“What Do We Deserve?”
In “What Do We Deserve?”, Namit Arora considers the problems that emerge when we confuse economic and social outcomes with merit or worth; in other words, when we assume that economic or social outcomes equate to “moral desert” (59). Such misperceptions are an outcome of stories of social mobility that are central to American culture, and Arora argues that resisting these misperceptions requires “telling new kinds of stories” (59). Locate a story of economic justice (or injustice) and analyze it in order to discover the lessons in fairness and deserving that it imparts.
Write an essay in which you make an argument about this story and how it relates to libertarianism, meritocracy or egalitarianism, and the merits/flaws with that system.Give examples factual or fictional .