projects. There is a way to go still. I am also well aware that there are lots of people on the outside who want to live in Cambridge and their voices are silent. Local problems are never completely local.

The Section 2A case is more interesting. Here, a state-wide majority has established a principle that constrains local democratic outcomes, albeit only slightly. The democratic fault to be remedied here is two-fold. On the one hand, seemingly valid local majoritarian decisions can clearly be contrary to the public good of the larger community, from which the local community is inseparable. This is a simple form of political failure.12 At another level, it is not that clear that those local decisions are “democratic” in the broadest sense, given the normal class-based biases of local government and the power of narrow NIMBY interests. Using the power of a “greater” majority to constrain local decisions is a useful template for all problems of this type, ranging from these local districting decisions all the way up to international matters, but it is still unclear how aggressive the “external” imposition ought to be. Developmental matters are ultimately case-specific so local governments ought to be involved in every major choice. As much as we need every sub-division of the Commonwealth to have an oar in the water, we don’t want the whole place to be homogeneous. It is important to preserve the character of each place.

In these housing examples, I have taken the subdivisions themselves (here, cities and towns) as given, I think that is fair, at least in New England. Across the U.S., the situation is more complex. If I were writing about education, I would call that assumption into question. (See this earlier post.)

I will leave it there for now.

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I’m still on a summer schedule and make no promises, but I do expect to post next week when I will ask “Where Do Rights Come From?”

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<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship are meant to connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

Notes

Post 70: 4 Aug 20261

Equality is best understood as an aspect of membership. The respect due to others in our community is the recognition of full membership, of peers. The test of that equality is the capability of participating fully in the community; it’s having a set of life choices, understood across a full life, that is comparable to others in the community. This lens simplifies a lot of politics. There have always been those among us who we actively exclude, whose equal rights we deny. Removing the formal barriers to their membership is an obvious priority. You can call that drive toward inclusion “identity politics” if you want, but that makes me wonder if you secretly approve of the exclusion or perhaps don’t disapprove of it so much as to suffer the inconvenience of repairing it. We have made great progress toward the formal inclusion of everyone in our society, even if we have a way to go.

But lots of us fail the test of full membership even though we possess the full panoply of formal rights. We are unable to make effective use of our rights because we do not have access to the resources or personal capabilities needed to do so. The social rights of citizenship respond to this sort of passive exclusion by directly supporting individuals. Almost any of us can suffer from this sort of exclusion in some way, but it routinely excludes the poor and economically powerless. Economic justice and civil rights are complementary; they are both about inclusion, about membership.2

But what about people who are not members of our community?

A Statement of the Problem

Social rights rest on human equality, which is why I write about equality a lot—real equality, not some abstract ideal. Because of this, the fact that national borders impose unequal statuses on persons is a major theoretical threat to the whole idea of social citizenship. If foreigners outside our borders have a lower status, then why not foreigners inside? My instinct to resolve this is to insist that those outside have equal worth too, but what follows from that?

I have made clear elsewhere that the determinative standard for social rights—the requirements of full participation—is the same for newcomers to the community and long-standing members. Since immigrants have different life backgrounds on average, the mix of resources required for this is different, on average. These supports ought to be afforded to all newcomers regardless of their legal standing because preventing the exploitation of undocumented immigrants is a general social benefit and because many undocumented people will eventually achieve permanent status—an independent process—or, barring that, remain in the community for a long time. So, I am not talking about anyone who is here now. They are members of the community, and all members of the community ought to have equal social rights, even if some of their political rights may be different.3

The Two Equalities

This brings us to the issue I am struggling with. It comes down to two ways of approaching the idea of equality. As declared above, On Social Citizenship finds the meaning of “equality” in membership, since membership provides the context within which equal concern and respect has concrete meaning. But the claim that we are one another’s equals is universal, the only membership required is membership in the human race. We have a duty to treat all people, wherever they are, with a basic dignity. People hold human rights independent of jurisdiction.4 These include access to the necessities of life such as food, shelter, education, and medicine; fundamental rights such as protection against slavery in all its forms, the right to marry and have children, to own property, to move about (within a country), to choose an occupation, and to be secure in one’s person; freedom of conscience and religion; and basic political and civil protections, such as the right to trial, habeas corpus,5 assembly, speech, protest, and privacy. All of these are enumerated in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.6

The U.N. Declaration includes the basic “right to leave any country” (Art. 13) but does not include any guidance about where someone can go. The exception is the right to seek asylum in cases of “persecution” (Art. 14). This imposes a duty on all nations to respect claims of asylum, but only under a narrow set of circumstances. “Persecution” generally involves actual physical threat or active discrimination, still a pretty fuzzy line, but certainly does not include economically motivated migration or flights toward climate or political stability. As bold as the Declaration is, it does not carry the principle of human equality to its logical conclusion: that people ought to be able to live where they want. In the world in which we live, human worth depends on national boundaries. That’s just the way it is. As we struggle to make the equality of membership a reality within nations, the deeper contradiction of global inequality continues to make a lie of our most prized principle.

This is a circle that cannot be squared. The best reconciliation we have right now is to treat the two inequalities as substantively different things, different memberships, to which different duties are attached. We are doing a terrible job of fulfilling either set of obligations.

We have to navigate the space between universal human rights and the social rights associated with membership in a particular community. For us, the biggest human rights question is plain: Who can come here? This question may seem a bit off topic for this publication, but it reflects directly on the narrower social rights question about our duty toward new members in our community.

Towards an International Response

As self-governing communities, national states have a great deal of control over who gets to be a member. Perhaps this will always be so. That means that the two memberships are at least sometimes in opposition. This issue is routinely over-blown for political gain but still should be acknowledged. Completely uncontrolled in-migration could substantially change the community’s sense of identity or overtax its resources, reducing funding for the social rights of all members. As I have argued before, levels of in-migration have never been great enough for these to be reasonable concerns, at least in the United States, but are occasionally high enough for these standard conservative talking points to bite. We cannot truly respect the human rights of persons unless we create opportunities for everyone to live where they want to live, however. How do we even begin thinking about that?

First, we should get a sense of how big the problem is. Most people are happy to stay where they are most of the time, or nearby, even when they know (or believe) that the grass is greener elsewhere. There will always be adventurers who choose to leave seeking a better life, to attend school, or pursue a specific career. Our first principles tell us that they ought to be able to. I don’t know what this baseline rate of individual emigration is (I’d like to figure it out), but I suspect it is low. If that was the whole story, I doubt international mobility would be a major issue. National immigration systems ought to be able to accommodate it. But that requires that a global system is in place to manage mass emigrations.

Unfortunately, famine, war, and tyranny sometimes overwhelm ordinary inertia, leading to a major exodus. Something like a quarter of the Irish population left during the famine decade in the mid-19^th century. A similar percentage of Syrians probably crossed international borders during their recent long civil war.7 The proportion of South Sudanese refugees is comparable.8 It is shocking how little attention American media pay to major dislocations like this.9 Climate change and war (often related to climate change) will make these sorts of flows increasingly common.

These mass shifts create a different sort of migration problem. According to the UN Population Division, there were more than 300 million international migrants in 2024. The figure would obviously be much larger if we count internal migrations. That’s 3.7% of everyone. This share has risen rapidly in this century. It was more like 1% annually during the whole period between 1960 and 1980. As the climate crisis deepens, this figure will continue to rise. It is not hard to imagine that number doubling or tripling by mid-century, depending on which Cassandra you listen to.10

The closest thing to a solution here is to support national states as they face the crises that trigger mass migration episodes. Our presumption here is that people in these circumstances do not choose to move; they are forced to emigrate. The best response is to provide resources that might make moving unnecessary or at least limit the degree of dislocation. This is not always possible, either because the regime in question is the cause of the problem or is simply too corrupt (or too weak) to be a reliable partner.11 When these political barriers exist, the second-best solution is to provide a similar level of support to those nations that are nearest geographically with the aim of making displacements as temporary as possible.

This sort of in situ response is cheaper and less disruptive to “donor” nations12 than if each deals with its own waves of in-migrants. Superficially, it is how we handle things now, except that the global commitment to the effort is very low. In particular, the capacity of the United Nations to play a leading role in this area has been kept extremely limited. Instead, the response to humanitarian crises has come from nation-driven efforts such as the now-gutted USAID, or through a disjointed set of ad hoc NGOs, all of them begging for support from the governments or monied classes of these same donor nations.

The news may give the impression that the NGO-driven system is large. It isn’t. It’s hard to pin a number on the effort but it cannot be much greater than $25 B per year. To this, we can add what’s left of USAID. As recently as FFY23, annual appropriations for USAID exceeded $50B (with a fair chunk of that supporting Ukraine), but that has fallen to less than $17B today, with only a minority of that ($6B) committed to actual projects right now. Even if I am missing a lot, the scale of the whole effort is less than $50B. This sounds like a lot of money, but it represents only about $4 of every $10,000 of world GDP.13 If the effort were increased ten-fold, the global North would hardly notice. This level of effort, $500B or more per year, is probably more than what we need to protect people during a crisis. The cost of protecting people in these situations is actually fairly low, since the aim is just to keep people safe. But we also need to help the affected countries build or rebuild the infrastructure required for return (or to accept immigrants). Over time, these capital investments would increasingly focus on climate resiliency—work that can be done before the crisis and that has to be done anyway. And over time, funds could follow migrants; that is, they could support infrastructure in both the global North and South.

These numbers seem staggeringly large, but this starting annual investment is only 0.5% of world GDP. I expect that an effective long-run target probably ought to be twice that. Fiscally, this is very doable, and much cheaper in the long run than an island nation strategy. But to get to this place we must have the will to do so. That, in turn, means we actually believe that we are one another’s equals. I am pessimistic. There is a personal paradox embedded in that gloom. The longer I consider this question the more I am convinced of the wisdom of the axiom of human equality and the more I am convinced that humans lack the virtue to act upon it. But the weather today is dark. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps the global catastrophe now only in its earliest days will be enough to help us overcome the myopia of xenophobia and get us started in the direction of global cooperation (again).14

In the meantime, we can focus on building some of the capacities that will be required. This includes focusing national resources on developing the needed human resources, the helpers. Internationally, it means beefing up the governance structures required to operate a global effort. There’s quite a bit to be done there. At the moment, we are, collectively, just too corrupt to handle these kinds of flows. But we cannot let selfishness stop us. Good governments spend a great deal more than this with only isolated (and usually police-able) levels of corruption. I expect that a robust system would still be NGO-centric since this is the way to overcome, to a degree, nationalistic narrowness, but at scale, the UN must have a role in managing and allocating the global trust fund created for these purposes. Making the UN useful in this way likely will require re-founding the institution, a constitutional convention of sorts. I humbly propose that this happen every 100 years, whether the UN needs it or not. If we convene it today, we might be able to finish this meeting by 2045.15

A beefed-up UN and international aid and development function would represent a modest loss of sovereignty. Since the UN’s portfolio would not change in a fundamental way (it would mainly become an important federated funding source), these concerns should not be determinative, but this rhetorical line of opposition would be very strong (along with corruption concerns). Sovereignty is a difficult concept that is not well understood; I should write about it soon. The logic of human equality is ultimately hostile to the idea of impermeable national borders. But the autonomy of self-governing communities also rests, ultimately, on this same principle. My hypothesis is that the “ordinary” flow of individuals across borders would not threaten the identity of any national communities, except perhaps the smallest ones. These flows are swamped by mass flows of migrants fleeing political oppression, violence, and natural disaster. No nation can deal effectively with these crisis-driven movements alone, but shifting to a cooperative international response will require significant institution and skill building, which needs to begin now.

That’s enough for today.

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I remain on a summer schedule and may or may not post next week.

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<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship are meant to connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

Notes

Post 69: 14 July 20261

The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.
— Andrew Carnegie (1889)

The rich do not pay their fair share for the benefits of living in our society. They should pay a higher tax rate than the average person, and more than they do now, because they can—because the declining marginal utility of money is a real thing—and because they often benefit the most from government—even if they almost never realize this. A comprehensive response to this problem would revisit the definition of “income” and the current rate structures. It would also consider the burdens carried by all forms of taxation at all levels of government. For today, my focus will be on one avenue of proposed reform: taxing wealth.

Wealth should be taxed as a way of taxing untaxed incomes. The aim of wealth taxation is not fundamentally redistributive; rather, its function is to ensure that the rich pay their fair share to support the community. That requires wealth taxation because “income” as it is ordinarily understood is not reflective of the rich’s ability to pay taxes. This breakdown of the income-based tax system requires that we use an additional tool. This has always been the root justification for estate taxes, but the idea ought to be extended now.

One way to approach this problem would be to impute a stream of income based on a stock of wealth, with individuals paying income taxes on this imputed figure if it is greater than the capital income they report. I’ll say more about this idea below, but it would be a major change in the way we think about income taxation and a heavy political lift. In the near term, a better strategy is to repair the buy-borrow-die loophole (see below) by treating loans not used to buy or improve an asset or finance education as ordinary income. This is the most egregious way in which rich individuals use their wealth to shield themselves from taxation.

Justifying Wealth Taxes—Estate Taxes

We tax wealth now, but in limited ways. First of all, local governments tax wealth in land or held in other specific forms of property (cars and boats, for example). There is a strong case to be made for some form of land taxes as a kind of super user fee, but property tax practices in the United States do not usually promote the sorts of development we want and, more importantly, help foster unequal educational outcomes, mostly by reinforcing residential segregation. These are topics I have raised before2 but will leave for another time.

The taxes we pay ought to reflect our ability to pay them, which we usually evaluate using income.3 But what happens when that fails?

Traditionally, this issue has been handled through estate and inheritance taxation. The strongest argument for the estate tax has always been that a large portion of estates are comprised of capital gains unrealized, and therefore untaxed, during the lifetime of the deceased.4 They will also not be taxed if the heirs choose to realize them, because the basis value of all assets are reset (step-up) in this transfer.5 This is a reasonable solution. Taxing unrealized gains on an annual basis is burdensome and impractical. It could also be distortionary, forcing sales or shifting asset values artificially. The full financial accounting that always occurs at death is an appropriate time to record and tax this “income”.

I want to emphasize that the estate tax is not a remedy for an accumulating immorality; it is not a response to tax evasion, but to a simple fact about how wealth works. It is normal to hold (and not sell) assets and therefore normal to accumulate wealth in the form of unrealized gains. There is a strong tendency to drift into moralistic screeds. Even Andrew Carnegie, writing about the estate tax in the “Gospel of Wealth” in 1889, said

Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.

Buy, Borrow & Die

The estate tax is not primarily a response to life-long tax evasions, but increasingly, very wealthy individuals are using their wealth to lower their official incomes and therefore evade income taxes. They do this by reducing the flow of direct compensation (salaries and dividends) and instead borrowing against the value of their assets. Most notoriously, this dodge is effected through the “buy, borrow, and die” maneuver. Since this tactic carries real costs (the cost of borrowing), it is available as a practical matter only to a small number of potential taxpayers, perhaps the top 1%, but this group represents an outsized share of potential tax revenues.6 We are especially interested in this abuse as it is used by the small slice of ultra-wealthy persons such as the Forbes 400.

We keep losing sight of it, but it is important to keep in mind that this whole trick requires that corporations in which rich people hold so much of their wealth do not pay dividends (since dividends would show up as taxable income). Dividend yields have fallen dramatically since companies were first permitted to buy-back their own shares (something that was illegal before 1982) and now sit at about 1% for the S&P 500 as a whole. Dividend yields are at zero for Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, AMD, and Berkshire Hathaway and are nearly so for Micron (0.1%), Apple (0.3%), Meta (0.3%), and Google (0.3%). For a very long stretch of Wall Street history, average dividends ranged between 3 and 5%.

It is not surprising that this evasion has triggered proposals to tax the wealth of the ultra-wealthy. Elizabeth Warren has led the charge for progressive Democrats in Congress on this front. She proposed a 2% tax on net worth in excess of $50 million, or 3% on net worth above $1 billion. This is estimated to affect about a quarter million households (about 0.15% of the total) but generate about $620 billion per year in revenue.7

I am skeptical of this estimate. It will be sensitive to the specifics of the legislation. More importantly, potential taxpayers will use every tool at their disposal to evade the tax by overstating debts, claiming lower asset values, and shifting assets into less transparent forms, such as privately held companies. Still, there is no doubt that a tax like this would produce a great deal of revenue.8

This would be a big change, since the federal government has not taxed wealth directly before, except the aforementioned estate tax. I am concerned that the tax is not well grounded in principle and offer some thoughts on that below. Before we get that far, however, I think we should consider an easier path. Since the most straightforward response to a loophole is to close it, we should do that first. We can then revisit whether a deeper repair is required.

The Quick Fix: Closing the Loopholes

The narrative above suggests that there are two related abuses that allow the ultra-rich to evade taxation. We can fix both of these. A more systematic rethinking of the problem could be part of comprehensive tax reform, which I start talking about below, but these quick fixes are more realistic.

The buy, borrow, and die gambit depends on the fact that loans secured by assets do not count as income. While repairing this can get a bit messy, it is very doable. Simply, loans secured by assets but not used to buy or improve an asset or to finance education or medical care should be counted as income. In theory, this rule could apply to everyone, though we might have strong political reasons to exempt borrowing below a certain level or debt secured with a primary residence (by presuming that it is for home improvement).

The other change, a reversion really, is to return to once again prohibit the corporate maneuver of stock buybacks.9 It would be inappropriate to require companies to make dividend payments, but this change would encourage that practice. This alone would dramatically raise the current income of our oligarchs. It is also a good idea, since buybacks are a clear and obvious form of price manipulation, which is why they were illegal to begin with, and have no obvious social value.10 Given the modern tendency to compensate corporate executives with stock, the implicit corruption of moves designed mainly to increase stock prices also ought to trouble more people than it does.11

While the push-back against both of these moves would be very great, these changes will be much easier, politically, than a comprehensive wealth tax. The buy-borrow-die loophole is universally recognized as a loophole and can be attacked as such. The buyback technique was illegal for a century, before it wasn’t.

The Path to Comprehensive Reform

We need to rebuild our revenue system from the bottom-up so that it is as simple as possible, adequate to meet our needs, and based on a shared understanding of what fairness requires. This is a major, multi-year political project. The negotiation must begin by agreeing on the grounding principles of reform. We will disagree, strongly, about how to implement these principles, but we must require that all parties make their argument based on interpretations of fairness, not on expressions of relative power.

Today, I begin with wealth taxation, but future posts will present a vision of an idealized revenue/budget system that can meet the revenue needs of a fully implemented scheme of social rights in a fair way. This will be the fiscal case for social citizenship, practical but grounded in theory. I owe readers that much. This is a big topic which I will approach in piecemeal fashion. Consider this the first post in a series.

That broader framework includes the local taxation of real property, which I must say more about at some point. But it also includes some taxation of wealth at the national (and possibly state) level, our topic today. The framework I will propose will center heavily on the progressive taxation of incomes because income is the best general measure of our ability to pay taxes. The basic idea about wealth taxation, already stated, is that we ought to view wealth as a store of income. We should tax wealth only to the degree that the income it represents has not been taxed already. In theory, a broad-based estate tax is the proper vehicle to do that work. The existence of the sorts of loopholes discussed above suggests that we should also consider annual assessments on wealth to ensure that it is not being used to conceal incomes. If we actually close the loopholes, we might decide that this is no longer a serious problem. That would be the best solution, but experience suggests that new loopholes will emerge. What then?

