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Rationing with time: time-cost ordeals’ burdens and distributive effects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2020

Julie L. Rose Open the ORCID record for Julie L. Rose [Opens in a new window]
Julie L. Rose*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, 231 Silsby Hall, 3 Tuck Mall, HanoverNH, 03755, USA
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Individuals often face administrative hurdles in attempting to access health care, public programmes, and other legal statuses and entitlements. These ordeals are the products, directly or indirectly, of institutional and policy design choices. I argue that evaluating whether such ordeals are justifiable or desirable instruments of social policy depends on assessing, beyond their targeting effects, the process-related burdens they impose on those attempting to navigate them and these burdens’ distributive effects. I here examine specifically how ordeals that levy time costs reduce and constrain individuals’ free time, and how such time-cost ordeals may thereby create, deepen and compound disadvantages.

Keywords

economic ordealstargetingfree timedistributive justicesocial and political inequality
Type
Symposium Article
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 37 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue on Ethics of Economic Ordeals , March 2021 , pp. 50 - 63
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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