There is a question as to whether inequality matters or not. We’re not dealing with that here. Let’s go ahead and assume for the purposes of this post that it does, action is justified, and we are in charge of fixing the world.
I have yet to hear anyone suggest a solution to inequality that isn’t some form of using resources from high-income (or wealthy) households to fund direct payments to or additional services for low- or no-income (or poor) households.
The societies we live in do this now, but not as much as many would like. A lot of folks in the United States, for example, would like to see us adopt policies closer to Sweden’s. #OWS
From everything I hear Sweden is a nice place, but it unfortunately seems possible to be unhappy enough to engage in extended mass riots there.
Perhaps it is my confirmation bias talking, but the most convincing explanation for the Stockholm riots in the linked article came not from the politicians interviewed, but from this guy:
Among a large group gathered on an overhead walkway was Mohammed Abdu, 27, whose family came to Sweden from Eritrea when he was aged three, and who now works as a security guard. While he condemned the violence as “hooliganism”, he claimed that many Husby residents still suffered from discrimination from the police and employers. Besides, he added, living in such a prosperous, advanced country offered no real satisfaction for those so conspicuously at the bottom of the heap.
“It’s true that the welfare system here is an example to the rest of the world, so if you fall here you do not fall all the way to the bottom,” he said. “But people don’t like being dependent on social welfare, and there is hidden racism.”
Mr. Abdu’s model suggests that tweaking economic inequality does little to solve other problems that are responsible for a lot of the dissatisfaction among some disaffected groups.
Even if all wealth were to be redistributed equally with the unemployed enjoying the same economic position as the CEO, the CEO will enjoy a far more exalted position within society than the permanently unemployed guy. In fact, the CEO might encounter even greater reverence given the number of people his pre-tax income supports.
In contrast, the unemployed man will feel dissociated from the society that supports him. Sure, one will write the next Harry Potter, but most will just be deeply unhappy. Check Chris Dillow:
[M]arket rewards are linked to the esteem in which we hold ourselves and others; there’s a reason why wages are called “earnings.” The rich get respect from others and a sense of self-worth and arrogance, whilst those reliant upon “hand-outs” feel despised; this is why the unemployed are so unhappy, even controlling for (pdf) their low incomes.
Contra Paul Krugman, a check is not a substitute for a job. Chris brings this point home with:
Mere monetary redistribution doesn’t solve this problem. Indeed, it might even exacerbate it, by making the rich feel that they are being deprived of their entitlements in order to support “scroungers”.
One of the functions of inequality in our society is to tell us who is of value. The consumption choices of the wealthy identify them as targets for the respect, reverence, and envy. I suspect that if we took that away from them, the hierarchy would reassert itself in other ways. It always has.
Reallocating everyone’s income would solve the narrow problem of income inequality. It’s just that that won’t be enough to fix the bajillion social problems that people have laid at the feet of inequality alone:
I’m not sure what I’m meant to make of this: should I object to any sort of safety net? Should I champion lowered taxes on the wealthy? Something else? Because I don’t see an explanation here of what we ought to do instead, only that what we’re currently doing is insufficient, and that doing anymore of it will be worse. But doing less will absolutely exacerbate the problem.
>should I object to any sort of safety net?
Not necessarily. But don’t pretend that the the following is true:
The US + a better safety net = Utopia
>Should I champion lowered taxes on the wealthy?
Oh, dear. If any of my posts ever lead anyone to think that dedicating themselves to political action is a good use of their time, I don’t think I could live with myself.
To more directly address your question though, I haven’t claimed here that reducing taxes on the wealthy would fix anything.
>…I don’t see an explanation here of what we ought to do instead…
Yes, that’s true. But that’s because I don’t have a one-sentence solution to fix the world. I would ask that you run screaming from those who claim they do. It works for me!
Why would I assume utopia? I wouldn’t. I’d assume a slightly better national situation.
We’re good then.
I think the embedded video illustrates that the claim is not really a straw man though. There are folks out there who think it.
But how close to the throne are those folks?
The reality is that people leave somewhere like Eritrea and go to somewhere like Sweden because Sweden (presumably) offers a better life. Not a utopia, mind you, but something that’s better than the other option.
We shouldn’t assume that those seeking something better are necessarily assuming that better means utopia, or, perhaps, we shouldn’t assume that utopia means what we think it means to all people. For some people, a little bit better than where they are might as well be utopia.
You don’t need a one-sentence solution — you have a whole blog post to spread out in!
Complaining that the US + a better safety net != Utopia is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Does The US + a better safety net == a better USA? If so, then we need a better safety net.
The sane is true of public health. It may save poor kids’ lives, but it does nothing for their social status, so the hell with it.
Mike, what I have done is say that won’t fix all the problems that people argue they will fix. This is either true or false. (I think it is obviously true, but you are free to argue otherwise.)
This is quite different from saying that we should not have a safety net. If you do not see the distinction, then this is for you. (Actually, it’s for everyone, including me at times.)
“what I have done is say that won’t fix all the problems that people argue they will fix”
Who argues that a strong social safety net necessitates that there will be no racism or Islamophobia or trouble integrating new cultures? Names please.
It seems to me that you are arguing that a strong social safety net doesn’t greatly increase equality. It does. It doesn’t necessitate utopia, because there can be other problems, e.g. racism and problems integrating new cultures or sexism or mad cow disease or bad banking policies or a poor educational system or Cylons or obesity or the plague or a water shortage or disco.
You are struggling to say that somehow the problem is the social safety net is somehow associated with these race riots, and it just isnt. It is a wholly separate problem, apparently partially caused by police brutality towards immigrants and the usual problems of cultural integration in a place that has always had (especially in less urban places or working class places) some xenophobia and racism. (Northern Europeans in general are more liberal than us and not more racist than the South, but also have some Nazi types and a whole spectrum of attitudes, IMO.)
Sweden is a much closer place to utopia than what we have here.
In other words, Swedish style economic policies are claimed to be necessary but not sufficient for utopia.
How could Sweden be Utopia when it’s full of Lutherans?
You haven’t had their casserole.
Vaccines are a “laughably inadequate” public health measure because sometimes there are illnesses that aren’t stopped by the vaccine, i.e. sometimes there are causes of public health problems not covered by the vaccine.
Good point. Most of the people involved in the riots in Sweden were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Most of their problems in the job market are from a combination of racism and failure at integration rather than Sweden’s social safety net, which probably makes their economic situation less horrible than it would be in a less generous system.
Am sad this comment hasn’t been addressed, nor my analogy below.
I feel like this is not an attempt to argue fairly and clearly with those who fabor Swedish-style social welfare programs.
Vikram: “Mr. Abdu’s model suggests that tweaking economic inequality does little to solve other problems that are responsible for a lot of the dissatisfaction among some disaffected groups.”
No, it doesn’t.
“Mike, what I have done is say that won’t fix all the problems that people argue they will fix. This is either true or false. (I think it is obviously true, but you are free to argue otherwise.)”
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!
This is what a poster on Crooked Timber so beautifully named ‘The Two-Step of Terrific Triviality’: make a claim, and when defending it back it down to something trivally true and worthless. One example would be to claim that intelligence is genetically determined, and when faced with proof of environmental influences, retreat to the claim that intelligence is not 100% environmentally influenced (i.e., that the genetic component is greater than 0%). This would be denied by nobody worth listening to, and is worthless.
In this case Vikram is now saying that a (safety net? improved safety net?) won’t fix all of the problems that an unidentified group of people say that it will.
Dean Baker wrote his book “The End of Loser Liberalism” on precisely this problem. Because a lot of the cause of economic inequality in this country comes from pre-tax issues (just look at the increasing share of income held by the richest among us), a lot of the solution has to occur before the government taxes it. He actually published the book for free on the CEPR website under a Creative Commons license; I highly recommend it.
Thanks, I’ll take a look. I found this interesting about it:
By releasing The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive under a Creative Commons license and as a free download, Baker walks the walk of one of his key arguments — that copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward.
” copyrights are a form of government intervention in markets that leads to enormous inefficiency, in addition to redistributing income upward.”
I’ll make sure to mention that to my wife, who is perpetually engaged in trying to keep mega-retailers from ripping off her jewelry designs and having them made on the cheap in China.
Just because copyrights help your wife does not mean that they are not a form of government intervention in markets.
Whether copyrights are a form of intrusion is a tricky question. Markets are generally presumed to be dependent on government enforcement of property rights, so in that respect copyright is not an intrusion on the market, but a pre-requisite.
But of course all property rights are socially and legally defined; there is no intrinsic set that is “the property rights of a market” (except, perhaps, as political economist (not Star Trek Commander) William Riker once wrote, the right to alienate one’s property (because how could you have a market where no one can sell what they possess?). So any particular definition represents a shaping of the market that at its core is a necessary prerequisite, but that also represents an intrusion that shapes and limits markets in some particular way.
That is, some basic right to copyright is not really an intrusion. Physical property is comparatively simple; if I produce, say, a go-kart, it’s not too hard for me to keep you from enjoying it without compensating me. But intellectual property is so much harder for the individual to prevent others from using without compensating the creator that it’s persistently a potential market failure.
So it’s not a question of IPR being either simply a market pre-requisite or a market intervention. It’s a fuzzy, always non-definitive, argument about how firmly we’re in the pre-requisite field or how deep we are into the intervention field.
For my part, I’d say ” moral rights” are indisputably beyond prerequisite and are purely interventionist (which, although I disapprove of the concept, does not function as a criticism of them–they obviously rely on justifications other than efficiency, and it’s those justifications themselves that would have to be argued against). Most people seem to think the Mickey Mouse law (aka DMCA) goes beyond pre-requisite and is clearly interventionist, too, a position with which I am in agreement.
But certainly not all possible sets of IPR are so clearly into the realm of pure market intervention.
By the way, that’s a riff off Mike’s comment, not an argument against it.
“So it’s not a question of IPR being either simply a market pre-requisite or a market intervention. It’s a fuzzy, always non-definitive, argument about how firmly we’re in the pre-requisite field or how deep we are into the intervention field.”
Ha-Joon Chang wrote a book called “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.” Number 1 is simply “There is no such thing as a free market.” It’s basically saying exactly what you are saying, that every market has some minimum set of rules concerning its operation, and there is no way to get rid of every rule because they need rules by their nature. Even a market with no government rules on its functioning has rules; one of them is possession being the law. If I want your boat, I can kill you and take it from you, and then it is mine.
The below link is the text of the chapter referenced.
http://www.alternet.org/story/149688/23_things_they_don't_tell_you_about_capitalism%3A_item_%231_–_there's_no_such_thing_as_a_free_market
I think there are two issues at work here. I agree with the premise of the argument that a better social safety net will not bring utopia or solve all the problems of inequality because people on the lower end will still feel the pain and lack of status of being recipients of welfare. At the same time, a vigrous welfare state is still a net good because it at least alleviates or gets rid of some the bad parts of inequality. Sweden’s public housing is a lot better than the slums of late 19th century cities or poor 19th century villages. Even without getting into morality, better housing leads to a more stable society and one where people with higher incomes are less likely to fear for their possessions. Social stability tends to be a net good. Likewise, universal healthcare leads to better public health and its kind of nice not to have to worry about pandemics or epidemics for the most part.
At the same time, people still feel rage at being unemployed even if their life is less bad under the welfare state than it would be in the past. I think that a full or near full employment policy must be part of any solution to inequality. People need work to feel good about themselves, that they are doing something. Fulfilling work makes this better.
I’m going to put up a front page mirror link to this post, Vikram.
“I have yet to hear anyone suggest a solution to inequality that isn’t some form of using resources from high-income (or wealthy) households to fund direct payments to or additional services for low- or no-income (or poor) households.”
This is not true at all. You could, for instance, end the reverse: that is, stop actively transferring resources from the have-nots to the haves through, say, corporate welfare, cronyism, etc. You could institute an exam-based promotion system such that exists in Confucian countries. You could develop a universal translator that effectively eliminates the advantage of being fluent in the dominant language.
Hooray, Christopher!
Sadly, it is true and beyond frustrating, that most discussions on responses to income inequality devolve quickly to arguments about higher taxes on the rich or greater social services for the poor, but to my mind, this is not where the fight belongs. No progress can be made on inequality without dismantling all the the systemic advantage to the Haves that has been layered into the system over the last 30 years – corporate welfare and cronyism, sure, but most of all the perverse incentives to politicians when it comes to campaign fund-raising.
Campaign finance reform has to be the first step.
Double-plus hooray.
When you’re privileged, it seems like the norm. So the advantages of privilege are not obvious; for instance, lack of good schooling and good models of how to get an education can make a very bright AA student have a much more difficult time finding success.
Vikram,
Re: Utopia.
How dare you use hyperbole! That’s the worst thing ever!!
And he does it all the time!
Thomas Jefferson observed all men are created equal. BlaiseP observes they don’t stay that way for long. The problem isn’t inequality. It’s lack of opportunity.
The terminus of unregulated capitalism is the Banana Republic. My father had a joke on this subject. It’s over here
Let’s put aside, as did Hobbes’ Monarch, any of these glib assertions about the benefits of democracy and equality and any other such fatuous moralising. An absolute monarch would say “I am the state” and view his success or failure on the basis of his country’s well-being, in total. Were vast herds of aggressive beggars to appear on the streets around his palace, he would view this as a failure, a menace to the prosperity of his realm, a personal affront. Other, better-run nations wouldn’t be plagued with beggars. He would have to Keep Up with the Joneses, so to speak, encourage commerce, punishing corruption and malfeasance, generally set about managing things on a proper basis.
When Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq, he made people go to school, imposing three year jail terms on those who wouldn’t be educated. He electrified even the remotest hamlet, built sewers and streets, water treatment plants. Hospitals, public health clinics, his modernisation programs were the wonder of the age. He even won a UNESCO award for children’s literacy. Under his admittedly savage auspices, Iraq became a middle-class country, the envy of its neighbours. He suppressed all ethnic rivalries by a cunning policy of divide-and-conquer, creating the greatest network of spies and toadies since Stalin, who was a great hero of Saddam’s. Though Saddam did not repeat Stalin’s earlier mistakes, he did repeat his latter mistakes: Saddam’s greatest complaint was that everyone lied to him.
Beggars are bad for business. Inequality leads inevitably to bad places: my home in Guatemala City, in the nicest neighbourhood of that miserable city, is surrounded by a three meter wall, topped by electrified barbed wire, with firing parapets on the roof. Kidnapping is a constant threat: my children had bodyguards and were trained in small arms tactics. A ten year old girl can fire a .32 pistol but a fifteen year old boy can fire a .45 pistol. That’s no way to live.
Resource redistribution is a lousy way to achieve equality. If the Monarch — or some elected assembly more congruent with the principles of democracy and the rule of law beyond absolute despotism — were to consider taxation and expenditures as investments in the people of their nation, expecting some return on that investment, things would become clearer. If a cursory inspection of the streets reveals an excess of beggars and vagrants, something’s going amiss. Every tyrant knows — and legislatures ought to, as well — that a large enough lump of disaffected beggars becomes a danger to their mandate and authority. The poor are dangerous and you can’t jail them all.
This! +1000
Aside from the minority of scoundrels who are happy to live off the public teat, most beneficiaries are happy to earn & pay their own way. It is in our best interest to do all we can to give them the opportunity to find that way.
The fact that we/our government has failed to do this is the tragedy.
I just finished reading Richard Sennett’s “The Culture of the New Capitalism”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Culture-Capitalism-Richard-Sennett/dp/0300119925
which covers some of the ground here.
While wealth inequality can’t be blamed for all the ills of the new economy, maybe it can be said that the inequality is symptomatic of something deeper and more intractable, which is as he calls it, “the inability to form a life narrative”.
The disruption and sharp dislocations of the new economy, the increasing ambiguity of the meaning of “work”, create less opportunity, than uncompensated risk and alienation from the sources of power. We are all only a moment away from becoming useless, our skills unneeded in the economy. How do we maintain a sense of civic engagement, of belonging to the larger community?
He makes the point rather well, I think, that inclusiveness, of providing universal engagement with the economy has its own benefit, beyond efficiency.
The first step toward civic engagement is giving people a reason to stay put and not run off to some better-run state. Reduced to its most ragged edge, refugees always run away from the bad guy and toward the good guy as surely as animals run away from a grass fire.
Economies are constantly in a state of flux. This is of no consequence. A well-run regime can always attract investment capital because it’s stable and reasonably free of corruption. Its leaders are nimble enough to adapt in the face of change. They observe, they plan. In short, they evolve.
Unlike our leaders, who adapt or evolve because can’t see past the next election, or earnings statement
Well, we can’t expect our leaders to evolve much, not while they’re insulated from the consequences of their stupidity. America will stumble along like a third-string linebacker (yes, he’s big and slow, but he’s dumb, too!) from pillar to post, as it’s always done. As with Rome, we’ve had our two centuries of the Republic, inclusive and expansive. Now we’re in for four centuries of Empire. We’ll have a few good emperors, the Roman Empire wasn’t an unalloyed failure. But at its core, the Roman Empire was a madhouse, populated with inbred paranoiacs and baroquely sadistic effetes, riding the ever-hungrier tiger of the legions. The emperors could have adapted to their times but they lost touch with the people.
Ah, our other sin, legal immunity – a curse from both sides of the aisle.
The romans were pretty smart till they got lead poisoning.
Right, the key isn’t to stop things from changing, it to help people keep their lives on track while things change around them.
One of the functions of inequality in our society is to tell us who is of value.
That’s a pretty contested means of determining “who is of value”. An alternative proposition is “everyone is of value”. The proposition that a wealthy heir or hedge fund manager is more valuable than a third grade teacher or a homeless vet deserves scrutiny (to put it mildly). Where do human dignity or equality of opportunity fit into inequality as currently exhibited by US society?
I suspect that if we took that away from them, the hierarchy would reassert itself in other ways. It always has.