The principle here is that wealth is related to the ability to pay taxes because it produces a stream of income. The tax system should therefore evaluate wealth based on the assumption that a given stock of wealth ought to produce a minimum income. Following the history of dividend yields shown above, I would set this imputed income at somewhere like 2 or 3 percent of net worth from all sources. Individuals would pay income tax on this amount if it is greater than their reported capital income. This structure would encourage people to shift assets toward productive uses (since assets like real estate and art would count towards the imputed income figure). By extension, it would also promote a shift back towards dividends as a way of distributing corporate profits. One strength of this approach is that off-shoring assets has no effect on tax liability, even if it does make evasion easier.12

Annual wealth assessments are not intended to tax unrealized capital gains, just the assumed stream of income that assets are expected to produce, so it does not interfere with the logic of the estate tax, which should be strengthened. For this reason, it is not necessary to update the valuations of non-financial assets every year. This burden on both individuals and tax administrators is a major bureaucratic barrier to the effective implementation of broad-based wealth taxes.13 The problem of properly valuing privately held companies remains, however; this is a major obstacle for any general tax based on wealth.

This limited approach to the annual taxation of wealth would effectively bring wealth under the umbrella of income taxation, which ought to be the primary mechanism for all of us to support government at all levels. This sketch leaves out a lot of possible details and complications, however. Overall, a whack-a-mole approach of identifying and addressing loopholes might be our best approach.

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That’s all for today.

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During July and August posts will be irregular. I expect to skip both July 21 and July 28, but you never know.

Notes

Post 68: 23 June 2026

People have a social right to housing, but how should we guarantee that? A perennial progressive answer has been rent control. Today I will be arguing that some rent controls ought to be part of a broader package of tenants’ rights but that broad-based price controls on rent are counterproductive and often have unjust distributional consequences. We ought to adopt a supply-first housing strategy that includes major direct public investments in housing and treat prices as an indicator of the success of the overall policy.

My interest today is triggered by rent control proposals in Massachusetts where I live, so I will make references to the version of control from a recent initiative petition and emphasize more local data than I typically do. Rent control may be on our ballot this fall, but the situation is complicated.1

The Problem

Most people agree that renters face an affordability crisis. Census data show that rent represents more than half of the household budget for a quarter of all renters.2 Among low-income renters, it’s much worse, with two-thirds spending more than half of all their money on rent.3 And these are now old data, dating back to 2021. HUD’s estimates of “Fair Market Rents” in the city of Boston has risen 26% since then and in the median place in the U.S. by 37%.4 The chart below gives a sense of how rents have shifted relative to prices overall since 1985 in the U.S. and in Boston. Interestingly, median rents on two bedroom units have risen only at the pace of general inflation nationally until quite recently. Locally, there was a major spike in rents in the mid-teens and rents have risen more slowly, but are still rising, in this decade.

The HUD measure is a reasonable one, but it blends together a number of different trends and is intentionally focused toward the lower half of the rental market. As Boston residents well know, new development is skewed toward the high end of this market (more on that below), which reduces the options available to newcomers and other movers. How bad the problem appears depends on whether we compare rents for new renters in existing units (pretty bad), for continuing renters (a bit less bad), or for those in new units (worst of all).5 But the broad HUD metric makes one thing very clear: rents in Boston are two to three times higher than the national median place. Locally, it sure feels like we have to do something.

I have argued before6 that building is the only way out of the crisis. But today, I want to consider the role of rent control, first taken on its own, then as part of a more comprehensive response.

What the Economists Say

A wide variety of rent control policies have been implemented around the world and a small cottage industry has been dedicated to studying the impacts of these efforts. A recent literature review covered 206 papers, including 112 separate data collections. Here is the consensus view:

Rent control generally does reduce rents, relative to no policy, for continuing renters in rent-controlled units. This makes sense, since this is the target of the policy. Rent on uncontrolled units typically rises faster, however. The Massachusetts proposal would exempt rental units in owner-occupied buildings and any apartment building with four or fewer units; that’s about half of all rental properties.7 That fact, combined with the range of effects in the literature, means that we just don’t know if the current proposal would raise or lower costs for the average renter. In the congested markets around Boston, we need more apartment buidings; we don’t want a policy that incentivizes smaller scale projects that evade the controls.

Most studies find that rent control decreases residential mobility, as renters in controlled units are generally do not want to leave them. To the extent that this finding also reflects fewer evictions, it is a pretty good thing. But unless new units are produced, it also means that the benefits of rent control reach fewer new people over time, essentially creating a benefit transfer from (younger) new residents, mostly renting in the uncontrolled sector, and (older) longer-term residents who hold on to their rent-controlled units.

Not surprisingly, the key variable is supply. About two-thirds of the studies find that rent control slows housing production. This is not a strong consensus finding; pro-production policies can combat this tendency. Importantly, however, simply exempting new units from price regulation for some period does not counteract the negative production effect (the Massachusetts proposal has a provision like this). Almost all rent control studies find that the quality of controlled units tends to decline over time because landlords have no incentive to invest in upkeep. Perhaps because of this, those in rent-controlled units are not more satisfied with their housing, despite the lower rents they pay.

Some studies have observed that controls can induce an increase in condo conversions. This has no net effect on supply overall, but only relatively well-resourced renters can buy the new condos. This can increase home ownership, which some would clock as a win, but it obviously also reduces the number of rental units, further pressuring the market rents.

Rent Control for the Next Person

Unless we simultaneously increase the supply of rental housing (see below), a predictable effect of rent control will be to lower costs, at least somewhat, for those renters who manage to obtain a rent-controlled apartment but increase rental costs for those who do not. Since renters in controlled units are less likely to move, newcomers will find it increasingly difficult over time to find a controlled unit, again, unless we can also increase supply.

This dynamic has a long-term distributional implication. As these long-term renters get older, their incomes will tend to rise, so the burden of rent will gradually lessen for them while it grows steadily for the young adults looking for their first places. The risk of worsening intergenerational and class inequality is what troubles me most about price-only regulation. Too often, it helps relatively well-to-do older residents but not younger people struggling to find an apartment.

I am pretty sure that anyone living in a place with some rent control knows someone who probably could live pretty well without it. Back in the fall of 1994, at the end of the last era of rent-control here in Cambridge, I was a grad student in a seminar with a senior Harvard professor who complained about how he expected to lose his own rent control. At the time, I could not afford a Cambridge apartment and had to make a difficult daily commute to school. As I recall, I still voted to keep rent control, but I was angry that this rich professor paid a lower rent than I could get; I understood why people would vote to repeal.8

The Role of Government

The role of government in American housing presents a very strange case. On the one hand, as a society, we do very little to help people obtain and keep a secure home in the community where they live and work. Public housing is rare, as is direct support for housing costs, and both are designed to help only the most needy. They are structured as emergency subsistence programs, not as universal social rights. Whatever we do, it must be broad-based and not especially income sensitive.

On the other hand, much of the crisis in American housing today can be traced back to over-regulation with two broad aims. First is a deep pro-suburban anti-urban bias. Zoning laws, the tax code, and short-sighted transportation policy and other infrastructure investments have massively advantaged single family home ownership over other forms of housing. The flip-side of those suburban-centric policies crippled many American cities with neighborhood-killing interstate highways and endless parking lots. Liberal governance requires a broad neutrality with respect to ends and these policies violate that basic principle.

A bit more subtly, our regulatory tilt has evolved a kind of preservationist bias over time. The whole idea of the suburb is based on this, but it is also a problem for any cities that managed to avoid the highway-and-parking hellscape. I mean the tendency to want to freeze development at a point in time, as if we lived in a Stars Hollow snow globe. The impulse to preserve an historical community is valid, but real places have to grow and change. We must stay in motion.

That means we have to build. Assuming we can overcome the inertia of NIMBY blockades, not a minor assumption, we still have the problem of building for people rather than for markets. In places like Boston, economic incentives push developers to focus mainly on the upper end of the marketplace. This ought to be self-equilibrating: there really aren’t that many people who can actually afford a million dollar condo.9 This simple fact doesn’t lower costs because of our real estate investment culture; rich out-of-towners parking excess wealth and locals speculating that they can get a strong return on investment. That is, the over-emphasis on the high end reflects a market-first orientation.

This constellation of incentives is not about to change anytime soon, so what can governments do? There are three basic tools—tax, spend, defend—and we need to use all of them. I could write whole essays on each of these, but I will just fly over them today.

Real estate taxation must punish non-residency severely. Some jurisdictions make this distinction, but probably none to a great enough extent. The tax code should also punish the failure to improve real estate that could be put to productive purposes or, especially, that could be purposed or repurposed for housing. In most American cities, parking lots are the main source of this waste, but this issue arises everywhere, even in parking-light places like Cambridge. Tax rates on these classes of property ought to be high enough to pressure speculators to sell or simply allow the local authorities to take the property. These changes require reframing the way we assess and tax property, placing more weight on the land and location, and less on improvements, channeling Henry George.10

An even sharper break is needed on the spending side. Governments must spend directly on housing production, either by building housing on land it controls (including those properties seized as a result of the tax policies just described) or by providing direct incentives to developers to build the desired sorts of housing. I am not referring here to “affordable” set-asides. That is not what we need. All the units in each project ought to be “affordable” to someone already in the community and the resulting mix ought to reflect the actual housing needs of the community; that is, it ought to include reasonable numbers of units ranging from studios to four-bedroom multi-generational family homes. The way governments can ensure this is by putting up the cash to pay for it, with lots of strings attached.11 We should not think of these efforts as directed at the poor; rather, they are intended to improve the match between the housing needs of the community as a whole and the housing production system.

Most of the time, it will be best if local governments are not landlords for these properties once completed. Their focus ought to be on achieving an adequate supply; that is, on the next project. Instead, management can be outsourced or entrusted to a co-op board (for larger projects). Units can even be sold to individuals. Regardless of the specific governance and market solution, the key is that the new developments include covenants that limit their resale and rental value over time. This creates direct “rent control” but only for units produced by this system. The idea is that the expansion of supply of affordable units is large enough to pressure rents in the broader housing market downward.12 This does most of the work of rent control (but not all, see below).

Both the local and national government have roles to play defending renter rights. Local governments must limit the ability of landlords to displace renters. The best way to do this is by allowing all renters their day in court, which means funding housing courts and the public advocacy that renters need to be able to make use of them. Presently, only a few states have dedicated housing courts, and none of these are adequately funded.13 Protections against condo conversions are also reasonable and seem to be a bit more common (though still the exception).14 Finally, the national government can support renters by fully funding the Section 8 voucher program. Funding for this tool ought to be doubled or tripled.

Where does this leave broad-based rent control?

In this vision, rent control can still help protect renters from landlords who raise rents to force them to move or who simply profiteer in tight market conditions. We want to protect tenants from these abuses without imposing bureaucratic burdens on landlords. The fear of bureaucracy has forced rent control systems to exempt smaller and owner-occupied properties, and that has mostly negated the effectiveness of controls. I would propose that all landlords justify rent increases that are large relative to general inflation (TBD) or out-of-line with rent increases in their other units. Allowable justifications would include significant new investments in the property or delays between rent increases (i.e., they can “catch up”). Landlords would also not be allowed to increase charges on new tenants more than on continuing ones, again, unless it can be justified. We can implement these rules without imposing bureaucratic burdens; compliance with the rules can be assured by requiring transparency. If all tenants know the rental history of their unit and that of other units controlled by the same landlord, and the housing court system referred to above is established and funded (critical), then ordinary people can seek redress in court. Knowing this, most landlords will comply with the standards. This is a good example of how we should think of social rights as giving ordinary people the tools they need to assert their own rights.

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That’s a lot to chew on, so I’ll quit for now. I expect to write about housing again sometime in 2026.

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I will not post next week, as I will be on vacation. The schedule may be a bit erratic at least through July, but the work will continue. Have a good summer!

<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

Notes

Post 67: 16 June 2026

“The primary good that we distribute to one another is membership.”
— Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice1

Last week, I made my best philosophical pitch for how to understand and defend the idea that we are one another’s equals. Both these things—the understanding and the defense—are difficult to grasp. We can understand equality only in the context of membership: status equality is the status of full membership, with all that entails. The defense of equality can be even harder to accept. We must be equal because no scheme of inequality is defensible. Any such system would require sorting people based on some criteria, but those criteria are ultimately arbitrary and, in any case, impossible to implement, and—this is the kicker—we could never trust anyone to do the necessary sorting in a fair way.

The drive toward equality is manifest as demands for full membership, but how does that happen? That’s what I want to focus on today, though I can really only scratch the surface. There are several pathways, but in each, a “sphere of equality” is pressured to expand. Hierarchy can and will react to this, often successfully, but the memory of the advance is permanent, so the process tends to ratchet forward. This traces the “arc of the moral universe”.2

Spheres of Equality

Underlying my model is a claim that almost all human societies, at all times and places, include spheres of equality. These are groups of people who consider others in their group to be their peers or equals and who see themselves as full members of the community. That implies, in turn, that the idea of equality is deeply rooted in the human experience.3 I am not saying that these societies are “egalitarian”—I’m not sure any society could be so characterized—only that some people experience the status equality associated with full membership. They can do this even while comfortably accepting broader hierarchical structures, including extremes such as slavery or very large gender-based status differences. The main mechanisms for advancing equality derive from the fact that those outside this circle—usually those just outside this circle—want in and have the necessary resources to be at least partially successful.

My claims about a “sphere of equality” run counter to the usual narrative, which is that the idea of basic human equality is recent, the product of the Enlightenment, or for some, even of more recent advances in civil rights in the 20^th century. These moments are important—they mark leaps toward universality—but the advances built on something older and deeper. That’s what I want to get at.4 Our analysis must separate the idea and practice of equality from the penetration of both into day-to-day life. As I said last week, the difficult part of “All men are created equal” is the “all”.

It is more than a bit paradoxical that the theory and practice of equality was developed in very hierarchical societies. But equality and hierarchy always coexist, at least so far, so how could it be otherwise?

Ancient Athens remains our democratic role model despite the fact the status equality enjoyed by the citizens required slavery. Indeed, it has been argued that the very idea of “freedom” rested on the knowledge of slavery. No light without shadow. Viking settlements similarly maintained a rough equality and a form of self-rule but also held slaves. These spheres of equality were small and depended on the exploitation of others, but we learned a great deal about the practice of equality from them and still aspire to the sort of self-governance that they enjoyed.

The ancient Greeks and intrepid Vikings were self-governing, which makes them unicorns of a sort. More typically, the sphere of equality is comprised of landholding aristocrats who cannot claim to govern, since they must deal with a prince above them, but still considered themselves both the equals of their peers and “full members” of society. The membership claim is only approximate; it is based on the fact that they command enough resources, money, material, and men, to guard their own independence. This often allowed them to check the monarch. A group of English barons, hardly liberal democrats, were able to extract the guarantees of the Magna Carta from their king that still forms the foundation of our Anglo-American rights.

In their own imaginations, and to some degree in reality as well, the American Founders crossed these two types of exemplars, with a cranky set of New England farmers and merchants envisioning themselves as republicans in the ancient sense while a cavalier elite in the South took on a role a bit closer to that of those English barons, egalitarian leaders of a very hierarchical society.

The Mechanisms

My thesis is that these spheres of equality tend to expand due to internal and external pressures. The external pressures are directed “upwards” toward social betters. The barons of 1215 asserted their rights claims upwards at King John. In the long transition between an aristocracy of land to oligopolies of capital, the demands of unlanded bourgeoisie for more complete membership were based on the financial clout they held. It is not a coincidence that one of the big things that the new monied class wanted to buy were titles, formal recognition of aristocratic status; that is, they wanted to literally buy their way into the sphere of full members. The expansion of wealth based in industry and trade created a new “middle” class who demanded, among other things, that they be afforded some of the dignities afforded to aristocrats. Consider the expansion of titles like “Mister”. This petite bourgeoisie was always the dominant class in parts of the United States and came to dominate British politics by the 1830s. When labor finally began to understand and assert its power in the late 19^th century, they similarly leveraged this to achieve the ideal of full membership more completely, eventually including suffrage rights—since the self-governing part of this equation is not optional.

Sometimes part of the pressure to expand comes from within the sphere of equality. This happens when one fully-empowered faction seeks to improve their political position by reaching out to new participants—who are also likely to be employing external pressures at the same time. The political scientist E.E. Schattschneider called this the “contagion of conflict.” The weaker party in the contest between insiders has reason to bring in outsiders who had previously only been “spectators”—either by choice or status. A good example of this, I think, was the inclusion of African Americans in the New Deal Democratic party coalition. This was an important, but generally underappreciated, element in the broader 20^th century Civil Rights movement. Democratic party majorities in Northern states were strengthened by these new coalition partners. That, in turn, pushed the party towards substantive inclusion.5 I have not thought about this enough, but it seems clear to me that successful expansions of the sphere of members will typically include both outside agents pushing for inclusion and inside partners whose political position is strengthened by progress on this front.

Note that the insiders in this last statement do not need to be committed to the principle at all. Many autocrats, locked in a struggle with their landed gentry, have mobilized common people, whose day-to-day conflicts were typically with their local aristocratic overlord. This served an immediate purpose for the king, but could not fail to further the cause of universal equality.

The Role of Ideas

Most excluded groups have some economic or political leverage that can be used in the struggle for inclusion, but sometimes the excluded group is small or diffuse, making the direct expression of power—either as economic or political actors—ineffective. The main appeal must then be to ideas, to the principle of equality itself. Since most of us now at least pay lip service to the principle of basic equality, pointing out violations of the principle can be quite effective. I am thinking, especially, about recent movements for gay and transgender rights. In these cases, many, myself included, simply did not clock the degree of exclusion, mainly (in my case) because the economic dimension was muted; that is, these are cases of exclusion without exploitation (see “Exclusion and Exploitation”). In these cases, the fact that we (I) failed to simply apply a principle that we all say we accept as axiomatic is ultimately just embarrassing. This is why opposition to gay marriage evaporated so quickly.6 My point here is not to minimize these exclusions, but merely to point out that in these cases those whose membership is more secure do not have narrow (economic) grounds for maintaining the contradiction, which makes it more vulnerable to educational campaigns. This is why conservative opponents try so hard to create some level of threat (from gays, pedophilia; from trans people, some sort of threat to girls’ sports that I don’t understand). For more on conservative reactions, see “The Inclusion-Reaction Engine”.

A more general word on the role of ideas is probably a good place to stop today. Assigning a causal role to ideas is always tricky. It is usually reasonable to claim that ideas follow practice, that political philosophers are usually trying to explain and justify the world around them, not build a new world from whole cloth.7 But, unlike most physical systems, the political world is not memoryless. Once in the world, ideas shape the trajectory of the events that they initially were only intended to justify. Over time, they shift from being post hoc rationalizations to having causal force.

Since I am claiming that spheres of equality always existed, I am also claiming that the principle of basic equality also has, just not in the form that the Enlightenment passed down to us. To understand how we can expand the sphere of equality, we have to grasp this difference. It has to do with how equality and membership are connected.

The traditional idea of a sphere of equality was that members were one another’s equals so those who were not recognized as equals were not full members. That does not mean that the citizens of ancient Athens or the Viking settlers of Iceland, or the members of other spheres of equality, did not recognize a basic human equality. I suspect they did, especially in religious matters,8 but equal social status did not follow from this elemental recognition, just as our current recognition of a common humanity does not seem to oblige us to protect human rights around the world. That said, the idea was still there, but the practice was circumscribed.

