Egalitarianism and Economic Rents in Distributional Inequalities

The concept of economic rent is a prominent theoretical anchor for many sociologists studying distributional inequalities. However, its normative assumptions and implications have been undertheorized, leaving its connection to the reasons why we might object to economic rents unclear. In this article, I scrutinize economic rents through the two dominant egalitarian frameworks in political philosophy: luck egalitarianism and relational egalitarianism. I find that rents as typically conceptualized—as deviations from a competitive market outcome—fail to align with either normative framework, operating in some cases orthogonally to their concerns but mostly contradictory to them. Ultimately, economic rents provide an anti-egalitarian distributional metric, the perfectly competitive market, to pursue the egalitarian aim of eliminating structural advantages. The concept thereby fails to capture the way that distributional inequalities are normatively problematic or even what constitutes inequality in the first place. I conclude by using relational egalitarianism as a starting point for better grounding the concept of economic rent.