Can Joe the Plumber Support Redistribution? Law, Social Preferences, and Sustainable Policy Design

This Article analyzes and compares law reforms that purport to redistribute by targeting benefits at poor individuals through an income or means test, with those that rely more heavily on "universally" allocated benefits, not conditioned on poverty. I argue that universalist policies may be more effective at achieving redistribution in the long run due to greater political durability, and by catalyzing social toleration for redistribution. I support this argument by drawing on the growing body of research in psychology and economics suggesting that people have a mixture of self-regarding and other-regarding impulses, and that some forms of social organization are more likely than others to elicit pro-social behavior. Adapted from the source document.