The achievements of the Enlightenment flipped this relation. Now, we recognize that everyone in our society are equals and therefore must also be recognized as full members. Those who are excluded from membership demand the equality of status associated with it. The rest of us know that the fullness of our own membership requires that we be in a socioeconomic position consistent with it. Ensuring this position is, of course, the function of social rights and the whole reason this publication exists (so you should have seen that coming). We are not equal unless we can fully participate in our community on a par with others. Again, this has strong implications for how we treat other members of our own community, but much weaker implications internationally.

A great deal more could be said about how the idea of equality advanced from a mostly religious notion to the linchpin of secular political theories to, finally, to become the core motivating principle of political life, but I think this is where I have to leave it today.

Next week, I expect to switch gears a bit. I am researching the rent control proposal currently being considered in Massachusetts. Would that advance the social right to a home, or not?

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Notes

Post 66: 9 June 20261

All has always been the difficult part of the Declaration’s claim that all men are created equal. Full members of society can easily see themselves as one another’s equals; what they have trouble imagining is that everyone else is too. Most of us believe. We accept, with Jefferson, that equality is self-evident. Some reject the idea entirely, but very few are willing to say so, at least not directly. This itself is a great victory for equality. Still, we cannot disregard the enemies of equality. I also often wonder how deeply the rest of us believe it. We still find it easy to deny equality by limiting membership through all the subtle and even unconscious ways in which we reject that all means all.

My first essay for On Social Citizenship was titled “Membership, Equality, and Freedom”. I remember the feeling of progress when I began to see these concepts as sides of a single object, even as I struggled to articulate how. Of course, my title was simply a restatement of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. So much for my originality. Classic ideas are always worth revisiting. Today, I take another bite at this apple. In this essay I take a philosophical approach to consider the connection between equality and membership. Next week, I’ll approach the same problem as a political process.2

The Centrality of Membership

We still need a defense of equality. The lack of an airtight philosophical argument for it is deeply troubling. So much depends on it but we can’t quite articulate its center: equality of what exactly? Our other founding abstraction—freedom—similarly eludes us. Membership grounds these debates. To be equal is to be a full member of the community, someone of recognized equal status with both the right and capability of fully participating in society. This means having a set of life choices that are comparable to others and the capacity to choose among them. But that is what real freedom is. Membership is the concrete expression of both these abstractions. We can be one another’s equals, and we can be free, only by achieving universal membership. We the people must mean all the people.

The recognition of full membership is fully half of the business of the republic. Our central task is to constitute a self-governing people—but only full members can truly engage in self-rule. Most of us are left somewhere between subject and citizen. Far from being some sort of left-wing plaything, the struggle for membership is a central aspiration for all of us, regardless of ideology. For those who lack equal rights, that is, whose membership is legally denied, the effort to secure membership is existential, the main point of politics. But the secret power of conservatism has always been its ability to exploit the anxiety of those who feel their own full membership is threatened by new inclusions and by their own economic vulnerability. In between, the rest of us are aware of the deficiencies in our democratic institutions and our own civic mindedness. Is this really self-government?

Human Equality and the Equality of Membership

Equality of membership is a strictly political concept, expressed in a specific community in a particular way. This is the sort of equality social citizenship is concerned with.3 But philosophers usually try to provide a proof of human equality. That is a tall order, but membership equality may have to rest on the more general claim of human equality. If so, my defense of it must connect these two levels.

We accept human equality—if we do—as an axiom, but axioms are the parts of the proof that are accepted without proof as “self-evident”. The philosopher Paul Sagar, in his excellent recent book Basic Equality (Princeton, 2024), concludes that “there appear to be no good arguments for believing in basic equality.”4 Previous philosophical proofs rest on some aspect of a human “essence” attached to only species membership. Different writers emphasize different aspects of humanness. A number of these explanations build on the Kantian idea of persons as rational agents.5 Rawls’ characterization of persons as having two “moral powers”—the ability to form and revise a conception of the good and possessing a sense of justice—is, to me, the most satisfying of these frameworks.6

We may not be able to agree on what the human trait is and that might not matter. Indeed, if you accept the liberal idea that we all should be able to decide what we value in our own lives (that’s what Rawls’ moral powers are about), it might even be a good thing. According to George Sher, what matters is that each person can “live a characteristically human life.” This is a I-know-it-when-I-see-it perspective.7 What matters is that there is some human essence, that we all have it, and for an important set of fundamental things, nothing else matters.

The elusiveness of this human essence troubles philosophers greatly. Even if we can articulate what it is, can we define a meaningful threshold for recognizing it? How rational do you have to be? How do we deal with the special cases: senility, madness, extreme disability? Do some people stop being persons? While this last question needs to be addressed in our moral and legal systems, the general problem of recognizing a human as human should not concern us too much.8 We can move on to the set of issues that do.

The biggest philosophical problem concerns the implications of passing the humanness test, whatever it is. The equality claim rests on a belief that differences in this characteristic beyond the very fact of its existence are unimportant. In the lexicon, the characteristic is a “range property”.9 Being more rational, more moral, more intelligent or creative, feeling more, or having more agency are all irrelevant. This is complicated. We know these things do matter: the rewards we expect in society hinge on them. But “equality” requires that the resulting inequalities do not affect, that nothing affects, our fundamental status as equals. This refocuses the problem a bit. We need to show why, and when, these differences should not matter: we must decide “on what kinds of grounds we are forbidden from imposing inequalities on each other.”10

Belief in basic equality may not be so widespread nor so deep as we presuppose. Traditional conservatives, for example, embrace hierarchies, even if they may accept some version of human equality (some, of course, do not). This is not necessarily a contradiction. Accepting that each person has moral worth does not require that we “must therefore value each agent equally…moral worth can be both unconditional and yet also unequally distributed”.11 Owing everyone some level of concern and respect does not necessarily mean equal concern and respect. The strong version of this conservative view holds that we share a human essence but that this fact has “no further consequences in terms of how people were to be treated”,12 no moral implications. We are equal: So what? It’s all about power.

A morally grounded version of conservatism holds that rewards ought to flow toward demonstrated virtue. I explored a version of this approach in my earlier essays on John Kekes.13 This is the view we should take seriously and try to refute. It implies that we ought to sort people based on the degree to which they possess or demonstrate the moral value or values we prize. This is an Aristotelian conception of justice in which benefits ought to flow to those who contribute the most to the collective achievement of a good life. I am focusing on the sorting part of this process, but equally troubling to the liberal mind is the embedded assumption that there is a best way to be human and that the community ought to promote that. These two thoughts are, of course, related.14

If we are honest, we will recognize this sort of equality hedging in ourselves. It is most evident at the boundary between our views about “humanity” and membership in any particular human community. We may allow that persons have equal moral worth as humans but still value them less than members of our own society, whom we may come closer to viewing and treating as equals. We do this all the time. Even the strongest advocates of human rights assert only subsistence standards internationally, much lower than what we would accept as domestically reasonable. Allowing national borders to dictate moral worth may be more egalitarian than the conservative view just discussed, but it is still hypocrisy. Perhaps the difference between liberal egalitarianism and conservatism is how close to home we allow this contradiction to get. The question is probably not whether we believe people are equal, but what we are willing to do about it.15

The Case for Equal Membership

If we accept even the most minimal version of natural human equality, we must also accept that the humans with whom we share a community must be treated as fully equal members of that community. Here’s why: (1) we could never agree on a basis for unequal treatment; and, even if we could agree on that, (2) we lack the knowledge to evaluate individuals on this basis in a timely way; and (3) we could not trust anyone to do the required sorting in a fair way. Simply put, the reason we must have equal membership is that the case for unequal membership is so weak.

First of all, we cannot sort ourselves based on how human we are unless we can agree, at least in a rough way, on a hierarchy of human value. That is, we inherit the problem discussed above. For any given culture, it is often possible to identify a predominant value, though not an uncontested one. It was arête for the ancient Greeks (excellence), virtus for the Roman republicans (manliness), and, for us modern market liberals, pardon any offense, it is something like rationality. Nietzsche hated that. These different values, of course, produce different sortings, different hierarchies, different winners and losers, but can a compelling case be made for inequality based on any of these?16

For the sake of argument now, let’s assume that we all agree on some characteristic or set of characteristics upon which moral worth should be evaluated. Someone with more of whatever this is ought to have more authority in society, greater economic rewards, and so on. What mechanism should be used to reveal this individualized value? Who would get to decide who our betters are? The intractability of this problem is obvious. To “solve” it, Plato had to adopt communism and abolish the family in his Republic. And he could still not convincingly tell us who would guard his guardians.

A very simple and compelling argument for human equality is that we ought to value each person equally simply because we cannot know their value, a viewpoint labeled “opacity respect”.17 This idea is on to something important. It is most obvious when we consider young people, many of whom would have had a limited opportunity to demonstrate their worth. Even if we tried to evaluate relative worth in good faith, we would not be able to do it until a person reached adulthood, at least. Before that, the only fair thing is to treat everyone equally, otherwise we would be rigging the eventual evaluation by making unequal investments in individuals’ preparations.

But of course, the evaluation of relative worth can never be made in good faith. Nepotism, family ties, and group memberships of all sorts color it, invalidate it. This has always been so. In our modern world, all these forces still operate, but we mostly rig the sorting in subtle embedded ways. We make much greater investments in some young people than others then discover that those in whom we invested demonstrate more worth, what we now call “merit”. After that, the distribution of rewards is largely left to the automatic, impersonal workings of the market. The impersonal nature of market-based allocations is their great strength—it is the best solution to this “who should decide” problem—but the fairness of that result rests on the precondition that everyone enters the marketplace on reasonably equal terms. If that condition holds, the resulting inequality of outcomes is probably defensible. This is one way to understand the social rights of citizenship: they satisfy this precondition by guaranteeing access to the necessary resources.

Some may be troubled by the generally negative approach taken in this “proof”. They would like me to assert the positive case: we must treat each other with equal concern and respect because… But all of the substantive endings to this phrase limit us in some way, eventually unraveling our claim of equality. We must treat people as equals because there is no reasonable way to treat them unequally. The proof works because it iterates, snowballs. Every inequality triggers the same set of objections: Is that a valid basis for sorting? Do we know enough to evaluate individuals? And who can be trusted to do this sorting? This process will never stop until all the inequalities that limit full membership are addressed. Until all means all.18

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Next week, I hope to continue this line of reasoning to explore this last insight. How is equality achieved as a political practice?

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Notes

Post 65: 2 June 20261

Every one of us ought to be able to make undominated choices about our own lives. That’s the meat of the social citizenship approach to material inequality. Today, I want to explain that declaration. Achieving this goal requires establishing the familiar, if aspirational, social rights of citizenship—access to an adequate education, healthcare, housing and income and robust worker rights—but also anti-monopolist protection for both consumers and small businesses and direct support for entrepreneurship. We don’t usually list these things in the same breath, but fundamentally they aim at the same goal.

The Lived Question

Social citizenship is about membership. Its central claim is that equality and freedom are properly understood as aspects of full membership. If we grasp the meaning of full membership, we’ll have a tangible hold on these otherwise abstract ideas. Full members can participate fully in their community; this is the ground of their equal status and the practical meaning of their freedom. This gets us closer. We have a concrete, a lived question: How can we guarantee that each person can “participate fully”?

Here is the social citizenship claim: We are not full members of the community, we are not truly free, unless we each have a set of life choices that is comparable to others in society and the ability to choose among them. The choices I mean are the ordinary ones we make across a complete life: education, career, marriage, family, to participate in community life, to start a business, a place to live, a time to retire. To be able to choose these things on our own requires education and training, a certain degree of economic security, and other tools that can be used to resist public and private domination. Each of the social rights discussed in this publication addresses a different aspect of these lists, but these very dissimilar rights support the same objective. Every one of us needs to achieve a certain degree of “independence”, understood not as autarky but as the capability to make undominated choices for ourselves.2 That is the litmus test for equality of status.

This approach to equality is deeper than the traditional liberal3 understanding. Liberalism protects legitimate personal choices from state interference, it carves out a safe space for individuals to pursue their own vision of a good life, or as the Declaration says, “happiness”. The rights we derive from the liberal tradition are essential and our priority must always be to secure them where they are deficient. But they are not self-effectuating. This leaves us doubly incapable of addressing material inequality. At one extreme, liberalism can be blind to the ways that private power restricts our freedom. The protection of individual freedom serves as a justification for unlimited material inequality and makes any state intervention in this area appear tyrannical. At the other extreme, the lack of resources limits the ability of ordinary people to exercise their formally equal rights. Social citizenship, grounded in civic republicanism,4 recognizes that it is not enough to possess these rights, we must also be able to make full use of them.

The False Choice

The inability of traditional liberalism to respond to material inequality has been apparent to liberals since the industrial revolution but progressives have found it difficult to respond. Progress is fitful and slow while the oligarchy grows in strength. Even though nearly every aspect of the American welfare state is deeply rooted in liberal principles—I complain frequently about how poverty is stigmatized and how every program is tied to work, often punitively—opponents are still able to invoke liberal principles to block almost every advance. They characterize proposals to limit the power of concentrated capital and to increase the resources and protections available to ordinary Americans as coercive restrictions on individual freedom. The new programs, they say, are dangerous extensions of public power that will ultimately undermine the capitalist system itself.

They are “socialism”.

We are being told, effectively, that we must either reject the whole system and become “socialists” or learn to love the oligarchy. This is a false choice, not least because the vilified progressive proposals are far from being socialist. The opposition, along with most Americans, is blissfully ignorant of what that term means (hence the air quotes). There was nothing in the New Deal that undermined capitalism. Nothing proposed by today’s “Democratic Socialists” would either.5 Still, progressives have always had a hard time responding to the neoliberal alarmists. A big reason why is that they are limited by their, and our, purely liberal vocabulary. If everyone believes that freedom is governmental nonintervention then it is hard to justify governmental interventions even when they will enhance freedom.6

The Ownership Society

What’s the alternative?

The opposite of oligarchy is not socialism; it is what John Rawls called “property-owning democracy”.7 For now, I’ll call it “the ownership society”. It is capitalist, but anti-oligarchic and republican, with an emphasis on individuals and smaller economic agents. The average person should have an ownership stake in the productive capacity of society. This ownership share is one of the material bases for the independence I mentioned earlier.8 It protects a subset of those life choices that I said we all ought to have.

I have explored some aspects of this idea in the past. In “The Social Rights of Producers” I noted that anti-monopoly protection for small businesses of all kinds and buyer-of-last-resort protections for small-scale farmers were part of the original plan Roosevelt presented in his Second Bill of Rights. We might be prone to treat pro-small business policies as a strange bedfellow of unemployment insurance, Social Security or union rights, but they are, in fact, all of a piece. The United States had made strong strides in the general area of anti-oligarchic protections for small producers, individual investors, and consumers. We have decent legal tools in this area. Unfortunately, we have now decided not to use any of them.

Not part of Roosevelt’s vision, but appealing to me, is “A Public Inheritance.” First offered, I believe, by Tom Paine, this is the idea that the next person ought to have some share in the bequest of prior generations to help launch them into adulthood, and equal citizenship, on fair terms with their peers, who may have access to private bequests. These “lump-sum” transfers would be different from other forms of income support in that they are relatively large, episodic, and often tied to particular purposes like post-secondary education. Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott presented a version of a public inheritance in their 1999 book, The Stakeholder Society (Yale). Their grant is general purpose but prioritizes education. My own book, The Tools to Be Free (Lexington, 2024) offers lump sums for education (as part of a service-to-school system). Since then, my own view has expanded. Since the service-driven system I envisioned could be used to train people in any trade, it makes sense for it to also provide individual support for small-scale entrepreneurship. We can group these sorts of lump-sum entitlements as “start-up money.” Their purpose is to increase access to a set of individual choices that I believe, and that I think we can all come to agree, ought to be universally accessible: access to post-secondary education and access to start-up business capital.

Last week I dismissed as foolish the array of schemes to introduce market risk into the Social Security system but had to admit that having more people with more savings would be a good thing. Indeed, more people with more savings would advance core social citizenship principles. Many social rights, starting with the right to bargain collectively but including any rights that would guarantee access to housing, healthcare, or income independently of work, can be characterized as “walk-away money”; that is, these resources help support the decision to leave work when that is the only way to preserve individual dignity and autonomy. We throw up a great many barriers to this kind of support, since it seems to be “anti” work.9 Any programs we design to support retirement savings would, though, have a similar function. Indeed, that would be the ultimate pool of walk-away money.

Ideally, all retirees should have the sort of independent status that protects them from exploitation and domination. Just having cash would not be enough for that; we would also have to contain certain critical costs, especially healthcare and housing, and provide a public backstop for essential but sometimes very expensive end-of-life care. This is a difficult policy area. We already have savings-incentive programs in place, a lot of them: IRAs, 401Ks, health savings accounts, educational savings accounts. The problem is that these programs, which are collectively very expensive, mostly benefit wealthier Americans.10

A useful, if ambitious, proposal could make IRA participation universal by carving out an optional deduction for this purpose from the existing Social Security payroll tax. This carve out would have the primary purpose of reducing the overall burden of the OASDI tax on lower-income filers by creating a refundable credit for the first N dollars of tax paid (I’m thinking $2000). Filers would have the option of simply reducing their current tax (by half this amount) or banking the entire value in an IRA-like instrument (a standard two marshmallow set-up). The Trust Fund itself would be made whole either through higher payroll taxes on higher-earning workers (see “Paying for Retirement”) or through a General Fund reimbursement. That’s a bit pie-in-the-sky; I offer it only as a way of showing how a system like this can work—one whose primary purpose is augmenting, not destroying, Social Security.

The justification for all these policies is to improve the ability of individuals to resist the domination of others with more marketplace power. In my parlance, we want to give everyone access to the tools they need to be free.

A final class of policies that would increase the stake that individuals hold in the American economy involve workplace democracy, specifically employee stock options and profit-sharing schemes. Both tools have been around for a long time, but they are rarely used. The National Center for Employee Ownership reported a total of 6,609 ESOP plans in 2023. Not many, as a share of over 30 million active businesses. Some sort of profit sharing seems to be more common, though it is sometimes hard to separate this from other forms of compensation, like 401K matches or individual bonuses. Profit-sharing can mask employer efforts to shift market risks onto workers without really increasing the risk-based rewards available to them. These kinds of programs are entirely private now, but as tools they could have broad social value. I need to learn more about this.11

One last thing: I have not mentioned home ownership. Though many would argue that home ownership represents the kind of stake in the community that republican citizenship requires, all residents can experience this level of connection. Owning a home can be part of a plan to achieve more financial independence and personal control, great things, but that doesn’t make it a productive resource. The echo it carries from the time when land was the main productive resource, and almost the sole basis for status equality, leads us to overvalue it. (Feels like a separate essay.)

Still Capitalism

All of this is part of the exploration and articulation of what “full participation” in society means and what, exactly, we mean when we say that everyone ought to have a set of life choices comparable to others in their society. Social rights are the public guarantees that we all have the resources we need to make these choices in practice. But that requires deciding, through the democratic process, which life choices are fundamental enough to trigger this level of public duty and, having established that, deciding which resources are necessary preconditions for these choices. Domestically, these two questions ought to consume most of what we call “politics”. Obviously, we are not there yet.12

Today’s essay underscores that full participation in a capitalist society requires that we all have access to the ownership of capital. Otherwise, we accept Marx’s bifurcation between owners and workers. The differences in material inequality will always threaten to rise to a categorical level, to create different classes of membership. We can oppose that through direct checks on oligarchs, a topic for later, and by creating the conditions through which everyone else has comparable life choices. In an earlier essay, I mused that this made us all “middle class”. Status equality seems to imply this status. I am okay with that, but we need to continue to fill in the implications of this idea and figure out how to get there.

