The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

46 apologyoverrepresented, because the swing voters decide who wins. In a 49-51institution the half of 1 percent in the middle will decide who wins. In a40-60 institution the 10 percent in the middle will. Anyway, the middle,the median, runs the show. And the median person in the United States,who is very well off by historical and international standards, earning$40,000 per capita a year, is not enthusiastic about helping the poor of theworld or the poor of the United States. The politicians therefore give whatthey can extract in taxes to her, not to the poor. The median voter decideswho wins and, not surprisingly, she is the winner.The news from the median voter theorem is nothing like all bad. Democracyis a good thing, and a great improvement over the non–median votertheorem, under which a tiny elite of aristocrats or property owners or samuraiwins, every time. Sen has argued persuasively, for example, that democraticrule prevents moral horrors such as famines. “No famine has evertaken place in the history of the world,” he observes, “in a functioningdemocracy.” 112 He notes that the largest famine in history, in China after thesocialist experiment of the Great Leap Forward, 1958–1961 (I remember well,by the way, the enthusiasm we American lefties of 1958–1961 had for thisnoble experiment) took place in a socialist autocracy, “whereas India has nothad a famine [of any sort] since independence” and democratic rule. 113But in rich countries like the United States or France the subsidies to themedian voter are in effect subsidies to pretty high-income people, unlessoffset by an ideology of egalitarianism and by accounting above the average.A good example is public higher education. The average taxpayer inCalifornia has a lower income than the typical coed at the University of California,reckoning her income either by that of her family of origin or bythat of her college-enabled future. This was even more true around 1960than it is now, and it is still strikingly true in Europe. It is worse in, say,Africa.“Zambia,” writes Robert Guest,“spends 135 times more public moneyon each university student than on each primary school pupil despite thefact that university students typically come from affluent families.” 114 Iregard public higher education as one of the great projects of modern civilization,and I told you that I am employed at the University of Illinois atChicago. But we are speaking here not of its existence, but of the peculiarway in which it is financed, especially in states or times of very lowtuitions, as in the western U.S. states, such as California in 1960. Statefinancing of higher education under the no-pay scheme takes from the