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University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2008, 448pp., $60.00.
ISBN: 0-472-11644-4.
The most important thing to know about this book is that analytical egalitarianism has very little to do with egalitarianism as most of us understand it. The editors use the term "analytical egalitarianism" for a "theoretical system that abstracts from any inherent differences among persons" [p. 1]. They use the term "practical egalitarianism" to refer to what they call the more familiar definition of "egalitarianism" as "a belief in economic equality". Obviously, one can be extremely inegalitarian in the practical sense, and still employ theoretical models that use analytical egalitarian assumptions.
Analytical egalitarianism has been practiced by people with very different beliefs about practical egalitarianism. John Rawls uses the analytical egalitarian theory to argue that a just government should promote practical egalitarianism up to the point at which the incentive effects become so severe that additional redistribution is no longer advantageous to the least well-off individual. Austrian and Chicago School economists, such as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, and James Buchanan, use the analytical egalitarian theory to argue (with qualifications) that the government should not make practical egalitarianism a goal. According to the chapter by Eric Crampton and Andrew Farrant, "Buchanan is perhaps the most important advocate in modern economics of what we might term analytical egalitarianism [which] requires that all ... be modeled symmetrically, any differences in their observed behavior lying not in any supposedly intrinsic preferences or abilities ... but rather...