That’s all for now.

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Post 64: 26 May 20261

It may seem silly to add market risk to a system whose sole purpose is to insulate people from market risk, but that is exactly what one powerful faction of would-be reformers propose for Social Security. The coming fiscal crisis in the program will give these folks a great opportunity to make their pitch (again). Something has to be done and the changes they propose will promise greater benefits and increased individual control. They will appeal to core liberal American anti-government, individualistic, and pro-market values. We must resist.

Lots of these proposals are not made in good faith, driven as much by personal greed and longer-term efforts to undermine the current system as by misplaced market fundamentalism. Today, I conclude my series on Social Security with a look at market-centric “reform” proposals. It is a good opportunity to remind ourselves why we have Social Security in the first place. While we must reject neoliberal schemes that would end Social Security as we know it, we should also be looking for ways to expand the ownership stake that ordinary individuals have in the American economy.

There are two big flavors of these proposals: (a) to allow the Trust Fund to invest in equities; and (b) to divert some or all of each person’s payroll tax contributions to personal investment accounts and reduce the defined benefit proportionately. I’ll address these in turn.

Investing the Trust Fund on Wall Street

Moving Social Security Trust Fund monies into the stock market would increase administrative costs, add a great deal of risk, including the risk of bankruptcy, and would have no long-term impact on Fund solvency. But it may well make a handful of fund managers very rich.

Making the Trust Fund a Wall Street player has long appealed to, well, other Wall Street players. Over the past five years, the Trust Fund has had an average end-of-year balance of $2.7 trillion. The brain trust that gets the management fees on all these funds is likely to earn—I use the term loosely—something like $30 billion per year. For reference, the entire administrative cost of the program is now about $5 billion, with most of that being for beneficiary services. The initial round of these proposals came during the George W. Bush administration and were part of his partial privatization push after the 2004 election. They started the bidding at 40% of the pot. After that failed more recent proposals have shot for 25% or even 15% of the portfolio. These shares are camel’s noses: more ambitious proposals would quickly follow any legislative success. Still, these would be significant prizes for the firm or firms lucky enough to win the contract.

The investment portfolio of the Trust Fund, by law, is restricted to U.S. Treasury instruments. The main argument for investing the Fund in equities is they have a higher expected return. Historically, it’s hard to argue with that. Between 1990 and 2024, the Trust Fund earned about 5% per year in interest, basically tracking the 30-year Treasury rate. The average annual growth of the SP500 was 9.3%.

That might seem like a good deal, but it really isn’t. First, equity returns were negative in nine of those years (counting 1990), often spectacularly so: down three years in a row (2000-2002) for a combined 37% fall, down 39% in 2008, and 19% in 2022. Good years have, so far, overcome these bad years, but only for those who stay invested.2 When withdrawals must happen—and the Trust Fund must pay benefits of about $1.3 trillion per year—this volatility triggers what retirement planners call “sequence of return” risk, the idea that the double hit of a big withdrawal in a bad year lowers balances permanently. The payout is presently about half of the starting Fund balance each year, so a couple of bad years in a row would be enough to bankrupt the system.3 That does not mean that investing in equities is impossible, only that doing so would require much higher initial balances.

Of course, we can’t assume that returns like 9% per year will continue forever. Japan’s experience between 1990 and 2012 shows that long periods of flat-to-declining stock prices are very possible. The Nikkei 225 did not recover to its 1989 peak until 2024. Given the obvious bubble-like quality of our current asset prices, a US version of this scenario does not seem far-fetched.

When asked to game out a shift to equity investments, the Trustees correctly concluded that the equities have higher expected returns because they are riskier—which is how investments work. As actuaries, they are forced to adopt a “risk-adjusted perspective where equity yields equal the average real yield on long-term Treasury bonds. Thus, these selections have no effect on the actuarial balance of the OASDI program” (SSA Estimates). So maybe this really is just about making a handful of fund managers very rich?4

Antisocial Security?

The other type of market-centric Social Security proposals involves creating individual retirement accounts, funded either by diverting a portion of the current payroll tax or by adding to new payroll tax on top. Saving for retirement is a good thing that governments ought to encourage, so something like Al Gore’s “Social Security Plus” is worth considering. But I want to address diversions here, since these plans explicitly call for replacing the whole Social Security infrastructure.5

This idea came up during the 2000 Presidential campaign and then became part of Bush’s 2005 proposal, which would have allowed workers to divert as much as 4% of their payroll tax payment into a personal plan. This is another camel’s nose (same camel actually): the plan was to eventually replace the whole pay-as-you-go structure of Social Security—which people still find troubling— with one that is funded up front. At retirement, the accumulated value of these set-asides would be converted to an annuity that would either augment or replace the Social Security benefit.

Superficially, there was a lot to like about this and there was some polling support, until the implications of the plan were spelled out in poll questions.6 Up-front funding does not guarantee full funding; instead benefit levels depend entirely on market returns. This forces every individual to bear the risk instead of distributing that risk across a public infrastructure. This is entirely analogous to the private sector shift from defined-benefit pensions to defined contribution 401Ks. That might be okay if this augmented the existing system, but the private set-aside diverts funds. It reduces funding for the current pay-as-you-go system. Existing benefits would have to be cut. Finally, it is unclear how the non-retiree elements of Social Security—spousal, survivor, and disability benefits—would work with a system of private accounts. These tubs cannot sit on their own bottoms. It seems likely that they limp on as means-tested “welfare” programs—exactly what Social Security was created to prevent. A close look shows that, even if you bought the idea that a private system might raise your income in retirement, dropping the social part of Social Security also means dropping the security part. We need to reaffirm why we have it in the first place.

The Mission Restated

I have made at least three inter-related statements in this series about the purpose of Social Security. Very narrowly, it can be seen as a poverty prevention program that works by setting a minimum income floor for seniors, albeit not as well as I would like. The social citizenship perspective is broader. It can be broken down into the decision to retire and the quality of life after that point. Retirement is one of those basic life choices that ought to be available to all of us. We either have this as a collective expectation or not; we do, so everyone ought to be able to retire at a reasonable point in their lives. When that happens is partly a matter of social consensus but, at an individual level, people ought to be able to retire earlier if their health makes working more difficult. Once retired, people ought to have access to income (Social Security) as well as other resources that they need to participate fully in the community in a way that is comparable to others, conditioned on health. This is a higher standard than what poverty prevention requires but is in the same spirit.

From any of these perspectives Social Security is a social insurance program, not a personal investment system. It is insurance against not having enough money during the period in our lives when we cannot earn money (or more money). Restated in a more ghoulish way: it is insurance against the risk of living too long. The perverseness of this statement confuses people. The “risk” here involves something we all should want (staying alive) combined with something we all fear (being broke).

The system rankles traditional liberal views in several ways. Most fundamental is its compulsory nature, which libertarians perceive as coercive. The promise of individual choice and control, even if it is within a governmental program, is part of the appeal of personal accounts. There is still a faction of rugged individualists who would leave the whole problem to personal responsibility. I complained in the last essay that Social Security is tied too closely to work, but this group would double-down on this link. We should get the retirement we earned.

Not many of us hold a pure version of this hard-line view, but the gospel of personal responsibility still appeals to our core liberal values, especially when presented to us in a simplistic way, when we forget for a moment that things can go badly. I think that the notion of responsibility is itself misplaced, that we “owe” seniors dignity in their retirement regardless of how well they prepared for it, but that thought is for another essay. For now, we just need to remember that no individual can fully prepare for all the personal, family, generational, and economy-wide disasters that can happen. That’s why we buy insurance.

Belief in personal responsibility also fuels the suspicion among higher-earners, and those that imagine themselves to be in their class, that Social Security is unfair. First, the expected payouts are too low, not a fair return for the payroll taxes contributed. Some of the interest in investing in the stock market comes from here. Left to their own devices, that’s where they would have put the money. Second, though, taxes supporting Social Security are seen as a taking used, in part, to help less-deserving people, people who did not take responsibility for their own retirement plan. It is, they say, “redistribution.”

That is certainly one of the bogeyman words of the American right, redistribution. If Social Security were a personal retirement investment program, it might be a fair complaint, though the degree of redistribution it effects is pretty small. But it is an insurance program. All insurance is redistributive. If 1000 homeowners insure their houses against fire and one house burns down, owners of the other 999 homes do not complain that they were cheated because they did not receive the fire benefit (they may want a lower premium). Similarly, I don’t feel cheated that I didn’t get a good value from my health insurance because I was not sick this year. That analogy is a bit closer because I probably did consume health care, I did use the insurance just as I will receive Social Security benefits. But others needed it more and they did, in fact, get a better “deal”. So, yes, the poor and the sick get a better “deal” from Social Security. The proper reaction to that is to be thankful that you, too, did not get such a great “deal”—your house did not burn down.

The Next Step

While it ought to be kept clear of Social Security itself, there is an insight in these market-based reforms that we can build on, and that can be part of a broader consensus on policy. We should be looking for ways to expand the ownership stake that ordinary individuals have in the American economy, including using governmental leverage to increase savings for retirement. Exploring whether and how we can build this kind of “ownership society” is definitely worth its own essay, which I am working on.

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That’s all for today. Here’s an overview of the whole Social Security series. I hope you will read them all:

• Part 1: What is Social Security For? [Post 58]

• Part 2: America Aging in Place [Post 59]

• Part 3: Paying for Retirement [Post 60]

• Part 4: When Should We Retire? [Post 61]

• Part 5: Fun with COLAs [Post 62]

• Part 6: Social Security and Poverty [Post 63]

• Part 7: Social Security and Market Risk

<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

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Next week: TBD. Done with Social Security for now, but the next essay may be pretty closely related.

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Notes

Post 63: 19 May 20261

Social Security is America’s best anti-poverty program. This was the program’s initial mission. Its developers wrote that their proposed “old-age annuities are designed to prevent destitution and dependency”—to keep people off “the dole” and to relieve families of some of the burden of eldercare.2 Similarly, in his signing message, FDR said that the retirement provisions were intended to provide “protection to the average citizen…against poverty-ridden old age.”

Social Security does a good job at this. One recent study estimated that 23.5 million Americans would be below the poverty line without the program, including one-in-four seniors. Despite this success, however, about 10% of all seniors still live in poverty. Poverty rates are especially high for single seniors, 18.1%, and especially for single women, 18.6%.3 The renewal of Social Security ought to have, as one of its goals, eradicating this pocket of poverty. It is not the only tool we have to effect this purpose, but it is the main one.

How Benefits are Tied to Work

The structure of the Social Security retirement program sets real limits on how well it can fight poverty. The problem is that benefits are tied too tightly to work history. People’s benefits are based on their lifetime earnings as summarized in a construct called “average indexed monthly earnings” or AIME—I’ll just call this “earnings”.4 Earnings map to benefits in a progressive way, rising almost dollar-for-dollar (90¢) up to an initial “bend point” ($1,174 in 2024). Above this level, benefits rise by 32¢ on the dollar up to a second point ($5,904 in 2024). Finally, earnings above this second bend translate to additional benefits only at a rate of 15¢ per dollar.5 This calculation defines what Social Security calls the “primary insurance amount” or PIA. Think of that as a baseline—it’s what we will focus on. If someone retires early, they receive less than this amount and if they wait to retire, they receive more.6

The sketch below plots this benefits schedule with the 90%, 32%, and 15% “wage replacement” rates and the 2024 bend points. This gives an intuitive sense of how benefits rise with wages. Note that the lower bend point corresponds to a PIA very close to the monthly income implied by the federal minimum wage and the (nearly identical) poverty threshold for a single senior. I indicate this level with a horizontal line. For good measure, I add horizontal lines that correspond to the monthly incomes implied by hourly wages of $15 and $20 per hour.

This basic structure was established in the 1977 Social Security Amendments, part of the transition to a system that updates automatically—a good thing. The replacement rates (referred to as “factors”) have not changed since but the bend points are updated to match the overall growth of wages.7 The parameters did not seem to have any empirical or theoretical basis but were instead chosen for continuity. We should not feel that wedded to any of them.

The “Special Minimum”

As a poverty-fighting tool, the main shortcoming of this schedule is obvious: low-wage earners are entitled to very low benefits. So long as we conceptualize the benefit curve only as a “replacement” for wages, there will be a hard limit on the degree to which the program can reduce senior poverty. This limitation was always apparent, which is why the original program included a “special minimum” benefit for workers who earned low wages over their whole lifetimes. I am not sure if the special minimum was ever sufficient, but as its levels were updated over time for inflation it became defunct. As far as I know, new retirees never qualify for it now. The concept is still on the books and part of the machinery of the program, however; we can still use it to tackle the poverty problem.

If any new retiree did qualify for it, the special minimum would now be worth $1067 per month. Since no one does, plenty of new retirees have baseline entitlements (PIAs) less than that. In 2024, about 10% of new retirees were at the left end of this curve, with PIAs of $1000 or less. This isn’t an exact overlap with the set of seniors living in poverty (also about 10%), but the connection is clear enough.8

The special minimum makes a small conceptual break with the notion that Social Security benefits “replace” but can never exceed wages, but it is still closely tied to work effort. To earn the full special minimum, a claimant would need to have a certain minimum level of earnings for 30 years. Fewer years of work (“years of coverage” or YOC in the parlance) earn prorated minimums, with everyone needing at least 11 valid years to earn anything. One reason the special minimum is defunct is that these YOC thresholds are too high, above the poverty threshold and above what a minimum wage worker would expect to earn. The main Social Security program itself requires only 10 valid quarters to trigger some sort of benefit, and the current earnings threshold is only $7,560 per year. Reviving the special minimum will require redefining a YOC in a more realistic way. Progressive reform proposals like the one led by Bernie Sanders (more below) simply adopt the much lower standard for general Social Security eligibility. This is a good start.9

Progressive Proposals

The main progressive proposal, spearheaded by Bernie Sanders, reinvigorates the special minimum and adjusts the first bend point upward. The first change sets the minimum benefit at 125% of poverty (indexed to wage growth in the future) for anyone who worked for thirty years (see below). Raising this bend point raises everyone’s benefits (by perhaps $200), which raises costs by about 1.6% of payroll in the long run. Raising the minimum benefit is much more affordable, with a long-term effect equivalent to a 0.15% increase in the payroll tax. The sketch below gives a general sense of these changes.10

The Sanders proposal does a lot, but it does not respond to the concerns I have raised in these pages about early retirement pressures and the need to protect the incomes of long-time retirees. It also does not fully respond to the general problem that benefit levels are too strongly tied work experience and lifetime earnings. I’ll close today with a few thoughts about that.

Old Age Security and the Work Incentive

One thing that most seniors who earn low Social Security benefits, or who have low incomes generally, have in common is a low lifetime engagement in the labor force. This has a big effect on the average monthly earnings calculation (the AIME) that formed the horizontal axis in the benefits graph above.

Your AIME is based on your 35 highest-earning years of work history. Here’s the rub: if you have fewer years of covered work history than that, the missing years are recorded, and averaged in, as zeros. This has a huge impact. Retirees at the lower end of the average wage axis are very likely to be there because they have a lot of those zero years. Among those in the lowest quartile of lifetime earnings, only 23% have 30 or more years of wage data in their record. Among the other three-quarters of workers, 93% do. One-in-eight of these workers has fewer than ten years of work history. Folks in this last category often fail to qualify for Social Security at all and, of those who do, most receive benefits as a spouse or survivor, not as retired workers. This puts single people at especially high risk.11

Some “reforms” aimed at saving the Trust Fund cash propose raising the 35-year average to a 38- or 40-year one. A 40-year rule would save the equivalent of 0.5% on the payroll tax, which alone would fund 14% of the long-term shortfall.12 This change, if we were to make it, would have very little impact on high earning individuals but cut benefits for lower-earning ones by an average of more than 4%.13

That is exactly the wrong way to go. We ought to be lowering the number of years used for these computations, at least for some targeted groups. We have to understand who these people are. A recent Congressional Research Service (CRS) study (I cited it above) examined the characteristics of workers with the lowest lifetime earnings. Women comprise three-quarters of this group. And nearly half have three or more children, compared to 30% of other workers. They are also much more likely to report health issues, with 27% reporting a work-disrupting disability at age 62, compared to only 10% of other workers. I would love to know more, but this study, though excellent, is a bit of a fly-over.14

We can take meaningful action is to reduce the penalty that people—usually women—pay for caregiving. Childbearing costs women (again, usually) time on the job and tends to lower earnings generally.15 Several proposals have been made to allow individuals to exempt “childcare years” from the AIME computation. Allowing five “dropout” years for caring for young children would not cost much, the equivalent of raising the payroll tax by 0.24%, and would only make the Trust Fund deficit slightly worse.16 This is not part of the progressive package, but should be. We should also make allowances for others engaged in caregiving. Prospectively, that would not be difficult to do.

When the “special minimum” fails to protect people from poverty, the final backstop in the system is the SSI program, but it is extremely stingy and difficult to qualify for. To receive SSI, individuals must have very low incomes and virtually no assets. Even among the poorest seniors, less than one-in-three qualify and, on average, receive an average of only $560 per month from the program.17 Like the special minimum, the role SSI plays has declined over the years, mainly due to how the program is indexed to inflation. While it is essential to the few who receive it, it is not, and probably never was, a serious response to poverty.

Concluding Thoughts

Social Security benefits are excessively linked to work history and labor-market earnings. Some of the issue relates directly to work time lost due to childcare and other family caregiving. By accounting for those cases, we can significantly improve the program without making the fiscal imbalance much worse. A more difficult problem is that low work “effort” is often associated with health and disability issues. There is a disability system in place and, on paper, it seems adequate, but close study suggests that many “low earners” who then receive low Social Security benefits fall between the cracks of the DI system—they are unhealthy enough to have their conditions affect work, but are not unhealthy enough to qualify for disability insurance. (Or, let’s be honest, are not able to navigate that difficult bureaucratic system.) The whole concept of “early retirement” is infected with this problem; see the discussion in “When Should People Retire?”

The American welfare state is heavily tied to work—I have noted and complained about this before. The vague but pernicious logic of this rests on an assumption that, left to their own devices, poor people will provide only the minimum possible work effort; that is, they are lazy. Handouts induce idleness. The assumption is a thin veil for class- and race-based prejudices, but it is also mostly incorrect.18 It makes the least sense when we are talking about retirement benefits. Do we really think people will not work when they are in their 20s and 30s because they know they will have benefits coming in their 60s and 70s? Or that the promise of a slightly bigger Social Security check at age 70 will spur work ambitions at 30? That is just ridiculous, especially since people now in their 30s are more apt to believe that they will never receive any benefits. The minimum benefit needs to have a much lower lifetime work qualification.

That’s all for today.

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I had expected today’s essay to be about how “progressive” Social Security is—what that means or could mean and how we could make it more so—but I ultimately did not think that was the right question, at least not at the moment. I may still write an essay about that at some point in the future.

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I plan to conclude this series on Social Security next week. Here’s an overview of these essays:

• Part 1: What is Social Security For? [Post 58]

• Part 2: America Aging in Place [Post 59]

• Part 3: Paying for Retirement [Post 60]

• Part 4: When Should We Retire? [Post 61]

• Part 5: Fun with COLAs [Post 62]

• Part 6: Social Security and Poverty

• Part 7: Social Security and Market Risk

<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

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Notes

Post 62: 12 May 2026

This week, I continue my series on Social Security reform by considering how benefits are updated over time for inflation. The next post will focus on the benefit structure, in particular, the degree to which it can be described as “progressive”. I should then be able to wrap up the series by considering the broader question of how Social Security ought to interact with markets.

