Why Freedom Needs Equality

Institutions related to freedom—particularly the free market, free speech and democracy—need a certain level of equality if they are to work as we would like them to work.

The key institutions of our society are showing cracks. While the free market is delivering a high standard of living, the wealth it creates is not as evenly distributed as some might wish it to be. Free speech does not now seem to be a reliable mechanism for producing true beliefs. And democracy has produced bad decisions and unfit rulers. Given that these institutions are related to freedom, some might conclude that if freedom is what is getting us into trouble, perhaps freedom ought to be reduced. John Wright argues that such a response would not be correct.

This book suggests that a main factor contributing to the failures of the freedom-related institutions is inequality of what will here be called "epistemic power", or the ability of one person to get others to believe what the more powerful person would like them to believe. One way of getting the freedom-related institutions to work better is to increase equality of epistemic power. There is, therefore, a sense in which the freedom related institutions need a sufficient level of a certain type of equality if they are to work correctly.

The book explains how inequality of epistemic power undermines the ability of free market to deliver goods including mutual benefit and pareto-optimality. It proposes that inequality of epistemic power undermines the ability of public discussion to lead to truth and ultimately undermines the ability of democracy to deliver autonomy to voters. The last section of the book discusses solutions.