S0031819119000482jra 63..91
Power, Predistribution, and Social
Justice
MARTIN O’NEILL
Abstract
The idea of predistribution has the potential to offer a valuable and distinctive ap-
proach to political philosophers, political scientists, and economists, in thinking
about social justice and the creation of more egalitarian economies. It is also an
idea that has drawn the interest of politicians of the left and centre-left, promising
an alternative to traditional forms of social democracy. But the idea of predistribution
is not well understood, and stands in need of elucidation. This article explores ways of
drawing the conceptual and normative distinction between predistribution and redis-
tribution, examining those general categories when considering the roles of public
services and fiscal transfers, and looking at the ways in which government policies
can empower and disempower different individuals and groups within the
economy. This article argues that the most initially plausible and common-sensical
ways of drawing the distinction between predistributive and redistributive public
policies collapse when put under analytical pressure. It concludes that the distinction
between predistribution and redistribution is best seen in terms of the aims or effects
of policies rather than a deeper division of policy types, and argues that, once seen in
those terms, predistribution is a central concern of social justice.
1. Introduction: Predistribution, Redistribution, and
Social Justice
In recent years the idea of ‘predistribution’ has received a good deal of
attention, both in academic discussions of inequality and social
justice, and within the world of practical politics. And yet this idea
of predistribution is not always used clearly, and much needs to be
done to put the notion on a more secure footing. This essay aims to
uncover, and then eradicate, various confusions about the idea of pre-
distribution, putting the idea on a firmer footing, and thereby clear-
ing the way for more productive future discussions of policies and
institutions for addressing economic inequality.
When political philosophers think about egalitarian public policy,
and about what states need to do in order to deliver social and eco-
nomic justice, their attention has most often naturally been drawn
to questions of redistribution. They typically consider how states
can create more equal outcomes through standard fiscal mechanisms,
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as when more advantaged members of society are taxed by the state,
which then uses those fiscal flows to fund transfer payments
and to provide public services. It is illustrative here that, when
G. A. Cohen launched his powerful and influential critique of
Rawls’s account of social justice, the totemic practical issue on
which he focussed was the level of the top marginal rate of income
taxation.1
While this predominant concern with questions of redistribution
as being central to thinking about justice and equality generally still
remains, it is noteworthy that more recent work in political philoso-
phy increasingly brings questions of predistribution to the fore. As
T. M. Scanlon puts it in his 2018 book Why Does Inequality
Matter?, ‘[a]nother way of promoting equality, or avoiding inequal-
ity, is through what has been called predistribution, that is to say,
through the laws and policies that determine individuals’ pretax
incomes’.2 This shift of attention to the broader set of laws and pol-
icies that produce inequality aligns with a general broadening of
concern with the normative assessment of a range of socioeconomic
institutions, and away from an artificially circumscribed focus on
only a particular subset of the ways in which institutions can either
foster or reduce economic inequality.3 This broader focus could en-
compass, for example, concerns with minimum wage levels, or the
regulation of trade unions and wage bargaining processes, as well as
issues of financial and corporate regulation, the regulation of import-
ant sectors such as the housing or energy markets, and the use of na-
tional and local government procurement spending in shaping the
structure of markets.4
1 G. A. Cohen, ‘Incentives, Inequality and Community’, Tanner
Lectures on Human Values (Salt Lake City, 1991), 261–329, e.g. 263–4;
G. A Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, (Harvard University Press,
2008), e.g. 27–86.
2 T. M. Scanlon, Why Does Inequality Matter? (Oxford University
Press, 2018), 102.
3 See Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, ‘The Promise of
Predistribution’, Policy Network, 2012; Nick Pearce, ‘What Should Social
Democrats Believe?’, Juncture 20.2 (2013), 101–110; Alan Thomas,
Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy,
(Oxford University Press, 2017).
4 Emily McTernan, Martin O’Neill, Christian Schemmel, and Fabian
Schuppert, ‘If You Care About Social Equality You Want a Big State:
Home, Work, Care and Social Egalitarianism’, Juncture, 23.2 (2016),
138–44; Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, ‘The Institutional Turn:
Labour’s New Political Economy’, Renewal: a Journal of Social
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A similar broadening of concern can be seen in recent work by
leading economists, with Joseph Stiglitz also using the language of
predistribution to describe his 2016 proposals for ‘Rewriting the
Rules of the American Economy’.5 As Stiglitz puts it in his 2019
book, People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age
of Discontent, ‘If we succeed in making market incomes more equal,
there is less of a burden on redistribution. This emphasis on pre-dis-
tribution is important. It highlights that getting a fairer distribution
of income is not just a matter of redistribution, of taxing the rich to
give to the more needy’.6 The idea here seems to be a straightforward
one, at least at first acquaintance: predistribution is about the role of
government in changing market outcomes, and thereby creating
fairer distributive outcomes without the need for directly engaging
in redistribution.7 Thomas Piketty, meanwhile, has stressed the
need to pursue redistribution and predistribution in combination,
with the two being ‘complementary, not substitutes,’8 while also
Democracy, 26.2, 2018, 5–16; Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, The Case for
Community Wealth Building, (Polity, 2019).
5 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An
Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity, (W. W. Norton & Company,
2015); see also Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2018, ‘Weak economic recovery was
down to flawed policies, not secular stagnation’, The Guardian, 29 August
2018.
6 Joseph E. Stiglitz 2019, People, Power and Profits: Progressive
Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (Allen Lane, 2019), 198.
7 For concrete proposals for predistributive policies, see for example,
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Isaac Stanley, Madeleine Gabriel, and Geoff
Mulgan, Imagination Unleashed: Democratising the Knowledge Economy,
(NESTA, 2019); Liam Kennedy, ‘The institution’s not for turning?
Inequality, taxes and anti-capitalism’, Renewal: a Journal of Social
Democracy, 27.3 (2019), 51–59; Liam Kennedy, ‘Inequality: from redistri-
bution to predistribution and beyond?’, Social Europe, 2 May 2019, avail-
able at ; Paul
Gregg, ‘The Potential and Limits of Predistribution in the UK: Tackling
Inequality and Poverty’ in The Predistribution Agenda: Tackling Inequality
and Supporting Sustainable Growth, (Policy Network, 2015), edited by
Claudia Chwalisz and Patrick Diamond, 79–90; Anne Wren, ‘The
Political Economy of the Service Transition: New Political Coalitions for
Predistributive Strategies’, in Chwalisz and Diamond, op. cit., 222–234.
For a somewhat dissenting voice, see Lane Kenworthy, ‘What’s Wrong
with Predistribution’, Juncture, 20.2 (2013), 111–17.
8 Thomas Piketty, ‘Capital, Predistribution and Redistribution’ in
Crooked Timber Seminar on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First
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questioning the conceptual distinction between the two categories: an
issue that will be explored in detail in what follows here.