Then we’d need to examine the social justice implications (access to opportunity, public health outcomes, etc.) of the new hierarchy. But a focus on inequality is a pretty good proxy for a number of connected social problems; there are quite a few social indicators on which the US underperforms compared to developed nation peers, and certainly woefully underperforms when compared to Sweden. There’s good reason to see a connection between high levels of inequality and these social problems.
Police brutality may not be one of the inequality related social problems, but that doesn’t mean that those other problems aren’t interconnected.
“One of the functions of inequality in our society is to tell us who is of value.”
I would say it (the free market) is wonderful at telling us WHAT is of value. I fail to see how it tells us anything about the intrinsic value of anybody. It rewards solving problems for others. A jerk that fixes sinks real well adds more value than a saint who fixes sinks poorly. The jerk is rewarded, and the saint not so much. Does anyone have a problem with this?
As I wrote below, inequality of outcome is not a bug, it is an essential feature of markets and of any progressive system. Yeah inequality!*
Unequal outcomes act as feedback for continued improvement. The error of extreme redistributionists is that they fail to recognize that prosperity and progress eats redistribution for lunch. If we care about the disadvantaged, the key is to align interests in such a way as to optimize the current and future size of the pie. Poorly built redistribution systems limit economic growth and harm future generations. Safety nets make lots of sense, but they must be well designed, and they are always costly.
At current conservative historic growth rates of two percent per year, you do realize that the future poor are on pace to become millionaires? Let’s not derail the real progress of humanity as we solve immediate problems.
* boo inequality of opportunity in terms of rigged games.
I’m reminded of the recent CBS Sunday Morning interview with IL Senator Mark Kirk, stroke victim.
To preface, Kirk’s long been a moderate GOP Rep from an affluent, moderate IL district. A bona fide RINO, if you will. In fact, it can be substantively argued that he narrowly won his Senate seat–Obama’s seat–only via some magical mix of his own GOP moderate-ness and his Dem opponent’s [cough] shortcomings.
Whatever. Because of the generosity of taxpayers, Kirk enjoyed a year of uninterrupted pay and full healthcare benefits.
But he’s still not okay with any of that for the rest of us, and he makes no excuses for it in this interview.
I used to like this guy. Sadly, I don’t anymore. He squandered a truly rare opportunity to be brave. Time to cut off the benefits he enjoyed via taxpayers.
Oops. I meant to include the link.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3445_162-57592449/mark-kirk-the-senators-comeback/
Mark Kirk is an interesting case in self-contradiction. I really wanted to like the guy. Kirk was an improvement on the disgraceful Roland Burris, though that’s not saying much.
Kirk is more reasonable than most Republicans — which, again, isn’t saying much. He’s said some dumb things, sure. I’ll give him as many mulligans as he needs, for all his malarkey about Obamacare. He has to say such things to stay in the good graces of his party’s leadership. Obamacare is a work in progress: it’s no sin to say it’s all got to be paid for and Democrats should be willing to stipulate to that much of his message.
Mark Kirk cares about Illinois, which used to be my state. He has the good sense and the comity to work with Dick Durbin, one of the most complex characters in the US Senate today. Flawed as he is, for all the dumb things he’s said, I sure wish we had more senators like Mark Kirk.
Mark Kirk cares about Illinois, which used to be my state. He has the good sense and the comity to work with Dick Durbin, one of the most complex characters in the US Senate today. Flawed as he is, for all the dumb things he’s said, I sure wish we had more senators like Mark Kirk.
I don’t essentially disagree with this, and largely true before his stroke.
But Kirk’s gonna have a hard time defending the positions he’s chosen to take, post stroke. By which I mean, he won’t have a hard time with IL GOP primary voters, but he’ll have a hard time with IL GE voters. I suspect this interview will come back to haunt him.
I’ve said this before: Illinois is a weird state, politically. We think of Illinois as a Blue State, but looking at it from above, county by county, it’s mostly a Red State, with a few pockets of Blue in Cook County and downstate. But all around Chicago, the collar counties are amazingly Red, especially Dupage County. People vote their zip code.
I have this theory about good government. Every state gets two senators. Wouldn’t it be great if every state just got one Democrat and one Republican? That way there wouldn’t be any of this partisan nonsense: a party line vote wouldn’t mean anything. The Vice President would break the tie and that’s all she wrote. The Senate is sposta be Conservative in nature, if not in the current sense of that word — the cautious men, taking the long term view of things, a brake on the ebb and flow of the obstreperous House of Representatives.
The Democrats have to get right, quit hamming it up. All this gabbling and fretting and hand-wringing about those Awful Republicans must stop. A bunch of fretful Chicken Littles. Getting sick of them. We need some statesmen, some good old boys and girls who know how to drive the big rigs of politics and do the business of the nation. That means finding Republicans who aren’t completely apeshit crazy and work with them. Obama used to carry water to those Red County Republicans back in his day in the Illinois State Senate. They respected him for it. If only because “He’s not a complete maniac”, I’d like to see Mark Kirk mature a bit more as a politician. We need Republicans like him.
Kirk suffers from the same problem that every other Republican politician suffers from the base. The people who go to the weekly or monthly meetings of the local GOP branch and vote in the primaries want fidelity to a certain set of core beliefs and hate compromise. In local and state governments and the House of Representatives, the average GOP politician believes what the base believes so this isn’t a problem. More than a few GOP Senators, while very conservative themselves, know that sticking to the creed of the GOP base is the slow or fast way to political death and isn’t away to govern a country anyway. The base won’t have it.
When Mark Kirk is alleged to be the uncompromising, base-pandering reduce republican, the charge loses its meaning.
In the long run, we are all dead. John Maynard Keynes. Look, here’s my contention, as an ex-Conservative, which is something akin to a Norwegian Blue ex-Parrot: this country has to quit treating our political system as if it were the Thunderdome: two go in but one comes out. Conservative and Liberal are adjectives, not nouns.
The parties are playing the voters for suckers, pitting us against each other. Madison might have designed this system for conflict but this system is so constipated, so out of sorts, it’s now become impossible to get anything done. We’re awash in the sewage of political money, it’s coming up through the grates like a vile tide. The politicians fear it, despise it, wish all that money wasn’t needed — it’s a goddamn arms race only it’s toxic waste, demon shit in the warheads and neither party thinks it can stop building their arsenals lest the other party get ahead.
…and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
The revelation is at hand. Neither party can continue along their current trajectories. The last two decades are one long litany of lies, screwups, trillions of dollars wasted on needless wars, thousands of dead troops, tens of thousands wounded, a tsunami of PTSD and suicide, dispirited young people drowning in debt, a government wrapped around the axle of Security Considerations, lying its collective ass off to us, our friends despise us, our enemies no longer fear us — none of this is sinking in with either the Democrats or Republicans. Neither of them can be trusted with anything sharper than a styrofoam ball. I don’t believe these stories about the demands of the GOP base. Their base is tens of thousands of frightened oldsters, unsure of who or what to believe any more. They’re quite literally being scared to death. Someone needs to tell these people it’s gonna be all right, that America will get through this, as it always has. These people need some hope.
The closer you get to the maelstrom of Washington, all these odious little tapeworms, millions of them now, parasites upon the guts of the body politic, slithering around. This nation needs to be dewormed like a stray dog. While the political parties ignore the gravity, the depravity of our predicament, it will only get worse.
I’m sorry we do silly things like look at a guy’s voting record, Will. Just because a guy only punches you in the face nine times out of ten instead of ten times out of ten doesn’t make somebody a moderate. Just like Olympia Snowe, Kirk is a perfectly conservative garden variety Republican. He would’ve been in the middle of the Republican Caucus twenty or thirty years ago, just like Olympia Snowe was. Nothing wrong with that, I’m just tired of the false equivalence where every Republican who doesn’t vote exactly like Jim Imfhoe is a moderate maverick independent.
The US would probably be wise to emulate Sweden by eliminating the minimum wage, privatizing most government functions, lowering corporate tax rates, tying Social Security payments to financial markets or to overall economic performance, and other measures.
Breaking news. Sweden started moving away from the Swedish social model in the 1960’s. That’s why it isn’t an economic basket case.
Unfortunately they allowed massive Muslim integration, and as occurred almost everywhere else, they vainly looked to the particulars of their own country, its history and social systems, to try and figure out why their cars were being set on fire to chants of “Allah Akbar.”
Breaking news. Sweden started moving away from the Swedish social model in the 1960′s.
The Nordic model is still very much alive in Sweden.
Compare*, Sweden : US
– Top income tax rate, 57% : 39%
– Effective tax rate, 37% : 25%
– Tax revenue as percent of GDP, 45% : 26.9&
– Social expenditure as percent of GDP, 28.2% : 19.4%
Government, labor, and industry partnership for a more equitable society, yes, “The US would probably be wise to emulate Sweden”.
—
* The top income tax rate in Sweden is 57% (Wikipedia, “List of countries by tax rates”). Effective tax rate in Sweden approx 37% (eyeballing the table here, but a significant differnec, via the Economist, Oct 16, 2012, “Effective tax rates”). Tax revenue as a percent of GDP in Sweden, approx 45% (Wikipedia “List of countries by tax revenue as percentage of GDP”, 2012 figures). Social expenditure as percent of GDP in Sweden, 28.2% (OECD StatExtacts, 2012 figures).
US corporate tax rate: 40%
Swedish corporate tax rate: 22%
KPMG global link
And Sweden continues moving away from where it used to be, choosing to remain competitive instead of joining Southern Europe in the heap of failed experiments in uncontrolled public sector spending.
Yes, that’s the listed tax. Now, what’s the effective corporate tax rate in each of those countries. Because, I know it’s amazingly small in the US.
Our effective corporate tax rate is still pretty high, actually. Not “amazingly small” at all, according to any source that I’ve found.
i call fluff on that cite. six industries and yet finance is left out. hmm, wonder why?
“Looking at six different industries (Automotive, Aerospace and Defense, Chemicals, Engineering and Construction, Industrial Manufacturing and Metals, and Transportation and Logistics”
i mean when you narrow down the tax focus to industries that only make big ticket items and ship the same i am sure you find more honest taxpaying. because those industries require making actual things, not moving phantom money around.
I am open to something more comprehensive with a different result (one that suggests “amazingly small”). The study was from Price Waterhouse Cooper, which doesn’t have the same ideological motivations as would, say, Heritage. Also, the Tax Foundation’s report looks at 13 studies with the US consistently coming up high.
In other words, as low as our taxes in the US are generally, I have seen little to suggest that our corporate taxes don’t actually run in the other direction.
This provides a pretty interesting discussion. It’s a few years out of date, but still relevant.
Of course, any time the statutory rate and effective rate are that wildly divergent, you have yourself a serious policy problem.
I think about the only thing that everyone can agree on is that the corporate tax is a mess, even if we can’t agree on precisely why or what to do about it.
I’m one of the rare liberals who would be fine with dumping the corporate income tax. Corporations have the money and the flexibility to make it into Swiss cheese by reconfiguring themselves to squeeze through loopholes. It clearly isn’t raising any meaningful amount of revenue and the loopholes give corporations incentives to do all sorts of insane things that are bad for both the businesses and their customers.
If you want to tax wealthy people who own companies, dump the corporate income tax and tax dividends and capital gains to make up for the loss. Right now, we’re just paying people to break their own windows.
Building on George and Will’s comments…
The below are from the following link, which no longer seems to work.
http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sweden%20Paper-%20revised.pdf
“Sweden did not become wealthy through social democracy, big government and a large welfare state. It developed economically by adopting free-market policies in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It also benefited from positive cultural norms, including a strong work ethic and high levels of trust.
• As late as 1950, Swedish tax revenues were still only around 21 per cent of GDP. The policy shift towards a big state and higher taxes occurred mainly during the next thirty years, as taxes increased by almost one per cent of GDP annually
• The rapid growth of the state in the late 1960s and 1970s led to a large decline in Sweden’s relative economic performance. In 1975, Sweden was the 4th richest industrialised country in terms of GDP per head. By 1993, it had fallen to 14th.
• Big government had a devastating impact on entrepreneurship. After 1970, the establishment of new firms dropped significantly. Among the 100 firms with the highest revenues in Sweden in 2004, only two were entrepreneurial Swedish firms founded after 1970, compared with 21 founded before 1913.
• High levels of equality and favourable social outcomes were evident before the creation of an extensive welfare state. Moreover, generous welfare policies have created numerous social problems, including high levels of dependency among certain groups.
• Descendants of Swedes who migrated to the USA in the 19th century are characterised by favourable social outcomes, such as a low poverty rate and high employment, despite the less extensive welfare state in the USA. The average income of Americans with Swedish ancestry is over 50 per cent higher than Swedes in their native country.
• Third World immigrants have been particularly badly affected by a combination of high welfare benefits and restrictive labour market regulations. In 2004, when the Swedish economy was performing strongly, the employment rate among immigrants from non- Western nations in Sweden was only 48 per cent.
• Since the economic crisis of the early 1990s, Swedish governments have rolled back the state and introduced market reforms in sectors such as education, health and pensions. Economic freedom has increased in Sweden while it has declined in the UK and USA. Sweden’s relative economic performance has improved accordingly.”
In many ways, Sweden seems more free market than the US. The freedom index scores are about the same, and better in several ways. They are certainly role models on competition and market-based education.
http://www.freetheworld.com/2012/EFW2012-complete.pdf
Sweden’s far far less corrupt than America.
“Descendants of Swedes who migrated to the USA in the 19th century are characterised by favourable social outcomes, such as a low poverty rate and high employment, despite the less extensive welfare state in the USA. The average income of Americans with Swedish ancestry is over 50 per cent higher than Swedes in their native country.”
… how racist are we going to be? the more salient correlation (causative, you might even say) is with class, both in the old country and the new.
I find it interesting that your conclusion is ultimately that inequality isn’t the sole cause of problems, but your argument for this conclusion is relies on the riots in Sweden, riots caused by inequality (as the quotes you include indicate!). I’m not sure what to make of this. Perhaps there’s a rhetorical maneuver here that I’m missing?
I don’t think that was his conclusion, or at least that’s not what I read his conclusion to be. Rather, I think his conclusion is that the measures proposed to reduce inequality would be sufficient to mitigate the effects of inequality because the remaining inequality is sufficient to perpetuate the problems of inequality.
(Sort of like how elsewhere people are arguing that a fence would not stop enough illegal immigration to mitigate the effects of the illegal immigration.)
He uses the video, which says that inequality is the only problem, as an example of the position he’s arguing against, in his conclusion. I know people who think like that. If he were arguing against a real position, that would have to be it. If he is arguing that redistribution in the form of the modern capitalist welfare state is not going to solve the problem of inequality by itself, then he’s arguing against a straw man, or at best a caricature of a system that no one really likes, but which says that if there is a problem, be it inequality or something else, throw some money at it, because that’s easy and will appease the constituents long enough for the incumbents to get re-elected. Since in comments he uses the video as evidence that the position he’s arguing against is not a straw man, I don’t know which reading is more charitable: that he is in fact arguing against a position no one holds, that he’s arguing against a positiin that his own argument actually supports, or that he’s conflating the two.
I still don’t understand why we’re assuming that tax-funded welfare is the only policy with which to fight inequality. What happened to looser monetary policy, strict financial sector regulation, or changes to the laws governing unionization drives? These might be inadequate to the scale of the problem and aren’t favored by everybody that talks about inequality, but they do exist and they undercut the whole argument about the requirement that people work with dignity. In fact, I seem to remember reading intra-left debates about “pity-charity Liberalism” and the unsustainability/undesireability of limiting the liberal inequality program to redistribution. Don’t we have to acknowledge these things to evaluate Vikram’s thesis?
I think that’s a part of the disconnect that caused the response to the post that Vikram has received. Which is that Vik has mostly heard about one mechanism to address inequality and has declared in insufficient… but a lot of other people are taking objection to the notion that it’s the only mechanism that has been offered (Vikram wasn’t around during the great inequality symposium).
I had a different response to Vikram’s post and were I not about to move across the country it would probably inspire a post on the subject. (On the other hand, it’s natural that I wouldn’t have focused on the part that liberals have focused on, because I wasn’t the one being criticized. So this isn’t a criticism of the response to the OP.)
In any event, today’s conversations have been much more productive (my objection to yesterday’s actually had to do with commenters’ treatment of one another, rather than the pushback to the original post).
One of the functions of inequality in our society is to tell us who is of value.
We also have People magazine for that.
The problem with inequality is that it is, by definition, relative.
If I am enjoying a 2013-level of health care in 2013, I am sitting pretty… so long as it is 2013. If I am enjoying a 2013-level of health care in 2023? I am one of the folks left behind. If I am enjoying a 2013-level of health care in 2033, I am evidence of global injustice… even if what I receive *NEVER CHANGES*.
Because it does not look at what I am getting. It looks at what you are getting, what Bill Gates is getting, what the politically connected are getting, what the richest of the rich are getting.
It’s a view that sees less injustice in a 2033-level world where everyone has access to 2013-level tech and nothing further than a 2033-level world where the connected have 2033-level tech and the unconnected have 2023-level tech.
Well yeah. Inequality is by its a nature a comparison. A ratio is a description of the relation of two numbers. That is what those things are, they are describing relationships between things. If certain policies have led some people to be able to afford jet packs, gold plated spacely sprockets and a VR sandwich shop in their home while others are stuck in 1970 then that is a comparison between two fates. The discussion then is why are things that way, is it good and should something be done differently.
I’m not really seeing people who think inequality is a problem complaining that everybody doesn’t have a mansion, a yacht and a string of polo ponies.
What if I can find someone complaining that the general public doesn’t have the same access to health care coverage as Senators?
Because access to quality health care is the same thing as access to living in mansion?
The example I gave in my original comment was not “living in a mansion” but discussion of levels of health care.
Seriously. It’s right there.
The “living in a mansion” is something that Greg made up and, for some reason, you’re also using to argue against me as if I were not talking about health care in my original comment.
