Yesterday, a procession of wonks — Marshall Steinbaum, James Medlock, Matt Bruenig, and Dean Baker — got into it over “predistribution.” Blogger Matt Yglesias chimed in as well. I’m not really interested in wading into the weeds of their debate — you can read it for yourself here — but I do want to clarify what this rhetoric is actually about.
In case you’re unfamiliar, predistribution is a relatively new term coined by Jacob Hacker about 13 years ago. As he put it, “pre-distribution” concerns “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” A clearer way to understand this is to contrast predistribution with redistribution, which specifically refers to measures taken to reduce inequality after the market has done its thing. So any government measures that precede or concern factor payments count as predistribution.
If this were the only way the terms were used I don’t think there would be much of a problem. But then we invariably run into comments like this about pre-and-re-distribution:
The problem here is that Baker wants us to proceed as if predistribution and redistribution have the same relationship with outcomes. But this simply isn’t true. If you successfully apply redistributionary policies then wealth will be distributed however you like. This is just true because of the way that we define redistribution.
Successfully applying predistributionary policies, however, does not necessarily imply any certain outcome of distribution. If for example I pass legislation that makes wage scales at a given workplace transparent, this counts as the successful implementation of a predistributionary policy, but it does not imply that anyone’s wages will actually change. For that to happen all kinds of other things have to happen as well.
Or consider, for example: socialism. Accepting Hacker’s definition, we can easily say that mass nationalization would effect “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” But would this predistribution give us a good outcome or a bad outcome? As far as I can tell, of the people I named above only Bruenig would likely say the former. Everyone else would say that this predistribution policy, even if successfully implemented, would not guarantee any given outcome.
Again: successful redistribution implies a particular distributionary outcome by definition. Taxing some people and transfering to others is a certain way to ensure a new distribution of wealth; this is true just because of what it means to tax and transfer wealth. Predistributionary policies try to have the same effect, but since they are mediated by the market the market can potentially fuck the outcomes up.
It is hard not to suspect that Hacker invented the term “predistribution” to create precisely the misconception that Baker advances here: he wanted to suggest that things like antitrust and transparency initiatives are as certain to improve the distribution of wealth as redistribution is. Predistribution rhetoric constantly returns to making that sort of point. To keep these debates clear, the left would probably be better off just referring to “predistributionary policies” as “liberal policies” or “good government policies” or “regulatory policies” or all of the other similar terms we used to use before “predistribution” muddied the waters.