This increasing academic concern with predistribution runs paral-
lel with developments in the world of practical politics. Traditional
models of social democracy have come under pressure as support
for welfare state institutions have weakened, leaving a scepticism
about familiar forms of redistribution, together with a lack of
clarity about what the most promising alternatives to such policies
might be. Moreover, with runaway levels of inequality within the
rich industrialised countries, it seems increasingly implausible that
familiar forms of redistributive, tax-and-spend centre-left politics
can any longer be adequate to the task of creating a more just and
equitable economic settlement. The lack of clear ideas to animate a
new centre-left vision of the role of the state has been associated, in
many countries, with a fall in support for mainstream social demo-
cratic parties, as we see with the travails of parties such as the
French Parti Socialiste, or the German SPD.9
While the US Democratic Party has its own distinct history,
placing it at some distance from the mainstream currents of global
social democracy, ideas of predistribution have also gained some pur-
chase within that party, especially on its more radical wing. A January
2019 New York Times article by Steven K. Vogel, a political scientist
based at UC Berkeley, explains the economic policies at the centre of
Senator Elizabeth Warren’s policy platform for her 2020 Presidential
bid as itself being organised around an idea of predistribution. As the
NY Times headline puts it, ‘Elizabeth Warren Wants to Stop
Inequality Before It Starts: Redistribution is important, but comes
too late’.10
The idea of predistribution has therefore been seen as offering a
way forward for progressive and social democratic parties of the left
Century, edited by Henry Farrell, 90–107. Available at . See also Martin
O’Neill, ‘Philosophy and Public Policy after Piketty’, Journal of Political
Philosophy, 25.3 (2017), 343–375.
9 See Thomas Piketty, Capital et Idéologie (Éditions du Seuil, 2019);
Stephanie Mudge, Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to
Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018); Wolfgang Streeck,
Buying Time: the Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Verso Books,
2014), Ashley Lavelle, The Death of Social Democracy: Political
Consequences in the 21st Century (Ashgate, 2008).
10 Steven K. Vogel, ‘Elizabeth Warren Wants to Stop Inequality Before
It Starts’, The New York Times, 3 January 2019.
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and centre-left, finding a way of moving beyond political strategies
that seem to have run out of steam. Patrick Diamond and Claudia
Chwalisz of the think tank Policy Network, which brings together
social democratic parties across the globe, go so far as to describe pre-
distribution as offering ‘a new governing prospectus for the centre-
left’.11 The idea has, indeed, been taken up by politicians from a
range of European social democratic parties, as well as by politicians
from the Australian and New Zealand Labor Parties.12 Perhaps most
famously, or notoriously, the idea of predistribution was invoked by
former UK Labour leader Ed Miliband as a central organising theme
of the Labour Party’s economic policy during his leadership, with a
focus on reforms to corporate governance (with worker representation
on boards) and government procurement practices (to drive up wages
and incentivise private sector investment in skills development).13
Although the idea became somewhat muted in the run-up to the
2015 general election in the UK, the idea of emphasising underlying
institutional changes to the economy, rather than relying on fiscal re-
distribution, has retained its currency as pointing a path forward in
the achievement of more just societies in the decades after the end
of the social democratic era.14
Having given a sense of the relevant background, both intellectual
and political, the aim of this article is to apply some analytical rigour
to the idea of predistribution, and to offer a diagnosis of whether it
really does describe a distinct and coherent set of policies, to be dis-
tinguished from the more familiar forms of redistribution that have
traditionally been championed by the centre-left. Only by getting a
11 Claudia Chwalisz and Patrick Diamond, ‘Predistribution: A New
Governing Prospectus for the Centre-Left,’ in The Predistribution
Agenda: Tackling Inequality and Supporting Sustainable Growth, edited by
Claudia Chwalisz and Patrick Diamond, (I. B. Tauris, 2015).
12 See for example Jim Chalmers, ‘Labor and the Tools of Success’, in
Not Dead Yet: What Future for Labor? by Mark Latham (Black Inc, 2013);
and Penny Wong, ‘Australians Shouldn’t Have to Choose between Growth
and Fairness’, The Guardian, 19 May 2014.
13 See Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson, ‘Philosophical
Foundations for ‘Good Capitalism’’, Renewal: a Journal of Social
Democracy, 20.1, 2012, 20–32.
14 Ed Miliband, ‘The Inequality Problem’, London Review of Books, 38
(3), 2016, 19–20. See also Eunice Goes, The Labour Party Under Ed
Miliband: Trying but Failing to Renew Social Democracy (Manchester
University Press, 2016), and Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, ‘The
Institutional Turn: Labour’s New Political Economy’, Renewal, 26 (2),
2018, 5–16, esp. at 7.
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clear sense of what may or may not be distinctive in the idea of pre-
distribution, and, relatedly, whether there is a fundamental distinc-
tion between predistributive and redistributive forms of public
policy, can we assess whether, as some of those mentioned above
might believe, the idea of ‘predistribution’ could serve as an import-
ant organising idea for thinking about the future of egalitarian public
policy.
I shall argue that there are considerable conceptual problems with
most common ways in which the contours of the idea of predistribu-
tion have been articulated, not least because it is difficult to find an
unproblematic way in which to distinguish between predistributive
and redistributive forms of public policy. In establishing this claim,
my approach will be somewhat dialectical, starting not from an ab-
stract conceptual foundation, but encountering the idea of predistri-
bution in media res, working through some of the initially plausible
but ultimately unsuccessful ways that the idea has been presented.
Nevertheless, I shall argue that it is possible to rescue the idea of pre-
distribution from the conceptual quagmire into which it might be in
danger of falling, if we look to reconstruct it – again in a somewhat
dialectical fashion – by first challenging and then redrawing its
boundaries. This reconstruction of the idea of predistribution
allows us to lay out the idea of predistribution as an important
strand in thinking about the potential of a more egalitarian political
economy. While my discussion will touch upon the pre-history of
predistribution, I begin with the recent history of the idea.
2. The Recent Conceptual History of Predistribution: Jacob
Hacker on the ‘Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class
Democracy’
Although one can find one or two earlier uses of the term predistribu-
tion15, conceived as an alternative approach to standard forms of
redistribution, the recent use of the term dates back to a 2011 paper
delivered at the Progressive Governance Conference in Oslo by the
political scientist Jacob Hacker, on ‘The Institutional Foundations
of Middle-Class Democracy’; Hacker has, since then, rightly come
to be seen as the central and pre-eminent academic advocate of the
15 James Robertson, ‘The Future of Money: If We Want a Better Game
of Life, We’ll Have to Change the Scoring System’, Soundings, 31 (2005),
118–32
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idea of predistribution.16 In this article, Hacker is looking to draw on
the lessons of his book co-authored with Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-
All Politics17, in terms of its implications for how progressive politi-
cians should look to correct for the increasingly inegalitarian charac-
ter of the economic settlement in the advanced industrial countries.18
Hacker introduces the idea of predistribution as one of three
strands in his diagnosis of what had gone wrong in the past with
regard to growing inequality, and therefore as an aspect of the eco-
nomic situation ‘crucial for grasping – and overcoming – the chal-
lenges that progressives face today’.19 Here is his characterisation of
the idea:
‘The first feature is the role of pre-distribution. When we think of
government’s effects on inequality, we think of redistribution –
government taxes and transfers that take from some and give to
others. Yet many of the most important changes have been in
what might be called “pre-distribution” – the way in which the
market distributes its rewards in the first place. Policies governing
financial markets, the rights of unions and the pay of top execu-
tives have all shifted in favour of those at the top …
The moral of this story is that progressive reformers need to focus
on market reforms that encourage a more equal distribution of eco-
nomic power and rewards even before government collects taxes or
pays out benefits. This is not just because pre-distribution is
where the action is. It is also because excessive reliance on
16 Jacob S. Hacker, ‘The Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class
Democracy,’ in Priorities for a New Political Economy: Memos to the Left,
(Policy Network, 2011), 33–38. Hacker here is using the term ‘middle-
class’ in its sense in American English, rather than its sense in British
English.
17 Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics: How
Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle
Class, (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
18 A caveat about my argumentative strategy: In this section and the two
sections that follow, I shall put quite a degree of pressure on Hacker’s at-
tempts to give more definite shape to the intuitive distinction between pre-
distribution and redistribution. But this is not intended as criticism of
Hacker per se: he has done a great deal to develop an important public
policy agenda in this area, and his ways of articulating the conceptual dis-
tinction between these kinds of policies are valuable in pointing us
towards intuitively appealing, if ultimately unstable, ways of thinking
about these issues.