Originally, I planned to treat cost-of-living adjustments as a minor topic within the broader question of how benefits ought to be set, but—as you will see—COLAs raise some interesting issues of their own. How we set the COLA has an especially big impact on the resources we provide for our oldest retirees. This led me to re-evaluate what the COLA is supposed to do in the first place, and whether we need to modify the approach overall, or at least for long-time retirees.1

COLA Diets

Right now, social security benefits are adjusted for inflation based on the third quarter year-over-year change in the CPI for urban workers (CPI-W). A simple way to save money in the Trust Fund is to go on a COLA diet. And the simplest of these would just shave something off the current calculation. Reducing increases in benefits by 1 point below inflation—which has been proposed—would cut benefits significantly over the long run. Total costs could be reduced by the equivalent of a 2.75% payroll tax or about half of the Fund shortfall.

The thing about changes in COLAs is that they can feel minor in the short run—indeed, if we made the one-point shift right now, the Fund would still run out of money (perhaps a year or so later)—but the effects really add up. In the long run, this cut is draconian. If it had been in place between 2000 and 2025, a 2000 retiree would be facing a benefits cut of one-third.

Mostly, the debate around COLAs occurs in a more confined policy space.

Conservatives tend to advocate shifting from using the CPI-W to the so-called “chained CPI” to calculate the COLA. This construct adjusts the CPI for the fact that consumers make substitutions in their own market basket in response to rising prices. This has the effect of lowering measured inflation as actually experienced by individuals, typically by about three-tenths of a percent per year, on average. If this index had been in place between 2000 and 2025, those retired over this whole period would be receiving about 12% lower benefits now. Not quite the sledgehammer of a 1-point cut, but significant.

The chained-CPI is a theoretical fig leaf designed to mask benefit cuts. I’m not saying it has no basis in theory. People do make these sorts of substitutions, but I am left with two reactions. First, we make a lot of CPI adjustments across different policy arenas and we don’t take this step for any other CPI adjustment. Why would we do so here? If this is better measure of inflation, we should adopt it for all purposes. This connects to my second reaction. The whole point of a cost-of-living adjustment is to capture rising costs of a fixed market basket—the intent is for people to maintain their purchasing power. The fact that they adapt to reduced purchasing power by changing their personal basket of goods is off point. This proposal is the result of a search, not for a more authentic metric, but for a slower-growing index—by definition, the chained CPI must grow slower than the CPI.2

The progressive counterproposal is to use the CPI for elders (CPI-E). This CPI uses a slightly different market basket of goods tailored to seniors. It tends to run about three-tenths of a point per year faster than the CPI-W—though in some years the two are more similar. If we had been using that index since 2000, benefits would be about 5% higher than they are now for people who were retired then.

The chart below shows the path of these CPI-based COLA adjustors since 2000. It plots the CPI-W (current law), the CPI-E, the chained CPI, and the CPI-W trimmed by 1 point. This gives a sense of how big the differences get and how long it takes for them to be significant. Cost-of-living adjustments are time bombs. These changes affect the oldest retirees the most simply because they are subjected to them for longer periods. That segues to my next problem.

Inflation or Quality-of-Life Parity?

Since the proposals to use the chained CPI and the CPI for seniors pull by about the same amount but in opposite directions, a reasonable political resolution to the COLA issue is simply to stand pat. “Compromise” here means doing nothing. But I have a deeper question—or problem—that leads me to wonder whether adjusting for “inflation” is the right approach at all.

That needs an explanation.

The fundamental question here is how Social Security benefits should be adjusted over time in order to treat every cohort as fairly and in as comparable a manner as possible. This is what the first principles of social citizenship require. Since we change the rules of the system from time to time, some intergenerational inequities are inevitable, but we would like to minimize these issues. The problem is that it is not immediately clear how to do that.

The Social Security system uses two mechanisms for aligning benefits over time. The two reflect different aims that ultimately conflict. At retirement, initial benefits are set based on lifetime earnings using a method that is indexed to the average national wage. This procedure solves the problem of how to “add up” earnings that occurred at very different wage-price levels by comparing each individual’s earnings to the national average wage each year. This normalization is based on the standard of living. It works fine. The method ensures that the initial benefits received by each new retiring cohort rise based on the general progress of the economy. My initial benefits reflect where the society has been over the course of my career (and my relative place within it). Because of the normal life cycle of individual earnings, this snapshot is weighed heavily toward the latter part of that career, when earnings are a bit higher relative to that national average. [I’ll go more deeply into how initial benefits are set in my next essay.]

After the initial benefit (the “primary insurance amount” or PIA) is set, benefits increase from year to year based on inflation. That is, we adjust benefits to maintain their purchasing power. This is related to, but very distinct from, the standard of living inputs used to set the PIA. Even if we got the inflation adjustment correct—and it is hard to get it correct—the best we can do is to “lock in” the living standard crystalized in the initial benefit determination.

We hope and expect the standard of living to rise over time, but the inflation adjustment will not account for that. Since (we hope that) real wages will rise over time, subsequent cohorts of retirees will begin their benefits at a higher basis than earlier cohorts. At any given moment in time, this means that older retirees get lower benefits than younger ones.

This is evident in the data. The chart below shows the average monthly benefits received by retirees in 2024. The data exclude those retiring early with reduced benefits (but not those retiring later with those incentives added, which is why this peaks at 70). Retirees now in their late 80s receive about $500 per month less than those who retired within the past ten years.3 Use of the CPI-E deflator would not have changed these results much. My own back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that, had this COLA method been in place for all these retirees, the monthly gap would have narrowed, but only by less than $100.4

The shape of this curve troubles me. We need to evaluate this empirical fact through the lens of social citizenship. Those principles require that everyone has access to the resources they need to fully participate in society. It could well be that the lower cash benefits are not problematic in these terms. Older people may need less income even as they require more non-cash support, especially with medical care and support for daily living. The evaluation must be holistic in this way, beginning with a conception of what “full participation” means for someone twenty years into retirement.

A social citizenship-based evaluation may find that the $3-4 thousand dollar per year difference between does reduce their ability to participate in society fully. We could address this issue by dropping the CPI-based COLA altogether and scaling all social security benefits over time using the same national average wage concept that feeds into the initial benefit calculation. This would raise benefits substantially for all cohorts—I estimate by about $300 per month on average— but, compared to current law, more so for those who are retired for longer. This may be the “correct” answer because its aim would be to preserve living standards relative to a rising national living standard rises rather than purchasing power relative to rising prices. Changing to this model now, however, would be very expensive and help many who are already well resourced. We should only do it if we believe that the general benefit level ought to be higher for everyone (a strong possibility).5

Another approach is to short-circuit the regular cost-of-living adjustment and simply raise benefits for older retirees. Several proposals like this have been made, usually targeting seniors aged 85 or older, or those 20 years into retirement. Early proposals along this line suggested a 5% benefit increase for these older retirees, more recent proposals are more complex but aim in the same direction. In her larger package of reforms, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) has proposed stepping into this benefit increase over five years. This change would significantly flatten the above graph. It would also not be especially expensive, since only about 10% of retiree beneficiaries are this old. It equilibrates at the equivalent of about 0.3% of payroll, making the Trust Fund deficit about 7% worse. This is affordable within the framework I set out in a recent essay, but only if we evaluate this issue as an area of need.

That’s all for today.

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This series keeps expanding. Here’s an overview:

• Part 1: What is Social Security For? [Post 58]

• Part 2: America Aging in Place [Post 59]

• Part 3: Paying for Retirement [Post 60]

• Part 4: When Should We Retire? [Post 61]

• Part 5: Fun with COLAs [Post 62]

• Part 6: Making Social Security Progressive

• Part 7: Social Security and Market Risk

My goal, as always, is to ground the analysis of social policy in the principles of social citizenship that insist that everyone has a comparable ability to participate in society as full and equal members and, consequently, must have access to the resources that this participation requires as a matter of right. These broad principles are reasonably easy to declaim—I do so regularly—but actual policies get messy fast. This exploration of Social Security details makes that pretty clear, but it also demonstrates the value of keeping the deeper principles in view at all times.

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<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

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Notes (verbose notes today)

Post 61: 28 April 2026

Last week, I established that we could restore solvency to the Social Security Trust Fund simply by broadening the tax base for the program; there is no need to raise the payroll tax rate.

Now we move to the cost side. There are only two ways that we can lower costs in the Social Security program: we can cut benefits or reduce the amount of time people receive benefits. Today, I will focus on the second of these: proposals to raise the retirement age. My argument will have the same tone that I struck last week: we should not raise the retirement age. Indeed, we need to raise benefits for some people who retire early as part of a broader scheme of raising benefits for lower-income seniors. We can afford to do that.

Raising the Normal Retirement Age

Several proposals have been floated to raise the normal retirement age (called “full retirement age” in Social Security jargon) to either 69 or 70 as a way of reducing the cost of the program. For those born in 1960 or later, the normal retirement age is now 67. Raising the age to 69 would have only a limited short-term impact because almost all proposals would raise the age over a long period (20 years or more)—this is how we raised it to 67, a process being completed only now—but it would reduce costs significantly in the long run, equilibrating at the equivalent of 1.4% of payroll. That’s a lot, but the Trust Fund deficit is more like 4-to-5% of payroll at its projected maximum in the 2080s, so at best this is only part of the solution.1

This is a bad idea, but it has a logic to it that means we should take it seriously.2 First, a bit of context. The normal retirement age in the U.S. is already at the higher end internationally, two years higher than the median OECD country (65)—no country has a higher age at the moment. The U.S. age is the same as in Australia, Norway, Netherlands, Israel, Iceland, and Denmark, however, so we are not a wild outlier. In addition, we know that many OECD countries either plan to raise their retirement age or are considering that move now, as just about all Western systems try to deal with some long-term fiscal imbalances.

The main argument for raising the retirement age is that life expectancy is rising and therefore retirements are lengthening. This is the trend. The Social Security Administration (SSA) estimates that a man retiring in 2027 (at the full retirement age of 67) should expect, on average, to live to be 83. Women live longer on average; their life expectancy is 86. These figures have risen by five years since 1960 and are expected to rise by another 1.7 years by 2050. From this point of view, raising the retirement age by two years seems reasonable because it keeps the time in retirement more or less constant. Indeed, the proposed increase in the retirement age only offsets the expected future increase in longevity.3

This logic fails on at least two counts. Most obviously, it rests on the assumption that the typical time in retirement is adequate now. I’m not sure I buy that. The combination of a relatively high retirement age and a lower-than-average life expectancy means that the expected number of years of funded retirement is already lower in the United States than in peer nations. An average male retiree in the U.S. can expect about 15.4 years of retirement; the comparable OECD median is 18.5.4

Retiring Inequalities

The deeper problem with raising the retirement age is that doing so will exacerbate the inequalities that find their expression during this time of life. It is not surprising that people who were better off during their working years are better off in retirement. What might surprise some is that the Social Security system contributes to this inequality and, most important for our purposes, that this has gotten much worse over time. This is true, in part, because people who earn more in lifetime wages get higher benefits, a topic for the next essay. But more important than that, those higher wage workers will receive those higher benefits for longer. That has always been true, but the gap in life expectancies between rich and poor has been widening. Look at this comparison of the cohorts born in 1930 and 1960. The averages say that life expectancy rose by about three years during this period but the details show no improvement in the life expectancies of the poorest fifth compared to a seven-year rise among the richest fifth. This widened the gap in expected years of life from less than five years to more than twelve.

Besides being depressing as hell, this has direct fiscal and policy implications. The authors of the study conclude “that Social Security is becoming significantly less progressive over time due to the widening gap in life expectancy.”5 Here’s how that translates into dollars and cents (in 2017). The richest 20% of the 1930 cohort earned 82% more benefits than the poorest 20% of their peers but that figure jumped to 141% for the 1960 cohort. Meanwhile, the real value of Social Security benefits actually fell for the bottom 20%.

We should respond to this situation in two ways. We should raise the net benefits received by the lowest-income retirees, both by tweaking the way we calculate benefits and through changes in the federal income tax code. I plan to address that topic in my next post. More to the point today, we should change the way we set benefit levels for some early retirees (and, in general, reconsider how we think about early retirement). I’ll close with that theme.

Retiring Early

Pressure to raise the retirement age, I reported above, comes partly from the fact that people are living longer. Again, this is true on average, but the averages mask the diversity of individual experiences.

We are working longer too, at least compared to recent history. This is driven by the changing incentives set by Social Security, but also by better health and fewer physically demanding or dangerous jobs. Since 2000, the average retirement age rose by 2 years for men and 1.4 years for women.6 With this, the number of older workers has been increasing. In 2024, 31% of men aged 65-74 were in the labor market. That’s up from 26.7% in 2004.7 The flip side of this is that many fewer people are choosing to retire at the prescribed “early retirement” age of 62 and claim benefits. That shift has been dramatic: in 2023 only 26% of 62-year-old men made initial benefit claims (27% for women); that share was 56% in 2003 (60% for women).8

Those sorts of stats seem to support the move to raise retirement ages—just a case of policy following public norms. The length of working careers has not risen for everyone, however, but has instead been driven by more advantaged workers. This may go against some readers’ prior beliefs, but one researcher concluded that “the gains in the average retirement age since the 1990s have been driven almost solely by those with more education.” Here’s a chart from his study:9

This chart hints at it, but, even at this level of disaggregation, there is no way to distinguish between people who choose to retire early because they have the resources to support that choice and those who find working increasingly difficult because of physical limitations or illness. In a very interesting 2021 study, researchers at the BC Center for Retirement Research used a variety of survey-based sources to estimate the proportion of 62-year-old workers who were healthy enough to be able to work longer. They found stark race- and education- and gender-based patterns.

Their simulations suggest that a higher retirement age is reasonable(ish) for better-educated White workers but unrealistic for the less-well educated or for African American workers. Here’s a taste of their results: 97% of more-educated 62-year-old male White workers were expected to be capable of working to age 64, and 83% would be healthy enough to work until age 70. This still makes a retirement goal of 69 unrealistic for quite a few, but among less-well educated White men, these rates drop to 88% and 56%, respectively. That is, only a small majority in this group, healthy enough to work at age 62, will be capable of working to age 70. It’s much worse for African Americans. Only 76% of 62-year-ols male Black workers are healthy enough to work until age 64, and only 24% would be healthy enough to work to age 70.10

The takeaway from this line of research is that the Social Security benefit structure ought to be sensitive to the health differences among older workers.

Presently, workers who are physically unable to work can qualify for disability insurance (DI) payments. These effectively remove the penalty for retiring early (i.e., the benefit at age 62 is the same as 67, all else being equal).11 Qualifying for DI is complicated and lengthy process that requires extensive medical documentation and only about one-third of all disability applications are approved. Older workers who fail to qualify often take early retirement or continue to work despite poor health. Either way, their risk of poverty is much greater.12

The solution is to establish a disability program that would apply to older workers. Claimants would still need to prove disability but under a more relaxed set of standards based on the specific type of work that the person was doing (not their overall capacity to do any work). Programs like this have been proposed. A February 2025 Brookings Social Security package included an “Early Retirement Disability” system that would be available to workers 58 or older who are no longer physically capable to performing the work they have been doing. The main benefit of the system is that these workers can avoid the benefit penalty associated with early retirement (their benefit level is still likely to be lower than if they worker longer). They estimate that it would have a relatively small effect on actuarial balances, in part because many of these folks already qualify for DI, equivalent to about 0.1% of payroll. They estimate that it would affect about 700,000 additional workers [there are 8.3 million DI beneficiaries right now]. The Peterson Foundation has endorsed the same (or a very similar) proposal.

There is no reason to raise the retirement age13 and lots of reasons to let some workers retire earlier without penalty. We don’t want to make any changes to the benefit system that make the inequalities so prevalent in American society any greater. And we don’t want to balance Social Security on the backs of those who benefit least from it and are least able to afford new tax burdens or benefit cuts.

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This series is a work in progress. It feels like it will have at least two more installments: one on benefit-cutting proposals and one on neoliberal proposals to “reform” Social Security by exposing all of us to greater market risk (note the foreshadowing air quotes). I will be traveling this week, so those posts will likely have to wait until 12 May 2026.

So far on Social Security:

• Part 1: What is Social Security For?

• Part 2: America Aging In Place

• Part 3: Paying for Retirement

• Part 4: When Should We Retire?

  tentatively:

• Part 5: Making Social Security Progressive

• Part 6: Social Security and Market Risk

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Notes

Post 60: 21 April 2026

Last week, I made the general point that the “crisis” in Social Security was mostly attributable to slower than needed growth in wages, and therefore revenues. Since then, I ran into a report from the American Academy of Actuaries that concluded that

I don’t want to lose sight of this basic insight as we debate policies to restore stability to the Trust Fund. Our best long-term response will be to increase wages. In the short-run, we still have a fiscal imbalance to fix using the policy levers to which it is directly attached—the payroll tax and the way that benefits are calculated and taxed—but as we make projections based on these policies, we should be working to undermine them, but this time in a good way by outperforming expectations. A wealthier working population can support more retirees.

Today, I want to talk a bit about the sorts of fixes available to us on the revenue side. We can generate enough income to keep the Trust Fund solvent without increasing the burden on the average person.

The Payroll Tax

Presently, 90% of the revenue for the Social Security program is drawn from a payroll tax of 12.4% on the first $184,500 of wages. This rate is split evenly, 6.2% paid directly by workers and 6.2% paid by employers, but there is little doubt that in equilibrium workers bear the whole burden of this tax, half directly and half through lower wages.2

The chart at top depicts the flows in and out of the Trust Fund as percentages of taxable payroll. The “income rate” is our focus today. You can see that this rate has been fairly constant since the increases enacted in 1983 took full effect. The chart shows that the system produced an annual surplus for the whole period between 1984 and 2009 and an operating deficit since.

It is possible to restore balance simply by raising the payroll tax rate. Eyeballing the chart will give you a rough sense of the rates required on a year-to-year basis: we would have to raise the total payroll tax to something like 14% immediately, to 16% in the next decade, and finally to 18%. The middle position, which the Social Security Administration (SSA) has produced estimates for, would be to raise the payroll tax to 16.4% immediately (in 2026) and permanently. They project that this alone would keep the Trust Fund solvent for the rest of the century.3

That’s a helpful place to start. If this was all we did, we would have to increase the average tax rate on income by about 4 percentage points to keep this ship afloat. But that’s a lot, and we should not do this unless we absolutely have to. To put these rates in the context of the whole system of personal taxation: In 2025, Americans paid about 30% of their total compensation in personal taxes. On this base, a 4 point increase looms pretty large.4

Expanding the Base

We can and should fix the problem without raising the payroll tax at all.

The other major lever in the payroll tax system is the hard cap on taxable wages (now $184,500). That high a salary is reached by only 6.3% of salaried workers, but something like 17% of all wages are untaxed because of it. Simple math therefore says that we can raise the total income available to the fund by 20% (1/.83) simply by taxing all wages. This is equivalent to raising the payroll tax by about 2.5 points without raising taxes on anyone earning less than $184,500. That change alone would not solve the system’s fiscal problem—the exercise above suggested that an overall revenue increase of about one-third is needed—but the SSA estimates that this shift, by itself, would extend the life of the program by 20 years, to 2054.

I note that eliminating the tax cap also eliminates the benefit cap, so this proposal makes the cost problem worse over time. Some proposals would not increase benefits above this (or some higher)5 wage limit. While that change buys more time (about 5 years), it adds an unnecessary layer of complication to the system and introduces a new point of contention about fairness. A better approach is to count these benefits as income and increase the progressivity of the income tax. I’ll return to that theme in a moment.

