The excellent and insightful Nick Oulton (https://www.lse.ac.uk/CFM/assets/pdf/CFM-Discussion-Papers-2022/CFMDP2022-05-Paper.pdf), link has a very interesting thought.
1. People often don't want inequality.
2. But an aversion to inequality likely comes with some moral attitudes. One example is whether the inequality is deserved or not. As he says if we didn't care about "deservedness"...
then social welfare would be raised by abolishing two institutions (among others): the national lotteries run in many countries and the Nobel prizes. Both increase inequality unambiguously. Indeed, Nobel prizes must be the most unequally distributed of all forms of income: only a dozen or so individuals receive one each year out of a world population of some 8 billion.
Nobel prizes could be justified on Rawlsian grounds: monetary incentives are needed to induce the effort required to make discoveries that benefit everyone, including the worst off. But suppose that it could be conclusively shown that the monetary rewards are not necessary, and that the prize winners (and their less-successful colleagues) would have expended the same effort in exchange for just the honour and glory alone? I suspect that most people would still be quite happy to see the winners receive a monetary reward, even if it was not economically required. This is because they are perceived to deserve it.
With national lotteries, a different form of desert comes into play. In the UK version, some winners receive £20 million or more, and, in one sense, no-one is worth this amount. But anyone can buy a lottery ticket and, as long as the lottery process is perceived as fair (not rigged), most people are quite happy with the outcome.