19 Op. cit. note 13, 35.
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redistribution fosters backlash, making taxes more salient and
feeding into the conservative critique that government simply
meddles with “natural” market rewards.’20 (my italics)
Hacker is giving us two reasons for switching our concern from redis-
tribution to predistribution: (a) predistribution is simply of greater
fundamental importance than redistribution, because it reflects
more deep-seated features of how the economy functions – i.e. it is
‘where the action is’; and (b) notwithstanding the more fundamental
nature of predistribution over redistribution, it is anyway the case
that there are instrumental reasons to turn away from traditional redis-
tributive policies, for such policies foster ‘backlash’ and can be
counter-productive in terms of feeding the kinds of conservative
and anti-egalitarian political sentiments that undermine support for
progressive or egalitarian politics. Let us call these the fundamental
case for predistribution and the instrumental case. I take it that
Hacker takes both considerations – fundamental and instrumental –
to operate in tandem, presumably overdetermining his advice for
centre-left politicians and political parties.
Before assessing the substance of either the fundamental or the in-
strumental case for predistribution, though, I want first to pause to
ask whether this characterisation of predistribution can be seen as
passing muster in terms of determinateness and coherence.
Hacker’s characterisation of predistribution is that it is constituted
by ‘market reforms that encourage a more equal distribution of eco-
nomic power even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits’.
(my italics) But it is not clear how we should understand that char-
acterisation, once we begin to put some pressure on it. There are, in
fact, two ways in which this characterisation might seem to be both
confused and confusing, and hence two clear objections that one
can make to it. I’ll call these the temporal objection and the Murphy-
Nagel objection, and will take them in turn.
Firstly, the temporal objection. If read in its literal sense, the talk of
before and after with regard to the tax system simply does not stand
up. It is not that economic activity somehow takes place within a dis-
crete time period, with the government standing outside the eco-
nomic domain while these processes take place, only stepping in at
the end of each period, so to speak, in order to collect taxes and pay
out benefits, so that a new discrete period of economic activity can
then take place. Rather, economic activity is an endlessly ongoing
process, with the government’s activities as both collector of taxes
20 Op. cit. note 13, 35.
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and payer of benefits a similarly continuous, if periodically modulat-
ing, constitutive part of that process. The temporal objection then, is
that talk of ‘before’ and ‘after’ with regard to government’s role in
economic life, while it has a certain kind of brisk initial plausibility,
is on further investigation merely mystifying.21
A second objection takes a step back, allowing that this temporal
language of ‘before’ and ‘after’ should not be read literally. One can
grant that the distinction between economic activity and government
tax-and-spend should not be understood in temporal terms, because
the two are always temporally intertwined, while nevertheless thinking
that there is an important distinction to be made between economic ac-
tivity considered on its own terms, conceptually if not temporally
prior to government intervention, and the same activity taking place
within the context of a regime of government tax-and-spend activity.
But even if the terrain here shifts from the temporal to the conceptual,
a different variant of the same kind of problem remains.
In their book The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, Liam
Murphy and Thomas Nagel diagnose the conceptual errors embed-
ded in the view they call ‘everyday libertarianism’.22 This is, in
effect, the view that there is a domain of economic activity, free of
government intervention, that has conceptual (if not temporal) prior-
ity over really existing economic activity that takes place in the pres-
ence of government tax-and-spending. This ‘everyday libertarian’
fallacy explains what goes wrong when an individual thinks of their
pre-tax income as in some sense robustly all ‘theirs’, with government
intervention through the tax system then conceptualised as the expro-
priation of something that would otherwise belong to them. As
21 For a related discussion of the conceptual problems of temporal meta-
phors for thinking about the way that the state structures economic activity,
see Martin O’Neill, ‘Free (and Fair) Markets without Capitalism: Political
Values, Principles of Justice, and Property-Owning Democracy,’ in Martin
O’Neill and Thad Williamson, eds., Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls
and Beyond, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 75–100, esp. 87–91.
22 Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes
and Justice, (Oxford University Press, 2002). For critical discussion of
Murphy and Nagel’s idea of ‘everyday libertarianism’, see Marc
Fleurbaey, ‘Welfarism, Libertarianism, and Fairness in the Economic
Approach to Taxation’, in Martin O’Neill and Shepley Orr, eds.,
Taxation: Philosophical Perspectives, (Oxford University Press, 2018),
37–59; Geoffrey Brennan, ‘Striving for the Middle Ground: Taxation,
Justice, and the State of Private Rights’, in O’Neill and Orr, op. cit.,
60–80; and Laura Biron, ‘Taxing or Taking? Property Rhetoric and the
Justice of Taxation’, in O’Neill and Orr, op. cit., 81–97.
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Murphy and Nagel point out, what counts as somebody’s property is
itself defined by the full system of property rights, of which the tax
system is a part. The tax system is not some alien extrusion into the
property system, but a constitutive part of it. Moreover, given that
an individual’s market earnings will typically depend on a back-
ground of legal, social and physical infrastructure – from contract-en-
forcement to public roads – which itself depends on the tax system, it
is not as if there exists some kind of normatively privileged possible
world in which we somehow can have the benefits of the tax system
without being taxed, and against which we should set the normative
benchmark of our property entitlements.
Hence, what we might call the Murphy-Nagel objection to Hacker’s
initial characterisation of predistribution is that there is something
confused in talk of economic distributions ‘before government collects
taxes or pays out benefits’ even when that before is understood as in-
dicating a kind of conceptual rather than temporal priority. The mys-
tification may be of a slightly different kind, but it persists in moving
from the temporal reading of the phrase to the conceptual reading.
Moreover, there would be an odd tension in Hacker’s position if it
were to need to make use of this kind of conceptual prioritisation of
pre- tax-and-spend economic activity. For bear in mind that, in
Hacker’s instrumental case for the shift in focus from redistribution
to predistribution, his argument is that the backlash fostered by redis-
tributive policies feeds into ‘the conservative critique that government
meddles with “natural” market rewards’. In other words, the political
psychology of redistribution, in which people resent the government’s
apparent appropriation of ‘their’ pre-tax income, is one that involves,
and indeed reinforces, the conceptually muddled ‘everyday libertarian’
view to which Murphy and Nagel take exception. Given that Hacker’s
instrumental objection to redistributive politics is that it feeds this
muddled way of thinking about the relationship between government
activity and economic rewards, it would therefore be odd if Hacker’s
canonical characterisation of predistribution – conceived as an alterna-
tive strategy to familiar forms of redistribution – itself embedded its
own version of this same kind of conceptual mistake.
3. A Better Account of Predistribution? Tax-and-Spend vs
Market-Shaping
Hacker gives a broader and less mystifying characterisation of predis-
tribution in a 2013 interview on ‘The Politics of Predistribution’:
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‘[Predistribution] is a very basic idea. It is that government has an
enormous range of ways in which it can shape the distribution of
income and opportunity in a society that are distinct from simply
taxing and providing benefits. […] (my italics)
Markets are deeply shaped by government. And over the last gen-
eration markets have been shaped in ways that have benefited
those at the top far more than those in the middle and bottom.
If we are going to have an effective, progressive agenda for the
future, we are going to have to think about how to use these ways
in which government shapes markets to pursue progressive goals.