Because wages and salaries represent only one-half of personal income, another way to increase the revenue base for Social Security is to expand the “payroll” tax to include other income streams. A group of Progressive Democrats, led by Bernie Sanders, have proposed included in the taxable base investment income and S-corp incomes, for example. Including investment income is equivalent to raising the payroll tax by about 1.25 points; adding S-corps income is equivalent to adding about 1 point to the payroll tax.6 Each of these changes, standing alone, would add about five years of solvency.

We have already outlined a workable proposal that could fund Social Security for the foreseeable future without raising payroll taxes. Taxing all wages, including pass-through income from S-corps in the wage bill, and taxing some investment income would, taken together, raise more revenue than raising the payroll tax by 4 points, enough, in fact, to increase benefits as well. This is why the Progressive reform proposals generally do not include any increase in the payroll tax rate, and neither would I.

Payroll Taxes and Income Taxes

Payroll taxes are just one form of income taxes, albeit a very clumsy and regressive one. How should it interact with the basic IRS-based tax?

In 2024, 4.4% of total income into the Trust Fund came from the taxation of Social Security benefits. This share will rise gradually because the relevant tax law does not include automatic inflation adjustments.7 The formula calculating it is complicated,8 but the tax affects about half of all retirees and mostly falls on those whose cash incomes (AGI plus benefits) are greater than $100,000 (see this CBPP analysis). In aggregate, the average tax rate on benefits is very low: the tax yield is only 4.1% of benefits paid.

Right now, the taxation of benefits is equivalent to about 0.5 points on the payroll tax. In theory, taxing Social Security as ordinary income makes more sense. This is how we tax private pension incomes. Under the current tax code, this would raise some revenue. The SSA estimates that this would be equivalent to an additional 0.25 points [about 50% more than presently but still only about 6% of all Trust Fund in-flows]. We should not make this change to improve the Trust Fund balance (though I think a fair system of taxation would do that), but to simplify and gain control over the tax code. Lower-income people ought to pay taxes at lower rates, but the easiest way to construct a fair tax schedule is to combine all forms of income on as close to a dollar-for-dollar basis as we can and apply a progressive exemption, deduction, and rate structure to this simple aggregate. A full examination of this topic will have to wait for another time, but we should not be taxing income differentially based on its source, rather than its value, unless we can make a compelling case for preferring one kind of income over another. People 100% reliant on Social Security should not pay an income tax, not because the source is Social Security, but because their incomes are too low to justify paying any tax. Indeed, they probably ought to pay a negative income tax, effectively raising their benefits that way. I’ll say a bit more about that when I discuss the benefit structure, which I plan to do next week.

There is a deeper issue here. Almost all “social security” (old age and disability pension) systems around the world depend almost solely on payroll taxes for funding. While this has the advantage of creating a secure and dedicated source of revenue for these programs, it ties eventual retirement benefits excessively to the labor market value of claimants. As I have noted, this still leaves too many American retirees in poverty. The flat payroll tax also skews the overall tax system in a regressive direction. We should be analyzing the adequacy and fairness of whole tax system instead of looking at each tax separately. There are reasons to tax wealth (real estate), consumption and other economic transactions, and incomes separately. These events capture different aspects of economic life and individual ability to pay. But if we are honest, we would admit that governments tax events that they can tax, that is, for which they have an administrative tax apparatus, rather than based on a coherent broader theory of taxation. The absence of an overarching framework is most apparent when we tax the same thing twice, which we do for wages. Broadening the base for the payroll tax to include non-wage incomes is the best solution for Social Security’s fiscal problems precisely because it would begin the process of placing this social burden on incomes rather than just wages. A better long-term solution would be to fund more, if not all, of the Social Security program through the income tax itself. But that is part of the larger conversation about how we ought to pay for the social rights of citizenship, a theme I hope to return to in the future.

Next week, I hope to turn to the cost side of Social Security. My focus, however, will not be to argue for cutting costs but for increasing them by strengthening the program.

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Notes

Post 59: 14 April 2026

Last week, I began my approach to Social Security by trying to ground the program in social citizenship principles. The decision to stop working for pay is one that every healthy person ought to be able to make at some point; that is, there ought to be a social right to choose retirement. In my initial brief review of the program, I concluded that the benefits for the lowest income retirees ought to be higher but the average benefit level is probably (could be?) acceptable. I also argued that early retirement ought to be a choice, meaning that those who feel compelled to retire early because of health or other circumstances ought to receive higher benefits than they do now. Social Security ought to be a predictable element of a typical life path, something we can count on and base other life decisions on, institutionalized and universal.

To keep the bites small, today I want to focus on the demographic dimensions of the problem. This will require some grounding in the basic financing of Social Security, but we need to lay that out at some point anyway. Thinking about these structural elements will help us avoid a few of the rhetorical traps that opponents of Social Security want us to fall into. In the end, we cannot forget that this is a social insurance program, a way for all of us to pool some risks that would be difficult for any one of us to bear alone and in doing so, declaw them. We must keep the “social” in Social Security; indeed, we need to make it more “social”.

Social Security is not a Ponzi Scheme

Critics of Social Security like to call it a “Ponzi scheme” because the structure of the program bears a superficial mathematical resemblance to the famous investment scam. There are resemblances. Like a true Ponzi scheme, current beneficiaries (who play the role of the early investors in the analogy) depend on payments made by current taxpayers (new investors) and, like a Ponzi scheme, the system only works so long as there are enough new taxpayers (investors) to sustain it. This, in turn, requires continuous exponential growth in new revenues (investments).

Mathematically, this is all correct, but the analogy still fails. Most obviously, the Social Security system is transparent; there is no attempt to deceive. Beyond that, the big error is that people think “exponential” means “rapid”, but it doesn’t. It is just a math term that refers to compounding processes. The formulae for these include exponents, hence the name, but the rate of growth can be anything at all and can even point to decline.1 For Carlo Ponzi to satisfy his promises to early investors, the investment pool had to grow by something like 10% per year. Since that could never be sustained, the house of cards had to crumble. The Trustees of Social Security2 project that the “explosion” in the number of senior citizens in the United States over the next 50 years (2025-2075) is a bit less than 1% per year. I don’t mean to pooh-pooh the power of even a 1% compounding problem, but this rate of aggregate expansion is slower than in earlier periods—this population expanded at a 2% annual rate between 1950 and 2010, and much more rapidly since 2010. That alone suggests that the problem may be more manageable than we think. Consistent with the relatively slow rise in the absolute number of retirees, the annual costs of the program are projected to rise by about 1.9% per year over the next 50 years (adjusting for inflation). That’s much slower than the 2.9% annual pace that we have been on since 2010.

I spot two interrelated errors in the Social Security debate: an excessive focus on costs and a tendency to isolate Social Security from the rest of the economy. The emphasis on costs flows naturally from an over-focus on demographic ratios. These are important, but there isn’t that much we can do about them. This points people toward fatalistic austerity measures as “fixes”. I’ll get back to demos in a moment.

Another reason we tend to see the crisis as a cost problem is that the revenues on which Social Security depend are quite stable relative to GDP, controlling for the payroll tax regime, and this is expected to remain so for the foreseeable future.3 While it is sensible to evaluate the burden of the tax relative to the whole economy (or the whole payroll), that comparison misses the basic relationship between economic growth and Trust Fund income. We expect inflows to the Fund to rise more or less in lockstep with economic growth. The rub is that the economy is growing at a slower rate. The “intermediate” projection from the Trustees expects GDP to rise by about 1.5% per year over the next 50 years, supporting income growth of only 1.6% per year. That is considerably slower than the 2+% growth rates that we’ve typically experienced over the past half-century. Some part of this general economic sluggishness is driven by slower population growth. This does not negate my point here: we ought to be talking about how we could generate more economic growth and/or more taxable income per worker—for example, by raising the minimum wage. Another half-point per year would be enough to meet the program’s cost needs without any other changes.

Here’s a table with some of the numbers I have just been citing. These are all drawn from various parts of the 2025 Trustees report.4

Demographic “Dependencies”

We are currently about half-way through a major shift in the “dependency ratio” of the senior population (65+) to the population aged 20 to 64. This ratio rose very gradually between 1941 and 2010 before suddenly shifting upward. The accelerated rise should continue for a little more than a decade from now, and then the ratio is expected to rise at a much slower pace for the rest of the century. Since worker taxes pay current benefits, the shift in this ratio is alarming. Won’t this become too great a burden on current workers? Perhaps, but as I just pointed out, that will only be true if the working age population can’t earn enough income to maintain the system. There is a big difference between paying more because you earn more and just paying a higher rate.5 But even just looking at the demographics, these data should not induce panic.

What I just described is called “aged dependency”, but dependency can also be defined more broadly to include both children (everyone aged 20 or less) and seniors. That’s called “total dependency”. [These are terrible terms, but I take them directly from the Trustees reports.]6 An alternative definition that I prefer uses the actual number of workers rather than the working-age population as the denominator in the calculation. As the chart below shows,7 these redefinitions give us very different senses of past and future. The total dependency ratios were often much higher in the past than they are today. This is especially true for the ratio to workers, which was greater than 1 for the whole period before 1976 and which is not projected to reach that level again during this century. Even the narrower definition using working-age population was much higher than at present, especially during the period between 1955 and 1975 when the Boomers were young. The peak during that period (.945 in 1965) also won’t be reached again this century. Now there are a lot of things we can say about the labor markets that generated those “total dependency” ratios, but the fact remains: somehow we managed.

Recasting Inter-Generational Cooperation

My aim here is not to dismiss these issues but to place them in a broader historical and economic context. The demographic transition we are in the middle of is very significant and will require that we change the way we think about how individuals from different generations cooperate with one another over the course of a complete life.

Much is made of the fact that taxes from current workers pay current benefits as if this were somehow inappropriate (see the “Ponzi Scheme” discussion above). The use of the term “dependency” captures the moral tone. The implication, sometimes explicit but always in the air, is that the “fair” approach would create individual retirement accounts within Social Security as if it were an individualized pension system. The Social Security program itself is confused on this point. The original design looked a lot like that individualized plan, but it quickly migrated to the pay-as-you-go system we have now. But benefits are tied to lifetime payroll taxes paid, though not in a linear way (more on that in another post), so it retains the patina of a public pension system while serving as a social insurance program. In theory, this can work. I think it ends up not doing the social insurance function well enough as a result.

Social security shares a developmental flaw that many defined-benefit pension systems have: the burden of the system tends to fall more heavily on later entrants. Early generations pay lower taxes and get full benefits while later generations pay higher taxes and often feel like the benefits they receive are not a good deal. They compare the “returns” to Social Security to what they could have gotten from investing the same amount in a 401K and conclude they were cheated. The fatal flaw in this logic is that it completely ignores the insurance character of Social Security entirely. The “better returns” argument is also entirely post hoc. I don’t know about you, but I do not expect equity returns over the next 20 years to match those of the last 20. They might, but I’ll take the defined benefit, thank you, and share the risk with the entire community rather than bearing it all myself.

That said, it is unfair to have burdens rise for subsequent generations. I understand why this happens: it is politically difficult to set the payroll tax when the sustainable (or permanent) rate is higher than the rate actuarially required for a cohort. It is also not that easy to know what the sustainable level is; these are very long-term projections. It does make sense to use Trust Funds to fund programs that entail very long-term public commitments—citizens need to make long-term plans and would benefit from this signaling—and endowing these funds adequately is almost certainly cheaper in the long-run as well as more fair intergenerationally.

In the case of Social Security, the Boomers got a much better deal than, say, Millennials. One thing we can do about that is to tax Boomer estates upon their death and use some or all of those proceeds to shore up the Trust Fund. A more robust estate tax ought to be part of the larger scheme of social rights and duties, something I will write about at another time. A version of that has been proposed by Sen. Van Hollen. It raises the effective “income rate” by between 2/3s and 3/4s of one percent (in the case of his proposal) without raising the payroll tax at all.8 A move like this would be only a small part of the overall fiscal solution, but it sends the right message to current payroll taxpayers. It also signals to all of us that some of the funding for Social Security can come from general fund sources, a theme worth exploring as we proceed.

That will have to do it for today. Next week I expect to continue my exploration of the Social Security program.

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Notes

Post 58: 7 April 2026

There are two Social Security crises. The first is about funding: The trustees of the program report that the trust fund will most likely be depleted sometime during 2033. Without changes in the law, the program will have to reduce benefits (by 22%) to remain solvent.1 That’s a serious problem, more serious than earlier Social Security funding crises, but it is a solvable one. The second crisis is political, and it is more serious. Americans have little faith that Congress can fix the program’s technical issues.

Large majorities of Americans now believe that Social Security will not be there for them in retirement even though a substantial minority know they will have to rely on it as their primary source of income.2 That’s not a great mix. People are probably right about how much they personally need the program. Surveys of current seniors show that Social Security is the only source of income for more than one-quarter and makes up more than half of the income of two-thirds.3 The result is that a growing number of working-age Americans are losing faith in the idea of retirement. A recent TIAA survey found that 30% of Americans felt that they would not be able to retire at “retirement age” but instead work until physically unable to.4

Though sincere, the personal pessimism about individual retirement options is often exaggerated—I need to say more about that at another time—but the political pessimism is well earned. Congress is as dysfunctional as at any moment in my lifetime. And political negotiations about Social Security are complicated by the fact that neoliberals (mostly in the Republican party) often conceal their deep preferences for privatizing or otherwise crippling the program.5 This lack of good faith inevitably leads to misdirection and misinformation and, yes, pessimism. The only way we can work through the political crisis is to address the practical problems. We need to set out our goals and values and use them to evaluate the technical options and tradeoffs. Once we expose the hidden agendas, the funding problem is not so daunting.

My plan is to approach this topic in several bites. Today, I will set out some basic principles that provide some desiderata for reform. Next week, I plan to review the structural and fiscal issues and outline some of the proposed fixes. I may spend a week describing some of the serious good faith efforts to repair the program. At some point, I’ll rant about some of the not-so-good-faith neoliberal efforts to undermine it. To keep things as simple as possible, I will mostly focus on retirement, that is on the approximately 52 million retirees receiving Social Security right now. I will leave survivors and those on disability for another time.6

Social Security and Social Citizenship

One of the tenets of social citizenship is that we all should have a set of life choices that are similar to others in our community. For those of us without physical impairments that force the issue, one of these choices will be when to stop working for pay. The idea suggested in the TIAA poll cited earlier that some of us will not, or already do not, have this choice is unacceptable, a violation of basic autonomy. Not every society has had the expectation of a healthy retirement, but in our society, it is a life choice we expect, and that means that everyone must be afforded this choice.

The traditional liberal, we would now say “neoliberal”, response to this assertion is that everyone has the right to retire but also the responsibility to prepare for retirement. Neoliberals would not recognize that the mere existence of this right confers a duty on the rest of us to ensure that everyone has the necessary resources. You made your bed.

The understanding of personal responsibility embedded in this view often conceals deep prejudices, is wildly unrealistic about how much any of us can prepare for what life throws at us and, by extension, how much we can depend on the “rugged individualism” they value so highly, is generally too optimistic about financial returns, and, perhaps most importantly, mistakes luck, mostly the luck of birth, as merit. The simple fact is that people often cannot prepare for all the exigencies of old age. Physical infirmity may shift timelines or raise costs, sometimes beyond the point for which anyone could prepare. Morally pressing demands on income may arise. Patterns of economic exploitation, or simple lack of opportunity, may place an absolute limit on our ability to save. And stuff can happen to flatten even the best-laid plans of whole generations: natural disaster, sickness, injury, war, and economic crisis. In the Depression years before the passage of Social Security, a majority of senior citizens lived in poverty.7 Were they all “irresponsible”?

Given all these uncertainties, we can, and did, decide to insure one another against the risk of running out of money in retirement. That was, and remains, the rational thing to do. That’s why, stripped of its ideological baggage, the vast majority of Americans approve of the approach. It is why Social Security is the most popular program of the federal government, and why most people think we should preserve, and even extend, the program, regardless of the nation’s fiscal situation.8

Setting the Level of Security

How generous should Social Security be? There is a constituency for simply accepting some or all of the projected 22% benefit cuts, especially among those who are angry that America does a much better job of taking care of seniors—who get Medicare and have a poverty rate of about 10%—than children—who have no universal health program and whose poverty rate is more like 15%.9 I too would like to see much greater investments in children, but this is not a zero-sum game. I will focus on evaluating the needs of retirees independently and still advocate for the next person.

Social citizenship requires that every person is able to participate fully in the community. It is always difficult to evaluate “adequacy” by this standard, but the concept is simpler among those for whom work is not, and is not expected to be, a primary part of what “participation” means. These folks aren’t preparing for or making big start-of-adult-life choices, so we can focus on whether they have enough resources to live a life that the rest of us would find acceptable. As our guide TH Marshall put it: “to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”10 This means, I think, being able to live as independently as health allows and to meet basic needs without depending on charity. That requires a certain level of income, our focus today, but it also means that we have to set some guardrails around key costs, especially for healthcare and housing. This complication means that we cannot evaluate the income part of these requirements independently.

Arguably, the “typical” Social Security payment—about $1,900 per month in 2024— is reasonable if not completely adequate (since the average one-bedroom apartment rents for about $1500). By definition, though, half receive less than this median amount, with about 20% receiving $1,200 or less, which is close to the poverty threshold.11 We need to worry more about those who receive these lower benefit amounts, especially since these are exactly the people who are unlikely to have other sources of income. For a large swath of middle- to higher-income American seniors average Social Security payments are quite similar, but these payments are very low for the poorest decile of older households. Supplemental Security Income offsets this gap, but not nearly by or often enough. (See chart.)12 The eventual plateau in average annual benefits owes a great deal to the somewhat “progressive” structure of Social Security benefit calculations,13 but this does not help those with very low lifetime earnings. In the long run, raising federal minimum wages would do a great deal to repair this source of inequality, but a strong argument can be made for adjusting the “kink” points in the benefits calculation (more on that is possible next week) and/or simply augmenting benefits at the low end, either through Social Security or SSI, so that no senior citizen lives in poverty. This is a very attainable goal; I’ll try to price that out in the next week or so.

Part of the benefit inadequacy problem can be attributed to the loss of benefits that retirees (essentially) inflict upon themselves by choosing to collect benefits early. In 2024, the median initial benefit received by those retiring early (before their official “full retirement age” or FRA) was about $750 less than those retiring at FRA or later ($1550 vs $2300).14 Some reform of early retirement may also be in order, for several reasons. Most seriously, there is a class of workers who may now be choosing early retirement only because their jobs are too physically demanding. This may be a good option for them, but it may also put them at grave financial risk. We ought to have a way for these workers, without the extended and difficult process of establishing “disability”, to retire early without penalty, or a new program that can build a “bridge” to FRA for them.

There is also some evidence that some people take early retirement in response to poor labor market conditions. This also may be a valid option for them, but the choice to take this path begs the question: what other options ought to have been open?

In general, the timing of retirement ought to be actuarially neutral—whether one gets less for longer or gets more for less time is mostly a wash—but that is only true if the income stream that results is adequate. People ought to have this choice, but a forced choice is not a choice at all. The system ought to be structured so that we are free to choose what is best for ourselves. I again refer to the central tenets of social citizenship: we should all have comparable choices.