Sorry Jaybird. Really. I’m not trying to throw words (or intention) into your mouth, just trying to understand your position.
That said, I’m not sure my comment lacks validity here. I mean, surely access to quality health care ranks higher on the list of citizen needs, Rights even, than anything else you choose to trot out in some ideologically driven comparative exercise.
Yes i used a mansion as an example regarding your discussion of things being relative. You brought up billy gates and the politically connected as people who we compare ourselves against to find inequality. You brought up the comparison of us and the richest of the rich. I’m not sure why that isn’t part of an interesting comparison but certainly not complete.
Go ahead a find an example of people complaining we all don’t have the same health care as senators, that won’t be hard. That was a common example trotted out against the the R’s who fought HC reform; they had sweet gov supplied HC but were denying it to others. So what does that prove. Lots of us are all for uni HC for everybody, lots of people are for a single payer system. That isn’t either news or something extravagant.
But drop the mansion part for whatever it was worth. Why is wrong to compare what some people get due to the laws, regs and gov and what others get. Especially when some Haves ( like Senators) argue against let some Have Nots have access to their sweet deal.
Rights? We’re talking about medical technology, medical expertise, and (probably) chemical compounds that required massive amounts of both.
If we were talking about video games, you’d rightly snort at me if I said that I had a right to a Playstation Seven.
Yet when we’re talking about stuff that wasn’t possible 10 years ago, suddenly you have a “right” to it? A “right” to something that only recently came into existence at all?
Senators get their health care through their employee. I see no inconsistency in suggesting people who do not work for their employee should not get the same health care they get.
How about this, people used be able to live on less then a dollar a day. So do we say to people on SS here is $400 for the year, when you were a kid you could live on that.?? Yes things move forward and change, i’m not sure i see the issue. When i was a kid there were no ultrasounds. Now if a doc didn’t do an ultrasound for some concerns that might be malpractice. Good for us all, that advance in tech helped us all. If we say here is health insurance why wouldn’t we pay for and receive a decent ( not gold plated) modern standard of care. Why does something being new mean it shouldn’t be part of a HC plan?
Greg, I don’t know where to draw the line between “decent” and “gold plated”.
It seems to me that if there is something in “gold plated” that would save the life of someone who only had “decent” health care, our standards would change and the very existence of the new technology would move it directly to “decent” without spending any time in “gold plated” at all.
Here’s an interesting sentence:
“There are health care options that are appropriate for billionaires to buy that would be inappropriate to be provided without cost to the child of an illegal immigrant in a poor part of Oklahoma.”
Do you agree with this sentence?
” If we say here is health insurance why wouldn’t we pay for and receive a decent ( not gold plated) modern standard of care.”
What happens if they decide that ultrasounds are “gold-plated”?
I’ll agree what is decent and gold plated might be hard to figure. But that doesn’t imply to me we shouldn’t aim for providing decent. That lines are hard to draw isn’t an argument not to do something. Actually neither you nor i would be good judged of bronze, silver or gold plated. Doctors and actuaries and hospitals are much more likely to be able to figure that out.
Things will definitely move from gold plated to decent. Good for us all. Well and truly good, whether that is video game systems or medical care. We should hasten the process.
Answer: I’m assuming you mean health care options that wouldn’t be provided by insurance that billionaires should be able to buy out of pocket. Is so, then yes. There will always be some sorts of medical care that isn’t provided by even my dream Uni HC.Those things will either be experimental, or completely unproven, or cosmetic. No HC plan pays for absolutely everything. That is fine by me. But if someone has money they should be able to pay for them.
Dude. The taxes you and I pay afford said Senators the top-notch health care access they currently enjoy. Make no mistake, I don’t begrudge them this.
But surely it’s not unreasonable to expect that my tax dollars benefit not only needy Senators, bur needy citizens. You’re arguing otherwise?
I’m arguing that your tax dollars are benefiting needy citizens as well as senators (there are a number of programs that I could point to… I mean, I imagine that if I said “we should get rid of (program)!”, I could expect you to argue “But that will hurt the needy citizens!”) and, yet, this is still not enough.
It seems to me that this is a function of the difference rather than a function of the baseline.
Regardless if the merits of government-sponsored universal health care, I don’t see an equivalent obligation to give everyone the health care the health care that wegive to government employees as a part of their compensation package. Two different things.
I’m not sure I disagree with you, given current realities. I mean, it’s proven unfortunate that health care insurance is linked to employment, and our elected officials are indeed employees of the government. But, must these two things be necessarily different? Perhaps it’s time we start thinking differently about health care access. When we start discussing it in terms of who gets it and who doesn’t, a lot of folks get hinky. Why do you suppose that is?
So really, Jaybird, what exactly are YOU arguing for, in terms of health care access?
I mean the very first comment you made at the top of this sub-thread is, “The problem with inequality is that it is, by definition, relative.”
Sheesh. Give me a fucking break. No one here is arguing that the gov’t should provide everyone with a pony and a yacht. What’s being discussed, specifically, is access to quality health care. Let’s not muddy those waters, any of us.
What is the definition of “quality” that we’re using? Maybe I agree that everyone is entitled to “quality” health care.
How about something like Reasonable and Customary. Is that a start? How about we use the same process that insurance companies and Medicare/caid, etc use now to determine what is quality. What you are asking about is something these groups do everyday already.
So Medicaid level of healthcare?
Can I say “We’re already providing Medicaid to the least fortunate”?
Kt, of course they’re different. For the same reason that we give senators six-digit salaries and do not give everybody six digit salaries. Their insurance is a party of their compensation package for the jobs they hold.
We’re providing MC level of care to some people. Other’s are still waiting for the implementation of Ocare. I even hear tell there were one or two people actually proposing the gov offer MC to all as a sort of public option. But maybe that was just a dream.
Jaybird.
I’m not arguing with you. I’m pretty sure I have a fairly decent grasp of your position, I simply do not agree with it. At. All.
Comparing health care access to playing video games is just stupid. Juvenile, really. You’re not a stupid guy so for the life of me I can’t understand why you went there. I’m gonna overlook it and move on.
I’ll simply highlight this gem:
Yet when we’re talking about stuff that wasn’t possible 10 years ago, suddenly you have a “right” to it? A “right” to something that only recently came into existence at all?
Since you don’t mention a specific issue, seems like your argument could be swapped in for almost anything at any time, no? “You women didn’t have the vote 10 years ago, suddenly you have a right to it?”
Listen to yourself, Jaybird. Do the positions you hold reflect the values you hold? Sometimes we let ideology muddy up those waters, and I kinda think that’s what you’re doing here.
I could be wrong. I just want to believe I’m not.
Will-
I understand that that these things *are* different, I simply rhetorically asked *must* they be different.
It’s not a unique way of thinking. Hindsight is awesome, after all, and plenty of folks, both Left and Right, see major benefit in unhinging health care insurance from employment.
ktward, I look at what medical care *ACTUALLY* *IS*.
It is technology. It is the time of specialists and experts. If I wanted the services of an expert lawyer, I should expect to pay for it. If I wanted a piece of technology that cost millions of dollars to research and hundreds of dollars to produce, I should expect to pay for it.
But when it comes to, say, the insertion of a stent into a heart valve, suddenly questioning whether someone who cannot afford to pay for the time of a specialist or for the technology itself is, in fact, a “right” results in questions of whether I even have values.
For the record, I’m of the opinion that the right of women to vote existed even as the right was being violated.
When it comes to the medical technology that does not exist today and will not even see testing until 2033 and will not even see the market until 2043, it seems silly to say that you, or anyone, has a “right” to this technology that does not exist (or, for that matter, expertise in knowledge that has not yet been discovered).
Medical care is a scarce good that will need to be rationed either by price or by queue and rationing it by queue will slow medical advancement immeasurably.
If “equality” is your goal, then slowing in new discoveries (if not cessation of new discoveries!) is nothing to worry about. After all, everyone will finally have “equality”.
I’d rather live in a society where 3D medical printing, say, is seen as a third-rate technique used by backwards societies that haven’t yet managed to master The New Stuff… even if The New Stuff isn’t available to everybody equally.
You are way wrong on what drives medical progress Jay. Most medical research is funded at a basic level by gov funds (NIH, NSF) That does not have to be changed, we can even do more of it. There is nothing about uni HC that says progress will stop since we can fund the research and there is a strong demand for more and newer tech. None of that goes away. It seems like you are touching on some Randian fantasy here. There is actually plenty of med research going on in countries with Uni HC.
Jaybird.
Based upon your comment, I’m not convinced you have a realistic grasp of what reasonable, much less “quality”, medical care actually is.
Sure, some teeny tiny percentage of Americans stricken with some horrific rare condition or disease might serve the ideological point you’re peddling. But the vast, VAST majority of Americans simply want quality preventative and therapeutic care for all the shit we’ve already figured out. (Thanks in no small part to gov’t funding, btw.)
For instance, I myself have a hypothyroid condition. I was diagnosed in adolescence over 40 years ago. What clued us in? I had a goiter.
Consequently, I need to take an Rx pill every day for the entirety of my life, and I also need a few blood tests once a year to make sure my Rx dose is right.
It’s actually simple stuff. Not all that expensive, as health treatments go.
But an untreated hypothyroid condition can cause, long term, serious organ and skeletal problems. Google it up if you want the details. Point being, if I don’t have health insurance that covers the cost of labs and Dr visits, or I don’t have the shekels to pay for same, I don’t get treated. It’s not like I have cancer or anything, but FFS I can’t get treatment for my wholly manageable condition via a visit to my local ER.
Anyhoo, like I said, I think I have a good grasp of your position viz health care: only people who can pay for it get it, not at all a Right, on any level.
Do I have that right?
(FTR, I’m glad you’re personally on board with women having the vote and all, but that’s not the point I was making. I thought you’d recognize that my criticism was for the flawed premise of your argument.)
Well, to be honest, there are distinctions that I’d make (for example: if I said that “you don’t have a Right to aspirin”, I’d want to balance it with “you, of course, have a right to buy aspirin”).
So when it comes to your unfortunate thyroid condition, I am delighted that the option of buying that medication is there. I’m glad that other people researched the condition, found a workaround, and then put that workaround out in the marketplace.
THAT’S A WONDERFUL THING.
I’m glad you can buy it.
Now, it’s my opinion that your ability (and the ability of others) to buy it is one of the things that is instrumental in its continued production.
And, for the record? It sure as hell feels like we’re not talking about a baseline provision of health care at which our obligations, as a society, have been met.
Ho.Ly. Cow.
Dude. How can you be at all confident stating that “baseline provision of healthcare … ” has been met.? Society-wide? Have you been living under a rock?
To ask the question with a focus of “what are we, as a society, obliged to provide?” is to invite condemnation.
You do the League a serious disservice by such a comment. In fact, it seems to me that the folks here painstakingly strive to grapple with exactly these kinds of ugly policy/philosophical/moral questions, often disagreeing on one level or another. Evidently you see condemnation where disagreement exists. (Typical of ideologues. Just saying.)
You seem bent on turning yourself into a victim, as did TVD. I genuinely hope you’ll rethink your tack.
But when it comes to, say, the insertion of a stent into a heart valve, suddenly questioning whether someone who cannot afford to pay for the time of a specialist or for the technology itself is, in fact, a “right” results in questions of whether I even have values.
Yeah. That’s right. The looming issue is whether or not Jaybird has any values at all. Christ almighty, get your head out of your ass already.
Crikey, Jaybird, you totally missed my point!
Sure, I can just “take a pill.” But in order to get that Rx pill, I have to have annual lab tests and a visit to my Endocrinologist. That stuff costs shekels. Then again, it costs waaay less shekels for my annual doc visit and lab tests than it does to treat the organ/skeletal disorders associated with long term untreated hypothyroidism.
Are you even trying to have a serious discussion here, or are you simply committed to reducing everything to an ideological talking point?
How can you be at all confident stating that “baseline provision of healthcare … ” has been met.? Society-wide? Have you been living under a rock?
I wouldn’t mind hearing what said baseline would be.
We seem to be in agreement that you think that Medicaid is not sufficient and we need more, more, more.
You do the League a serious disservice by such a comment. In fact, it seems to me that the folks here painstakingly strive to grapple with exactly these kinds of ugly policy/philosophical/moral questions, often disagreeing on one level or another. Evidently you see condemnation where disagreement exists.
So far, you’ve asked about my virtues and compared my views to the views of people who questioned the right of women to vote. I’m waiting to see what will show up next.
Yeah. That’s right. The looming issue is whether or not Jaybird has any values at all. Christ almighty, get your head out of your ass already.
Well. After that, then.
But in order to get that Rx pill, I have to have annual lab tests and a visit to my Endocrinologist.
Prior to that, in order to get that Rx pill, someone has to have made it.
Are you even trying to have a serious discussion here, or are you simply committed to reducing everything to an ideological talking point?
One person’s serious statement of his own take on things is another person’s ideological talking point.
I have no idea what your point is.
It seems to me that there is an undercurrent of “I am entitled to that which is possible” in discussions of inequality when it comes to certain corners.
The discussion does not have to do with “what is enough?” unless we are talking about people who have oh-so-much. To ask the question with a focus of “what are we, as a society, obliged to provide?” is to invite condemnation.
Where is the undercurrent of being entitled to that which is possible? There is a direct current of everybody should have some things, but that is not all that is possible.
As to your second paragraph this is an old, old argument, but lots of us are saying “we should provide xyz”. Of course part of that discussion is what is enough. We’ve been talking about these very questions and answers with plenty of condemnation on all sides. But we have been discussing exactly what you think we should discuss, you just don’t like our answers.
There is a direct current of everybody should have some things, but that is not all that is possible.
And when I discuss such things as, let me cut and paste it here: “If I am enjoying a 2013-level of health care in 2013, I am sitting pretty… so long as it is 2013. If I am enjoying a 2013-level of health care in 2023? I am one of the folks left behind. If I am enjoying a 2013-level of health care in 2033, I am evidence of global injustice… even if what I receive *NEVER CHANGES*.”
The counter argument is that I am talking about giving people mansions and yachts.
What we are hoping for is that the answer to “how much is enough?” is something other than “how much ya got?”
Because if that latter is your answer then inequality will never be solved, unless by Procrustean methods.
Again Jay you brought up billy gates and such in your post that started this.
I think i tried to address your question and why i still get the issue above.
I argued that people are not looking at a baseline of health care but are instead looking at the absolute upper limits of what is possible.
And you mocked this as me saying that everyone should have a mansion and a yacht… when, really, I was saying that people aren’t looking at a baseline but at what is possible.
And, for the record? It sure as hell feels like we’re not talking about a baseline provision of health care at which our obligations, as a society, have been met.
In 2033, the cost of providing you, say, 2020-level healthcare will probably be drastically lower than it was to provide you 2013-level healthcare in 2013. I can understand a poor society with limited medical technology not offering to pay for your lifesaving procedure when it stretches their resources to the limit. I can’t understand it nearly as well if that procedure is a trivial expenditure relative to their overall output.
Thinking this way seems to imply that as long as people can be hunter-gatherers who die in their thirties (totally satisfactory in the good old days!), we shouldn’t think twice about their neighbors riding around in flying cars and enjoying 400 year lifespans.
Holy cow. Your last statement sounds like something TVD might have said. Please please please don’t turn yourself into a victim like TVD did. I don’t know how to have a rational conversation with you if you’ve already labeled “me” your persecutor.
You ask a reasonable question, yes, but you shouldn’t be surprised much less offended that plenty of folks respond differently than you do.
I assure you, my skin is thicker than most. You’re right. I ought to wait until I receive the condemnation before I complain about getting it.
May I complain that I’m talking about provision of health care and my interlocutors are arguing against me as if I were talking about giving everyone a mansion and a yacht?
I think the issue is that “everybody deserves all the healthcare they can eat” is such a fundamental assumption on some people’s part that asking them “how much healthcare should people get” is like asking how much gravity one ought to be allowed.
But where are people arguing and proposing plans where every person gets every possible medical gizmo, medication and intervention?
But where are people arguing and proposing plans where every person gets every possible medical gizmo, medication and intervention?
What does “inequality” mean, Greg?
What does “is” mean?
I’m not sure I would argue for precisely that, but I might argue that it would be better to spend less money in super advanced gizmos that only a few people can afford, and instead give everyone access to less advanced but still pretty damned effective advanced gizmos. A sort of calculus in which thousands of people get healthy or even not dead, instead of a few.
Yesterday’s inadequate technologies were super advanced gizmos three days ago. (Proverbially.)
Chris: I might argue that it would be better to spend less money in super advanced gizmos that only a few people can afford, and instead give everyone access to less advanced but still pretty damned effective advanced gizmos. A sort of calculus in which thousands of people get healthy or even not dead, instead of a few.
Sounds reasonable to me. But I think some ideological folks call that Socialism. If you don’t have the shekels to pay for whatever health care you need, no matter how rudimentary … well, y’know. Just die already. (Unless you’re a blastocyst or fetus, of course.)
…and lot of those super advanced gizmos of yesteryear wouldn’t have existed without the evil Gubermint funding the research. Kinda’ like a lot of the medical research. I mean, in your world, not in reality, it’s all being funded by Pfizer, I guess.
Jay, definitely. Which is why you focus on research and affordability too.
ktward, I might have been called that too.
This presumes, in the words of that fatuous old optimist Émile Coué “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” Well, you’re not.
It’s Anno Domini 2013. You’re Y years old. In 2033, you will be Y+20 years old. Your medical needs will increase over time. You won’t receive 2013 care. You won’t be getting Medicare, either — at least in its present form. Lord knows what level of care you’ll get, but your point of comparison must start with a person Y+20 years older than yourself in 2013.
The odds of your getting better care are diminishing. Just because there will doubtless be better technology in 2033 does not mean you will benefit from it. I predict a massive epidemic between now and then: as population densities rise in the ever-growing cities, combined with the failure to find new antibiotics to replace our current arsenal — the odds of that epidemic not happening are remote.