By progressive goals I mean, first and foremost, broad growth
in the economy that translates into social and economic gains
for citizens across the income distribution.’23 (my italics)
This is a happier, less problematic characterisation of the core of the
idea of predistribution, given not in terms of what can be done
before or after government tax-and-spend, but instead putting things
more simply in terms of what government can do (a) ‘to shape the dis-
tribution of income and opportunity’ (b) ‘that are distinct from simply
taxing and providing benefits’. The characterisation of predistributive
policies simply as being distinct from, rather than either temporally or
conceptually prior, dismisses the two kinds of worries discussed previ-
ously. We seem therefore to have here at least a provisionally satisfac-
tory characterisation of the idea of predistribution.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting a problem with talk of the ‘ways in
which it can shape the distribution of income and opportunity in a
society that are distinct from simply taxing and providing benefits’ when
considered at face value, which is that there is nothing in such a charac-
terisation that capturesthe idea of predistribution as a substantively pro-
gressive or egalitarian kind of policy. Consider the case of what one
might call ‘inegalitarian predistribution’, using a semi-imaginary
country that I’ll call Ukania, as a way of illustrating the distinction
between formal and substantive understandings of predistribution:
The Case of Ukania
Ukania has strong labour unions and a relatively compressed income
distribution. Organised labour is politically strong when negotiating
23 Jacob S. Hacker, Ben Jackson and Martin O’Neill, ‘Interview: the
Politics of Predistribution’, Renewal, 21 (2/3), 54–64, at 54.
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with employers, keeping the capital share of national income rela-
tively low. After a general election, a radically anti-egalitarian, ‘pro-
business’ government enacts a range of economic policies, including
reducing both current and investment spending in public services,
and reducing the top rate of income tax (with this latter policy
being the one to receive most attention from Ukania’s political philo-
sophers24). But at least as important as these changes to the tax-and-
spend regime, the government also undertakes a number of measures
that we might describe as instances of (formal) predistribution, which
are distinct from changes to taxation or benefits. For example, the gov-
ernment makes it more difficult for workers to take industrial action,
thereby weakening the bargaining power of labour unions, and makes
it easier for employers to sack workers, thereby making individual
workers more fearful of their economic security and less liable to
indulge in industrial militancy. The effect of these (formally) predis-
tributive policies is to reshape the power dynamics of the labour
market, thereby attenuating the income distribution as managers
and entrepreneurs begin to find their economic rewards accelerating
away from those of ordinary workers, while also leading to a shift in
the balance between labour and capital in their shares of the distribu-
tion of national income.
The case of Ukania shows that there is nothing in the formal idea of
non-tax-and-spend government interventions in market regulation
that necessarily aligns with progressive or egalitarian goals. Plenty
that a government might do that is not tax-and-spend, from weaken-
ing vacation entitlements to lowering minimum wage levels, could
lessen the income or opportunities of those people within the
economy who were already relatively disadvantaged. Therefore, as
we work our way towards a more precise characterisation of the idea
of predistribution, it will be worth making a stipulation that what
we have in mind is not merely predistribution in the formal sense –
under which the government of Reagan and Thatcher in the US
and UK could count as striking examples of effective predistributive
public policy – but a more substantive idea of predistribution that in-
volves the pursuit of broadly progressive or egalitarian goals.
Obviously there could be different ways of spelling out the precise
nature of those goals, and this is something to which we shall
return later in this discussion. Hacker offers one example in talking
about ‘economic and social gains for citizens across the income
24 In the vein of the discussion in G. A. Cohen’s work on inequality, in-
centives and marginal tax rates. See op. cit. note 2.
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distribution’, which one might see as a fairly minimalist characterisa-
tion of a progressive aim, leaving open the space for more ambitious
rival views. But the main stipulation is that, in talking about predis-
tribution from here onwards, it will be the substantive idea of a
broadly progressive or egalitarian form of predistribution that will
be in view, rather than the kind of merely formal idea of predistribu-
tion under which the regressive policies of our Ukanian example
would qualify as a case of predistribution par excellence. This stipula-
tion is driven by the nature of the investigation at hand: the fact that
we are starting from a really-existing debate among advocates of a
more progressive or egalitarian economic settlement, and that it is
from that debate that the idea of predistribution has emerged.
To return to our provisional characterisation, making use of Hacker’s
revised definition and pre-empting the problem of merely formal
forms of predistribution, we can define predistributive policies as
those that pursue progressive or egalitarian ends (however precisely
those are to be characterised) by means of government action distinct
from taxing and providing benefits. This position certainly on the
face of it seems clear and determinate. But I want to suggest that
things get much more complicated as soon as we try to investigate
the question of whether there is really an important distinction in
kind between government action that involves taxation and spending,
and government action that involves distinct mechanisms that shape
markets and the location of power within those markets. The potential
problem for our provisional position here is that there is a danger that
the category of predistributive policies – and hence the idea of predis-
tribution itself – may end up relying on a distinction without a real
underlying difference. It is to this question that we shall now turn.
4. The Plot Thickens: the Predistributive Function of Public
Services
For a paradigm case of predistribution, let’s return to our semi-im-
aginary Ukania, and imagine the accession to power in that country
of a new government which is resolutely sympathetic to labour
unions and enacts a number of measures to increase union density,
to make industrial action easier, and to embed the role of unions in
sectoral pay bargaining, on something of the model of codetermin-
ation or Mitbestimmung as we see in models of Rhenish capitalism.25
25 Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The
Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, (Oxford University
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Let us imagine, as is likely, that these reforms greatly increase the bar-
gaining power of labour relative to capital. In John
Kenneth Galbraith’s terms, such reforms would grant ordinary
workers a form of ‘countervailing power’ with regard to their employ-
ers.26 The predictable consequences of such reforms, other things
being equal, would be that labour would be able to claim more of
the division of the social surplus, the gap in wages between ordinary
workers and their bosses would reduce, and inequality would go
down. Thus we have here a clear paradigm case of predistributive
public policy (in the full substantive sense).
Nevertheless, if we’re interested in what governments do to shape
markets, and to change the balance of bargaining power between dif-
ferent groups or classes within the economy, then that does not give
us a special category of action that is distinct from taxation and public
spending, but seems to include it, in particular when we think about
redistribution through the provision of public services. Consider a
different example, where the provision of public services also
changes the relevant power dynamics between workers and employ-
ers. Let’s call this example the Case of USania.
The Case of USania
Imagine a society in which healthcare benefits are provided in a hap-
hazard way by an inefficient system of private insurance, with many
people’s access to even a minimally decent level of healthcare provi-
sion being tied to their employment status. Imagine that in such a
society, against all previous expectations, a democratic socialist candi-
date is elected to the presidency, and that one of his or her first policy
priorities is to create a national health system that ensures that all
workers have access to an excellent level of universally available
healthcare, provided free at the point of use through direct public
provision, funded by general taxation. What would be the implica-
tions enacting this kind of policy? Well, obviously something
would have to happen to the tax system in order to fund this new
system, and the new system would bring benefits to many individuals
who were comparatively disadvantaged by the previous system.
Press, 2001); Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
(Harvard University Press, 2014), 140–46.
26 John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of
Countervailing Power, (Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
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No doubt there would be some general efficiency gains in moving
from a splintered private market to a coherent public system of
healthcare provision, and so there would be a certain amount of ‘lev-
elling up’, and the removal of the deadweight loss associated with the
rent-seeking private bureaucracies associated with the previous
system. What there would also be, in terms of direct effects, would
be a de facto economic transfer from those who were especially advan-
taged by the old system (e.g. by the unreasonable suppression of top
rates of taxation) towards those relatively disadvantaged individuals
who would be most advantaged by the new system.
