THOMAS EDSALL, a professor of journalism at Columbia, reflects at length on economic inequality and America's "broken social contract" in a meandering post at the New York Times' Opinionator blog. Mr Edsall's main point seems to be that rising inequality is not an inevitable consequence of globalisation and technological advance, but is at least partly due to the breakdown of certain norms about fairness. He cites Alan Krueger, a prominent labour economist and chairman of Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, who has said:

In considering reasons for the growing wage gap between the top and everyone else, economists have tended to shy away from considerations of fairness and instead focus on market forces, mainly technological change and globalization. But given the compelling evidence that considerations of fairness matter for wage setting, I would argue that we need to devote more attention to the erosion of the norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the job market. We also need to focus on the policies that can lead to more widely shared—and stronger—economic growth. It is natural to expect that market forces such as globalization would weaken norms and institutions that support fairness in wage setting. Yet I would argue that the erosion of the institutions and practices that support fairness has gone beyond market forces.

I agree with Mr Krueger that fairness matters, but I think he fails to acknowledge the complexity of the role of fairness in the distribution of joint economic products.

Whenever we cooperate, there arises a question of the division of cooperation's fruits. However, it's important to recognise that our intuitions about fairness are not reliable independent evidence about what is in fact fair, because often there is no such fact. The sense of fairness is so often a moralised stalking horse for personal interest that considerations of fairness are at least as likely to create conflicts as to settle them. To especially industrious or critically valuable workers, to divide the spoils in a way that fails to reflect their disproportionately large contribution will seem quite unfair. In contrast, average or easily replaceable workers will find too much deviation from equal compensation an outrageously unfair and raw deal. Of course, without the capitalist, who coordinates and makes available the means of production, there'd be little surplus to divide, so it's only fair, the capitalist thinks, that he or she should take the lion's share. Who's right? Well, there is no determinate answer. Appealing to fairness is a strategy for bargaining over the division of the surplus, not a way of determining in advance the "correct" division. Our discourse would be a lot less confused if everyone grasped this.

I feel sure that changes in patterns of compensation reflect sentiments about fairness at some level, but it's not very clear what this really means. If wage growth and productivity growth have come apart, and they have, that could mean any of a number of different things.

Suppose productivity growth is largely the consequence of improved technology. It's easy to mount an argument that the people who own the technology ought to enjoy most of the gains from new efficiencies, as a matter of fairness. And it's also easy to mount an argument that the workers who use that technology actually producing things ought to reap most of those gains. Maybe the distribution of the gains from productivity growth has in fact favoured capital because fairness norms have "weakened". Or maybe not. Maybe fairness norms have simply changed, more Americans having become convinced that it is fair for capitalists to internalise most of the gains from improvements to capital. Or perhaps the content of these norms has remained constant, and all we are seeing is the relative increase in the importance of other determinants of bargaining power due to, say, technological change and globalisation. To claim, as Mr Krueger does, that "the erosion of the institutions and practices that support fairness has gone beyond market forces" may be to say little more than that market forces have made those institutions and practices decreasingly relevant to bargaining over the economic surplus, and that, because they are less relevant our culture's commitment to those institutions and practices has also weakened, further consolidating their ineffectuality. Another way to say this is that these institutions and practices were formerly strong because market forces were arrayed in a way that made them effective. To imagine that reenergising these institutions and practices, by means of a re-energised focus on fairness, could effectively offset the distributive effects of changes in technology and patterns of production and trade, is to misunderstand the extent to which those institutions and practices were tangled up in the old configuration of market forces.

It would be less confusing were Mr Krueger and Mr Edsall simply to say that they would prefer to see workers get more and capital get less, though that would be strategically counterproductive, and I strongly advise them against it. It's always smartest to couch one's preferences in terms of fairness. But it's important to recognise that appeals to fairness are themselves bargaining gambits. To argue that union bargaining power, say, ought to be strengthened because the distribution of gains in productivity has been unfair, is simply to attempt to use one bargaining tool to strengthen another. It seems to me that if this sort of bootstrapping tactic could be effective, it would have been effective already in preventing the erosion of union power. That is to say, to campaign for a greater appreciation of the importance of "norms, institutions and practices that maintain fairness in the job market" is simply to campaign to identifyfairness with a certain distribution of bargaining power. But isn't this by now an ancient campaign? Hasn't it already earned a long record of failure? Maybe economists have been ignoring fairness all this time, but the rest of us certainly haven't.

In the end, I worry that Mr Krueger and Mr Edsall are confusing a wish and a strategy; the wish that their favoured notion of fair distribution were more widely accepted is not much of a strategy for offsetting inequalities driven by globalisation and technological change. There is probably more promise in labour riots, or the coming demographic obsolescence of the current Republican coalition, or a designer virus that kills only people with libertarian instincts. In the mean time, though, it can't hurt to keep decrying the unfairness of market forces. If a potentially effective check on the distributive drift of contemporary global capitalism someday becomes available, it can only be fortified by a widespread sense of the rank unfairness of the current dispensation.