When Patient Zero arrives bearing his cargo of influenza, let’s hope we’re among the survivors. More tech does not lead to better outcomes when it comes to viral infections.
Our health care system is woefully inadequate. Were that pandemic to arise, all those shiny boxes in all those clinics, with all their winky-blinky lights and hi-res displays would be worse than useless. More tech does not mean better health care. We can log every phone call, every email, every piece of snail mail — but we can’t even compile a working dataset of disease in this country. Our political system won’t allow it. Even the few statistics we can compile show we’re not able to manage our live birth rate as well as nations with half our per-capita income.
Fair enough… but let me ask this: am I entitled to an adequate level of health care given the realities (and potentialities) you outline above?
Begged questions shall receive beggar’s answers. Insofar as you’re worth saving, by someone’s calculations, you will be receive what is then deemed to be adequate health care.
“Insofar as you’re worth saving, by someone’s calculations, you will be receive what is then deemed to be adequate health care.”
But some animals are more equal than others.
‘Twas ever so, Heff. Entitlements being what they are, and if my predictions come true, which they usually do — those with title will be the only ones in line. The shortages will be divided among the peasants.
BTW Blaise, check out this street interview with a 12-year old Egyptian. ^_^
Interesting, George. ‹مِنْ أفواهِ الأطفالِ وَالرُّضَّعِ،
Valid question. In the 21st century, is access to quality (or even just “adequate”, whatever that means) health care a Right? Or simply an “entitlement” to be legislated?
Let’s really talk here.
I do not see how my access to cutting edge medical technology, cutting edge medical expertise as measured by the time of the medical specialist, and/or chemical compounds researched by others would be anything other than a good or service to be bartered for.
I’m open to a discussion of making vaccines available to all for heavily subsidized prices (hey, that’s a social good right there).
I don’t understand how “inequality” is seen, in itself, as evidence of anything at all.
Of course you wouldn’t, Jaybird. Health care isn’t just about some gouty old stockbroker getting titanium knees, you know. It’s about communicable diseases, which just might not play by the rules. Barter with the virus.
How magnanimous of you to open this hand with low trump, offering Heavily Subsidised Vaccines (not free) for all those beggar children. Perhaps a few ducats tossed from your carriage might also benefit their mothers with prenatal care.
(raises hand— “now can I complain about having invited condemnation?”)
Do you have a reservation for condemnation? It gets crowded this time of year ( between Jan 1 and Dec 31) so you can’t just show up. You really need a reservation.
Cracked me up, greginak. And I don’t crack up easy. (No matter what anyone says.)
I’m so laughing. But no, Jaybird, you don’t get to claim victimhood from a Blaise comment. C’mon. Dude. That’s too easy. I thought you had a thick skin. 😉
Heavens! That wicked ol’ Blaise! Will no-one rid us of this Turbulent Priest, this Mocker of Certitudes and Pestilential Plague upon Platitudinous Pronouncements? Is he allowed no fun at all? Guess not.
I question your perspective.
The issue with inequality is that it demonstrates that we have the capacity of providing people with certain necessary, even life-saving, goods and services, but have chosen not to do so. We currently possess the resources – and far more than the resources – to see that everyone on earth is decently fed, clothed, and housed. (You’ll probably question the meaning of the word “decently”. For the present let’s say it means “sufficient to not suffer physical suffering or generalized societal ostracism”). We’ve decided that it’s more important that some people have millions and billions to squander to no purpose instead. It is entirely possible for the world to make better use of its existing resources.
To tolerate human suffering to a greater extent than insurmountable resource constraints require, is an evil.
Your hypothesis assumes that finding a way to give the greater part of the population access to 2033-level tech inherently precludes achieving 2033-level tech in the first place. I disagree. Many great medical and technological breakthroughs have been made out of other motives than pure profit; and in addition, if we could feed, clothe, and house the world, provide access to clean water, and eradicate some of the diseases that are the worse scourges of mankind, I would consider the lack or postponement of the development of iPods, iPads, iPhones, credit default swaps, and films with robots punching each other an eminently bearable sacrifice. It’s a matter of what we choose to spend our money on.
This. I can’t see that anyone would treat health care as equivalent to all other classes of goods and services if they’d ever found themselves lacking it. I know that I’ve never taken my kids to see the doctor just for fun; conversely, I’ve never postponed such a visit just because there was something else I’d rather spend the money on this week.
I’m not particularly interested in the question of whether anyone has an inherent right to anything. However, I *am* interested in whether any policy produces a greater net benefit for society than the alternative. Equal access to health care seems very much a net positive, and I’d welcome any evidence to the contrary.
I can’t see that anyone would treat health care as equivalent to all other classes of goods and services if they’d ever found themselves lacking it.
Just for the record, I have lacked it and really needed it. I don’t think my powers are sufficient to persuade you to my side, or perhaps even to make the position sound at all reasonable to you, so I’m not going to try to argue it here. But we do exist, and we’re not all seen as entirely unreasonable people.
’m not particularly interested in the question of whether anyone has an inherent right to anything. However, I *am* interested in whether any policy produces a greater net benefit for society than the alternative.
Amen.
Thanks James. I have been lurking here for some time and am familiar with your writings; “not… entirely unreasonable people” is pretty much the label I have for you and Jaybird (and most people here for that matter). The first sentence you quote above probably came across as “people who treat health care as just another good/service have never lacked it” and I guess that’s my fault.
With respect to your powers of persuasion: you might be surprised. I’m not particularly rusted on to any ideology yet, and am more sympathetic to the principles of libertarianism than you might think.
“not… entirely unreasonable people” is pretty much the label I have for you and Jaybird
Hey, that’s all I really ask for, so it’s a win for me!
I just wrote a longish post on my own blog, so I’m tapped out on persuasive power right now, unfortunately. If I tried, it would be something about how I have also gone without food because I didn’t have money (fortunately, never for more than a single day), didn’t have a home once (again, fortunately, only a short time, and I had plenty of friends to crash with), so at the least we would need to recognize that even if health care isn’t like most other goods (bottles of sodapop, pizza pies, big screen TVs), it’s also not, I think, a unique type of good, because there are other things that are as vital, or perhaps even more so. And while I think a good case can be made for treating those vital goods differently from non-vital ones, I find that people always want to expand the set of vital goods beyond what seems reasonable to me (perhaps superficially reasonable, but ultimately untenable), to include such things as a car (to get to work, if you live in a rural area) and internet access (so you can compete in applying for jobs). Thanks for the vote of confidence, but that’s the best I can do until I recharge my analyticalish functions.
I do not see how my access to cutting edge medical technology, cutting edge medical expertise as measured by the time of the medical specialist, and/or chemical compounds researched by others would be anything other than a good or service to be bartered for.
Okay then. We know where you stand, Jaybird. And when you or someone you love is denied access to life-saving healthcare due to lack of shekels or influence, then equally you won’t expect any tears from the rest of us who hold a decidedly different point of view. (Ironically, we’re probably the most likely to shed said tears. Go figure.)
Does he have enough fingers and toes to do the figuring?
Oops. Supposed to be tags around that first P- it’s Jaybird talking, not me. My bad.
So, yes, the answer is “how much you got?”.
Okay then. We know where you stand, Jaybird. And when you or someone you love is denied access to life-saving healthcare due to lack of shekels or influence, then equally you won’t expect any tears from the rest of us who hold a decidedly different point of view. (Ironically, we’re probably the most likely to shed said tears. Go figure.)
I can beg, borrow, or steal shekels or influence. What I cannot produce are consistent medical advancements in the face of people who demand that any new technology ought be categorized as “quality” if they produce any efficacious results at all.
Perhaps there are scientists and docs who can tell us what works well. Demand is an interesting word here. Perhaps some of the solution to demand is supplying copious amounts of money to scientists and docs to research medical type stuff.
Where are people demanding “any new technology” be called “quality” if is does anything useful at all. Seems almost like a bit of an hyperbole.
“Where are people demanding “any new technology” be called “quality””
Welp
Earlier in this discussion you claimed that medical ultrasounds were “good for us all”
So I guess some of those people demanding “any new technology” include *you*
it is damn fucking hyperbole.
You could save HUNDREDS of lives by using lasers for hard tissue removal in dentistry.
Nonetheless, because they don’t perform “better than conventional methods” they are not advocated for by the Dentists’ Association.
(How save lives then? You try putting adrenalin shots in a million people. see if you don’t kill a few).
I can beg, borrow, or steal shekels or influence. What I cannot produce are consistent medical advancements in the face of people who demand that any new technology ought be categorized as “quality” if they produce any efficacious results at all.
I’m positively baffled by this statement.
A. Maybe you can beg, borrow, or steal shekels and/or influence in order to receive access to quality health care, but there’s a whole lot of us who can’t beg, borrow, or steal shekels nor any other acceptable form of barter because we don’t actually live within a barter system anymore. Did you not get the memo?
B. I’ve no idea who it is you believe is “demanding” questionable medical treatments, and I’ve no idea how it bears topical relevance to this thread. Seriously, what the hell is that all about? If I turned the clock back a few decades, I’d wonder if you weren’t ranting about Reagan and ACT UP and AIDS research. What’s your point?
Vikram:
You start by saying this post is not about the question of whether inequality is a problem or not. But it seems to me your post is dedicated to arguing that inequality is either not a problem, or less of a problem, or only part of the overall problem in any society.
Vikram:
After rereading this comment, and after reading Will Truman’s comment below, I guess my response was probably too hostile.
For the record, I’ll say that I’m convinced by much of what you write here, especially your point that unemployment, now matter how equal the circumstances or how much one’s life is subsidized or guaranteed not to fall below a certain baseline, creates a certain alienation.
I do differ from you when you suggest, if I read you correctly, that only redistributionist solutions have been offered to the “problem” of inequality. I can imagine, although I do not endorse, that a theory of growth in which wealth in general increases, and increases at a much faster rate for less affluent people than for more affluent people, would result in a general decrease in inequality.
Usually, to my knowledge, such theories of growth are not designed to ease inequality, but to raise wealth and lift all the boats, any effect on lessening inequality is secondary to those goals. Still, that is a possible solution to inequality that doesn’t necessarily demand a redistribution of wealth.
This puts me in mind of an idea I’ve long had about liberalism and leftist. Liberalism is about addressing the consequences of inequality and poverty, not the causes. The present model of capitalism greatly enriches some while impoverishing others, and does not do this on anything resembling a meritocratic basis. In order to minimize the damage from this, liberalism promotes social welfare systems so that some money can be transferred from those who benefit from capitalism to those whom it harms.
Leftism – which is a political pariah in the United States, and scarcely less so in Canada and Europe – is about addressing the causes. The most extreme version is to do away with property altogether, but we haven’t yet found a way to make that work in large societies; in a small commune it can work because a sense of responsibility, accountability, and commitment to the community are strong enough to motivate everyone to do their share and look out for each other, but when our social bonds with other people are abstract – when we don’t actually know them on a personal basis – it breaks down. A less extreme – but still, from the liberal perspective, highly radical – idea would be to totally rejig how we assign value to different employments. Currently being a lawyer, or a hedge fund manager, or a stockbroker is valued and respected because those positions pay well, despite arguably being of less benefit to society than a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, or an electrician (sorry, Burt; and I recognize society needs some lawyers, I just think it could do with a lot fewer that it’s got now. The other two first-mentioned professions I’d be happy to entirely dispense with).
If you paid a low-level office worker the same as a stockbroker or CEO makes, it’s true that their social status (and, likely, their job satisfactions) would remain very different. But if we reject the ideology behind capitalism – if we say that a profession being lucrative does not make it inherently beneficial or laudable, and that a nurse ought to make more than a hedge fund manager in view of his or her contribution to others’ well-being – then we turn things on their heads. The profitability of a profession depends on its social benefit, rather than vice versa. And actions that currently aren’t classified as “work”, such as volunteering, are treated as equally valuable worthwhile, and even worthy of compensation. Inequality still exists, but it’s lessened because we don’t regard one type of job as $100 million times more valuable than another, as the current system does.
Now, the obvious counterpoint to this is to ask “how to we decide how to value different jobs, if not by the market?”. I don’t have a full answer, but I believe we could do substantially better than the market can, if only because the market is currently doing such an execrable job. The people who make our clothes and shoes are paid starvation wages and murdered by being kept in flagrantly unsafe conditions, though we know we could not do without clothes and shoes. CEOs who fail utterly and destroy their companies are paid hundreds of millions. This isn’t a system in which rationality – or at least common sense, which may be something different – has anything to do with what we economically and socially assign value to.
Or, to go further, we could do away with the concept of “employment” at all. Our world is, currently, capable of producing every good and service we could need without employing anything close to the planet’s entire working-age population. Due to that, it’s somewhat irrational that we continue requiring people to work and condemning them when they can’t find any. I don’t believe this would result in generalized indolence; unlimited leisure time, beyond the space of several months to a year, becomes deeply boring (I say this from experience). And not everything useful a person can do equates to employment – retired people, for example, do a lot of volunteer work that’s of value to many people. So distribute resources to provide a certain level of support for everyone, and give them liberty. This doesn’t require a post-scarcity one – just one in which the volume of production is not tied to the number of labourers, a situation which in large sectors of the economy already exists. If there’s necessary jobs that are sufficiently unpleasant that nobody wants to do them in this society, then we can use that basis to start paying people extra for doing them.
A different alternative – one which I’d be inclined to experiment with if I were given a small town to govern and try out my ideas on – is simply to require that no business-owner (or government official, for that matter) is allowed to pay any employee less than 10% of what they themselves make. It would keep businesses small, and thus maintain competition and prevent domination by a few large retailers or businesses, because there would be a limit to how much richer you could make yourself by expanding your business. It would keep inequality down at a very manageable level. It would, by making the differences in their lifestyles far less, decrease social distance between employees and employers.
I’m not claiming any of these as solutions. Rather, they’re intended to illustrate the idea that solutions to inequality beyond the social safety net and progressive taxation are certainly conceivable, and things that many people do think about; it’s simply that anyone who talks about them is shut out from the discourse of polite, mainstream, respectable politics.
Katherine,
Kudos on the way you make this distinction. I’m of the view that American liberalism is basically too diffuse to really lend itself to clean distinctions like this, but what’s more important in your comment is not the delineation between the labels, but rather the distinction between the ideas you describe as their referents. It’s important to recognize that efforts to treat the effects or to treat the causes of harmful or unfair inequality are different, and so should have different methods and assessments associated with them, even though they are both worthwhile. Excellent comment.
Great and substantive comment, Katherine.
Before addressing your primary focus of the comment, let me concentrate on your lead in…
“This puts me in mind of an idea I’ve long had about liberalism and leftist. Liberalism is about addressing the consequences of inequality and poverty, not the causes. The present model of capitalism greatly enriches some while impoverishing others, and does not do this on anything resembling a meritocratic basis. In order to minimize the damage from this, liberalism promotes social welfare systems so that some money can be transferred from those who benefit from capitalism to those whom it harms.”
You unfortunately are starting with a bunch of serious errors. Free markets do not cause poverty. Poverty, disease, entropic decay and death are the natural state. They are what we get if we do nothing. The entire history of the human race can be characterized as us toiling to barely survive on the equivalent of two to three dollars a day. Impoverishment and bouts of Malthusian disaster were the best we could accomplish.
With the advent of free maket institutions as espoused by classical liberals such as Smith, we experienced the modern breakthrough which has steadily enriched the average standard of living of humanity. We now have six times as many people living more than twice as long with per capita incomes sixteen times larger (30 to 100 times larger in the most free market examples such as the US and northern Europe.) As markets have extended to China and Third world on past generation, over a billion people have progressed out of impoverishment. In other words, markets have delivered the goods and are doing so at an accelerating pace, and the biggest gains in life consequences are to those on the bottom.
The next error is that you suggest markets enrich some by impoverishing others. I suspect you are falling for a version of the zero sum fallacy, but I guess you could be bemoaning the effects of competition and change. Free markets, properly structured, do not allow harm, other than the indirect harm of constructive competition (there is a zero sum dimension within the positive sum game).
Finally, what does free enterprise have to do with meritocracy? The idea of free enterprise is that billions of individuals can mutually agree to win win interactions. Both gain. We then connect trillions of such little voluntary gains together on a daily basis into huge competitive cooperative networks. Prosperity emerges. Meritocracy is antithetical to the process. This is a feature of markets, not a bug.
Before going on to the heart of your comment, I just need to clarify that your foundational beliefs are topsey turvy.
For the record, I do believe poverty is a problem. Inequality of outcome is not a problem though. It is an essential product of progressive systems.
One can indeed have zero sum games in a free market. Assume a market where you have two big players, and a moderate customer base (assume for the moment it’s unchanging, and relatively sticky — switching between the two big players is relatively unlikely, barring something major).
One game theory starts a price war. Good for consumers, no?
A different one has the corporations going for each others’ throats,
with the eventual goal of creating a monopoly. Bad for consumers.
The latter is playing out as we speak, in a reasonably free market.
I started by saying there are usually zero sum dimensions in well designed positive sum games. Where are all these free market monopolies of which you speak? Most monopolies are products of crony capitalism. In case it is not clear, crony capitalism is what I am against.
I was speaking of a system that acts to create a monopoly within a free market (not saying that a monopoly is within the free market, as I believe that’s out of bounds… just saying that not all free markets are stable systems).
These are hospitals/doctors (It’s complicated, but I’m talking about health care providers). hence the stickiness of customer choice…
But, though there is plenty of involvement by government in this sector, it’s not what’s causing these destructive and corrosive tactics. It’s merely good business sense in a zero-sum market.
Roger –
Respectfully, it seems inevitable for you and Katherine to talk past each other if she states “The present model of capitalism greatly enriches some while impoverishing others, and does not do this on anything resembling a meritocratic basis.” and you start to defend “free markets, properly constructed.” The present model of capitalism is not free markets, but captured regulatory regimes and privatized gains partnered with socialized risks.