But something else would happen as well, which would directly
parallel what would happen when Ukania moved towards a more
Rhenish or Nordic model of employment relationships. The bargain-
ing power of labour would go up. When workers’ access to healthcare
depended directly on their employment status, and where employers
had a role as gatekeepers in terms of access to more adequate and at-
tractive health insurance plans, workers obviously had a direct incen-
tive against ‘rocking the boat’ in their workplace, given that the
effective costs of even a short period of unemployment could be so
high. By contrast, after the enactment of our imagined National
Health Service – or Medicare for All – in USania, the costs of
exiting from a bad employment relationship would be much lower
for workers, and hence their bargaining power against their employers
would go up, in much the same kind of way as if a change had been
made more directly to the regulation of that employment relationship.
The tax-funded provision of public services is not of interest to
progressives or egalitarians only because it is directly a way of benefit-
ting everyone at a cost that falls disproportionately on those who have
more, but also because of second-round effects that the provision of
public services can have in terms of the structure and distribution
of power in economic relationships within that society. The public
provision of services such as healthcare, education, and childcare,
or even provision of goods such as public transportation and public
parks,27 creates the background conditions against which different
groups and different sectional interests fight their corner and negoti-
ate their economic relationships. Public provision is not just a way of
27 Joshua Cohen, ‘On Central Park’, Gilded Birds, 2 January 2013, avail-
able at ; Bonnie
Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Fordham University Press,
2017). See also the Labour Party Report, Universal Basic Services: The
Right to a Good Life, (Labour Party, 2019), available at .
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undertaking a transfer against the backdrop of a market with a par-
ticular kind of shape and structure, it is also at the same time a
means of shaping markets, and changing the relative bargaining
power of different groups of market actors. Therefore, if predistribu-
tion is centrally about the role of government in what we might call
‘market-shaping’, then there is not a relevant contrast to be drawn
with a different kind of activity (imagined presumably as purely redis-
tributive) that government undertakes when it goes in for the provi-
sion of public services funded by taxation. Public service provision
is in general both about transferring benefits, per se, but also about
shaping the background within which market transactions take
place, and therefore it is misleading rather than illuminating to
draw a sharp contrast, at the levels of types of policy, between policies
that have a redistributive role and those that have a ‘market-shaping’
role.
A pessimistic diagnosis at this point is that the idea of predistribu-
tion as presented in Hacker’s revised and more promising formula-
tion ends up trading on a merely shallow distinction between
different kinds of government action. If it turns out that precisely
what is interesting about the predistributive effects of changes in
labour regulation can also be seen at work in the classically ‘redis-
tributive’ provision of public services, then we apparently do not
have a way of dividing government policies that affect economic
outcomes neatly into the two categories of ‘redistribution’ and
‘predistribution’. Advocates of predistribution as the proper zone
of focus for progressive or egalitarian politics, in distinction to the
previous focus on redistribution, might therefore be seen as relying
upon a superficial conceptual distinction that does not illuminate a
deeper contrast in how policies function.
5. Power, Public Services, and a Pluralist Account of
Predistribution
Stepping back from the characterisation of predistribution that has
been found wanting, we should note that Jacob Hacker is, of course,
fully aware of the market-shaping and power-rebalancing effects of
public service provision, and does not fall into the trap of seeing
such policies in purely redistributive terms, without being aware of
their more ‘predistributive’ function. In another presentation of the
core idea of predistribution, presented in a BBC Radio 4 Analysis pro-
gramme on the subject, Hacker pursues the thought (which seems to
have some intellectual kinship with the thinking of both Michael
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Walzer and T. H. Marshall28) that the provision of certain important
public services will be valuable precisely for the reason that such pro-
vision will reduce the salience and significance of market inequalities.
Here, then, is this third account of the idea of predistribution:
‘You have to ask what are the central ways in which government
can stand on the side of ordinary workers that do not involve
taxing and providing benefits, and I would say that there are
three. One, it means getting the macro economy right. When
we’re closer to full employment as an economy … we tend to
get stronger wage growth across the board. It also means
making sure that even if inequality’s growing in the market, it
matters less in terms of some vital public services - things like health-
care, childcare. And, finally, it means – and this is the hardest
part – it means trying to make sure that in an era in which orga-
nised labour is weaker that labour still has a voice and a place.
And whether that’s supporting living wage campaigns, whether
that means providing new opportunities for workers to have a
voice outside of unions, whether it means if we privatise public
services or contract out and allow all these low wage jobs to pro-
liferate in and around the public sector, we’re making our job
much, much harder’.29 (my italics)
Here we have a more complicated or pluralist conception of what is
meant by predistribution. I take it that the idea of ‘getting the macro-
economy right’ and avoiding the kind of contractionary austerity as-
sociated with UK economic policy in the years following the 2008
financial crisis, is uncontroversial common ground between the advo-
cates of different varieties of progressive political economy, whether
self-avowedly ‘redistributive’ or ‘predistributive’ in character. The
more interesting elements are the second and third. The idea of
making sure ‘that labour still has a voice and a place’ looks like a ca-
nonical case of predistributive market-shaping, in ensuring, as in our
Ukanian example above, that the organised power of labour can be a
source of Galbraithian countervailing power within the economy.
Let’s call this ‘labour predistribution’, which I now take to be an un-
problematic dimension of the idea of predistribution.
28 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, (Basic Books, 1984);
T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, (Cambridge University
Press, 1950).
29 BBC Analysis, ‘Predistribution’, 17 June 2013. Transcript available
at:
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The most interesting case, though, is the middle one, which, rather
than being a classic case of ‘labour predistribution’, sees the provision
of public services as a central plank of predistributive public policy.
What is worth noting about such policies is that the predistributive
dimension of public service provision has a dual aspect. On the one
hand, as in cases like our imagined USanian health service, public
service provision changes the distribution of power within market in-
teractions between employers and employees. But on the other hand,
as Hacker points out, such public service provision, by straightfor-
wardly making individuals less reliant on their market income to
provide for the vital necessities of life, also simply reduces the salience
and significance of market inequalities. Obviously these two effects
are related to one another in how they function, but it is worth
keeping them analytically distinct. The very same policies can be at-
tractive to progressives and egalitarians both because they reallocate
market power, changing the terms on which market transactions
take place so as to make them more egalitarian in their outcomes,
and also because they reduce the importance of market incomes for
individuals who can also rely on non-market social entitlements.
The first aspect is shared with central cases of ‘labour predistribu-
tion’, whereas the second element – lessening individuals’ reliance
on the labour market considered as valuable not merely because this
will increase individuals’ bargaining power within the labour
market – is a distinctive variety of predistribution which could not
be enacted by labour predistribution alone.
Where does this leave us? On the one hand, it is important to have a
clear sense of the significance this dual aspect of predistribution, and of
the non-derivative value of increasing workers’ power, and lessening
their vulnerability, within the labour market. This shows why it
would not be plausible to circumscribe the ambit of predistributive
policies so as to exclude predistributive tax-and-benefit policies. On
the other hand, this seems to lead us back into our earlier conceptual
difficulties, unable to identify a coherent specific category of predistri-
butive policies, held distinct from their redistributive alternatives.
6. The Predistributive Role of Taxation and Cash Transfers
Before adjudicating on this conceptual issue, I want first to consider a
potentially enlightening final proposal, which takes seriously the im-
plications of the predistributive role of public services. The proposal
is that where we should draw the distinction between predistribution
and redistribution is that, whereas the former includes both market-
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shaping regulations and the provision of public services (which both
increase workers’ bargaining power in their labour market transac-
tions and reduce workers’ reliance on those transactions), it excludes
the kinds of pure case of fiscal tax-and-transfer that are an essential
element of regimes of redistribution. The case for progressives fa-
vouring predistribution over redistribution could then be recast as a
case in favour of pursuing a combined strategy of market regulation
and the provision of in-kind benefits, as opposed to pursing simple
cash transfers. To assess this proposal, I want to take one clear and
unambiguous example of a policy of redistributive cash transfer,
and one clear example of a policy of altering top-rate income taxation.
