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the
lower incomes than industrial workers are freer than industrial workers in exercise of their ability and ingenuity and that some of them rise to dazzling heights of wealth towering over industrial workers who are bound by employment contracts to sell stipulated hours of service with little time left for personal use. "Today a miserable road-side vendor; tomorrow a powerful financial tycoon." Certainly, among the most successful businessmen in many Asian countries, those with humbler origins are not rare. But that is precisely the problem: their success, which is the reward for their risk-taking initiatives to seize opportunities available in the market economy is a mirror image of the failure of many others. Social security technology in the form that has developed in the West and diffused
to the rest of the world does not reach those who are in the massive wilderness of unsuccessful own-account workers, many of whom are poor and disadvantaged through no fault of their own.
Interestingly, however, while intersectoral and interoccupational income inequalities are great in developing countries, statistics on size distribution cf income do not show the expected inequalities. The concentration ratios of a customary type like the Gini Co-efficients do not show the size distribution of income in several Asian countries to be any more unequal than that in developed countries of the West.1 ECAFE studies on which this observation is based declare that "1mproved social justice means a change in the direction of increased economic equality".2 When taken with the statistical data, this declaration amounts to implying that Asia's developing countries have already attained as much "social justice" as developed countries of the West in terms of income distribution, despite their markedly lower per capita real income than the latter. This is a very encouraging situation from an economic point of view. Asian countries, presently characterised by a high level of distributive justice, can concentrate on efforts to raise economic welfare by raising per capita real income while maintaining the degree of equality in income distribution at the present level. It appears that developing Asian countries can also use a little less of social justice as a "trade- off" against a little more of economic development. 3 Under such favourable circumstances, no excessive hopes need be placed on social security as an instrument for promoting a higher degree of equality in income distribution, a role that social security cannot fulfil anyway.
In addition to compensatory justice, however, Vladimir Rys's definition of social security speaks of guaranteeing a certain standard of living to those who are usually below this standard. Should this type of programme be implemented SO that all those below a certain standard of living might be raised to that standard, the size distribution of income would be truncated at the guaranteed level of income and the concentration ratio would appreciably decrease. However, the concept of social justice that legitimises this type of income support is extremely complex. The notion of compensatory justice which has led this paper thus far would be ineffective without considerable adaptations (as will be attempted shortly). Traditionally, various forms of charity, private and public, have been the Sources of help for the poor and disadvantaged. To establish why they deserve something better than charity, or why they are entitled as a matter of right to a higher standard of living which they have never had, seems to require a much more complicated argument than an assertion that they are where they are through no fault of their own. The desired argument is difficult to articulate for a society long committed to the equality of opportunity and the freedom of occupational choice in which examples abound showing that many, having had to start their lives in poverty
1 United Nations, Econonic Survey of Asia and the Far East 1971 (Bangkok, Thai- land: 1972), Part 1, Chapter 1.
2 Ibid. # P. 8.
3 This makes one suspect that the degree of social justice a society enjoys may not be judged solely on grounds of income distribution. In the twentieth-century setting, it is doubtful that a society with roughly equal incomes for all households and individuals can claim to be a "just society" if the average income fails to meet minimum human needs. This doubt is а psychological reality in many developing countries. See for example "On the measurement of mass poverty in India", Economic Bulletin for Asia and the Far East (United Nations), Vol. 23, No. 3 (December 1972), PP. 63-66. In this connection, those who desire a review of fundamental issues in the economics and ethics of income distribution would like to consult Bronfenbrenner, Income Distribution Theory (Chicago and New York: Aldine-Atherton,
M.
1971).
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