Also, I don’t see how meritocracy can be antithetical to free enterprise, so perhaps you can clarify. Meritocracy would seem critical to progress through constructive competition. Better ideas and more skilled talent should come to the forefront in a free enterprise system – it’s how you get the win-win situations. It’s when protected markets quash innovation and hacks advance through cronyism that free enterprise is most undermined. And again, our present model of capitalism is more protected markets and cronyism than it is the model of free markets you’re defending here.
Scott,
I agree. Crony capitalism is not “free markets properly constructed.” I am arguing for less active interference in markets, and she is trying to master plan her way out of all the past sins of master planning. The Big Kahuna fallacy, with Katherine in the starring role…. Let’s, see, I think we should try paying teachers this much, lawyers this much and CEOs this much. Entire libraries have been written on the folly of that type of thinking, indeed it rejects 250 plus years of economics altogether. Wishful thinking at its most extreme.
As for meritocracy, you may be right and I am probably misusing the word. What I mean to argue against is 1) the belief that free markets reward honorable intentions. And /or 2) the belief that wise and noble Mandarins such as Katherine, or Plato’s philosophers, should direct affairs.
Free markets, properly constructed, reward solving problems for consumers. If this is your definition of meritocracy, I am all for it.
Free markets are complex adaptive problem solving systems that reward successful experimentation and value creation. Those meeting others’ needs when most in demand and least in supply will be very handsomely rewarded, whether the Mandarins agree or not.
assuming it “is a political philosophy that holds power should be vested in individuals according to merit. Advancement in such a system is based on perceived intellectual talent measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.”. I think of the Man
Roger (and James) –
Perhaps I’m the one using the term meritocracy incorrectly, but my intended definition is in line with the dictionary one – a system in which advancement is based on demonstrated individual ability or achievement. Since in a market achievement would be demonstrated by solving problems for consumers, I’d guess there is no real disagreement there. I note that the dictionary definition of merit brings “deserving” into the equation, so I can see how you might want to push back against what you think that says about what drives markets, but I am merely looking for a system where the best ideas and brightest talents will flourish more often than not.
And there’s the rub. Our present model of capitalism is not that. We live in what is for all extents and purposes an oligarchy, where a diminishing few with all the means set all the rules to entrench their advantages – throwing up barriers to advancement and crafting golden parachutes that prevent any descent from their present good fortune.
So, to my mind, you are engaging in wishful thinking every bit as extreme as anything Katherine is positing. This is because an oligarchy minus “active interference” does not equal a free market. An oligarchy, no matter how much it celebrates “markets” as cover for what it’s really about, is a hundred miles from the free markets you (and I) seek. And I can see no conceivable way to get from where we are to where we’d like to be (short of revolution – clearly not desirable) that doesn’t involve engaging wise and noble Mandarins whose intent it is to dismantle all the false constructs that have been erected over the last few decades to secure prosperity for those who have it already and bar the door for everyone else – regardless of merit.
Scott,
No, you’re absolutely using it in the standard sense, and I wholly agree our present model of capitalism is not that–at least not wholly, or as much as we might reasonably desire.
To be clear, it’s a certain set of business owners/managers who are defining merit in a non-dictionary way, a way different from the more standard meaning you’re using. They’re the ones saying, “yeah, he’s smart and has some good ideas, but does he fit in?” Or, “yeah, she’s a very efficient waitress, and she’d be a great trainer for new hires, but is she pretty enough?”
I’m not suggesting you ought to accept or approve their understanding of merit. I’m just saying it’s a real thing, and one that’s going to be really damned difficult to root out so that your preferred understanding of merit is really the operative standard. To the extent it has happened–such as breaking the color barrier in sports–it shows how effective markets can be at breaking down extant hierarchies. To the extent there are areas where it’s barely happened, or not at all–it shows that markets can also make value off reinforcing extant hierarchies. I don’t think either of those outcomes, or both together, are particularly surprising. (Which is not to say that it isn’t regrettable–markets are great and powerful forces for good, but only a fool would try to persuade you they bring utopia.)
I think that the iron law of wages is something like, “You’ll be paid somewhere between the minimum amount you’ll work for and the marginal value your boss thinks you produce.” That works pretty well, but it does leave for some serious slop in both tails of the distribution.
Measuring a CEO’s value is very hard and replacing even a very good manual laborer is often very easy.
James –
I don’t disagree with any of this, especially the idea that it is very real that certain business people will misappropriate the idea of merit to promote their own prejudices. I no more believe that can be eliminated than you do, but I’ll be vocal in my disapproval of the behavior nonetheless.
And I’d contend that markets alone aren’t to credit for the value created in your historic examples below. Branch Rickey was as much an idealist on race as he was a businessman. The Jackie Robinson hiring was the very definition of honorable intentions being rewarded by the market.
“Our present model of capitalism is not that. We live in what is for all extents and purposes an oligarchy, where a diminishing few with all the means set all the rules to entrench their advantages – throwing up barriers to advancement and crafting golden parachutes that prevent any descent from their present good fortune.”
Scott, I will be the first one to complain about how imperfect the system is and how it can and should be improved. However I think this paragraph is hyperbolic to the extreme. Human institutions are never perfect and will always be gamed. Those with privilege or incumbency will always throw whatever barriers they can to reduce competition and rig the game in their favor. They did it before capitalism. They did it in communism. They did it in the era of industrialization, they did it in the 30s, the 50s and today. The key is not whether the system is perfect, it is whether it is better than alternatives.
That said, the imperfections in the system are not anywhere near oligarchical. This is complete nonsense. Propaganda even.
In general, if you raise a child — of any race or gender — and teach them good values and work ethics, and ensure they are properly educated in a field which prepares them to add value to their fellow man, they can go out into the world and find a job where they are paid to solve problems. Over time they can improve their skills and work their way up to a good living. Tens of millions of families are doing so every generation. That is what everyone in my family did or is doing, though each in its own unique way.
My brother became a technician in Silicon valley. His wife became a teacher. My sister became a clerical employee, and her husband used twenty years in submarines to develop and leverage engineering skills. My wife became a Claims Supervisor. I became an executive at a financial company. My daughter works in Accounting at an airplane parts store. Granted my son is still searching for his role in life ( he is spending the summer hiking on his own dime).
The point is that tens of millions of people are working through and around the barriers. Calling the current economy oligarchical is frankly absurd.
I think that the iron law of wages is something like, “You’ll be paid somewhere between the minimum amount you’ll work for and the marginal value your boss thinks you produce.”
The Iron Law of Wages is the now-discredited proposition that wages must stabilize at subsistence level—if wages fall below subsistence level people will die until the supply of labor falls enough to push wages back up to subsistence level, and if wages rise above subsistence level people will have enough children to raise the supply of labor enough to push wages back down to subsistence level.
This is a pretty good model of animal populations, but the history of the Western world shows pretty clearly that it doesn’t necessarily hold for human populations.
Roger,
my financial ears are hearing that deflation might be here, shortly.
If the powers that be (you know who they are, if you worked in a financial company. smart money), deem that to be acceptable (preferable even), even though it hurts everyone that isn’t them… will you then acknowledge that we are in an oligarchy?
The Sunlight Foundation took a look at the 2012 election and found that not a single candidate for federal office won without taking a donation from the 31,385 people who make up the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of American politics.
Your mileage may vary, Roger, but I’m pretty comfortable with the idea that this demonstrates a “government of the few” and I’ll be standing by my frankly absurd hyperbole, thank you very much. Though I’m happy for your kin, family anecdotes do not make data. My sister has a job, too. She’s the executive director for missions at a large, affluent church in Orlando, FL. She spends her days working through her church to ameliorate the effects of profound destitution and to develop strategies to break the cycle of persistent multi-generational poverty in communities within spitting distance of The Happiest Place on Earth. I don’t expect that proves anything.
What I don’t get is how you would choose to be so dismissive of the idea. All the things that you purport to care about here – less active interference in markets, the elimination of crony capitalism, free markets, properly constructed – are breathtakingly out of reach with a government that has been bought. The Few don’t want what you want.
Scott,
Sorry if the hyperbole comment was too strong. I am usually the hyperbolic one. That said, I totally disagree with your comment.
1) wealthy, legally permissible contributions to politivs are not the equivalent of oligarchy, and it really is hyperbolic to equate the two.
2). Why would we assume the wealthy represent a common interest. The very fact that they give to such a wide spectrum of candidates seems to indicate they don’t. To be more specific they are to a great extent competing among themselves for influence. I believe this is built in to American Constitutional expectations on how interest groups are checked.
3). If wealthy people are not allowed to contribute money, then what is the argument we would use to justify discriminating against them?
4). If they are not allowed to contribute money, what does this do to the power of those running political action committees? The party machines? The political aristocracies (family names) such as Bushes, Clintons and Kennedies? To those owning newspapers or television stations? Agribusiness? Why are these latter organizations superior to the wealthy? Why are they less nefarious to democracy?
5) why would anybody be surprised that the group singled out for illogical disdain by the current president and the silly 99% ers use legally approved mechanisms to push back on the hysteria against them? In other words, after four years of demonizing a group politically, it makes sense that they would push back and increase contributions. Right?
I am a HUGE fan of less political interference and coercion by anybody, whether poor or rich. However, I am totally convinced that the only way to do so is to reduce the scope and influence of politics all together. Perhaps we actually see eye to eye here. If politics and government are influential and controlling the economy, it is naive to assume that someone, politicians, billionaires, journalists, bureaucrats, dependents or whatever won’t do everything possible to seek the helm.
But back to the main point. Absent my anecdotes, statistically speaking, the US has always been a great place for achieving a good standard of living. Every generation, tens of millions of families rise up to the level of affluence. Broadly speaking, our grand kids are likely to do pretty well compared to anywhere on earth today or any time in the past. Nothing is guaranteed, but this is where and when I want my grandson growing up. I am pretty confident he can carve out the life he wants and deserves.
Yes, people are trying to throw barriers in our way. For example, they make self employment illegal (try driving down to the airport and offering someone a ride for hire). They make it illegal for an unskilled worker to offer his services at a lower price than the minimum wage — locking him into destitution. They force minorities and poor kids to go to schools run for the unions and bureaucrats, basically condemning millions of souls to permanent underclass (aka dependent voters). They make it illegal to open a Walmart in the inner city.
The REAL danger isn’t the one percent. It is leftist and rightist do gooders trying to master plan the economy and micro manage our activities. Not only is master planning empirically impossible and morally absurd, it is guaranteed to foster influence peddling. It attracts special interests like flies are attracted to dog doo.
Roger –
We’ve beat this horse way past dead, so this is the last I’ll have to say on the matter. If you want the last word, you are welcome to it.
I agree we are closer to eye to eye than this particular back and forth would suggest. In the simplest terms – though I’m confident that we’d like to end at the same place, we are miles apart on where we think we are now and what we think is needed to get to where we want to be.
As to WHERE we are, yes, the US has always been a great place to achieve a good standard of living. It certainly beats a lot of the alternatives, since people continue to come to our shores seeking a better life. No argument there.
My concern is that it is becoming LESS so. The evidence is clear: middle class wage stagnation, decreasing class mobility, growing wealth and income inequality. You seem to be suggesting that the US economy is a “free-enough” market and that all that is required for that to continue is that we successfully hold off the master planners. But, an honest assessment would indicate that the general levels of regulatory interference in the US economy have decreased in the last thirty years. The master planners are held at bay, yet the trends aren’t heading in the promised direction. I don’t think that is because of market forces, properly understood, and I don’t think it is by accident.
Which brings us to WHAT we must do to bring about the land of “less political interference and coercion by anybody” we seek. If you are totally convinced that the only way to do so is to reduce the scope and influence of politics all together, how’s that done? Let’s see, we hold off the master planners, then… (this step is always omitted somehow) and eventually we’ve reduced the scope and influence of politics all together. I don’t get it.
I think you’ve fundamentally misread the analysis from The Sunlight Foundation if your only response is a full-throated defense of the wealthy. The discussion is about the people who make up the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent OF AMERICAN POLITICS, so this is only about those who have chosen to contribute monies to the political process. I’m sure there are many wealthy out there busy building better mousetraps and not getting heavily involved in politics, so this is not about them, but about those who have chosen to use their wealth to expressly influence the outcome. So, this is only about the wealthy to the extent that only the wealthy have the means to purchase this disproportionate influence (the price of electronics is coming down, but the price of congressmen is going up). You ask, “what is the argument we would use to justify discriminating against them (the 31,385 people who make up the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent of American politics)?” How about “Because they are cheating” and they have too much control. The result is a government of the few.
So, if you want what you say you want, you work to cut these oligarchs off at the knees. You shine sunlight on what they are doing at every opportunity. You seek out the politicians, billionaires, journalists, bureaucrats, dependents or whatever strong enough to resist the perverse incentives in play and you encourage them to work to dismantle this system (political and economic in collusion) that Katherine (way up thread) rightfully points out “greatly enriches some while impoverishing others, and does not do this on anything resembling a meritocratic basis.”
Well, that turned into a rant, but there you have it.
“My concern is that it is becoming LESS so. The evidence is clear: middle class wage stagnation, decreasing class mobility, growing wealth and income inequality. ”
The shift from labor to capital is worldwide. The economic explanation is technology and globalism extending the supply of less skilled workers by about a billion individuals. There are some mobility issues… I would point out marriage trends. Industrious people are marrying each other and less industrious folks are hooking up and then not marrying at all. Add to this restrictions on employment, inner city schools, etc. The Koch bros aren’t the ones screwing over inner city kids, leftist ideology is and then just projecting elsewhere to cover the horror. A bad magic trick.
“…an honest assessment would indicate that the general levels of regulatory interference in the US economy have decreased in the last thirty years. The master planners are held at bay, yet the trends aren’t heading in the promised direction.”
Regulation has grown like a monster in past thirty years. I can supply links on the growth rates, especially of bureaucratic agency level regulation. I’ve seen estimates that put the per capita cost of regulation at about a fourth of average household income. More significantly it is lowering our growth rate, by as much as half. Compounded, the results are staggering. Your comment that regulatory interference in markets is so off base, that I had to reread your comment to make sure it wasn’t a typo.
“If you are totally convinced that the only way to do so is to reduce the scope and influence of politics all together, how’s that done? Let’s see, we hold off the master planners, then… (this step is always omitted somehow) and eventually we’ve reduced the scope and influence of politics all together. I don’t get it.”
The path to less interference is pretty clear historically. First it depends upon constructive competition among states. In brief, you need exit rights and healthy competition and social evolutionary pressures. I could write about it for hours, but I can tell you are bored….
The other critical feature in healthy social institutions is the cultural beliefs and mores of the citizenry. See McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity for more details if ever interested.
The master planners are not, on net adding to prosperity or growth. They are getting in the way, reigning it in. Key is to keep them from getting in the way. Is this not clear?
The final point you are missing is you just seem to believe that the wealthy are doing something illegal by contributing to politics. They are not. The system is designed this way. They are legally allowed to use their wealth to support political candidates. I am convinced that if they were not allowed to do so, that the world would be a worse place. Not that I am arguing for political interference, just that I am arguing for balanced interference in a Madisonian sense. There are other, even more nefarious interest groups out there trying to hoodwink you into taking out the Jews and gypsies of the 1%. Be strong and resist, brother. The problem was never the rich Jews, and it isn’t the rich people of today. They just want you to think it is so you will empower them to take charge and fix everything.
Scott,
Merit may be in the eye of the beholder. For some, merit may consist in being family, or of the select social class, because you’ll fit in better, be understood to share the same values and commitments, and that merit may outweigh one’s intelligence and other talents.* And in that way, while meritocracy is, as you say, not antithetical to free enterprise, it may not work out exactly as we would hope it would.
________________________
*Oddly, that can work both ways. Businesses whose clientele is composed of the lower social classes would be skeptical of hiring someone with upper class sensibilities, regardless of their other talents, and former small business owners often face difficulty finding jobs because of the assumption that, whatever their abilities, they won’t be able to stop acting like a boss. But of course the worst effect is in the other direction, the difficulty of finding an offer of a ladder that allows you to move upwards. I’m reminded of a passage in the Aubrey/Maturin series, where Captain Aubrey is explaining the difficulty of promotion for certain exceptionally talented sea officers–they were able to pass the tests for promotion to Post Captain, but because of their background were unable to “pass for a gentleman.”
Roger –
I don’t compare capitalism to systems that preceded it (e.g., feudalism). Even Karl Marx said that capitalism was better than feudalism. I compare the current economic system against my own moral principles, and against the principles expressed in the Bible. And by those metrics, I find it lacking, and I am capable of imagining a system which, while still imperfect, would be less lacking in those terms, and involve less human suffering.
Sounds good. So, we agree the system has saved billions of lives, helped double life spans and increased prosperity and human welfare of the average life by a factor of ten or more.
Hence, along with science, free markets have done more for the human race than any other idea or good intention ever.
That said, the first rule of taking a good thing and making it even better is to be careful to not make it worse. As such it is critical that future experimentation a) understand the system that it hopes to build upon and b) that experimentation be local and well contained so as to avoid potential catastrophe.
I like your idea of experimenting with local solutions for the latter reason, but question whether you intuitively grasp why it is that markets actually work. Your master planning and faith in coercion and good intentions makes me suspect you are missing the critical elements of markets’ productive potential.
“that experimentation be local and well contained so as to avoid potential catastrophe.”
Multinational corporations make local experimentation a catastrophe. Let the example of Atlanta, Georgia, who provided tax breaks to get Japanese companies to invest there, serve as an example. When the tax breaks went away, the companies simply unbolted the factories and towed them away.
A teaser rate didn’t work so good.
How do you expect local experimentation to work, if it is at all not “market based” (aka bottom of the barrel?)
As an old school liberal, I am going to fight back a bit. Also as a lawyer.
