That’s a really strange sort of hypothetical to pick out. Sort of like if I were to say that since you were considering social distribution as not inherently immoral, that invites the following. Imagine some scheme in which everyone in the US got a standard deduction at the poverty level, and a 100% marginal tax rate for the rest of their income, which is then distributed to the rest of the world to feed the hungry people. Your statements are equally true, but I don’t think you would consider this to be a just society, right?
Fair enough. But there still isn’t anything inherently immoral about redistribution. It’s damn-near universal. Unless you oppose every form of social safety net and favor a completely flat tax (and by flat I mean everyone pays the same amount, not the same percentage), then you are accepting redistribution. It’s just a question of how much.
What evidence do you have that government-run social services have done more harm than good?
Nope. Before my office closed, I was solidly in the middle class. Assuming I find future employment, I should remain there, and possibly improve my position over time.
I don’t think you understand. My point is merely that there are many frameworks that are unjust - some with high inequality and some with low (or zero in your example’s case). I readily concede that perfect equality is neither achievable nor desired. But you don’t seem to concede that there are levels of inequality that are equally undesirable.
My position is that redistribution is morally justifiable, and that the important policy question is what level of redistribution is acceptable while maintaining a working capitalist system and maintaining a civil society?
Or, put slightly differently: given a set amount of government services required to maintain a healthy, functioning society what is the best way of raising the funds for these services in a manner that has the least-negative impact on economic activity and social stability?
Ah. You make some very good points, but reach an (IMO) flawed conclusion. Winning in serious adversarial competition is a big part of how our species has evolved. Whatever configuration does things better and more efficiently than others will win out over the medium to long term, whether directly adversarial or not. Competition still brings out the most from us. What alternative do you propose to it?
What I mean is that your reasoning as to why marketable skills require higher compensation has the fallacy of the excluded middle. That is, you seem to be saying that any amount of redistribution will eliminate your incentive to learn more marketable skills. I don’t think this is the case, as there are certainly incentives in current US society which has income redistribution.
There is plenty of middle ground between zero redistribution and communism.
You’re assuming that the humans who get the most bananas do the most work. Actually the reverse is true. The rich work, if they do, because they want to. The poor work because they have to.
As for the monkeys, here’s one:
But seriously, do your own experiment. Find two kids. Give one a pony, and the other a pair of socks. See what happens.
You seem to be ascribing to me the position that there should be no taxation. I have advocated government trying to ensure equality of opportunity. Where would the money come from? Of course it would come from taxation, and if the taxation so required needs more money than taxing everyone at one rate would generate, take more from rich people. My position is that the taxation should not be based on the idea, (nor should it be trying to attain the objective), that inequality of incomes is a bad thing. If there is inequality of opportunity, then yes it is a bad thing. But if there IS inequality of opportunity, *that * is the real disease policy needs to be aimed at curing, not the symptom of income inequality.
From your own cite, it turns out that the researchers actually conducted the experiment I laid out and then got the response you’ve quoted.
Personally, I’d rather be the CEO than the janitor, even if the pay’s the same. But the reason the pay’s different is that CEOs have a lot of power. Janitors don’t.
And here we have come to agreement.
I would add that the symptom of income inequality, in general, should cause us to search for the source and attempt to address it, if possible. One could hypothesize, for example, that changes in executive compensation may be traced to changes in the way these compensation packages are regulated, disclosed, etc. rather than some change in the fundamental value of a CEO.
And that we should always be on guard for dangerous levels of inequality (obviously difficult to define), because these tend to lead to economic and social unrest (which I think was the general question of the OP).
Well, sort of. The results could, I suppose, be construed to support either “view”.
The interesting point, to me, is that a monkey that received the same reward he always did (the cucumber) stopped participating if he saw that another monkey got a much better reward.
It is not hard to extrapolate this to human behavior to explain why people feel jilted even if their income stays the same when they see the CEO get huge bonuses. In particular if they get these rewards for no discernible reason (say, destroying the investment bank they ran).
Nope. The experiment involved giving monkeys different rewards for the same work, or no work at all. Your experiment was to give more bananas to harder-working monkeys. See the difference?
Well, all we have to do is determine what that amount is (for the CEO) and we’re set. Piece of cake, right?
But…but…that’s what I was saying right from the beginning! 
The dangerous levels of inequality is kind of a strange one too. If I had to, I’d say that as a symptom income inequality would be like a mole. Benign in and of itself, although ugly to some, but if it gets too large and stays too long, look for cancer. If you find it, treat the cancer, but if not, beware the doc who tells you to go into general anaesthesia to take out a mole.
Ok, there is such a thing as stretching a metaphor too far :smack: But you get what I’m saying.
Yes I do. It’s minimal. The experiment is, at best, unhelpful in an ‘inequality of incomes is harmful’ debate. Sure people prefer fairness. That is not the same thing as equity, in fact quite often it is the opposite. Have one person work harder at a more difficult job than the other and then give them both the same pay. Is that fair? No. Is it equitable? Yes.
Empirically, if memory serves, income inequality in the US tends to rise in boom times and fall in times of recession. Note, for instance, that “The share of income received by the top 1 percent … dropped to 17 percent in 2009 from 23 percent in 2007, according to federal tax data.”
You shouldn’t believe us, you should read Gretchen Morgensen and the like.
Now, in a certain sense even monopolistic pricing is market driven. But you don’t need massive studies - you need only look at the mechanisms of how CEO pay is set to figure this out. (You didn’t need to do detailed financial analysis to know Tammany Hall was corrupt either.) Sure globalization has an impact, but it is global, and so doesn’t explain why US salaries have risen so much faster than European or Japanese salaries have.
Now, I’ll admit it is possible that big salaries affect the middle rungs. But NBA salaries also affect kids shooting hoops who should be studying. I’d say that even if true, it is not healthy, since 99.9% of people so affected should be studying their bosses salaries, not someone 5 levels above them. Mailroom guys don’t get to be CEOs unless they happen to have the same last name as the founder - How to Succeed in Business is a comedy.
There’s a lot more to it than that. Anybody can push a mop. Not everyone can run a company. Moreover, the CEO has a lot more responsibility than a janitor. If the janitor fucks up, some cleaning doesn’t get done…until they replace him with the next janitor. If a CEO fucks up, the entire company can go out of business, many people lose jobs, investors lose money, etc…and there may not be time to right the ship by replacing the CEO. The risks are higher, so the company pays more to attract top talent. The greatest janitor in the world is not going to affect the bottom line in any meaningful way…but a good CEO can be the difference in staying in business, returning profits to investors, or going belly up.
Only because the income of top earners is more volatile. No data yet, but the articles on this say most expect it to have recovered in 2010.
In any case, notice how even with this massive drop in income we didn’t see the 0.1% decide to quit and go lie on the beach. In other words, we have proof that taxing them up to 17% additional wouldn’t hurt motivation. Just another example of marginal utility - a 17% drop income for someone on the bottom would really hurt. Not that we should tax the rich this much more, but the defenders of the rich don’t seem to be able to draw the proper conclusions.