Dynamic Versus Static Perspectives on Economic Justice

From a static perspective, we see society as a snapshot, and what is wrong with the picture is that some people have unmet needs while others have plenty. The question defining the static perspective is, How do we get needed resources to needy people? How can we help those whom the system has left behind? From a more dynamic perspective, though, society is a process by which one snapshot evolves into another. The question defining the dynamic perspective is, Which institutions make people less likely to need help in the first place?

From a static perspective, our task is to rearrange the resources visible in the snapshot, frame by frame. From a dynamic perspective, our task is to nurture the processes that produce the resources, and thereby produce better snapshots in the future. From a dynamic perspective, we might worry about the consequences of rearranging resources for purposes other than the purposes for which producers are producing them. When we worry about that, we appear from a static perspective to be willfully out of touch. We are talking about history or economic theory, perhaps, but not about the real world. The real world is the snapshot.

To people who see things from a purely static perspective, it will seem that those who take a dynamic perspective want people to suffer. Why else would people hesitate to rearrange resources? Those who see things from both perspectives, though, see a complicated dance of incentives, opportunities, evolving culture, and fragile personal values. They see that many things happen when we reshuffle, resources, and not all of them are good. …

…When I refer to the static perspective as static, I mean no insult. I mean only to suggest that an exclusively static perspective is not enough. A static perspective looks at how things change. Each perspective is legitimate in its own way. The suffering we see from a static perspective is, after all, really there. Unfortunately, there are things we do not see from a static perspective. We do not see long-term progress. We do not see what causes long-term progress. Those things are abstract. They lack the visceral urgency of the crises of the day. But they are no less real.

If it is only from a static perspective that we fully appreciate the problems, it is only from a dynamic perspective that we fully appreciate what it takes to solve them. (6-7)