Most lawyers are not super-wealthy. They might make comfortable middle class lives or upper-middle class but they are usually not super-wealthy. Super-wealth is relative I realize. Also most lawyers do not work for big and fancy corporate firms that employ hundreds of lawyers. The big and fancy white-shoe law firms that captivate the popular imagination employ only about 5 percent of the American lawyer population. Most lawyers in the SF-Bay Area are solo or work for very small firms. Most also do not do corporate law.
I also think you will find plenty of old-school liberals who think that CEOs get paid too much and would like salary caps and other controls. Old school liberals/social democrats and neo-liberals should not be conflated.
Communes are not for everyone and most fail without getting too big. The most successful communes I can think of are the Israeli Kibbutzs’ and these are dying out because young people are not interested in that kind of lifestyle. The Kibbutzniks are now all old timers.
Communes can work in limited circumstances but I am a big city guy and love everything cities have to offer. Those need a different form of governance. There are also too many people for us all to return to agricultural-communal lifestyles. That is no utopia to me. I am not a pastoralist or a utopian.
I’d argue for getting rid of accountants (and their concurrent tax breaks)
before I want to get rid of lawyers. In fact, I’d argue strongly that
people fail to consult lawyers entirely too often, and perhaps ought to
have their sanity questioned (legally, if necessary).
Certainly in the corporate world, a business transaction of greater
than 100 grand would not be done without an active lawyer
representing both sides…
I was traveling all day and seemed to have missed a rather lively and interesting discussion. Hopefully my contribution is not too late.
I agree with you that the unemployed will almost always feel disassociated from society even in a place where the welfare benefits are generous. For the most part, work is a natural good and most people seem to derive self-esteem from honest labor. Or what they perceive as honest labor.
However this implies that the solution to inequality is that old liberal belief of “Full Employment” This is the kind of thing that drives libertarians and neo-liberals crazy IIRC. There are people on the League who are in rapture about the idea of a world without menial labor.
Technological advancement is great and might benefit the masses but what we are not doing is having serious discussion about what a post-Employment future would be like. A true post-Employment future is going to require a serious paradigm shift in how we think of property and food and distribution of goods. Unless you want even more social unrest. What I fear is that we will keep with a Prosperity Gospel mentality while requiring fewer workers to do the jobs that need to be done.
I would also argue that the idea of redistribution is not to entirely negate the advantages of the rich but too mitigate them and make wealth disparity less extreme.
this implies that the solution to inequality is that old liberal belief of “Full Employment” This is the kind of thing that drives libertarians and neo-liberals crazy IIRC.
How does full employment drive libertarians crazy, exactly?
I’m guessing New Dealer means full employment via government spending. IE – if unemployment goes over x percent, the government hires y number of people in various jobs until the situation fixes itself.
I think ND might be referring to government guarantees of full employment. I’m not sure how such guarantees would work out in practice, but it might be something like guaranteed access to a safety net if one doesn’t find an adequately paying job, or perhaps to a guaranteed minimum income.
Of course, at least a few (maybe more?) libertarians like the GIT.
“Of course, at least a few (maybe more?) libertarians like the GIT.”
Err….GMI. I guess I should follow the DUAUYRKWYATA (Don’t Use Acronyms Unless You Really Know What You Are Talking About) rule.
The GIT is a good alternative to subversion.
Humphrey-Hawkins wouldn’t drive libertarians crazy?
I imagine a libertarian-friendly critique of Humphrey-Hawkins (which I hadn’t heard of until you mentioned it, and I wikipedia’d it) wouldn’t be so much its goal of full employment
Rather, one of the critiques might be whether it helps to accomplish that end. Following (again) wikipedia, it seems to promote two not intuitively compatible policy goals, low inflation and full employment. I won’t say those goals are always incompatible, just that in some cases, at least in the short term, high employment might be correlated with high inflation. I’m thinking of the so-called “Volcker Recession” of the early 1980s, when the fed chair raised rates dramatically to lower inflation. I’m too ignorant of economics to comment knowledgeably on the resulting recession and who/what was to blame, but there seems to be at least some relationship there.
Also, I’ve heard self-described libertarians express support for guaranteed minimum incomes. I will admit that I have my suspicions among some persons’ support for guaranteed minimum incomes, because some of that support seems motivated by a hostility to welfare provision such that once such provision is cut back to provide for GMI, we’ll find that the GMI is cut back as well, and all we’re left with is a tax credit and fewer benefits.
Still, there is a principled libertarian case for favoring GMI, namely, it values the autonomy of the welfare recipient more than more directed benefits, such as food stamps or rent vouchers, do. (For the record, my problem with GMI is more what it would look like in practice as opposed to the theory behind it.)
there is a principled libertarian case for favoring GMI, namely, it values the autonomy of the welfare recipient more than more directed benefits, such as food stamps or rent vouchers, do.
I think that’s a good point. I wonder, though, whether it conflicts with Vikram’s argument about the psychic value of holding down a job, which I also think is a good point. So….well, heck if I know, but I think I’m experiencing some cognitive dissonance. 😉
I will admit that I have my suspicions among some persons’ support for guaranteed minimum incomes, because some of that support seems motivated by a hostility to welfare provision such that once such provision is cut back to provide for GMI, we’ll find that the GMI is cut back as well, and all we’re left with is a tax credit and fewer benefits.
I think there’s no doubt that would happen. Conservatives and libertarians would almost certainly push for that, and liberals would have to fight a continuing battle of defense (with occasional moments of solid majority where they might be able to actually expand the payments). The history of employment benefits and minimum wages would seem to bear this out. That’s not a criticism of the idea, of course, but just a nod to the political realities.
I do think there are some libertarians who are sincerely committed to the GMI, but I’d expect that the bulk of self-defined libertarians aren’t even vaguely committed to the idea.
I haven’t tended to be a fan of guaranteed income, but then I read this piece on guaranteed income and the freedom to choose your boss and employees. This should give us full employment, substantially reduce the harmful effects of poorly constructed safety nets and increase prosperity and wealth.
The idea is to guarantee a minimum income for all able bodied adults and let prospective small employers and individuals bid for services. Seems like this works for liberals, conservatives and progressives??? Hell, it even kicks sand on Walmart.
Here is the link.
http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-income-choose-your-boss-the-market-based
Roger,
I’ve long been intrigued by Morgan’s proposal myself. He tweaks it in certain to make it look to be quite uncomfortable to participate in, but then he wouldn’t be in charge of the particulars if the basic idea were picked up and pursued. I’m glad you took notice of it, and I’d suggest it merits some discussion here at the League.
How is it uncomfortable? Seems his tweaks are aimed at making sure employers and employees don’t try to cheat or collude.
I agree it would be a great front page discussion of its own.
James,
I figure if the libertarians would ride this horse hard, they’d manage to get more liberals on board.
Kim,
Maybe, but I doubt the liberals would ever really trust the libertarians to follow through, and with good reason.
Roger,
Actually, I haven’t looked at it in a while. My recollection is that the amount he suggested was singy give the restrictions you mention, and that there didn’t seem to be any provision to deal with the issue of transportation. (I.e. for those who don’t know the proposal, it’s, you get a GMI so long as you never, ever turn down an offer of work (which may come in the form of one-day jobs or years-long or permanent offers). Well, obviously you can’t be in Peoria one day and Seattle the next unless the program comes with included airfare (which it doesn’t), so you have to draw a line somewhere relating to reasonable expectations about what job offers can be accepted and attended. My recollection was that what provisions there were were pretty stingy. A reminder to those who may have forgotten: people in need of a GMI tend not to have been doing well enough to have retained autonomous access to motorized personal transportation, and thus rely on cheaper or public forms of transportation, such as bicycles, buses, and feet. I find that people who don’t deal on a regular basis with the immediate reality of unemployment sometimes forget this constraint.)
That was a while ago, and my assessment may be different now; in any case, those details are (presumably) negotiable (even if not for Morgan: it’s too late, he’s already made the broad strokes of his idea public, and he’s not going to be in charge of it if it gets implemented). The broader idea would be worth discussing. i encourage you to write it up, Roger. Or, perhaps we could get Morgan to do a guesty outlining the idea.
Roger,
Thanks for the link. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’ll try in the next day or two.
Pierre,
It is a really good starting place for guaranteed income. It effectively solves poverty in a way without most of the issues that go with redistribution, including the soul destroying effects of dependency.
My take on it is that there are considerations for reasonable commutes, to address Mike’s concerns. most importantly, once a framework is established, the details are subject to experimentation and improvement.
I have never liked guaranteed income until I saw this outline.
The New Dealer, Jesse and Pierre (already my favorite band name),
Thank you. I wondered if that was the distinction, too. But it bothers me the way it was originally written, which implied that libertarians were opposed to the outcome (full employment), rather than the method (The Full Employment Act).
In all likelihood it was just inadvertent (we can’t reasonably expect perfect precision of explication in mere blog comments), but it caught my eye because the conflation of outcome and method is a common point of confusion, and one that in many cases becomes the basis for belief. Turned around on liberals, it would be like saying they’re opposed to democracy because they don’t support U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.
I’m not angry, ND, and I’m not trying to smack you down. I fully agree that the Full Employment Act, the method, is not exactly a libertarian’s wet dream.
Holy crap this has turned out to be a nasty thread. I am just going to try to forget a lot of this.
Honestly, with that title and the tone and content starting in the second paragraph, it wasn’t likely to turn out any other way.
I would suggest to Vikram that if what he says in the second paragraph is true, and he really hasn’t heard anyone offer other solutions, that he spend some time talking to and reading leftists, who will be happy to agree that throwing money at it is not the solution to inequality. Changing structures, mindsets, and imbalances of power, on the other hand, are necessary steps. That’s pretty vague, I know, but anyone familiar with leftist thinking will have an inkling of what I mean, and anyone not familiar with it might want to make themselves so if they’re interested in the sorts of things people think we should do to deal with inequality.
While the front page post is tagged with “Inequality Symposium”, I feel good about posting a link to it anyway.
https://ordinary-times.com/blog/Categories/symposia/inequality-symposium/
We had a lot of good posts in there.
I remember. I don’t remember any suggestions of “let’s just throw money at it,” either, so it would be a good place to start.
In fact, iirc, the proposed solution was to lower ticket prices to NFL games.
Lowering the ticket prices to NFL games would at the very least decrease the inequality in our access to bad nachos and jumbotrons.
One thing I took away from that symposium (and I didn’t read all the posts, I admit) was that before suggesting inequality is a problem, I have an obligation to elucidate in what ways it is a problem, rather than simply citing inequality and assuming the fact of inequality is dispositive of anything.
In other words, that was a good symposium and I learned a lot.
I have an obligation to elucidate in what ways it is a problem, rather than simply citing inequality and assuming the fact of inequality is dispositive of anything.
That’s a lesson applicable to all discussions about some particular concept. I find it’s a lesson most people (unfortunately, not excepting myself) need to continually relearn. When the problem seems so evident to us, it’s really difficult to understand how it’s not evident to others (this is what leads people to assume others really do know, but just are wicked folk who don’t care). But often what seems evident to us actually isn’t well-defined, even in our own minds. One of the great advantages of applying your “obligation to elucidate” standard is that it helps us develop a better understanding of our own position on the issue in question.
“Changing structures, mindsets, and imbalances of power, on the other hand, are necessary steps. That’s pretty vague, I know, but anyone familiar with leftist thinking will have an inkling of what I mean, and anyone not familiar with it might want to make themselves so if they’re interested in the sorts of things people think we should do to deal with inequality.”
Any good nuggets that you can share? You seem often to be more specific in your attacks on the engine of progress than in your defense of any alternative.
Getting rid of the ability for employers and corporations to put binding arbitration clauses in their contracts of adhesion are good ways to change the imbalance of power. Trade Unions and Collective Bargaining as done under the Wagner Act were good ways of changing the imbalance of power. Not allowing CEOs to throw temper tantrums like spoiled rich kids because they might have to provide health care is a good way of changing the imbalance of power. Also laws against going towards temp employees instead of full-time employees.
In past debates on organized labor your side has been woefully inadequate in explaining two critical points. First, how unions can improve average wages at all absent the use of force. And second, how unions can improve average wages (through force) without similarly harming less skilled or advantaged workers and consumers. My argument has been that union success at higher wages only comes at the expense of general prosperity. It is value destructive. It is wrong. Bad for humanity. A big mistake.
The CEO comment just reads like projected envy. Seriously.
Why should employers have to provide health care in your master planned universe? Why is refusing to do so a “temper tantrum?” Why should part time labor be outlawed?
Presumably, if a union destroys the value of its own product, consumers can choose to buy another one.
Hence the plight of GM, Chrysler and Detroit.
i notice you left ford out. and even terrible gm is making money again. so i don’t see how having a well paid workforce with good fringe benefits has killed them.
“First, how unions can improve average wages at all absent the use of force.”
… by serving as banks, by improved teaching, by eliminating waste.
It is possible to harm less skilled workers, while benefiting customers. Some things cost more to do twice than they do to do right once. (adding a ground wire to an outlet being one of them).
Hence the plight of GM, Chrysler and Detroit.
The unions were one of several problems in Detroit and I’d argue the least significant. The arrogance and the bloated corporate culture of GM did more to sink that company than any labor union could have dreamed possible.
Dave & Roger,
Yeah, the joke was that GM’s plan to congress was just what was written in WSJ editorial pages the day before.
Feel free to include any company. Above market wages, propped up by threat of force strangle the very companies that they work for. This is not some deep economic secret. It is the justification every good leftist offers… “We need to redistribute from evil capital to saintly labor.” Though they never seem to be able to elaborate why one party is more intrinsically godly than the other. It just is! Part of the religion I guess. Kind of like recycling.
When you lower returns on capital, all else equal, you get less of it. Capital moves to other industries, firms, states or nations, or it moves from paying wages to technological investment. Thus you see what we actually have seen for the past 50 years. Unions choke themselves off over time. I have the stats somewhere if you want them. Capital moves away from unions (using coercive force).
The solution to the leftist’s dilemma, is of course to unionize every industry everywhere and make technological improvement illegal and regulate work hours. This destroys the economy and increases unemployment, thus producing a huge class of dependents that vote for the handouts. It also raises prices. This makes greedy capitalists look like evil bastards (CEO’s!!!)
I am sure somebody somewhere is blaming the CEOs for Detroit. Maybe Michael Moore will even make a movie. Perhaps I can star in it!
Guaranteed electoral victory for leftists.
Roger,
Most companies make their profits in some way, shape or form from consumerism. Usually this involves making a product for the average consumer. Paying your workers a living wage is a good way to make sure they can afford your products.
Though you obviously seem beyond caring at this point and in full sympathy with the business class over the people. A Corporation could not exist without employees. There is no value to stockholders without employees providing the goods. No dividends, no product, no anything. Yet anything that the workers do to demand good and fair payment is described as limiting wealth to you. It seems to me that the workers and employees provide the basis for dividends and they should be paid well.
Is there where I point out that the companies that were kicking the Big 3’s ass all had unionized workforces when they were rising up and gaining market share, right? It’s not like Japan was a right-to-work state.
“It’s not like Japan was a right-to-work state.”
I wonder how American unions would have responded to karoshi…
“Most companies make their profits in some way, shape or form from consumerism. Usually this involves making a product for the average consumer. Paying your workers a living wage is a good way to make sure they can afford your products.”
Dude. You just just flunked economics. This is absurd. You should not believe every leftist anecdote about Henry Ford.
I do not favor either side of any mutually voluntary positive sum arrangement. It is the leftists who see everything as being about tipping the scales for the little guy (as long as he votes left). I want fingers off the scales. I call it free enterprise. If you think it is pro business, then you do not get it. Full stop.
Of course a corporation cannot exist without employees and customers. The workers should ALWAYS request the best wages and conditions, and they should be free to go to any firm, or to start any self employment idea to get this. The market rate for an employee is the best he can get. Same goes for the employer. Where I disagree is when employees try to increase their wages by using force to keep other prospective employees from having a fair shot at the same job. I call this immoral. Just as immoral as an employer trying to keep out prospective competition by force.
Free enterprise has a proven record of increasing average incomes. Where it is allowed to play out with minimal interference, prosperity rises by substantially more than a factor of ten. Life quality by even more. Free markets not only pay workers well, they pay them a factor of ten better than any wide-scale, long term alternative. (Granted leftists can forcibly redistribute for a while off the fruits of free markets, but this is a negative sum, value destroying game within the larger system)
Jesse,
Even Honda is moving their factories to lower wage states and nations. This is a serious and important issue and it does us no good when leftists give the same hit and run snarks. Eventually we are going to start thinking it is time you guys are not taking the discussion seriously.
I repeat. Unions which significantly increase the cost of labor* and/or lower the returns of capital by definition — and empirically — slowly but surely choke themselves out of free markets. Do you disagree? I would love to have empirical or logical arguments which could enlighten me or help expand or change my opinions.
* this is not true if the union can increase productivity faster than costs. This of course does not take coercion though to accomplish.
Apparently, without unions Americans and Bangladeshis would earn the same income. Otherwise the situation would be more complicated then “unions destroy everything they touch”.
Paying your workers a living wage is a good way to make sure they can afford your products.
Can every Rolls Royce employee afford a Rolls? If not, does that mean they’re paid a sub-living wage?
Consideration of the actual product in question might be important. It’s a lot easier to pay a Bic worker enough to afford pens and razors than to pay a Boeing employee enough to afford an airliner.
James,
It is true that there will always be luxury products and the workers who make these products will not be able to afford them. It is also true that there are products made and the people who make them have no use or need for said product.
However, there are also a lot of products that are meant for use by everyday people and for everyday consumption. We can’t live in a world where every product operates at the Rolls Royce level. Or if companies are trying to prove that we can, that is very scary.
New Dealer,
OK, who’s producing what that by some moral right they ought to be able to afford but can’t? And please do explain the justification of your standards to me.