Goals for Reform

The principal goal of the next round of Social Security amendments has to be fiscal—that will be the focus of the next post—but the above discussion suggests that the program ought to be strengthened in a number of other ways. Since major Social Security legislation is rare, we should not waste the opportunity. So far, I have suggested that benefit levels are too low for retirees with the lowest incomes and that the retirement age is too high for workers with physically demanding jobs. Reforms in both of these areas will make the fiscal problem worse, and both suggestions go directly against some of the reforms people propose, such as cutting benefits or raising the age of full or early retirement. I believe a balanced approach can address both equity and solvency concerns, but have to leave it here for today.

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Next week (14 April 2026) I plan to continue the discussion of Social Security by reviewing the fiscal situation, possibly listing some of the many proposals for restoring actuarial balance (there are many).

Post 57: 31 March 20261

I want to talk about freedom again.

Freedom is the ability to make undominated choices. It depends on achieving a certain degree of economic, social, and political independence from the will of other actors, both public and private. Following Quentin Skinner, I will refer to this paradigm as “freedom as independence”. As I have explained before,2 this is the traditional or classical understanding of individual freedom; it has its roots in ancient city-state republics, most notably the Roman republic, and is still associated with the public philosophy of civic republicanism today.3

This is not how we usually understand individual freedom. Now, we typically define freedom as noninterference: we are free insofar as no one coerces us to take actions against our wishes. This is the traditional liberal understanding of the idea. It is of relatively recent historical vintage, at least compared to ancient Rome, traceable back only as far as Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and it only became the dominant view during the first half of the 19^th century. It is not so much wrong as incomplete. The noninterference standard is a powerful tool for checking abuses of governmental power, but it is virtually blind to abuses of private power. Hostile to state action, it is a poor philosophy of self-government. More to my point today, traditional liberalism protects the legitimate choices of individuals understood to be intrinsically free but does little to ensure that people have the capacity to make these choices in the first place. When we lack that capability, the formal rights of liberalism, proclaimed to be inalienable, can become empty.

The function of social citizenship is to bridge this gap by ensuring that each of us has a set of life choices that are comparable to others in our community and the personal capability to choose among them. This is about freedom understood in civic republican terms. The social rights of citizenship ensure that each person has the tools they need to achieve and maintain the status of a free person. That means achieving and maintaining the ability to make undominated choices. Let’s talk a bit more about what that entails and whether it is even possible.

Membership and Property

Freedom as independence is a high standard. Our modern commitment to universal equal membership in society imposes a duty on us to meet that standard for everyone. Traditionally, however, civic republicans interpreted the requirements in exactly the opposite way: only those who could meet the standard of independence could be thought of as full and equal members of the community, as citizens. Everyone else had a lower status. In their excellent 1988 paper, Desmond King and Jeremy Waldron explained that in a traditional republic: “in order to be a citizen of the polis, in order to be able to participate fully in public life, one needed to be in a certain socio-economic position.”4

For traditional civic republicans, only an ownership stake in the community can confer full membership status. “Property confers independence” is the central idea, writes the scholar JGA Pocock.5 The American revolutionaries were all in on this brand of republicanism. Pocock, again, writes that they were “peculiarly concerned with the material basis of that autonomy.”6 This is most obviously manifest in Jefferson’s concept of a republic of yeoman farmers. Drew McCoy, in his valuable analysis of Jeffersonian ideas, concluded that

at the core of republicanism was an intense concern with the autonomy or “independence” of the individual, and particularly with the material or economic basis for that autonomy.7

This idea is deeply rooted in the American mind. It was reaffirmed in the Homesteading Act (1862). And it was reflected in the demands for land redistribution made by radical Republicans and African American leaders during Reconstruction. Its echo is still evident in the value that Americans place on home ownership today.8

Where does this leave us?

We now assert that everyone is an equal member of the community, endowed with equal rights. That is the liberal vision. Unequal economic power, and especially the persistence of a social class with very low levels of economic power, expose these assertions as lies. The highly vulnerable do not have a set of life choices that are comparable to others in the community: a lack of resources limits the range of options that play out across a whole life, and patterns of dependency limit ordinary everyday decisions.9 The ancient republican wisdom is still correct: equal status requires personal autonomy. But does that have to be rooted in property?

Historically, the only reasonable substitute for propertied independence was, as far as I can see, military service. In many republics, both ancient and early modern, these two paths amounted to the same thing because soldiers were responsible for bringing their own weapons (and horses, etc.) to battle. But soldiers without property have frequently staked their claims for recognition upon their service, implicitly affirming Aristotle’s dictum that “those who possess arms are the citizens”.10 For example, in his history of suffrage in the United States, Keyssar concluded that “Nearly all of the major expansions of the franchise that have occurred in American history took place either during or in the wake of wars.”11

I believe that service—but not specifically in military roles—is part of the overall solution, part of the pathway toward true universal membership. I have written about this some in the past, but need to return to it.

Social Rights and Personal Autonomy

This leads to the central question for On Social Citizenship: Can any scheme of social rights form an adequate basis for the sort of personal autonomy that can support full participation in society? This may be the central philosophical challenge for social citizenship. As a practical matter, we can restate it this way: Can we mobilize public resources to foster individual autonomy? The traditional liberal view is that reliance on state resources can only foster dependency on the state, which will inevitably lead to a state-based threat to liberty. For example, when John Stuart Mill advocates universal education, he accepts that the state may need to fund it, at least for poorer residents, but explicitly rejects state provision of that education as dangerous to liberty.12 With this tension in mind, let me make a few comments.

Restated in more general terms, the classical (republican) theory asserts that individual autonomy is rooted in control of productive resources. The focus on land merely reflects the fact that, for most of human history, land was nearly synonymous with productive capacity. The exception for military service noted above suggests that the deep driver can be stated in a more generic way: membership is grounded in the capacity to make valuable contributions to the community. For now, I’ll stick to the link to productive capacity.

But we all control a critical productive resource: our own labor. Or, we should. My claim that we are unequal in practice rests on the suspicion that, to an unacceptable degree, this is not true. Traditionally, suspicion of wage labor was based on the idea that wage workers were too dependent upon their employers to make independent economic or political judgements. I think we (mostly) reject that now. Instead, our central social justice concern is that this dependence limits the range of life choices available to workers, especially to reject wage offers. Essentially, actors with economic power of us, including employers, landlords, and sellers, shape and restrict our choice sets.

This perspective suggests the centrality of two sets of social rights that ensure that individuals have control over their own labor, concerning both what they do and when they do it. This control will never be absolute, sometimes we just need the money, but the standard, as always, is that everyone has a similar level of autonomy in this critical area.

The first is education. Access to an adequate education has two closely related functions. First, it raises the value of the labor we have to sell. Probably more importantly, education increases the range of options available to individuals and therefore their flexibility as economic agents. This is especially true if education is understood as a facility for lifetime learning (not one-time training).

The second critical set of social rights are the constellation of labor rights and worker protections. These have the general effect of reducing worker vulnerability to pernicious, arbitrary, or capricious employer decisions, either by directly limiting the range of choices that capitalists may have (by setting minimum standards for wages and safety, for example) or by increasing worker leverage (through collective bargaining power).

By highlighting these rights, I don’t mean to reduce the importance of the full constellation of social rights. Employment and our occupational identities just occupy a central place in most of our lives (arguably too central a place). The other social rights also secure our individual places in the community and protect individual resource endowments. Most can also be defended using the same employer-based logic used above, but protecting individuals from exploitative practices by landlords, for example, or health care gatekeepers. Each social right protects the ability of individuals to make autonomous choices in some domain and these capacities complement one another.

Why Not Universal Ownership?

We could take a different tack, and it is worth a few words.

Here’s a restatement of the problem: the ancient wisdom says that only those who control productive resources can be equal members of the community, but our modern belief is that we are all equal members of the community. We do not all control productive resources, so if both these statements are true, there is a contradiction.

The socialist solution to this problem is to say that we all own or otherwise control collectively those productive resources deemed critical to the community. The communist solution is to extend that logic to include virtually all productive resources. Traditional liberalism asserts a universal right to own productive resources but does not find unequal control of these resources problematic.13

Most of the social rights I have described in this publication approach this problem by finding bases for individual autonomy that are grounded in human capacities rather than control of capital. These capacities center on the value of human labor, as noted above, but importantly, labor should be understood here as including valuable care-giving and community-building work not priced in the marketplace. Mostly, this strikes me as the right approach. It does little to limit the reach of markets. Virtually all of us want to do meaningful work and, for most of us, that work will involve economically productive activities that have value in the marketplace. That is, putting humans first is not “anti-capitalist”. The long-standing assumption that workers will not work unless forced to by necessity is false. We all want a meaningful life that embraces membership at various levels of community. For most of us, meaningful work is central to that. Economists asserting otherwise just expose their class- and race-based biases—they find meaning in their work but these others do not?

That said, there are pro-capitalist labor systems that complement the social rights approach. Since the early industrial age, these have been advanced by advocates of “labor republicanism” among others. Key Black Reconstruction leaders, for example, as well as some unions at the time like the Knights of Labor, sought to replace simple wage labor with cooperative production arrangements, either employee ownership or profit-sharing. These structures recreate the stake that classical republican theory requires.14 John Stuart Mill, as part of his larger rhetorical response to socialist appeals, similarly proposed profit-sharing and employee ownership.15 These mechanisms are used in American business today, but they are not common (I don’t know enough about this). We ought to adopt tax and regulatory structures that promote them.

Finally, I have raised the possibility that a full scheme of social rights would also increase the public’s access to capital, especially for entrepreneurship. Providing a “public inheritance” and other forms of support for small business start-ups is one place where the theory of social citizenship explicitly acknowledges the classical ideas about the connection between control of productive resources and membership. Closely related to this are rights that protect smaller entrepreneurs (and by extension all consumers) from monopoly power.16

These kinds of policies are not inconsistent with the broader social citizenship agenda and should be pursued as part of the overall approach.

That’s enough for now.

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Notes

Post 56: 24 March 2026

The current California election for governor could produce a wildly undemocratic and silly result, or it might not. If everything works out this year, it will owe as much to luck as anything else. Eventually, the California election system will produce a result that will leave a majority of voters there very unhappy. It must be repaired.1

Here’s the background: California uses a nonpartisan “jungle primary” system in which candidates from all parties participate and the two leading candidates advance to the general election. The primary election is scheduled for June 2 and the general election on November 3.

The pie chart above shows a snapshot of the race as of early March. In this most recent available poll, the two Republicans primary were out-polling all eight Democrats in the race. If that result holds, California voters would have these two as their only options in the final election, despite the fact that together they have the support of only about one-third of the electorate. I don’t think that anyone would find that result small-d democratic.

I am not making a partisan complaint. Depending on the strategic choices of candidates and voters, this set-up could generate a final election pitting the two Republicans (Hilton and Bianco) or matching the two leading Democrats (probably Porter and Swalwell). Which of these obtains, or if a more traditional D-R contest results, rests on a knife edge. It may depend on the stubbornness or funding of one candidate. For example, if Villaraigosa and the other candidates polling below 5% drop out, but the other four Democrats actively campaign to the end, it could well happen that four candidates (two Republicans and two Democrats) will be within one or two percentage points of one another (but all below 20%). This means that none of the candidates will have a mandate and the result will really feel random. If, on the other hand, Becerra also withdraws, then a D-D final becomes quite likely. But that depends on Becerra’s ego or, alternatively, on Democratic voters arriving at a common strategic vision. I’ll return to that thought in a moment.

A one-party final election is unacceptable whether it is D-D or R-R. In both these scenarios, the general election will serve more as a primary. The excluded partisans will either vote for the candidate they deem more moderate or, more likely, stay home. One could argue that this makes the jungle primary a centripetal or moderating system, and this is how it was sold to voters originally,2 but that argument ignores the enormous difference between the parties. Politically, all of the Democratic candidates are much more similar to one another than they are to either Republican, and vice versa for the two GOP candidates. For virtually all Democratic voters, neither of the two Republicans is “close” enough to them ideologically to be an acceptable candidate.3 Indeed, the result of an R-R general election is most likely to be an early (and successful) recall effort. The situation is similar for Republican voters; the “pro-business” and therefore possibly acceptable candidates are unlikely to finish in one of the top two positions.4

If the idea of the jungle primary is to create a non-partisan nomination process, it fails. Democratic and Republican voters act as if two simultaneous, but otherwise traditional, party primaries are taking place on one ballot. This is why the partisan split between the candidates in the pie chart, after we make some assumptions about how to allocate the “other” slice, matches the party split among voters, which is roughly 57% to 34%.5 There isn’t that much mingling. The truth is that the nuanced differences among left-leaning candidates are mostly lost on right-leaning voters and vice versa. For loyal voters of the other party, those other candidates are close to interchangeable. But like two groups that don’t get along holding events at the same time at the same venue, it can get messy.

The general hope, if not belief, is that awareness of the problem I am highlighting here will induce some candidates to “do the right thing” and withdraw to throw their support behind one candidate. The problem with that plan is one outsized ego can destroy it, especially if the polls are close or volatile. Again, that may not happen in 2026, but it eventually will. Barring responsible candidate behavior, the secondary hope (or maybe this is the primary hope) is that voters will make their selections “strategically”. That is, they will decide not to vote for their most preferred candidate in favor of one of the “top” candidates.

Any electoral system that requires voters to make calculations like this is broken and should be fixed.

Democracy works best when voters have a range of choices (more than two parties) and can express their candidate preference sincerely without fear of “wasting” their votes or, worse, inadvertently advancing their least preferred candidate. It is bad when we are forced to become strategic voters. This is true, in part, because people will make mistakes when they make the necessary calculations, again, especially if the race is close or the polls volatile. The system, after all, asks us to make our choice based on what we think other voters will do.

But even if we were always good at this sort of thing, voting for less preferred candidates obscures the true preferences of the electorate. It reduces the amount of information voters send to the parties and to potential future candidates by making some types of candidates appear much less attractive than they really are, and some more. This starves the system of the feedback it needs to respond to popular preferences. But that, practically speaking, is what democracy is. We want more democracy, not less. As it is, this is a recipe for propping up “establishment” candidates who are not nearly as popular as election results suggest. The party (whichever party) is then blindsided by the its inability to excite support in the general election as the people steadily lose interest.

These desiderata—that there should be a wide range of candidates and that voters ought to express their sincere preferences among them—are not pie-in-the-sky. It is not too much to ask. The technology is readily available to run elections that will do these things. That technique is “instant run-off” voting (IRV), sometimes called “ranked-choice” voting. This system eliminates the primary or preliminary election entirely by asking voters to rank order candidates. Ballots are counted iteratively, simulating a number of run-off elections, by eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes one at a time and redistributing their ballots to voters’ next choice candidates. The procedure repeats until one candidate receives a majority of all valid ballots cast.

Below is a simple flowchart explaining the system. I have written about it before, so I will not offer a general defense of the method here. It could easily be used in place of the jungle primary system that California has now. My own preference would be to have parties nominate candidates through whatever party-centered process it wishes to employ at the district, state, or even national level, and then allow voters to choose among these nominees in a single IRV election that produces a clear majority winner. This does not seem like rocket science to me.

Today’s post was a break from my usual focus on social policy. I’ll get back on that beat next week.

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Notes

Post 55: 17 March 2026

Today’s post leans heavily on a study from the Opportunity Insights team (Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman). Here is a link to the work.1

In my recent essays on the problem of advantage I made a distinction between a “zone of universal access” in which a robust set of social rights can ensure a rough equality of opportunity and a much smaller number of highly sought-after positions for which parental (over?) investments in their children are still very likely to prove decisive, regardless of how generously we set the floor of social minima. This sets up today’s question:

How should we structure the competition for positions of social, economic, and political leadership in our society?

In an earlier essay, I suggested that the best we can do in response to this problem is to limit the returns to winning this tournament, specifically that we could change our winner-take-all culture (somewhat) and, barring that, simply tax the rich appropriately. I stand by these suggestions but admit that they are an inadequate response: they fail to satisfy my often-repeated maxim that every person ought to have a set of life choices comparable to others in the community. That’s what it means to fully participate in society, which is what those who are full members of the community do. When I talk about these choices I mostly focus on ordinary things—career choice, family formation, choice of residential community, and so forth—these are choices that everyone ought to be able to make. But fully participating means that everyone also ought to have comparable access to leadership positions in our society. Status equality requires that everyone has this access too.

Representation and Reward

What does it mean to have equal access to rare positions? Obviously, not everyone can hold one of these “leadership” roles. In this domain, we can only evaluate progress toward equality in statistical ways for broad populations. This is a shift from the individualistic and universalistic approach to “equality” I employ elsewhere. Angst. Here is my interpretation: Any one of us is very unlikely to be qualified for any given leadership role, regardless of how attractive it is to us, but any large cross-section of Americans, grouped by any characteristic whatsoever,2 ought to produce about the same proportion of people in these roles. This is what the principle of equal membership requires, not to mention the axiom of human equality. With reasonable adjustments,3 it ought to apply to every position. Think of it this way: The “top” one percent of name-your-group ought to be comparable to the top one percent of any other group. This is the implicit assumption we make when we complain about representation. The extent to which this is not true is a direct measure of our collective failure to provide equal opportunity, even when we cannot be certain that this conclusion applies to a particular person.4

Scarcity is the critical characteristic of the positions we are talking about; they are the skinny tail of the normal curve. How skinny depends on the absolute number of positions involved. Many of the most rarefied positions come at the end of a long road of specialization and highly-tracked advancement, like the path to be one of 50 (give or take) astronauts at any given time or one of 500 Fortune 500 CEOs. I want to focus on the special set of “elite” career-starting positions—slots at highly selective colleges (especially), prized internships, or the most coveted first jobs—that are often the first steps down those career tracks.

Just how often is shocking. The graphic I open with, drawn from an Opportunity Insights study (Raj Chetty et al, August 2025), shows how many of society’s leaders attended one of the 12 Ivy-plus institutions.5 These schools produce 1.1% of all bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. but 13% of those earning in the top 0.1%, 12% of those Fortune 500 CEOs, 25% of U.S. Senators, and a whopping 71% of Supreme Court justices since 1967. More broadly, the researchers found that attending an Ivy-plus school increased individual incomes by over $100,000 per year compared to attending a flagship state school. One possible step toward greater access would be to reduce the gatekeeping role these institutions clearly serve. I will return to this thought below.

Advantage and Privilege, Again

Winning the merit-based competition for these elite slots often hinges on small marginal advantages. The balance could be tipped by a little extra tutoring or coaching, one or two extra educational trips or experiences, early access to a new technology, or access to a specific set of adult conversations. Rising adults with these marginal advantages are genuinely more impressive candidates in the competition for slots in college, the prized internship, or the most coveted first job. They have more “merit” or at least present as more meritorious. In an earlier post, I shared the basic profile of how striking the relationship between parent income and children’s SAT scores was. I re-post it here:

The typical Ivy-plus admitted student will be drawn from the part of this chart highlighted in reds and virtually all admits from the 1200-plus range plotted here. [We can argue about tests at another time; for now, accept that they are a decent observable proxy for academic preparation.] This gives a sense of what lower-income students are up against. An earlier Opportunity Insights study, looking at the 1980-82 birth cohorts, found that 14.5% of all Ivy-plus students were drawn from families in the top 1% of incomes but only 13.4% were drawn from the bottom 50%, and only 3.8% from the bottom 20%.6

But it’s worse than that. The new study also found that, even among those with strong test scores, students from higher-income families have a substantial admissions advantage. This was the most devastating finding from the research. They attributed it to three main factors.