Even for such pure cases of tax-and-transfer, I will argue that on
further investigation both have a dimension that is best understood
as ‘predistributive’, such that neither policy can be fully understood
in purely redistributive terms. I’ll take the cases in turn.
(a) The Predistributive Case for Universal Basic Income
There could be no policy that fits more centrally under the descrip-
tion of redistribution than a tax-funded cash transfer, of the kind
that would be paid unconditionally under proposals for an uncondi-
tional universal basic income (UBI). Such policies can be justified in
different ways, by means of appeal to different foundational norma-
tive principles.30 But it is striking that some plausible justifications
for such a paradigmatically redistributive policy depend precisely
on the twin ‘predistributive’ effects that such redistributive policies
can have. The individual in receipt of a (relatively high) uncondi-
tional basic income is, by virtue of receiving that income, likely (a)
to have more bargaining power in the labour market than she
would otherwise have, and (b) to be less reliant on how she fares in
the labour market, and hence less vulnerable to market outcomes.
Karl Widerquist, a leading defender of UBI policies, in his book
Independence, Propertylessness and Basic Income, justifies UBI on
broadly republican grounds, in terms of its giving individuals
‘freedom as the power to say ‘‘no’’’.31 Whilst this does not preclude
UBI having other sources of possible egalitarian justification,
30 See Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A
Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Harvard University
Press, 2017), Ch. 5.
31 Karl Widerquist, Independence, Propertylessness and Basic Income: A
Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No, (Palgrave, 2013).
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perhaps more closely aligned with its directly redistributive character,
this form of republican defence of UBI turns on its ‘second-round’ pre-
distributive dimension. The recipient of a (relatively high) UBI will
find herself more robustly secure outside of how she fares in the
labour market, which may be non-derivatively valuable to her as well
as being derivatively valuable in terms of this granting her greater
power as an actor within the labour market. Where UBI is universal,
and all workers are similarly situated, the bargaining power of labour
over capital will increase, just in the same way as in canonical cases of
‘labour predistribution’. And so here even the purest case of a redis-
tributive policy can find justification on predistributive grounds.
(b) Predistribution and Top-Rate Income Tax: the Piketty-Saez-
Stantcheva Effect
It is also significant that the justification of some forms of taxation
can turn not on the role of those taxes in raising revenue for the
fiscal authorities, but simply on their paradigmatically ‘predistribu-
tive’ effects in terms of the market bargaining-power of the best
paid. This may seem surprising at first sight, given that so much of
public and even academic discussion of top marginal tax rates pro-
ceeds with the unarticulated assumption that the primary function
of such taxes is in their ‘first-round’ effects in revenue raising,
hence embroiling us immediately in the over-simplified and rather
short-sighted discussion of the shape of the relevant Laffer curves,
and our current position with respect to them. But the indirect
effects of tax are often just as important, including those that work
through effects on the allocation of bargaining power.
This will be clearer if we consider what we can call the Piketty-
Saez-Stantcheva effect of changes in top marginal rates of income
taxation. In their modelling of top rates, Piketty, Saez and
Stantcheva find that the determination of top rates of pay is not
best understood in terms of standard marginal productivity theory.
This is not only because of the formidable epistemic barriers to deter-
mining what the marginal contribution of corporate managers or
other very highly paid workers actually is, at least outside of specific
domains such as the entertainment industry or professional sport,32
but also because more can be explained in terms of a ‘bargaining
32 As Thomas Piketty rather charmingly puts it in Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, ‘the theory of marginal productivity runs into
serious conceptual and economic difficulties (in addition to suffering from
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model’ of top pay.33 In short, senior managers get what they can
bargain their way to getting, given the behaviour of others and the
prevailing social norms. When top marginal rates of income taxation
are very high, with a comparatively large gap between gross and net
pay at the top end of the distribution, highly paid workers will be
less likely to focus on the extrinsic financial rewards of their positions,
and focus more on the intrinsic rewards of prestige and authority in
large organisations; conversely, when top marginal rates of taxation
are lowered, and the gap between gross and net pay at the top end
of the distribution falls, we see a phenomenon where competitive bar-
gaining focuses much more on pay rates per se, thereby driving up the
costs to companies of their senior managers.34
Hence, we get the Piketty-Saez-Stantcheva effect, whereby de-
creases in top marginal rates of taxation drive up not just net rates
of top pay, but much more significantly such tax changes greatly
drive up gross (pre-tax) levels of top pay as well. This is due to the
ways in which these tax changes transform the bargaining situations
in which top pay is determined, both in terms of the incentives held
by the highly paid themselves, and in terms of background effects on
social norms. What we have here, then, is another case of a putatively
pure ‘redistributive’ policy mechanism having significant effects
through what we might think of as typically ‘predistributive’ me-
chanisms. This is, so to speak, the obverse of what happens in the
basic income case, where a cash transfer can drive up bargaining
power; what we have here is the possibility that the imposition of a
higher marginal rate of income tax would be significant not so
much for its direct revenue-raising effects, but because it would sig-
nificantly reduce the de facto bargaining power of senior and already
well-remunerated managers. A classic instance of redistributive eco-
nomic policy would turn out, via the best available understanding of
the behaviour of the labour market, to be a paradigm case of ‘labour
predistribution’, in which the balance of bargaining power in the
labour market would be changed, reducing the existing advantages
of the small cadre of super-managers and others at the very top end
of the distribution of labour income.
a certain naïveté) when it comes to explaining how pay is determined at the
top of the income hierarchy’. (Piketty op. cit., 509)
33 See Thomas Piketty, Emmauel Saez and Stefanie Stantcheva,
‘Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities’,
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 6 (1), 2014, 230–71.
34 Piketty op. cit., 510.
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Progressives and egalitarians may therefore have very good reasons to
champion a significant increase in top rate marginal income taxation,
but not only or even mainly for the standard revenue-raising reasons
that are typically invoked in the justification of higher taxes on top earn-
ings. As Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva put it, ‘the optimal top tax
rate increases when there are zero-sum compensation-bargaining
effects’.35 This point about the existence of zero-sum bargaining
effects is of great importance, but is often overlooked. As Paul Segal
points out, there is a very important, if often unacknowledged, way in
which we collectively have an interest in keeping down top pay, not
out of envy, or even for intrinsically egalitarian reasons, but simply
because ‘one way or another, the rest of us have to pay for those
incomes: as workers, higher pay at the top means our salaries have to
be lower; or as consumers, it raises the prices we face; or as pension-
holders, it lowers share prices and profits that fund our retirement’.36
Hence, we return here in a different way to a version of the funda-
mental point about taxes made by Murphy and Nagel. Taxes are not
some external intrusion into an independently operating economic
system, but a constitutive part of the rules of that game; and the struc-
ture of the tax system, just as much as the structure of labour law or
the array of provision of public services, affects and conditions the
relative bargaining powers and positions of different groups and
classes of agents within that system.
7. The Collapse of the Distinction between Redistribution and
Predistribution?
Our conceptual conclusion, then, is that even this much-revised char-
acterisation of predistribution fails to pick out a distinct type of policy.