“Apparently, without unions Americans and Bangladeshis would earn the same income. Otherwise the situation would be more complicated then “unions destroy everything they touch”.”
None of this is true. Hell I don’t even remember writing those quoted words.
Average wages in America are more a factor of marginal productivity of American workers. One of the real economists here can say it better than me though, I am sure. There is no reason for average wages to be similar between Bangladesh and here, until such a time as our average (or is it marginal?) productivities merge. Granted jobs that can be done there more efficiently should be. Comparative advantage and all.
Unions do not destroy everything they touch. Coercion probably does. If you read carefully I am against COERCIVE DISTORTIONS IN WAGES. You know, threatening less skilled or minority or foreign workers when they offer to do the same job for less. The kind of stuff that makes leftists proud. These do tend to choke off industry.
James,
You are correct that there is no “moral right” for anyone to be able to purchase a particular purpose.
But from a Capitalist standpoint, it is good for business if your employees can purchase your product and/or other products. I am a firm believer in the idea that happy employees are productive employees. And it is morally and ethically better to run a business with high morale. Over something like this:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672939/think-your-office-is-soulless-check-out-this-amazon-fulfillment-center#1
“When you buy something from an independent retailer, you might pay more than Amazon, but that extra bit is an investment,” Roberts explains. “When you pay it, you’re investing in the quality of not only your own life but the life of the community around you.”
If we keep arguing that there is no “moral” right about being able to buy product X or product Y, it strikes me that we will live in a world of never-ending Victorian moralizing. “You should be happy to have a job even if it doesn’t pay a living wage. How dare you be so insolent as to dream of such things as human dignity and decency” I reject this view of labor and employment. Work is always going to be work and even people who have jobs they enjoy have days where they are bored out of their minds or doing long and painful drudgery tasks. The kind of moralizing that the former mine workers should be grateful for this kind of spot and associate work is really too much. It reads more like justification for the worst business practices. The ones most likely to run rough-shod over local workers.
I have no problem with the existence of luxury products or fancy restaurants. This might be possibly what makes me a liberal over a leftist and get accusation of merely wanting to ease up on inequality over going for radical solutions to end inequality. But I don’t think the things I like will disappear or go away in a world with universal healthcare, closer ratios in pay between a CEO and their lowest paid employee, universal pre-K and other aspects of the social safety net and welfare state. There are plenty of luxury companies that were founded in and operate out of those bastions of social welfare known as the Scandanvian countries. There are also a lot of huge international corporations founded in those countries.
Roger, I’m well aware corporations will do as corporations will do. Thus, why Honda moved it’s factories to poorer parts of the world where unions weren’t as strong…like Kentucky.
The difference between me and you I guess is I see no inherent right for a corporation to pay their worker the lowest possible wage. If groups of businessmen can pool their resources together (money) to gain an advantage in the market, why can’t group of workers pool their resources (labor) together to gain an advantage in the market?
As for crowding out poor and minority workers, ignoring the fact that the modern private sector union member is far more likely to be a Hispanic nurse from Houston than a white bricklayer from Michigan, I fully believe all workers should be paid more. In fact, I bet I want better conditions and pay for workers in Third World countries than you do.
But from a Capitalist standpoint, it is good for business if your employees can purchase your product and/or other products.
Wait, hold on, didn’t we just establish that this is not universally true? Is it really good business, from a capitalist standpoint, for Rolls Royce to pay their employees enough to buy a Rolls Royce?
Set aside the moral rights business–I thought that was the basis of your claim, but if not, I’m quite relieved to chuck it. Just explain to me in which American industry or firm are employees not able to afford their firms’ product (or service, I’m flexible here), who ought to be able to? And by what standard do you determine that they ought to, so you can identify this as one of the problem firms?
I am a firm believer in the idea that happy employees are productive employees.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s being disputed here. Certainly not by me. But the implication seems to be that to be happy workers have to be able to afford the company’s products. And that really depends on their own utility calculations, doesn’t it? If I’m a janitor in a pizza joint and I can’t afford to buy their pizzas, that fact only makes me unhappy if I like their pizza; if I hate pizza but can afford to buy the hot dogs that I love to nom nom, I’m not necessarily unhappy.
“When you buy something from an independent retailer, you might pay more than Amazon, but that extra bit is an investment,” Roberts explains. “When you pay it, you’re investing in the quality of not only your own life but the life of the community around you.”
I don’t buy it, and never have. I’ve heard it countless time, and it all smacks to me of romanticism that ignores the brute reality of what that independent retailer is like. Some are great, and I’m happy to support them (that little local breakfast place a few blocks from my house? looovvvee it). Some suck and deserve to be ignored in favor of any better alternative, even a meganational chain store.
I have vivid memories of coffee arguments with friends while in grad school. On the West side of the University of Oregon there’s a short commercial strip where we used to eat and drink. There was a Thai place that we used to eat at, run by the family of a couple UO students, until it finally shut down after one too many busts by the cops for allowing underage drinking in the evening, and was replaced by a Starbucks. I was unhappy–I love Thai food and hate Starbucks’ coffee. So my friends would try to drag me to the coffee shop next door, a local place that they loved just because it was local. It’s tables were unstable, rocky, things too small to comfortably work with a laptop, the chairs were rickety wooden folding chairs apparently stolen from a local church basement, they demanded you buy more coffee if you stayed more than about a half hour, and–blow my everlovin’ mind–they served their coffee piping hot in handleless glasses. On the other hand, Starbucks–in compensation, perhaps, for the nastiness of their brew–had tables you could actually work on, couches you could relax on, coffee served in proper mugs, and you could sit their all damn day without anyone hounding you to buy another cup! I almost felt guilty, sometimes, like I was taking advantage of them to get office space for a buck and change per day.
So which coffee company should I have supported to make a positive investment in my community? If your answer is Joes’ House of Handleless Coffee Glasses, Rickety Chairs and Buy Another or Get the Hell Out, I’m afraid I really have to disagree with you.
Do you think the employees were paid anymore? Hell, no, and Starbucks even has an employee stock plan.
Does Starbucks engage in charitable and service work in the community? It sure does. Does Joe’s House of Dig Deep or Fuck Off? Yeah, right.
The point is that local v. chain is not really the appropriate calculus, and “invest in the community” is an empty trope that ignores what kind of business you’re actually supporting. The key question is which business provides you with the most value. If the fact of buying local has real utility to you, then by all means do. But make sure that utility calculation is based on the real contribution of the business to the community.
And, look, mathematically, if you pay more you’re not necessarily contributing more money to the local economy. Paying more for product or service X means you’ll have to spend less, or just forgo, product or service Y. If you pay more at Joe’s House of Bugger Off You Loafers!, you might be costing someone else a job doing whatever it is you have to forgo. And is Joe really plowing that extra money back into the local economy while Starbucks sends it to Seattle? Well, I already showed that they’re doing good work in the community while Joe’s too much of a curmudgeon to do so. But also, how do you know where Joe’s spending his profits? He clearly hadn’t bought new furnishings from any local source in the past couple of decades (and if he did, does he need to buy them from a local manufacturer? what if he buys from a local supplier who buys them from some multinational firm producing tables and chairs in Bangladesh?), and for all I know he spent all his profits on sex tourism visits to Thailand. Or more kindly, just sticking them in an investment fund holding the stocks of multinational firms.
I’m sorry, but the guy you’re referencing knows diddly about how economies actually work, particularly about how intermeshed they are. The “buy local to support your community” approach is primarily misplaced romanticism, and ignores that the economic growth that has allowed poorly paid janitors to afford color TVs and XBoxes, allowed Thai children to escape a life in the sex trade, was primarily accomplished through expanding the range of the linkages in our market activities, not shrinking them.
There’s a movement in Toledo to buy local, using (voluntary) local currency. I hope to hell they succeed, and I hope in response people everywhere else stop buying from Toledo. Let’s see how the place does when nobody outside the city limits is buying Jeeps, Champion spark plugs, Libby and Owens Corning glass products. Let’s see what their investment in their community amounts to when outside investment produced through trade dries up.
But, hey, that’s just my soapbox spiel and I’ve said it a million times before. Feel free to ignore it (which has also happened a million times before, of course). Because what I really want is to know who is making what that they can’t afford but for some reason ought to? It’s just so abstract, it sounds like it’s happening all over the place and we should be outraged…but who am I supposed to be outraged against? Unless we can get down to real examples, how can I know if it’s a real thing or not?
(ND, this probably comes off as much harsher than I really mean it to be. It’s pretty much a rote spiel by now, given on the web and in classes more times than I can remember. Picture me as an actor on stage reciting a well-memorized speech, and with a smile on my face as I give it!)
“The difference between me and you I guess is I see no inherent right for a corporation to pay their worker the lowest possible wage.”
What you are saying is that you do not believe people should have the freedom to make make voluntary, mutually beneficial interactions. You believe that master planners sharing your vision can tell people what to do. From an economics standpoint, this is proven empirically to be the biggest mistake of history.
“If groups of businessmen can pool their resources together (money) to gain an advantage in the market, why can’t group of workers pool their resources (labor) together to gain an advantage in the market?”
Investors can voluntarily agree to pool their money to buy capital and voluntarily hire management, who voluntarily extend offers of employment to laborers. They then build products which are voluntarily sold to consumers who desire the utility the product or service delivers. And of course, the divisions between roles is itself fungible. Consumers are workers are management are investors. Every step of the process is a positive sum, voluntary, expected value adding improvement to human utility. Trillions of such interactions on a daily basis add up to human economic prosperity. And yes, humans are more prosperous in 2013 than any time since the Big Bang.
And of course workers can pool their resources. But they cannot pool them to screw over prospective employees looking for a job. I simply do not understand what allows leftists to screw over the unskilled and not employed to protect the currently employed. Stop it. This is wrong.
” I fully believe all workers should be paid more. In fact, I bet I want better conditions and pay for workers in Third World countries than you do.”
The difference between you and me is that you are using wishful, empirically disproven, thinking to “hope” your way to higher wages. I can show you how myriads of nations have actually worked their way to higher standards of living. It always involves relatively free markets, trillions of voluntary interactions and increasing productivity.
Prosperity does not come from pathological altruism, ignorance of history, the conceit of the Mandarins or zero sum redistribution. It comes from trillions of voluntary mutually beneficial, value -producing actions repeated on a daily basis.
That is why and how a billion people have worke their way out of severe poverty during the past generation. Markets did it. Not Mandarins.
One of these days, you extreme leftists need to just admit that your ideas are not just totally absurd. They are in effect evil. It only takes so much evidence that an idea is destructive to humanity before a rational person admits that they are doing harm.
Renounce your ways, Jesse. You can help the human race or you can do harm. Choose wisely.
And for the record I think KatherineMW is a bit extreme and radical in her solutions above. I am not a pastoralist/communalist. I like big cities and a variety of products. Spice of life type stuff. Nor do I think that we make laws that impose salary caps on certain professions that seem to be bete noirs of the radical left. However, I do agree that teachers are not adequately compensated for their role in society.
I’m not a pastoralist either. My discussion of communalism was to illustrate why it’s not, unless we come up with a completely new type of ideas or human nature fundamentally changes, currently a viable solution.
Heh, Mike Dwyer and I may be the only pastoralists here!
Sure, strengthening organized labor, making it so work is not necessary, reducing the influence of money in politics, increasing the focus on the environment and reducing the focus on stuff we can buy, radically changing our criminal justice and prison systems, including stopping the war on drugs, not just increasing access to educational and health care resources (both issues of redistribution), but changing the way we do universal education and the way we administer health care, and so on.
While it is much, much simpler to critique existing institutions than to propose new ones, and I admit that I’m much more likely to do critiquing than proposing as a result (though the fact that my own ideas are pretty far from anything expressed in these parts also contributes to this imbalance), one really doesn’t have to look very far on the internet or in a bookstore or library to find the left (and I have occasionally gotten into substantive discussions ’round these parts). The left may not have much of a role in our political system, if it has any role at all, but that doesn’t mean that it’s hard to find it outside of that political system. Hell, if there’s one thing the left has always been good at, it’s been giving people stuff to read.
“strengthening organized labor”
Why? You assume the competition is between labor and management/capital. In reality it is between those with jobs and those without. Strengthening organized labor is another way to say you dislike the less skilled.
“making it so work is not necessary”
Work is another word for effort spent at producing value for self or fellow humans. This amounts to a wish that value would produce itself or that we could just live less prosperous lives.
” reducing the influence of money in politics”
This just leads to things other than money becoming more important. Political connections. Ability to offer up votes. Ability to gain access to major media. Log rolling. It doesn’t solve the problem of influence, it just moves it from groups you disfavor to groups you favor. I suggest reducing the influence of politics altogether.
“increasing the focus on the environment and reducing the focus on stuff we can buy”
Why do we have to agree on a focus? If you value stuff and I value the ocean, why can’t we both be free to pursue what we want? Why the assumed trade off?
“changing the way we do universal education and the way we administer health care, and so on.”
Amen. Let’s quit establishing a centralized or universalized system run by politicians out for their own gain at our expense. Let’s experiment with lots of decentralized and voluntary breakthroughs in education and health care.
Roger, I won’t address all of them (we’ve gone back and forth many times on unions), but I will address this one, because I think it’s important:
Why do we have to agree on a focus? If you value stuff and I value the ocean, why can’t we both be free to pursue what we want? Why the assumed trade off?
All I really want to note is that stuff is generally incompatible with the environment, and also with taking inequality seriously. Not always, but generally.
Wrong. Environmentalism is a value that wealthy people have much more so than the poor. Environmental quality improves as we come to be able to afford it. Free markets are essential for the environment. Not only do they fund this higher value by eliminating baser needs, they also fund the science and prosperity needed to invest in cleaner solution sets.
Socialism, feudalism and mercantilism were incomparably dirty and destructive.
Valid points, but off the mark I think. While it’s true that people who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from are more likely to care about things other than where their next meal is coming from, this doesn’t mean that harm to the environment won’t have a greater impact on those who have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
I won’t get into why I think environmentalism is intimately related to issues of inequality here, because it seems like we’re wading into weeds that have nothing to do with the post (though if people are interested, maybe I’ll write something up in a bit longer form), but suffice it to say for now that one of the ways in which I think they’re related is that the current system, particularly with the focus on stuff, is unsustainable on both dimensions.
I’d like to see it Chris. I don’t think people focus on stuff. They focus on problem solving. They pursue a better life for themselves and those they care about. Problem solving and progress require learning, and this knowledge can be and is applied to improving the environment.
That said, properly functioning markets must be careful to avoid negative externalities. A little co2 produced as an unnoticeable side effect of trillions of little actions eventually adds up to a huge externality.
Roger,
Most of the native West Virginians campaigning against practices done by the Coal Companies do not strike me as being very wealthy or even middle-class.
And saying that environmentalism is only a concern for the wealthy* is a great sleight of hand trick. It really makes you sound like a man of the people. Only not really. The problem with not caring about the environment is that we really don’t have anywhere else to go. Complete destruction of the environment will just mean misery for everyone and possibly the end of the human race.
*I take your wealthy really means upper-middle class liberals with low six-figure salaries. Not billionaires like the Koch Brothers.
Roger,
Who bought Cleveland?
… my point exactly!
No, New Dealer, it does not reveal how removed from reality that I am. Seriously.
Native West Virginians living today are indeed the top 1% (or more likely the top one tenth of one percent) of historic humanity. The standard of living of a lower class american is incomparably rich compared to the historic rates of income (around $400 to $800 per person per year — feel free to do the math). And of course, the biggest advocates of environmental causes are not working class miners. It is middle and upper class college grads like you and me, now isn’t it?
Compared to you I AM a man of the people. I am arguing for the prosperity of mankind. I have a couple billion examples of success over a couple centuries. Let me be crystal clear in my argument… those of you preaching that we change the best thing in the history of mankind should at least understand what it is that they hope to improve. When I see self described ”leftists” arguing we should rationally dismantle that which they have not even tried to understand (for equality of outcome or the planet), I will proudly stand up for the common man of today and tomorrow who you are inadvertently planning on harming.
“The problem with not caring about the environment is that we really don’t have anywhere else to go. Complete destruction of the environment will just mean misery for everyone and possibly the end of the human race.”
I argue prosperity is crucial for maintaining our focus and ability to care for the environment, and you shift this to an accusation that I do NOT CARE about the environment? You even throw in a gratuitous accusation that I am pro extinction and pro Koch Brothers. That is like a triple bonus score for leftist comments.
Prosperity and social and technical progress are essential for the flourishing of humanity. Science and free markets are complex adaptive learning systems which create forward, cumulative types of problem solving in their particular domains. Both will be necessary to address the economic and environmental challenges of the future. Please do not dismantle either. Our grand children depend upon it.
Roger,
While I agree that the poorest modern humans are better off than the wealthiest citizens of the recent past, I think analyses of this type – where we monetize everything and view income as the only metric representing wealth or utility – ignores the fact that production for use was far more significant in the past as compared to production for income than it is today.
I assume the standard of living is adjusted for non market transactions. Not sure how it could make any sense otherwise. HG’s didnt trade or monetize much of anything, nor did most feudal serfs. I would love to know if I am wrong though.
HG’s didnt trade or monetize much of anything,
Trade was actually pretty extensive within and between many hunter-gatherer cultures. Granted, they lacked the production that we have today so their stock for trade was much more limited. But in many places they did trade what stock they had. The pre-Columbian Americas had extensive trade networks, such that artefacts of coastal origin could be found in the middle of the continent. The introduction of European trade goods just further expanded an activity that had gone on for a long long time.
Good clarification, James. My basic point was that as a percent of total output or production, very little was traded. My take on it is that most production was family or band produced, and that even within bands, sharing (especially of larger game) was more important than trade. I could be wrong though.
Roger,
In no way shape or form was New Dealer saying you were pro Koch brothers.
Just reread what he said…
I know you’re an honest enough man not to be pro Koch brothers, anyway.
