At this point I need to make a detour to add a point which detracts from the symmetry of my argument, but which is necessary background for some of the following chapters. Lurking in the background of Rawls’ texts, perhaps left in the background because Rawls does not wish to trespass on the turf of his colleagues in the economics department, is the fact that the empirical data which confirm the fact that too much equality hurts the poor, are not only data about incentives for workers. They are also about incentives for investments. This is the case, for example, with Arthur Okun’s Brookings Institution study Equality vs. Efficiency. It is one of many studies which report on a trade-off between social justice and economic efficiency, where the efficiency in question presupposes a world in which owners must be paid for the permissive acts of allowing the use of the property they own. Thus Rawls’ borrowed proposition that the poor are hurt by too much equality reflects not only a psychological fact about the need for incentives to stimulate individual effort, but also an institutional fact about property rights.

Back from the detour: Gandhi’s writings discuss a variety of ways in which the poor become less poor, in which actions deliberately taken by the non-poor for the purpose of serving the poor, or to help the poor help themselves, figure prominently. Gandhians are conscious consumers, who buy products produced where there are high labor and ecological standards. The poor themselves, when they follow Gandhi’s philosophy seek ways to make use of every idle hour and every unused resource, often starting with cleaning up the village and improving sanitation. Gandhi invokes the image of the Great Annihilator from the Bhagavad-Gita. Whom the Great Annihilator annihilates is he or she who lazes around instead of devoting every waking moment to self-improvement and service to others. As in religious revivals among the poor of all faiths, there are campaigns against drunkenness. The poor band together in cooperatives and other associations for mutual benefit, often with help from middle class activists. They produce as much as they can for their own use, and they share with their neighbors, through barter, through gifts, and through diverse kinds of reciprocal obligations. Like everyone else they try as best they can to sell whatever they have to sell, whether it is labor-power or something else, to get cash to meet cash expenses. Like everyone else they quarrel, for which reason learning nonviolent conflict resolution is a major part of making any collective effort succeed. Gandhi himself lived in Indian villages, and started or participated in numerous down-to-earth projects for uplifting them.