The answer, of course, is that a tax on tall people seems like a pretty horrible thing to have. (Kurt Vonngeut's "Harrison Bergeron" handled this back in 1961.) And, indeed, the point of the paper is to tease out that moral intuition. As Mankiw and Weinzierl write: "This paper can be interpreted in two ways. Some readers can take it as a small, quirky contribution aimed to clarify the literature on optimal income taxation. Others can take it as a broader effort to challenge that entire literature." Yeah, right. It's very kind of them to offer a choice, but I have the funny feeling they're hoping for something more than a "small, quirky" interpretation of their work.

On the other hand, I'm surprised to see the strong utilitarian view described as the consensus. I don't know much about utilitarian optimal tax theory, but I also don't know of any public finance or policy people who are dying to revive the prescriptive insights of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Edgeworth. Is there a cult of utilitarian social planners out there waiting to propose taxes on inputs like height, intelligence and race?

Update: Mankiw responds here with a restatement of the paper's purpose. I cobbled together a response to that here, and Emmanuel Saez responds by email here
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