Or, to put things in a different way, if we were stipulatively to decide
that predistribution should be understood as marking out a class of
policies that particularly exclude canonically redistributive tax-and-
transfer policies, then we would end up with a category of policies
without any underlying coherence at the level of justification, and
without any real conceptual or normative interest. There is no
35 Piketty, Saez and Stantcheva, op. cit., 230.
36 Paul Segal, ‘The Problem of Riches’, Renewal, 22 (3/4) (2014),
135–143, at 141. As Segal continues: “Again, since the evidence shows
that excessive pay at the top does not increase the size of the pie, their
ever-growing slice comes at everyone else’s expense, and trimming it
would leave more for the rest of us.”
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interesting or deep distinction at the level of types of policy, as regards
the distinction between redistribution and predistribution, given that
(a) many policies have both redistributive and predistributive conse-
quences, and (b) even the narrow class of pristinely ‘redistributive’
policies, against which the idea of predistribution was characterized
by Hacker and others, can themselves have predistributive effects.
There is simply no such thing as two distinct categories of policy,
one marked redistribution and one marked predistribution.
Does this mean that we have simply been on a wild goose chase in
thinking through the idea of predistribution, seen as an alternative to
traditional forms of redistribution? Thankfully this is not the case.
What we have shown is that, insofar as there is an important distinction
here, it hasto bewith regard to the aims and effects of policy, rather than
in terms of the nature of the policy tools or mechanisms that are used.
The content of these policy aims and effects has already been touched
upon above, in imagining the new USanian healthcare or Medicare
service, and its potential twin roles in both reducing objectionable in-
equalities of power within market relationships, and giving individuals
a secure standing outside of the market transactions in which they may
otherwise be potentially vulnerable to a troubling degree. To get a
clearer sense of these predistributive policy aims, I want very briefly
to revisit a thinker whom one can see as a highly significant theorist
of predistribution avant la lettre: the Nobel Prize winning economist
James Meade. In seeing what was at stake Meade’s critique of redistri-
bution, we can hope to get a clear fix on what is at stake between advo-
cates of predistribution and redistribution, now reconceived as aims or
objectives of policy, rather than as distinct kinds of policy.
8. The Pre-History of Predistribution: James Meade on the
Twin Aims of Predistribution
In his important 1964 book, Efficiency, Equality, and the Ownership
of Property, James Meade advanced a compelling account of how
wealth should be treated by institutions tasked with creating a more
egalitarian economy.37 This work has been influential both on polit-
ical philosophers – especially in John Rawls’s ideas of a ‘property-
owing democracy’ – and on Meade’s fellow economists, in particular
through the work of Anthony Atkinson and Thomas Piketty, the
37 J. E. Meade, Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property,
(George Allen & Unwin, 1964),
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latter of whom describes his own work as ‘following in the footsteps’
of Atkinson and Meade.38
Meade is an interesting figure in the development of thinking about
predistribution not least because he was in fact sceptical about the
central form of ‘labour predistribution’ that would be involved in
bidding-up the bargaining power of labour unions through having pol-
itically stronger unions – what he described as enacting a ‘Trade Union
State’. His argument was that the costs in overall aggregate economic ef-
ficiency of bidding up the price of wages were unjustifiable, and hence
an egalitarian economy would have to be sought bysome other means.39
His alternative to ‘labour predistribution’ was to change the character of
the overall economic distribution, and therefore also the social relation-
ships and distribution of power to which it would give rise, via mechan-
isms of what we might call ‘capital predistribution’. He saw the role of
the state not in merely ameliorating the poverty of those who did not
inherit any of society’s wealth, but in making sure that all citizens
within a society would benefit from capital returns. This ‘capital predis-
tribution’ would be achieved by a mixture of private means – the
creation of ‘a property-owning democracy’ in Meade’s terms – operat-
ing simultaneously alongside a ‘socialist state’ that would expand the
collective, public ownership of capital through institutions akin to
contemporary sovereign wealth funds (or, as Meade put it ‘a national
asset’ or ‘Citizens’ Trust’). Meade described the combination of these
public and private forms of capital predistribution as together bringing
about a form of ‘liberal socialism’.40
38 Piketty op. cit., 582. See also Martin O’Neill, ‘Philosophy and Public
Policy after Piketty’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 25.3 (2017), 343–375,
esp. 361–5; Martin O’Neill, ‘James Meade and Predistribution: 50 Years
Before his Time’, Policy Network: Classics of Social Democratic Thought,
2015, available at: .
39 Meade, op. cit., 35–7.
40 Meade, op. cit., 40–76. See also Martin O’Neill and Stuart White,
‘James Meade, Public Ownership, and the Idea of a Citizens’ Trust’,
International Journal of Public Policy, 15 (1–2), 2019, 21–37. Anthony
Atkinson, in his final book Inequality: What Can Be Done? (Harvard
University Press, 2015), advocates a suite of egalitarian policies, including
forms of ‘capital predistribution’ and the creation of a public ‘Investment
Authority’, operating as a sovereign wealth fund, that can be read as an
updated development of Meade’s pluralist egalitarian policy strategy.
(Atkinson remarked to me that he wrote his book ‘with a copy of James’s
book in front of me’ (personal correspondence, 4 January 2016)).
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In terms of getting to the normative heart of the predistributive
ideal, though, what is most striking in Meade’s book is not so
much the detail of his institutional proposals for ‘capital predistribu-
tion’, as the content of his critique of existing forms of welfare state
redistribution. He did not for a moment think that redistribution
was unnecessary, or that predistributive measures should entirely
replace traditional tax-and-spend or tax-and-transfer policies, but
his worries about the limits of the familiar mid-twentieth century
welfare state are powerfully expressed, and make a clear case for
why it is that a concern only for the distribution of income cannot
be sufficient to create an egalitarian economic settlement, and why
‘capital predistribution’ must be a necessary element of a just institu-
tional structure. Here is the key passage:
‘Extreme inequalities in the ownership of property are in my
view undesirable, quite apart from any inequalities of income
which they may imply. A man with much property has great bar-
gaining strength and a great sense of security, independence and
freedom; and he enjoys these things not only vis-à-vis his proper-
tyless fellow citizens but also vis-à-vis the public authorities. He
can snap his fingers at those on whom he must rely for an income;
for he can always live for a time on his capital. The propertyless
man must continuously and without interruption acquire his
income by working for an employer or by qualifying to receive
it from a public authority. An unequal distribution of property
means an unequal distribution of power and status even if it is pre-
vented from causing too unequal a distribution of income’.41
The predistributive ideal involves seeing that individuals who sell their
labour within the market need to be given (a) more equal bargaining
power within the labour market, and (b) greater security, independence
and freedom outside the labour market. Significantly, these goods have
to be secured against both other people and against the state. And ul-
timately these goals are best understood with regard to our underlying
egalitarian interest in social relations of status and power.
9. Conclusion: Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice
Predistribution is, one might say, the name for the broad set of egali-
tarian economic policies justified by a conception of egalitarian com-
mitment that goes beyond a concern only with the distribution of
41 Meade op. cit., 38–9.
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goods and money, but which is centrally concerned with status and
power in economic outcomes. There is, then, a clear sense in which
the idea of predistribution has an internal connection to ideas of
social egalitarianism, projected into the economic domain, embody-
ing the ambition to think about economic policy in a way that goes
beyond what Iris Marion Young has called ‘the distributive para-
digm’.42 The point of predistributive policies is to shape the character
of economic relationships, seen as sites for the exercise of power, and
this therefore runs beyond a concern only with final distributive
results. The twin egalitarian aims of such policies are dispersing
power within markets, and making individuals less dependent on
market outcomes in the first place. These twin aims are closely
related, and can often be achieved together.
