Meet the Rich
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
"But did they work 10 times as hard as a teacher on £30,000 a year or, in the case of some lawyers and bankers, 100 times as hard?"
It's not about how hard you work, it's about how much free time you have left AFTER work. Considering 8 hours of sleep, a commute, overhead for food and exercise and general life maintenance, a guy who works 80 hours a week really has very little spare time left. Easily 10 times less than a teacher.
Then the author makes those infuriating "Of course, the poor didn't deserve it." comments. Of course people don't -deserve- benefits. Benefits are charity - you get them because the state pities you. Handing out benefits is the ethical thing to do - but that doesn't mean you're -entitled- to them.
The article is shit.
Maybe once the US gets rid of its current president, it too will enter the civilized world, where people aren't left to die because they can't pay.
"The greatness of America is in how it treats its weakest members: the elderly, the infirm, the handicapped, the underprivileged, the unborn"
> It's not about how hard you work, it's about how much free time you have left AFTER work.
Your suggestion-- that income should be justified based on how much of someone's life is eaten by their job-- smacks of the same kind of moralistic posturing for which you criticize the author of the original piece.
Rather than try to morally justify or attack these inequalities (which I regard as silly as trying to morally justify or attack a rainstorm), I'd like to explore ways that the aforementioned teacher might slice himself a bigger piece of the pie.
Imagine that teachers were all free agents. Self-employed contractors free to negotiate their own rates for their services, and free to choose their students from the applicants they consider most promising.
The better teachers would probably make more money than they do under the current system, but still probably nowhere near as much as the successful banker or lawyer.
The exception might be the exceptional teacher who already has a track record of producing Nobel laureates, world leaders, curers of disease, self-made billionaire inventors, etc.
By the time this teacher could command the truly huge rates, he would be pretty old, and might well consider this new windfall to be merely the capstone of an already satisfying and distinguished life.
But the banker and the lawyer sink or swim based on goals that are directly measurable in the short term, so the same cycle that I've postulated for the old teacher (perhaps several lifetimes old!) can happen on a scale of months or years.
So, to achieve parity with the world-class banker or lawyer, the world-class teacher needs not just free-agency, but fine-grained, objective, fast turnaround metrics of performance that directly correlate with economic return.
I didn't mean that one's salaries --should-- be inversely correlated to spare time. But if you have want some metric of "fairness", then looking at free time is better than looking at hours worked - because that way you measure sacrifice, and a relation between sacrifice and compensation is seen by many as fair.
The notion that the numbers of hours worked and salary should be correlated makes no sense to me at all.
A better metric of fairness would be, how equal were the opportunities to become profession X?
If being a banker is so great, and being a teacher is so (comparatively) awful, then wouldn't it be fairer to simply equalize the opportunities, and let a glut of bankers and a shortage of teachers balance out the wage difference?
..is it? I find it hard to believe that you think the quotes admirable. That leaves "liar, liar pants on fire" as an argument.
Furthermore, the assertion that "[rich people have] easily 10 times less [free time] than a teacher" as some sort of justification for making 10 times more than a teacher is patently absurd; people in all walks of life end up with little or no free time, bankers cause they work long hours, the less well paid because they need to commute from where they can afford to live. By your assumption these people should be paid in the millions, no: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_...
I can only assume that you consider that you'll be among the rich and ignorant soon, and that when you do, you'd rather keep the cash yourself than share it. Of course, if you live in the US, the chances of you actually becoming rich if you weren't born into money is the lowest in the western world (check social mobility figures)
One good thing about this article is that they did original research by actually locating and interviewing these high income earners. After filtering out the slant I found some interesting information.
Another banker asserted that there is "little accountability and measurability in the way that tax is actually used".
They might be on to something. With all the stories of outrageous misspending and corruption around I think the world would benefit from big doses of transparency.
Hacker News: White-collar business owners and key founding personnel.
Hacker News Response: Outrage!
(To be fair, though, the Guardian is frothingly liberal, and as a merely left-of-center liberal I can honestly say it usually makes me wince.)
The real problem I have with the authors is that they operate from the presupposition that operating a business (which, on a transactional level is really just free exchange, like exchanging fish for books) is somehow unfair. The authors are neither party in the exchange; they are providing neither the fish nor the books, and are merely standing from the sidelines, saying "You should not exchange six books for twelve fish!" which is of course none of their business. The only other way I can see to do it would be to have some sort of a middleman who decided the amount of fish being traded for books, and he would probably take a cut off the top for his 'service'. In gradeschool we called this 'bullying', but one man's moral outrage is another man's fairness I guess.
Presumably, a person who thought <£22K/year defined poverty would be amenable to the idea that such levels of income should not be taxed heavily, or should receive additional moneys through redistribution. The authors willfully reverse that interpretation. At any rate, your caricatured "Scrooge" character would likely have put the poverty level at 2 quid a day, with anyone making more being disgustingly overpaid.
As always, the fundamental mistake is the evident belief that the economy is zero sum. The rich can only get that way by taking from someone else. Of course, with redistribution, that actually becomes the case...
They also tend to be subject to catastrophic social events.
Many African countries (i.e. Zimbabwe) are extremely poor overall and have great wealth disparities. But it seems highly unlikely that there's a direct causal relationship (it's more likely that there's a third cause behind both conditions, i.e. government corruption).
