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    3 Ways Boston University’s Online MBA Is A Disruptor In Business Education

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    Fairness: The Fragile Currency of Stability 

    Fairness: The Fragile Currency of Stability 

    The US banking safety net has proved its value

    Business school professors’ picks 

    3 Ways Boston University’s Online MBA Is A Disruptor In Business Education

    Crisis Communication Lessons From The Federal Government Shutdown 

    The Hidden Risk of Getting Paid in Stock Options 

    The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated. 

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    Intel And U.S. Government Investments In American Companies 

    Does anyone go to prison for federal mortgage fraud? Not many, the numbers suggest

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    S1:E1 CVS Paying the “Pink Tax” on Certain Products and the Evolution of the Electric Vehicle Industry

    Tariffs and Their Economic Impact

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    S1:E1 CVS Paying the “Pink Tax” on Certain Products and the Evolution of the Electric Vehicle Industry

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    The Hidden Risk of Getting Paid in Stock Options 

    The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated. 

    3 Ways Boston University’s Online MBA Is A Disruptor In Business Education

    Intel And U.S. Government Investments In American Companies 

    Does anyone go to prison for federal mortgage fraud? Not many, the numbers suggest

    Does anyone go to prison for federal mortgage fraud? Not many, the numbers suggest

    It’s Google’s world. Regulators are just living in it. 

    It’s Google’s world. Regulators are just living in it. 

    America Has a School Attendance Crisis

    Health Coverage Expanding For Americans From November 1 

    Infant mortality rises in states with restrictive abortion laws – new research

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    Could the GPT Store Turn ChatGPT into a Platform Powerhouse? 

    How Retailers Can Capitalize on the “Refund Effect”

    How to Monetize Volunteer-Driven Platforms 

    How Retailers Can Capitalize on the “Refund Effect”

    Leading Global Teams Effectively 

    How Retailers Can Capitalize on the “Refund Effect”

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    Transforming Products into Platforms: Unearthing New Avenues for Business Innovation

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Home Our Insights Business Challenges

Fairness: The Fragile Currency of Stability 

featuringNalin Kulatilaka
October 8, 2025
in Business Challenges, Our Insights
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Fairness: The Fragile Currency of Stability 
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Fairness is more than a moral ideal, it’s the invisible currency that keeps democracies and markets functioning. In his latest Insights@Questrom blog post, Nalin Kulatilaka, Wing Tat Lee Family Professor in Finance discusses how when people lose faith that the rules are applied evenly, trust collapses, and with it, the stability of entire systems. 

When people believe the rules are rigged, they stop playing by them. Fairness—not growth or efficiency—is the true foundation of stable societies. We saw this during the 2008 financial crisis: as millions lost their homes, Wall Street executives collected bonuses and bailouts, shattering faith in the promise that hard work brings stability. The problem wasn’t just inequality but the sense that outcomes no longer matched effort, and trust collapsed.The roots of both Occupy Wall Street and MAGA trace back to this breach of faith. Occupy blamed Wall Street and pushed for regulation and redistribution; MAGA faulted global trade, immigration, and a distant elite, calling for nationalist fixes. Different villains, same grievance: the rules felt rigged and the link between effort and reward was broken. 

History offers sobering precedents. In the late-19th-century Gilded Age, soaring fortunes of industrial barons alongside brutal labor conditions convinced many Americans that the economic game was fixed, fueling violent strikes, populist uprisings, and eventually sweeping antitrust and labor reforms. In Weimar Germany after World War I, hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and reparations created a sense that the system punished the hardworking while shielding speculators and insiders; the resulting loss of faith in democratic institutions paved the way for extremist movements. In both cases, perceived unfairness—not merely poverty or slow growth—eroded trust in the rules and destabilized society. 

Fairness is more than a moral virtue – it’s a civic currency. It underpins both distributive justice (how rewards are shared) and procedural justice (how rules are applied). Perceived fairness is just as important as actual fairness and how both activists and politicians use social media to create perceptions to weaponize this phenomenon. Behavioral economics shows we’ll even sacrifice personal gain to punish unfairness, because legitimacy matters more than profit. The same logic holds in nations: citizens tolerate inequality if they believe the process is fair. But once they see a game rigged in favor of elites, legitimacy vanishes – and populism or unrest fills the void. 

This dynamic transcends ideology. From Adam Smith to Karl Marx, from Hayek to Friedman, thinkers across the spectrum recognized that systems survive only when fairness feels real. Democracies rely on it for consent; markets rely on it for competition; even autocracies invoke it to maintain stability. 

Today, the fairness deficit spans economics, culture, and politics. Workers feel advancement depends on connections, not merit. Voters suspect laws favor the wealthy. Communities see cultural change happening to them, not with them. The result is the same everywhere: distrust. 

Restoring fairness means more than policy tweaks, it demands a recommitment to equal rules and real opportunity. That means breaking monopolies that stifle competition, ensuring every vote counts equally, and rebuilding systems where effort, not privilege, determines success. 

Fairness is the invisible glue holding democracies and markets together. When it’s abundant, societies thrive. When it runs out, no amount of money or power can buy back trust.  

In the end, fairness isn’t just a value, it’s infrastructure. It’s what allows markets to reward innovation and democracies to renew consent. Rebuilding trust begins by rebuilding fairness, because without it, every institution eventually runs on empty. 

Read the full piece here.  

Tags: Economic PolicyFairnessMoral EconomyNalin KulatilakaTrust
Nalin Kulatilaka

Nalin Kulatilaka

Nalin Kulatilaka is Wing Tat Lee Family Professor of Management and Professor of Finance at Boston University Questrom School of Business where he also serves as the co-director of the Susilo for Ethics in the Global Economy. Nalin’s current research interests include social impact investing and financing distributed energy. He has published over 75 papers in top academic journals as well as influential managerial publications. His book, Real Options (HBS Press), has received wide acclaim. He has co-founded several companies including FirstFuel Software (energy data analytics), and Certain Solar (aka Nine Dot Energy, community distributed generation for congested urban grids). He also serves on the Board of Directors of Assette. Nalin holds a PhD from MIT.

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