It is a familiar objection directed at advocates of a political focus on
predistribution, that even effective policies of predistribution would
not eradicate the need for forms of redistribution, both in the form of
direct cash transfers, and in the form of indirect transfers through the
provision of public services funded through taxation. Obviously, the
advocate of predistribution should have no argument with this objec-
tion, not least because, as we have seen in sections 4–6 above, such
redistributive policies frequently have a distinctively predistributive
justification. Moving away from the Hacker-type view that sees
predistribution as a kind of policy as opposed to a kind of aim or
goal, or valuable effect, helps to forestall this kind of unilluminating
disagreement between advocates of predistribution and their oppo-
nents. Moreover, it should be no part of advocating predistributive
public policies to think that there might not also be a justification
for transfers or public service provision that was based on purely re-
distributive considerations – i.e. because one person or group is in
need, or suffering some absolute level of privation, and the transfer
from a relatively advantaged person or group would rectify this.
After all, our concerns as egalitarians are complex, combining consid-
eration of both how well each individual fares, and of the nature of the
social relations between individuals.43 There may also be cases where
purely redistributive aims could be most efficiently enacted by means
of the kinds of policy mechanisms associated with predistribution. In
many cases, the same policies might be favoured by progressives and
42 See Martin O’Neill, ‘What Should Egalitarians Believe?’ Philosophy
& Public Affairs, 36.2, 2008, 119–56. On the idea of the “distributive para-
digm”, see Iris M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 2nd edition,
(Princeton University Press, 2011).
43 Scanlon, op. cit.; O’Neill, op. cit.
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egalitarians for both their redistributive and predistributive effects,
operating at once but by means of distinct mechanisms. None of
these cases would constitute an objection to either our characterisa-
tion of the idea of predistribution, or to the claim that progressive
or egalitarian politics should treat predistribution as a central
priority.
Some of the political attraction of predistribution to centre-left
parties and politicians during the 2010s rested on the fact it
looked like the route to a social democratic strategy for an age of
austerity, in which government spending was to be severely
curtailed. But taking seriously the state’s role in shaping markets,
or in accentuating the power of the disadvantaged, is not, as we
have seen, something that can be done in isolation from thinking
about the role of public services, or the role of the tax system. So
the hope that a commitment to predistribution might be an egali-
tarian strategy ‘on the cheap’, or one which could somehow be
pursued without political conflict with existing economic interests,
is obviously an illusory one. This might also be thought to be a
point that stands against Hacker’s ‘instrumental’ defence of the
focus on predistribution – that is, against the hope that the
pursuit of egalitarian strategies that did not involve standard
forms of redistribution might be achieved without whipping up
the usual kinds of reactionary political backlash that might be
expected to be faced by projects of egalitarian transformation in
the economy.
What we have seen in the foregoing discussion is that there is
unlikely to be a way of achieving the aims of predistribution without
significant changes both to labour regulation and to the fiscal system,
involving in particular changes to the taxation of wealth and inherit-
ance. Such measures are unlikely to be uncontroversial, or free from
political backlash, even if it is also true that some forms of predistribu-
tive public policy could, if skilfully designed, be more likely, at least
in some places and at some times, to fly under the ‘political radar’ of
anti-progressive or anti-egalitarian political forces.
Predistribution is a capacious idea. One might say that it is the name
for a problem in egalitarian public policy: that is, how can we create an
economy without objectionable inequalities in bargaining power, in
which the status, standing and self-respect of each is protected? It is
not the name for any particular solution to this pressing and difficult
problem. Nevertheless, by taking seriously the idea of predistribution
we open up an important agenda for thinking about egalitarian
public policy, and pursing the twin aims of equalizing market power
and making individuals’ life chances less dependent on market
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outcomes. Such an agenda emphasises the point that the character of
economic relationships should be at the core of our thinking about
social justice.
For political philosophers, one central lesson is that, whereas the
discipline has often thought a great deal about the assessment of dis-
tributive outcomes, developing a cornucopia of principles for the
normative assessment of all-things-considered final distributions,
we need to think more about the detailed structure and texture of eco-
nomic policy, and to give more consideration and attention to the
social consequences both of particular policies and institutions, and
to the interactions between them. We have an urgent collective goal
in thinking not just about the distributive outcomes the economy
produces, but in thinking more about the particular ways in which
the economy can be shaped to disempower the privileged and to
empower the disadvantaged.44
44 For helpful and stimulating comments and questions, I am grateful to
audiences at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford
University, at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane
University, at the Harvard-Fudan-NYUAD Conference on Justice at
Fudan University, Shanghai, at the Social Justice Centre at Concordia
University, at the Universities of Jerusalem, Belgrade, Minho, and Sydney,
and at McGill University, UCL, and the Universidad de Chile. I am also
grateful to the Fabian Society, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung of the German
Social Democratic Party, and the Chifley Research Foundation of the
Australian Labor Party for opportunities to discuss ideas of predistribution
with political audiences. Thanks in particular to Pablo Aguayo Westwood,
Daniel Attas, Tongdong Bai, Juliana Bidadanure, Jim Chalmers, Lindsey
Chambers, Prithviraj Datta, Avner de-Shalit, Patrick Diamond, Peter
Dietsch, Steven Durlauf, Bela Egyed, Marc Fleurbaey, Pablo Gilabert, Joe
Guinan, Jacob Hacker, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Ben Jackson, James
Johnson, Liam Kennedy, Hélène Landemore, Ben Laurence, Ted
Lechterman, Dominique Leydet, Désirée Lim, Fernando Lizárraga, Rocío
Lorca Ferreccio, Roberto Merrill, Henning Meyer, Ed Miliband, Oded
Na’aman, Dai Oba, Kristi Olson, Rachel Reeves, Jonathan Riley, Mathias
Risse, T. M. Scanlon, Shlomi Segall, Nicole Selamé Glena, Ania Skrzypek,
Lucas Stanczyk, Isaac Stanley, Christine Sypnowich, Alan Thomas,
Isabella Trifan, Laura Valentini, Daniel Weinstock, Stuart White, Karl
Widerquist, Andrew Williams, and Bernardo Zacka for illuminating discus-
sion of the issues with which this article is concerned. I also thank the journal’s
anonymous referees for their extremely helpful suggestions. I am pleased to be
able to acknowledge research support from the Independent Social Research
Foundation (ISRF), in the form of a research fellowship on ‘Social Justice,
Predistribution, and the Democratization of Capital’.
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MARTIN O’NEILL is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Department
of Philosophy at the University of York. He is the author, with Joe Guinan, of The
Case for Community Wealth Building (Polity Press, 2019), and the editor of Taxation:
Philosophical Perspectives (OUP, 2018) (with Shepley Orr), and Property-Owning
Democracy: Rawls and Beyond (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) (with Thad Williamson).
He works on a number of issues at the intersection of political philosophy, political
economy, and public policy.
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Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice
Abstract
Introduction: Predistribution, Redistribution, and Social Justice
The Recent Conceptual History of Predistribution: Jacob Hacker on the ‘Institutional Foundations of Middle-Class Democracy’
A Better Account of Predistribution? Tax-and-Spend vs Market-Shaping
The Case of Ukania
The Plot Thickens: the Predistributive Function of Public Services
The Case of USania
Power, Public Services, and a Pluralist Account of Predistribution
The Predistributive Role of Taxation and Cash Transfers
The Predistributive Case for Universal Basic Income
Predistribution and Top-Rate Income Tax: the Piketty-Saez-Stantcheva Effect
The Collapse of the Distinction between Redistribution and Predistribution?
The Pre-History of Predistribution: James Meade on the Twin Aims of Predistribution
Conclusion: Power, Predistribution, and Social Justice