I am sure somebody somewhere is blaming the CEOs for Detroit. Maybe Michael Moore will even make a movie. Perhaps I can star in it!
I blame GM’s corporate culture, your attempt at sarcasm notwithstanding. I have neither an ideological axe to grind nor any interest in defending the UAW.
Blaming the unions for Detroit is just as stupid for blaming the unions for Hostess (knee-jerk ideologues go straight for the labor and ignore everything else – that would earn a big fat F in b-school). Businesses fail due to a multitude of factors. I’m more than happy to engage in a discussion with you about it but we’re going to have to ditch all the abstract/ideological stuff about markets, coercion, etc. and discuss the facts as they happen.
I consider myself a libertarian but I have little to no use for ideology given that I live, eat and breathe markets every day.
I know nothing about GMs corporate culture. I assume it is pretty much as dysfunctional as any old dinosaur company. But that was never really my point, just an example that got into play.
My point is that unions either have very little effect on wages, or they use threats of force to achieve higher wages and in doing so lower returns on capital (by ten to twenty percent). This leads to an average of 6% lower capital investment and 15% less R&D. Net employment in union firms has shrunk by about 3% per year, while it grew at about 3% per year in non union firms. *
Union coercion penalizes capital. That is its stated goal. It succeeds. This naturally shifts capital, all else equal, to the superior returns of non union or less coercive union domains. This is the story of the last two generations.
I respect your background and share your disdain of depending on rhetoric over experience and data. I too made an actual living in real markets, designing and implementing products and managing growth and profit. I am not a libertarian, not really. I am however someone that the professors at B schools call as they design their courses.
* sorry, most of my data is from BT Hirsch and all my old links seem to have been abandoned or shut down by the subscription sites like JSTOR.
Roger,
Taking for granted that your sources are quite citable:
“My point is that unions either have very little effect on wages, or they use threats of force to achieve higher wages and in doing so lower returns on capital (by ten to twenty percent). This leads to an average of 6% lower capital investment and 15% less R&D. Net employment in union firms has shrunk by about 3% per year, while it grew at about 3% per year in non union firms. *”
Is this worldwide? Only in America?
One can say that car dealerships were more instrumental than unions in GM’s problems. More overhead means more drag (yes, i know obvs).
I lost all my links, but I am pretty sure it was US only. I had three of four journal papers with active working links and they are all gone now. Must have been a Koch brother cover up.
In fairness, a lot of less-leftier-than-thou liberals do say that giving people money (if not throwing it at them) is a useful response to inequality (at least where it intersects with poverty), if not a “solution” to it. Responses/solutions. Yes, I think purported “solutions” to inequality are doomed to laughable inadequacy, perhaps more accurately futility. However, various *responses* to it that don’t fundamentally redress or “solve” it might nevertheless be highly humane and utility-enhancing. Giving money to everyone in your country who’s poor might be one of those.
Well what Chris said and also they started it by being ninnys and knuckle knobs.
I have always thought that you are too sensitive when it comes to these things.
I don’t think any of this is particularly nasty.
“There is a question as to whether inequality matters or not. We’re not dealing with that here. Let’s go ahead and assume for the purposes of this post that it does, action is justified, and we are in charge of fixing the world.”
First, I just want to establish that I am not in agreement, well at least full agreement, with whether it matters. But I better explain..
Certainly inequality of outcome matters. It is the essential feedback mechanism of life. You try something and based upon your values, goals and context, see if it works. If it works poorly, you try something else. We all try lots of things. Some of us are good at learning and pursue successful paths. Others choose stupid and destructive paths.
The problem with eliminating inequality of outcome is you obliterate life’s essential feedback mechanism. You reduce, or substantially reduce the cost of stupidity and destructive behavior. Said another way, you effectively promote inefficiency and ineffectiveness.
Inequality of outcome is feedback. And feedback does matter. It is essential for learning and progress.
In fact, the CEO might encounter even greater reverence given the number of people his pre-tax income supports.
Does this happen in Sweden or France?
My guess is she will actually just earn more resentment. Dependents project their inadequacies and loathing on those they depend upon. Ticks have nothing nice to say about dogs.
Yes, CEOs who steal their way to riches indeed
do have nothing good to say about their workers.
Stealing deserves punishment. Being a CEO does not imply theft. Can we raise the bar a tad, please?
No, there are ways to gain money and become wealthy.
The traditional one is by taking that which you have not earned, by failing to justly compensate folks for what they do for you (a CEO indeed has oodles of justification for making more than the janitor, by the way…)
The alternative is productivity enhancements.
You may recognize the school of American economic thought from which I draw this. I assure you it’s looking less antiquated by the day.
Kim,
There is no point in continuing the discussion if you believe I defend taking what has not been mutually and voluntarily agreed upon, or if I believe you feel janitors are not justly compensated for what they do.
Roger,
I do not believe you intentionally do so.
You argue in good faith, and bring a lot to the table.
As there is legal rape, there is legal theft.
Can we raise the bar a tad, please?
Roger,
Is a tad equivalent to a mile? That’s about what a discussion like this needs to free it from the clutches of silly folk economics.
For the record, I think executive compensation is out of whack, but I’m not going to lower myself to the anti-CEO populist garbage I’ve seen too many people throw around. It doesn’t make for intelligent discussion.
Dave,
… you’ll name the school of economic thought I’m using?
Or do you really dare to defame that which you have not studied? 😉
Perhaps Spielberg had more of a point than I realized, if folks like you aren’t getting my allusions.
Kim,
… you’ll name the school of economic thought I’m using?
No, but I can name mine – the real world.
Or do you really dare to defame that which you have not studied?
Apparently yes.
Perhaps Spielberg had more of a point than I realized, if folks like you aren’t getting my allusions.
If Roger wants to argue that CEO’s are justly compensated (and I don’t know if he does or does not – just so I don’t put words in his mouth), I would argue why I have my doubts. Unlike you, who sees the C-Suite and sees a bunch of crooks and thieves who have not earned their way to these positions (although I’d argue most have earned it), I don’t have to bring cheap political talking points into the conversation to get to a place that may not be much different than yours. That’s what frustrates me.
Dave,
frequently I express myself poorly.
you’ll forgive the occasional witticism, I’m sure.
“Yes, CEOs who steal their way to riches indeed
do have nothing good to say about their workers.”
… was referencing a few CEOs in particular
and with good cause.
Naturally, now that you’ve reminded me of this,
I’ll mention what a good friend of mine said:
“I’ll miss Bear Stearns. They always paid their debts.”
(the implication, naturally, being that some of the others
were less certain about their obligations to contractors).
I suspect that they gain from certain market imperfections and nepotistic cross breeding among boards. I really don’t know or care though. There is nothing special about CEO pay. I would worry more about the corporate stationary budget — there is more inefficiency and waste to be eliminated.
I also do not worry about the superstar salaries of athletes, musicians, actors, celebrity nobodies or novelists. The CEO resentment thing just strikes as a massive form of penis envy.
Lets get over it. Some people have bigger packages. I wish them well.
Roger,
” I would worry more about the corporate stationary budget”
… you show me 9 million dollars of waste in a Corporate Stationary Budget?!
… baloney.
Passing along some stuff of interest:
http://www.epi.org/blog/government-business-source-breakthrough/
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/08/how_%E2%80%9Cecon_101%E2%80%9D_is_killing_america/
… figured you might find them interesting. Might even change a talking point or two
(you seem more amenable to statistical analysis than most).
Maybe we should start with the justifications for the redistribution of wealth through the welfare system and how they relate to inequality. There is, first of all, a moral justification for redistribution through the welfare state: certain people — the working class (and to some extent middle class) elderly, people with some types of disabilities, children, etc. — are excluded from our system of wealth largely, if not entirely, though no fault of their own, and we as a society decided some time ago that any system that excludes people for reasons outside of their control has a moral obligation not to leave them high and dry, which in an advanced capitalist society requires* some redistribution of wealth from the people who are benefitting from the system to those who are excluded from it.
There is also a second justification for redistribution through the welfare state, a systematic one. That is, some amount of redistribution of wealth is necessary for the system through which wealth is primarily distributed to continue to function effectively. That system is a caste system, requiring a more or less permanent underclass** – the people who pick the vegetables, tile the roofs, work in various service industries, on factory floors, etc. – to function effectively, and that underclass is always treading at the edge of a precipice down which even small mistakes or accidents of fate can cause them to tumble. It stands to reason that people who have little hope of moving far enough away from the cliff to feel completely safe would be less willing to continue to work, and work productively, in a system that didn’t promise them at little support should they fall over the edge. The history of working-class activism and active revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries, the winding down of which in the West not surprisingly corresponded to the advent of the modern welfare system, shows just how dangerous the underclass can be to the system if the system doesn’t sufficiently ensure the welfare of that class. So through some amount of redistribution, we do ensure their welfare.
And of course those of us who find ourselves above the underclass, but still too close to the edge for comfort, see such a system of assured welfare and collectively choose to strengthen that system lest we find ourselves tripping or being pushed over the edge ourselves, providing a third justification for redistribution, including redistribution from our own wealth downward.
Now, I feel like I might be coming off as condescending in explaining the justifications for the modern capitalist welfare system to people who are undoubtedly well aware of them, but I wanted to make sure we’re on the same page, and to make it clear that the redistribution that welfare system entails is not primarily aimed at eliminating inequality, or even reducing it, but instead at dealing at some of its more pernicious and inevitable consequences within our system. I understand why, given this function, some people might believe that we could use further redistribution to reduce inequality, and to some extent such a belief is justified, as redistribution has historically done a great deal to decrease inequalities of opportunity through increasing access to thinks like educational resources, health care, transportation, job and career services, etc., but it would be a mistake to think that redistribution alone will solve the problems of inequality, because inequality is inherent in the system (it is, as I said above, necessary for the function of the system), and merely throwing money at it is sort of like trying to keep water out of the boat by plugging tiny holes in the side with our fingers while ignoring the large hole that covers most of the bottom.
I must say that I don’t know anyone who thinks that the only necessary solution is more redistribution through the welfare state, but if there are people who actually hold such a view, I must say I would find it sad rather than laughable. And again, I’d find it understandable, particularly given that many of the other institutions through which we’ve addressed inequality in the recent past, such as organized labor, have eroded to the point that they are barely visible and amount to little more than other fingers poked in a few more of those tiny holes, while at the same time it’s become increasingly clear that our legal, social, and economic solutions to the problems of inequality that results from historical and continuing prejudice and discrimination have reached the limits of their effectiveness yet such inequality is still rampant. If it’s difficult to see other paths to a solution, then the primarily palliative measures you’ve been using may look like your only options.
*Societies in the past had other ways of dealing with those whom the system of power and wealth excluded, including familial support and the Church, which are to a large extent no longer viable solutions on a wide scale as a result of the way in which our system functions, and also institutionalization or imprisonment, which we have rightly concluded are immoral ways of dealing with the excluded (though we still do a fair amount of both).
**Our caste system may be less rigid than many others, but it’s not so flexible as we like to think. Economic mobility is still pretty restricted, and economic status is now the primary determiner of one’s place in the caste system.
The idea that we, as a society, have a responsibility to provide a baseline of wealth under which no person living in our country ought to fall… and this means a certain amount of food, shelter, climate control, and even entertainment options, then that’s an important discussion to have. Heck, whether we should expect to have this baseline move over time (food requirements don’t change much, shelter requirements don’t change much… but climate control has had a recent revolution and entertainment is constantly in flux).
Whenever I have seen problems enter into the equation is when someone asks the question “at what point can we say our obligations have been met?”
Oh, I agree that “when has our obligation been met” is a pretty fundamental question in our system, which is why I included the third justification. It’s not like that justification is a necessary one for the existence of the welfare state, but it is the one through which we decide how extensive that state is, because we’re the ones who are paying for it. I don’t necessarily agree that this should be the case, but as you may know, I don’t like the system in the first place. I’d tear it all down, but since I’m in the extreme minority, my goal in a discussion like this one would merely be to convince people that we might want to do a little more, and do it a little better, in addition to doing many other things that are less about redistribution than they are about moving people away from the cliff and making it more possible for people to move further away on their own.
…I don’t like the system in the first place. I’d tear it all down…
I’m in pretty much agreement here. Many of the fundamental problems have to deal with different cultures, different cultural expectations, one-size-fits-all solutions, and local decisions made a million miles away.
And, of course, the lingering resentment that “we’re all in this together” means “I’m accountable to you, but you’re not accountable to me” (no matter where you are in the system) and how that plays out when negotiations start.
If I were going to set up a system, it wouldn’t be this one.
You guys would cooperate just fine in tearing it down, but you’d never agree on what to build in its place. So don’t start plotting just yet, ok?
James, too late. We’ve already scheduled the first meeting of the Tear It Down Society. Fortunately for you, the first meeting will be entirely for the purpose of deciding on the rules to govern the Society, and we can’t move on to deciding any course(s) of action until we’ve come to a consensus on those.
May I please, please, pleeeeaaassseeee be invited?
James, we at TIDS will let anyone in, because TEAR IT DOWN, that’s why! So you’re welcome to come. Just come prepared to do some tearin’.
Part of the problem with the discussion of “entitlements” is the vocabulary and framing.
The question is posed in terms of a binary world of two sets-
A. That To Which I Am Entitled;
B. That To Which I am Not Entitled;
The word “entitled” is used analagous to “rights’, meaning things that we are entitled to have without any obligation or input, like free speech.
I am entitled to free speech. I don’t need to earn it, it isn’t transactional, I am entitled to it simply by virtue of existing, and no one can restrict it except under the most compelling of circumstances.
Framing too many things like this is, as Roger might say, a Lose-Lose proposition.
There just isn’t any way that binary equation can be solved without someone suffering an injustice. Rights are hard, absolute things, that don’t allow for the flexibility or changes of circumstance.
If you point to a fat lazy slob who does nothing with his life but sit on the couch playing video games, and assert that I am required to feed, clothe, and shelter him, while he is required to do absolutely nothing at all, that would tend to make this liberal start shouting about how TaxesAreTheft.
I think it is a lot more productive to frame things in terms of what our overall conception of a “well-ordered society” is, and how best we can assign responsibilities and and evaluate outcomes.
Such as, in a well ordered society, everyone is expected to be industrious and contribute to the common good; Everyone has access to health care without unreasonable cost; And so on. We start with a shared vision of the desired outcome, then work backwards to how best to get there.
Then the discussion about health care becomes more a matter of how much it costs, and how much we can provide, versus how much the individual contributes.
This becomes a way to reach a compromise, rather than retreating to polar corners.
Awesome comment, LWA
I basically agree with one crucial distinction. I do not believe a well ordered society is centrally agreed upon or planned. It arises from the decentralized merge points of hundreds of millions of overlapping visions.
To be more specific, it is not ever fully conceived. We don’t have a vision and work backward, at least on the details. Even the rules and institutions are developed in an evolutionary, experimental way.
Healthy societies are more like forests than parks, albeit forests with rangers.
I would agree- The decentralized merge point is the social consensus that undergirds political parties and the democratic process; there is a broadly shared consensus that, for example, young healthy people should support older sickly people, and we weigh different proposals to acheive that.
Whether health care for the aged is a “right” or not, is irrelevant; there is a consensus opinion that it should be made to happen, one way or the other.
Again I am not as far apart from you on this as we would expect from our past histories.
If people can come to an agreed consensus, they should be free to do so, and can probably gain socio-cultural advantages by doing so. I am fine with guaranteed health care for those unanimously agreeing to it. If structured correctly I would sign on.
I do not think they should be forced to come to a consensus on most issues, or that minorities opposing the consensus should be forced to go along ( on most issues).
Thus I recommend “tricks” to make consensus and cooperation easier such as make it bottoms up, create variation and competition in choices, allow opt outs on the consensus, require supermajorities and sunset provisions on consensus, and so on.
That system is a caste system, requiring a more or less permanent underclass** – the people who pick the vegetables, tile the roofs, work in various service industries, on factory floors, etc. – to function effectively
I don’t think this is correct. We need people to do these jobs, true*, but they need not constitute an underclass. The reason these jobs offer very low wages is that a) the supply of people who can do them is virtually unlimited, and b) those who do them generally lack the skills needed to do other jobs.
Suppose, hypothetically, that all people were essentially interchangeable—that everyone had the cognitive and noncognitive ability needed to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an actuary, or do any other sort of highly remunerative work. What would the wage distribution look like under these conditions?
Wages would more or less be based on what had to be sacrificed to earn them. Doctors would still be paid well due to the lengthy period of training necessary, but only enough to offset the costs of training and the implicit costs of forgoing the ability to earn an income while in training. People who pick vegetables would likely be paid well simply because the job is unpleasant. Those with particularly tedious jobs would be paid well. Cool, fun, or easy but not tedious jobs would offer lower pay, because everyone would want to do these.
The latter would not constitute an underclass, though. They aren’t actually poorly compensated—they’re just choosing to take their compensation in the form of an enjoyable job rather than high wages, and they always have the ability to switch to another job.
I’m pretty sure the economy would work better, not worse, under these conditions. Workers would be more productive, crime and its associated costs would be lower, and there would be no need for a welfare state.
*Technically even this is not true, insofar as these jobs could be automated.
Do you have a spam issue on this website; I also am
a blogger, and I was curious about your situation; we have developed some nice procedures and we are looking to exchange methods
with others, please shoot me an email if interested.
spam offering to get rid of spam!
To BlaiseP, for this:
Actually, no. This sounds like it’d end up further enshrining (unintentionally in your case) a status quo that desperately needs to be destroyed.
The status quo is one party in the majority, the other party balking literally everything. Federalist 10 warns of Factions.
“The status quo is one party in the majority, the other party balking literally everything. ”
If you mean the ‘current’ state of affairs, yes. If you mean that the norm is ‘whichever party is not in the majority is balking literally everything’, then you are quite factually wrong.