Social attitudes and re-distributive policies

The aim of this paper is to examine how the presence of social attitudes (our views of the others as a collective) may influence the effectiveness of re-distributive policies. The analysis will be focused on individuals' attitudes towards income which is directly connected to their own effort, and income which is derived from other people's effort. It will be shown that traditional views about the inefficiencies of some forms of taxation and welfare provisions are not universally true, and that the distribution of social attitudes plays an important role in determining the efficiency of public policy.