Need Satisfaction as a Necessary Condition of Efficiency

In a review of the scholarship on economic justice written for the Journal of Economic Literature , Konow (2003) identifies the three criteria of distributive justice considered by many to be the most important, namely: need, efficiency, and entitlement. Unfortunately, his positive theory of distributive justice does not go so far as to provide a rank ordering of these three norms. Most survey respondents concluded that the relative importance of these standards depended on context. Using the features of the knowledge economy described in part I as context, I submit that it is possible to provide a rank ordering of these three measures of distributive justice. For the following two chapters, I compare the principles of need and efficiency. Entitlement is examined in the last part of this study (part IV). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.