Bart Wilson: Fair's Fair | The Atlantic
Because the word [fair] is so central to how markets work, I've been engaged in a somewhat dizzying struggle to understand it better, or at least clarify how economists apply it to economic behavior. ...
Did you know that fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language -- that it is distinctly Anglo in origin? And a relatively new word at that? (Late 18th century, actually--the industrial revolution apparently also vastly enhanced our capacity to complain.) But the twisted history of "fair" is even more interesting than that. For the original antonym of fair is not, as most modern Americans would probably expect, unfair. If you want to understand the roots of fairness, look not to ethicists, but to baseball, which still uses the original dichotomy. If a ball is hit outside the bounds of fair play, it's not unfair--it's foul. That's an important clue. As Columbia law professor George Fletcher had noted in his 1996 book Basic Concepts of Legal Thought, the Anglo-American notion of fairness is firmly rooted in the rules of a game. ...
No matter how much we may feel that fairness is a pure principle, it's really a regular social rule, a custom. (Another surprispingly revealing word: you have probably seen the words "customary rates" applied to gratuities and sales commissions). Fairness really boils down to an issue of agreement: can we agree on what rules this particular context calls for?
