Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you.

Today's April 25th, 2012, and my guest is David Schmitz, the Kendrick Professor of Philosophy

and Professor of Economics at the University of Arizona, and founding director of the University

of Arizona's Freedom Center. David, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks, Russ. Thanks for having me on. What a pleasure it is to be here.

Our topic for today is economic justice. We're going to talk about John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the

notion of economic justice generally. So let's start with John Rawls. His book, A Theory of Justice,

was published in 1971. Correct. Talk about that book. Oh, well, it begins with Rawls trying to

set out a theory of justice, and he sees theorizing about justice as a project of

modeling a kind of fairness. Different things can be fair and evaluation can be fair and not

and shares can be fair or not. So Rawls is giving us a theory about what would make shares

fair. And the obvious first thing to say, which is the first thing he says, is that the fair

way to divide a pie would be into equal shares. But he said there is, in some theoretical way,

another alternative. So suppose that the pie's size is variable, and that how large the pie

would be would be in part a function of how we decided to divide it. So different ways of

dividing it, and possibly unequal ways of dividing it would be would lead to a larger pie,

and conceivably could lead to larger and smaller shares. But a pie so large that even the smallest

share is a larger slice than an equal share would have been in the smaller pie. And so that's

...