fighting poverty/positive rights

[Greg Magarian]

I'm not seeing how you get from point A to point B.  Do you mean that
positive rights, enforced by judges, might be counterproductive because
their enforcement would entail putting constraints on the market that
might limit the market's beneficial effects?  That's certainly possible,
but it seems highly conjectural.  Why shouldn't we just as readily
hypothesize that either (a) courts could design and enforce positive
rights that would not materially constrain the market, or (b) positive
rights would/should constrain the market in ways that would bring
greater benefits than those the unconstrained market has produced?

Gregory P. Magarian
Professor of Law
Villanova University School of Law
299 N. Spring Mill Road
Villanova, PA 19085
(610) 519-7652
>>> "Jeffrey Segal" <jeffrey.segal at stonybrook.edu> 04/21/07 8:28 PM >>>

Malla Pollak writes:

"I am hardly an expert on this literature. But my current belief is that
very
smart persons argued that in theory the market would fix poverty.  It
has
now been tried for over 20 years, and the literature I have found says
the
problem has not been fixed.  I would appreciate citations to empirical
current literature reporting that a nation's general economic
improvement,
without more directed effort, did help the poorest.  My article claiming
the
contrary is  Peter Townsend, "The Right to Social Security and National
Development: Lessons  from OECD Experience for Low-Income Countries,"
Issues in Social Protection Discussion Paper No. 18, London School of
Economics & Political Science; London School of Economics, available at
http://ssrn.com/abstract=958252 (visited April 6, 2007)."

Paul Krugman, a true lefty, writes as if in response:

"The benefits of export-led economic growth to the mass of people in the
newly industrializing economies are not a matter of conjecture. A
country
like Indonesia is still so poor that progress can be measured in terms
of
how much the average person gets to eat; since 1970, per capita intake
has
risen from less than 2,100 to more than 2,800 calories a day. A shocking
one-third of young children are still malnourished--but in 1975, the
fraction was more than half. Similar improvements can be seen throughout
the Pacific Rim, and even in places like Bangladesh. These improvements
have not taken place because well-meaning people in the West have done
anything to help--foreign aid, never large, has lately shrunk to
virtually
nothing. Nor is it the result of the benign policies of national
governments, which are as callous and corrupt as ever. It is the
indirect
and unintended result of the actions of soulless multinationals and
rapacious local entrepreneurs, whose only concern was to take advantage
of
the profit opportunities offered by cheap labor. It is not an edifying
spectacle; but no matter how base the motives of those involved, the
result
has been to move hundreds of millions of people from abject poverty to
something still awful but nonetheless significantly better."
http://www.slate.com/id/1918

Tie in to constitutional law: creating positive rights for judges to
enforce might be counter-productive.

Sincerely,

Jeff

Jeffrey Segal
Distinguished Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794
phone 631-632-7662
fax 631-632-4116
jeffrey.segal at stonybrook.edu
http://www.sunysb.edu/polsci/jsegal/

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