The first, and most important, is legacy preferences. This is privilege, pure and simple. They conclude:

among students from families in the top 1% with test scores above 1500, legacy students are admitted to an Ivy-Plus college at roughly 4 times the rate as non-legacy applicants with comparable credentials.7

There is no good reason to have preferences for legacy applicants and if these schools dropped them very little would happen. MIT, the one Ivy-plus institution that does not employ this tool, does fine, thank you. So would the other eleven. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the eleven seem committed to defending this last relic of aristocracy and privilege.8

The second factor is the practice of recruiting athletes. It surprises some people to learn that recruited athletes are more likely to be from higher income families (and also more likely to be White, but that’s a different essay) than the non-athletes in their class. It is not a secret among the wealthy, however. Many rich parents encourage their children to specialize in “prep school” sports, a category that now includes hockey, as an admissions hack. As a result, Chetty et al found that 13% of the students from the top 1% were athletes, compared to 5% for those from the bottom 60% of the income distribution. (Note how big a share of the class this is.)9 I am admittedly a nerd, but I don’t know why colleges engage in this athletic arms race. Can’t we just relax a bit?

Finally, students from higher-income families received higher “non-academic” ratings in the admissions process than their middle-class peers. These ratings are supposed to capture the less easily observed characteristics of value, such as leadership, dedication, teamwork, and so on. The core of these evaluations are drawn from recommendations provided by teachers and other high school staff. That seems neutral, but wealthier students are much more likely to attend elite private high schools and have teachers who know them well and who are committed to the college placement process. The students are drawn from the same social circle as their prep school teachers and relate easily with them. Public school students can’t get this sort of attention. This last issue highlights the fact that, in practice, it can be difficult to distinguish merit and privilege. Those teacher recommendations are real, and are evidence of merit, but the recommendations from different high school universes are just not comparable, so admissions evaluators get tricked. This is a difficult area. The research suggests that these kinds of inputs are a good way for identifying talented lower-income students, but they clearly work against the typical middle-class one. Overall, admissions committees probably ought to lean on high school teachers less, unless they believe the student is from a low-resource background (lower family income or poorly performing high school).

These recommendations—dropping legacy altogether, reducing the number of recruited athletes, and focusing “non-academic” evaluations to favor lower-income students only—would respond to the Opportunity Insights findings, but these would not erase the fundamental pipeline problem that the SAT/ACT chart above highlights. Building a class that represents the diversity of America is a tall order.

Elites

This makes me want to back up a bit and ask some more basic questions about the concept of an “elite” at least as it relates to the critical question about college admissions. I want to say three things: Our conception of “elite” is too restrictive and small. We need to overcome our bias toward private, and against public, institutions. And we need to figure out how to reduce the amount of tracking in the system.

The stats I opened with make my first point. The Ivy-plus schools produce barely 1% of all BA degrees in America. How did we get to the point where “elite” is so small? WEB DuBois famously advocated for focusing on the “talented tenth” who could assume leadership roles in the Black community. That was in 1903, when only 3% of all Americans held Bachelor’s degrees and obviously a much smaller proportion of African Americans. DuBois’s threshold was criticized as elitist but it does set a much more reasonable standard for what the “leadership cohort” ought to be. I think we can work with a ten percent rule.

The implicit definition of elite as the top one percent, or something very nearly as small, is artificial. My suspicion is that we keep the number of “elite” positions in college small because this setup serves the interests of the most advantaged classes well. As we have seen, they tend to win the resulting hyper-competition, which helps to replicate and extend their advantage.

When we talk about higher education, can we please talk about something other than the Ivy-plus schools? (Yes, I know that’s what I am talking about, but our fixation on this small group is debilitating.) A 2014 Vox article found that the New York Times wrote about Harvard University, one school, more in 2013 than all community colleges combined, that’s one thousand or more institutions. I suspect that if we repeated this exercise today the results would be similar or worse.

The fact that elite colleges and universities are almost all private helps perpetuate this artificial scarcity. Private schools find it difficult to expand, though they do so in fits and starts, and therefore tend to become more and more selective over time. All the Ivy-plus schools are private, but so are 18 of the top 20 ranked schools (US News). Berkeley breaks into the list at 16, Michigan at 20. Expanding “elite” to something more like a talented tenth necessarily means shifting our focus back to public institutions. Overall, the 50 U.S. flagship publics enrolled 1.2 million undergraduate students in 2018, according to an Urban Institute study; that is roughly 10% of all full-time U.S. undergraduates.10

What’s stopping us from committing to public schools? Right now, I would argue, the best students at the better flagship publics are certainly comparable to their Ivy-plus peers, and the faculty are drawn from virtually the same pool. The publics are much larger, however, and somewhat less selective. This erodes their “elite” character. A few numbers frame this: Harvard has about 7,000 undergraduates overall and admitted only 3.4% of applicants for fall 2024. Berkeley has 33,500 undergraduates and admitted 11.6% that year. The scale of publics mean that there is room on campus for as many or more excellent students as at private schools. But we do not perceive excellence in terms of raw numbers; rather, it is all about selectivity. We don’t have to buy the selectivity-equals-quality formula, though. We can shift our mindset to appreciate big institutions that enroll a core group of “elite” students and maybe some not-so-elite but still pretty good students.11

Geography figures in here as well or I should say regional cultures. The top ten public universities, according to U.S. News, include three California schools and are clustered in the bigger states outside of the Northeast—Michigan, UNC, Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Georgia. In the Northeast, the educational establishment is private, and public schools have been undervalued for generations. This, I think, has an impact on our national view of public institutions. Breaking our current model of “elite” education means that schools like SUNY (Binghamton I suppose), UMass, and Rutgers must become more attractive to the best students.

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This leads me to my final thought. Expanding our sense of what constitutes excellence in higher education would help to erode the level of tracking currently embedded in the system. The post-college advantage attached to an “Ivy-plus” education is simply too great and this needs to change. First employers rely too much on the selectivity of the college admissions process to filter their own hiring. That behavior is deeply embedded and will take a lot to change, but the first step is a broad national refocus on public higher education and expanding the size of the pool of presumptively competitive young people.

Much more can be said about all this, but I will leave it there for now.

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Post 54: 10 March 2026

Last month, I wrestled with the difficult problem of what to do about the “fact of advantage” especially the advantages we gain because our parents make extra investments in our future. I admitted at the end of that essay that my analysis reeked of “second-best-ness”, an implicit promise to keep at it. Today, I’ll try to move the ball a bit further along, but I suspect I will revisit this set of issues many times.

A Hard Problem

The negative social impact of parents helping their children is one of the oldest problems in public philosophy. To perfect his Republic, Plato abolishes the family as an institution altogether. That was 2400 years ago. Always present, the problem is particularly vexing in the liberal age. We now believe that parents ought to have the right to raise their children as they see fit, including making legitimate1 investments in their future. This is a basic freedom, as fundamental as the choice to have children in the first place, so we are obligated to accommodate it even though the subsequent inequality carries social costs. This is why I call this form of advantage a “fact”—we just have to deal with it.

In a terrific analysis of this terrain, James Fishkin concluded that treating the family as “private”—respecting the autonomy of parents to make decisions on behalf of their children—is inconsistent with equal life chances for individuals. Freedom for parents means unequal opportunity for children.2 Even though John Rawls describes society as “a fair system of cooperation over time between generations”, he admits that the intergenerational problem “subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests”. He, too, is forced to conclude that “the family may be a barrier to equal chances between individuals”.3

This is what we have stepped into. In my initial response, I made a distinction between a broad but undefined set of life choices that we can and should insulate from advantage—a “zone of universal access”—and a relatively small number of highly sought after positions. The dichotomy here, admittedly a bit forced, is between a set of opportunities to which most of us can aspire—a college degree or other valuable training leading to a career or trade, a family, perhaps our own small business—and those leadership or high status opportunities that, because of their scarcity, can only be open to the best and brightest. Those parental investments will skew the latter competition regardless of how well we set the universal resource floor, which is why I want to treat these two groups of opportunities separately. Most of my comments today will focus on universal aspects. I will return to the problems raised by extreme competition in another post.

Two Intergenerational Modes

Parents helping their own children could present an inequality problem for two reasons. First, some parents will not be well positioned to provide comparable assistance, leaving their children at a permanent disadvantage. Our collective response to this situation can only be to ensure that an adequate palette of resources, starting with high quality pre-K education, is universally available. A committed effort to raise the floor across the board will do a great deal to limit the scope of parent-based advantage, even if the most well-positioned parents will still be able to make extra investments that may prove critical in the competition for the most prized leadership positions. Incredibly modest educational investments in disadvantaged children have been shown to have enormous long-term payoffs; what would a real society-wide effort reap?4 Can we even imagine a society like that?

But the above presupposes that parents who do not make “extra” investments in their children are simply unable to—they either lack the money, the time, or the skill (mainly knowledge of academic pathways). A second, less talked about, source of inequality arises when parents choose not to make these investments. There are also two flavors of this. The first arises when the parental desire to replicate their own way of life necessarily limits the child’s lifetime options. I am thinking of separatist communities like the Amish, but choice-set constraints could in theory be introduced by any parent with a strong view about the right way to live, especially if they use tools like homeschooling to enact their vision. While this is an extreme case, it exposes a basic flaw in the way we think about the relation between parents and children in a liberal society. Truthfully, all parents probably do this to some degree, though many of the constraints they introduce are unintentional.

A more quotidian version of this involves parental views about post-secondary education.

The standard bourgeois assumption is that parents will do what they can, financially and physically, to help their children go to college. The entire financial aid system, such as it is, is built around this assumption: the FAFSA system and its private analogs are designed to calculate what parents can afford to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. This effectively treats the “family” as the client for post-secondary education, with the parents in charge.

The Problem of “Nontraditional” Students

There are a lot of problems with this.

First, parents are not obligated to pay for their child’s college education.5 The whole edifice is built on an unenforceable norm, leaving students utterly dependent on their parents to participate in the system as designed. But post-secondary students are adults, almost all of them anyway, not minors. This dependent relationship, however, means that these students must either not be adults or not be free persons. If that sounds stark, it is. Freedom is the state of social, economic, and personal independence necessary to make reasonably autonomous life choices. In liberal philosophy, we more or less ignore private threats to our freedom and fixate on public ones. So far when I have written about this, I have talked about the threat posed by private economic domination, by employers, landlords, sellers and buyers who have too much private power.6 It is uncomfortable to say so, but this same logic holds for parents. Parents have too much power, or can, and abuse of this power is a direct threat to the liberty of young adults.

I am not pointing to an exceptional situation, but the normative assumptions are so strong here that we rarely probe it directly. A 2011 Pew survey was closely on point, however, when it found that 37% of parents agreed that “Parents paying for a child’s college education” was “not really a responsibility”.7 This matched a 2005 poll asking the same question, which was consistent, in turn, with the 1980 “High School and Beyond” survey in which only 55% parents thought paying for college was mainly their responsibility. These results can be hard to interpret, and none of the studies is about this question, but the surveys suggest that substantial minorities of American parents, in as many as one-third of families, do not see paying for college as their responsibility. Students, for their part, usually do think that parents are responsible.8

Since the aid system assumes that recent high school graduates will be their parents’ dependents, disagreements between parents and students about who should pay for college can leave students high and dry. Students’ only options are to borrow their parents’ expected contribution or pursue post-secondary education as “independent” students. The latter is a technical category that usually requires being 24 or older (or meeting other qualifying conditions).9

Almost all public discourse about college focuses on the so-called “traditional” or dependent students who enter college directly after high school and whose parents contribute directly to the cost of their education. That seriously misrepresents who college students are. In academic year 2020, the last year for which I have decent data, 43% of all undergraduates were independent. This percentage appears to have been higher in the recent past, with about half of all college students having independent status between 1996 and 2016.10

Achieving a college degree is much harder for “nontraditional” independent students. In the last snapshot I saw about this, the six-year Bachelor’s degree completion rate was 45% for dependent students but only 9% for independent students. Nearly half of all independent students leave school with no degree or certificate at all. We are insufficiently attentive to this barrier to educational attainment. The best general-purpose student data system we have, the National Student Clearinghouse, does not keep track of dependent status at all, as far as I can tell.11

I am only beginning to scratch the surface of these data, but they clearly show that, even among those committed to the idea of pursuing a college degree, there are two constellations of opportunity.12

Regular readers should recognize my mantra of social citizenship: every person ought to have a set of life choices that are comparable to others in society and the ability to choose among them. We obviously fail to do this now, and probably always will fail, but we can do much better.

Even this cursory sketch suggests that almost all our public discussion about post-secondary education focuses on perhaps one-third of all students. My informal breakdown of rising American adults looks like this:13

This is a sketch of three distinct and not much overlapping opportunity zones inhabited by Americans. Meaningful progress towards full and equal membership for all Americans will require removing the divisions reflected in this chart and creating universally accessible pathways from adolescence to adulthood. This starts, I think, with the distinction between dependent and independent students. That will require rethinking the entire financial aid system, something I have written about before; I will return to this theme later in 2026. I will not be arguing that all Americans must go to “college” but these data show that a majority of Americans aspire to do so. This is a major reason why we ought to treat access to college as a social right. Most meaningful careers in the modern economy require some training beyond high school, so we ought to be routinely tracking and promoting all forms of post-secondary education, not just “college.” The residual share of Americans not completing high school is also too large. I would argue that merely completing the obligations of citizenship requires a high school diploma. There is no reason why we cannot shrink this percentage significantly (though I do not know what the effective maximum is).

Universal access does not mean homogeneity. High school is “universal” but high school curricula are more diverse than those in primary school. The forms and content of post-secondary training will be more diverse still. Finally, while it is convenient to think of this education as applicable to the transition to adulthood only, and most of these investments will be made at that time, whatever opportunity system we create ought to be able to serve people across their complete life.

More to come on this.

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Notes (edited)

Post 53: 3 March 2026

Today, a moment to regroup.

On Social Citizenship is primarily about how we should respond to the concentration of economic power that arises from material inequality. That is, I mostly write about the abuse of private power. But private power did not kill Renee Good or Alex Pretti. That was an abuse of public power, one of many committed by this administration, at home and abroad. Those abuses are, and always will be, the greatest threat to individual liberty, so much so that my arguments about private inequality can seem pointless. Obviously, I don’t think that’s true, but still, I feel compelled to defend the current project from time to time.

I won’t apologize for not spending time on Trump’s day-to-day outrages. Many others are doing that, and I would have little to add. Hot takes from me would be vainglorious at best. Instead, my focus is on planning for a post-Trump future.

The full why-Trump postmortem is complicated, it involves economics, racism, xenophobia, technology, and the breakdown of key institutions in politics and civil society. A lot had to go wrong and did. I would summarize it all this way:

The collapse of the New Deal order enabled the political success of a neoliberal agenda that increased economic inequality and elevated an economic elite. The resulting crises and poor performance created the opportunity for conservative elements to gain popular support through traditional racist and xenophobic appeals while still advancing core neoliberal policies. That is, Trump made little-c conservative appeals to the people while promising, and delivering, more oligarch-friendly neoliberalism for the elites.

This is why there is still reason to be hopeful. Those neoliberal policies had already failed. Doubling down on them, with more tax cuts, dangerous deregulation, and corrupt elite giveaways, will only lead to more failure. Economically, Americans did not get what they asked for and are taking notice of that. We can also smell the corrupt stink of the Epstein class (thank you Jon Ossoff for this coinage!). At the same time, we now know how ugly racism and xenophobia are when they are a governing philosophy instead of a campaign trick. The anti-immigrant screed was empty scapegoating all along. More importantly, Americans have rediscovered that this hate does not not reflect who we are. That is not America.

Trumpism will end, badly. But when it does, will the Democratic party have something to offer? If not, we will descend to a whole new level of ugly.

Which brings me to a restatement of purpose for this publication.

Now is the time to talk about what the institutions of self-government are for, exactly now, when these institutions are under attack. To what end should we use the public power of the state?

The traditional liberal instinct is to protect ourselves from governmental overreach by limiting its powers. That’s the wrong reaction. To be sure, one of the responses to this disastrous presidency must be to restrain the office through constitutional reform1 and the political invigoration of Congress. But the problem is not that the government is too powerful, it is who holds that power, whom they serve, and the ends to which it is, and is not, put. These institutions have never performed well, to be honest, but since the political and economic crises of the 1970s, they have been twisted to serve an ever-smaller group of monied elites. Dissatisfaction with that state of affairs was the root cause of the current crisis. Going back to 2015 will not be that helpful. Most importantly, attacking the concept of federal power, by accepting an austerity agenda, for example (foreshadowing!), will only lock in the growing neoliberal dysfunction. This only sets us up for the next would-be autocrat. I’d like to think that Trump is showing all of us what government over-reach really looks like; I hope that this will make us less afraid when what the state offers is just a little help.

To repeat an argument I have made before, we have to offer a different vision. That certainly includes a restatement of democratic principles, but assertions of the American “creed” are too abstract to deeply motivate most voters.2 Grand principles must be complemented with a concrete description of how government can be used as a tool to help each of us reach our own individual life goals. This is the essence of the social citizenship agenda: a set of fair rules for participation in the economy and a set of investments in individual autonomy. Fair rules and help when you need it. This still draws on abstract principles, on the idea of membership, equality in the context of that membership, and of what it means to be free people able to make choices about our own lives, but these systemic abstractions are all manifest at the individual level, we can see them at work in our own lives. Very few of us experience “democracy” that way.

Ultimately the best way to preserve and protect the institutions of self-government is to show ordinary people what they can achieve through self-government. In a recent town hall, Pete Buttigieg spoke directly to this. “What politics is really about,” he said, “is what it’s like to live in America”. Indeed, it’s about “what it means to be an American”. This is about big ideas, about democracy and freedom, but mostly it is “about everyday life”. (This is not an endorsement of Pete 2028, but we could do a lot worse.)

What this means for this publication’s agenda, I think, is three-fold:

• I will continue to focus on the nuts and bolts of the, mostly proposed, social rights of citizenship. I want my country to guarantee to everyone that they will have access to the resources they need to participate in the society, economy, and polity as full and equal members. This is the best way to ensure that all of us have, to the degree possible, a set of life choices that are comparable to others. And it is the best we can do to ensure that everyone has the tools they need to defend their own personal, economic, and political independence; that is, that they have the tools to be free.

• I will spend more time discussing ways we can repair the institutions of self-government and reinvigorate our democracy. In particular, I have not written much about the performance of the Democratic Party through all of this and need to.

• Finally, I have not spent any meaningful time on the need to respond to oligarchic and monopoly power through regulatory, enforcement, and institutional change. I will try to change that. The issue of oligarchy sits at the intersection of the first two themes; it is the place where private and public power overlap. The relationship between economic and political elites is always cozy, no matter the form of government, but the special intensity of this linkage is a particular power of fascism. This taint means that the collapse of our nascent fascism will create a rare opportunity to weaken the power the monopolists, but only if we (we being the Democrats now, but also the American “we”) don’t completely blow it.

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Aristotle defined the citizen as someone who has “the knowledge and the capacity requisite for ruling as well as for being ruled.”3 For him, this was a formula for deciding whom to exclude. But we are committed to the equality of persons, or at least we say we are, so we must include everyone. That means we must equip everyone with the capacities to rule and be ruled in turn.4 We cannot tolerate exclusion. We cannot tolerate second-class citizenship. These are the foundations both for our democratic republic and for the social rights of citizenship upon which it depends.

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<All of the posts in On Social Citizenship connect. I recommend that readers go back and read the first entry in the series.>

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Next week: TBD, but probably something a bit more nuts-and-boltsy.

Notes