If we throw out the bad datapoints and restrict our search to countries with relatively stable or well-established governments, I suspect you will find that the reverse is true, on the whole. Most U.S. economic growth happened during the oil boom and/or Rockefeller and/or train monopolies and/or ... Even recently, the first .com bubble coincided with Microsoft/antitrust. Contrast these periods with the relatively slow growth of Iceland, a stable country with low economic disparity.
Iceland is probably a great place to live (never been there). But I'm guessing they still put gas in their cars and use Windows and buy pharmaceuticals from the US.
I do think that the hypothesis that wealth disparities in the US are a product of massive corruption is not one to be dismissed lightly given the ongoing socialization of the costs of bailing out failing banks...
Of course, in order for a government to become corrupt it must first become powerful enough to be worth corrupting. It is my observation that governments most rapidly gain power as a reaction to perceived economic disparity: the New Deal, SOX, the IRS, the SEC. These were all once government 'solutions' to economic inequality and remain today some of the most powerful (and arguably, corrupt) organizations in the world. I would argue that almost any time you find a corrupt organization generating illicit wealth, you will also find a well-meaning person who proposed the creation of that organization to 'solve' economic disparity.
It is true that there are wealth disparities that are created through government corruption, especially in the short term. But historically that corruption is ultimately enabled (perhaps accidentally) by those overly concerned with the problem of wealth disparity.
I would love some numbers to back up that claim. I know that poor repressive governments tend to have high income disparity while the Western world tends to have less. However the last time I looked at the numbers I don't think the data showed that income disparity is a major causal factor in making a country poor or rich. It sounds to me like that is the dream of envious leftists, one of many unquestioned assumptions that they like to bring up in every debate.
There's a difference between a third-world country where the favored friends of the state are well-off while everybody else starves (see Zimbabwe) and a rich country where everybody is well-off but some are more well-off than others (see Britain). I question the "if you don't give us more money, we'll riot and break stuff" justification for income redistribution in a rich first-world country.
Also, third-world countries should be focused on getting rich, not redistributing what little wealth they have. I am highly skeptical of the benefits of income redistribution under any circumstances.
I'd like to apologize to every one in the hacker news community for having participated in it.
This is obviously not a topic it's possible to have an intelligent public discussion about.
Basically, it depends whether the disparities come from founding Google, or being the dictator's brother.
It would be interesting to actually quantify that. I suspect that the main catastrophes that occur involve rich people being robbed and/or murdered.
(I'm serious. I've had friends who were from wealthy parts of Latin America where kidnapping was a real concern.)
PG makes a good argument otherwise. Read the last paragraph for the concise version of the essay.
Redistribution is a necessary evil, though. It's zero-sum* in the immediate term, but it's a necessary upkeep measure for the long-term health of society.
Money is essentially a device for allocating resources to those who have put them to good/profitable use in the past. The problem with it is that there are so many degeneracies, such as crime and dumb luck, that also influence the flow of money. Foremost among these degeneracies is the way money is filtered through large corporations. Large companies profit or fail on account of reasonable market forces, but then go ahead and distribute the money in a manner that has 100 times more to do with office politics than actual productivity. Inheritances are also an enormous corrupting influence, in that they bequeath large amounts of capital to individuals who are entirely unworthy of the influence that it provides.
I tend to think of money and capitalism as shoddy (but the best we have) AI algorithms that need to be continuously tweaked in order to avoid divergence. If you start from an initial state where everyone is roughly equal, and allow capital to flow via a money economy, you'll have a system where more productive people have more control of the resources, and progressive improvements will result. Eventually, though, the degeneracies take over, and it starts to erode society; an elite selected not on merit emerges, and uses its influence to restructure society in its favor further, much in the way a cancer starves a body.
(* edit: I'd actually even argue against redistribution being "zero-sum" in any meaningful sense. From a utilitarian perspective, it's arguably positive-sum so long as we accept that the utility curve of material wealth is concave.)
Of course, the alternative to this (i.e. distribution by a government) would be the distribution of wealth that has an infinite number of times more to do with _actual_ politics.
Office politics is at least distributed, i.e. there are several companies that distribute their own individual wealth according to some non-perfect system. But some will be more perfect than others, and hopefully natural selection will reward those more than others.
Government redistribution does not have that characteristic. But not only is it missing the only piece of redeeming value in any distribution system, it is not in essence any different than the private redistribution system. That is, there are still people deciding how to spend money. It is true that people are flawed; but they are no less flawed because we call them government. In fact they are more so: we have removed the only incentive to improve redistribution that they may have had.
But then it is not easy to silence the voices of those who ask whether it is not paradoxical to entrust the nation's welfare to the decisions of voters whom the law itself considers incapable of managing their own affairs; whether it is not absurd to make those people supreme in the conduct of government who are manifestly in need of a guardian to prevent them from spending their own income foolishly." - Ludwig von Mises
Why does their position need justification?
"""They could not see that the pleasure they derived from possessions, prospects and doing well by their children is universal and that others deserve a share of that, too."""
Would the authors care explain on what grounds others "deserve" a share?
"""A last defence against paying more tax was their absolute conviction that government is inefficient and could not to be trusted with a penny more."""
Not-rich people seem to think that rather a lot, too.
"""One banker said he thought a family of four receives "say, £3,000 a month in their hands, and they're somewhere miles up north. They're not going to earn that sort of money, so where's the incentive for them to go out to work?" In fact, a family of four would in 2008 receive a net total of £1,328 a month."""
That's still the after-tax take home of someone on the average salary mentioned earlier. Free. Ad-hom Scroogey name calling wont help.
How surprising... ;)