Those are included in my rather wooly attributes terminology 
We should… and if you get a smart boss you might get valued that way.
I’ve worked with mediocre programmers who toiled away grimly and probably made more bugs than they fixed, and also with some brilliant ones who produced far less code but devised elegant, extensible, and bullet-proof solutions.
I’ve also worked with managers who valued the mediocre programmers over the brilliant ones because they managed by measuring lines of code produced. :smack:
Pay is based on results, not effort.
A just system is based on free markets. If people are allowed to take whatever jobs they can get at whatever pay they can get for them and employers are allowed to hire the best workers they can afford and either party can sever the relationship at will, it tends to maximize production and value generated. People will tend to work and train harder for jobs that pay more and so on.
This is a highly simplified model though. In reality, there are many jobs that are highly technical and required specialized skills and experience. By necessity these jobs have to pay more in order to make the time and cost of preparing for them worthwhile to potential employees. And the cost of this education and training can create real economic and class barriers for those who can’t afford them.
Also, people make choices. There are social and health costs associated with working “maximum effort”. A lot of people want to earn $120,000 right out of grad school. They don’t want to work 80+ hours a week as an attorney or investment banker. Those people are willing to trade money for lifestyle needs.
Also, jobs and employees aren’t “perfectly competetive goods” in the economics definition sense of being totally interchangeable. In my job search, I’ve looked at about 10 different companies in my field. Each job and each company has very different (if similar) requirements and cultures. As does each candidate for those jobs.
I have to admit, I also don’t get why “effort” is being counted for more than “results”. Surely efficiency is to be rewarded.
No…neither. To paraphrase, our society is the most unjust and unrighteous…except compared to all the others (I’m assuming we are talking about the Western World™ here, not simply American…MMV in any case, all rights reserved).
Moral? We don’t need no stinkin’ morals! I don’t believe there is a moral justification either way, to be honest, as I don’t think morals come into it. There is certainly justification for the effort of some to be regarded higher (and thus compensated more) than that of others. Even our communist brothers and sisters recognized this…they simply decided in committee who’s effort was worth more than others, instead of letting The Market(A trademark of the ultimate evil, ARR) figure it out. But in every society known to man reward hasn’t been tied so much to effort as to the worth of the work being done. A hunter of of consummate skill and prowess is rewarded by his society by getting the hot babes and his share of fresh liver, while someone of my own meager skills either breeds with the cross eyed wench with the gimpy leg or gets eaten by the bear as reward from an indifferent society.
It’s not how hard one works that the worth of one’s work to society that brings reward…or not. Myself, I am lazy and work only as much as necessary to get by…however, I have the genes of those cross eyed and low prowess hunters in my veins that means I’m really good with networks and computers, a skill that while it was under appreciated by our ancestors has some modest success in today’s society. I work smarter, not harder, and am rewarded not for the effort I put in, but for the results I produce. Which is lucky for me, all things considered.
-XT
It looks like every single person is a slave in this world, so no it isn’t just.
Say you iron out that wrinkle. Then it is indeterminate. You don’t mention anything about evil, or make any predictions how this world changes things. Maybe evil people are also lazy in our world, but in Maximum Effort World the evil people (or those interested in a ‘criminal career’ if you prefer) simply fuck up everything so badly that it is entirely unjust. Hard to predict.
No, that society is not just or moral, because it forces all people to perform to the maximum of their efforts.
Interestingly, this is part of the Mormon theology in that in the preexistence there was a great council and Satan proposed saving everyone by forcing people to all do good, which would have robbed everyone of their free choice.
While I’m not Mormon (and don’t agree with them on most issues), this is an interesting question, because your proposed society would require the elimination of personal freedom, which would cause the greater harm than the question of unequal pay for equal efforts. I’ve got a brother who is homeless by choice, because he doesn’t want to deal with his mental illness. How would you handle someone like that?
Another fundamental flaw is the incompatibility with equal pay for equal efforts and capitalism. Say that there are two independent producers of a service, Joe the Plumber and Jill the Plumber both of whom do put in equal efforts, but Jill is twice as fast. The only way to reward them equally would be to forcefully charge Joe’s consumers more. There is no way of doing this within the framework of a capitalistic system.
Third, this system would remove incentives for innovation. If I were to know that I could receive the same amount of pay simply by putting in the same amount of effort, there wouldn’t be a need for innovation or change. Joe the Plumber would continue to toil away instead of getting a job which suits him better, such as being a circus clown.
There are cases where that has been shown to be discrimination for unequal rewards for similar work, such as jobs which are traditionally filled by women being paid less than jobs which are traditionally filled by men. I think that this should be corrected.
Your assumptions are impossible, thus it is hard to find value in any moral reasoning based on them.
That said, as a practical matter life isn’t and can’t be completely fair and just. If we tried to make everything as economically fair as possible it would hurt productivity by a lot and make most people less well off. If everything about life was fair, we’d all be born exactly the same and live the exactly the same life, making everything meaningless.
To the OP: Work smarter, not harder. 
So just because they have more inborn ability, they get rewarded more? They probably also get their pick of the most attractive and healthy mates, too, and an increased ability to nurture their offspring, who themselves will be likely be more talented then their peers and hence rewarded. On and on, generation to generation, the more talented and fit will prosper at the expense of the weak and unskilled.
This an awful, unjust system. We must put our best minds at work overturning it, for the betterment of the human race.
This is not as simple as it seems. Many “pink collar” jobs pay less not due to simple sexism or bias against women, but rather because women are more likely to choose jobs whose rewards are not just monetary. I personally believe this has more to due with culture norms than biology, but the fact is that the salary for any job only needs be high enough to attract enough qualified applicants. If there are more than enough people willing to work cheap at a job, it does not need a high salary.
On a side note, I once heard it argued that it would be detrimental to raise salaries for teachers too high. A low livable salary insures that you get people who care about teaching. If teachers were paid like investment bankers, then you would attract the same type of people to the job.
Jonathan
It’s immoral to demand one person work harder than another for equal compensation. This is equivalent to making the person who works harder exert the extra effort unpaid.
It’s also immoral to demand that one person produce more for equal compensation. This is equivalent to forcing one person to pay more for than another for the same product.
If you have one person who can produce more than another with the same amount of effort, then at least one of the above immoral circumstances must occur. It is literally unavoidable.
So instead we throw both out, and just let people negotiate wages amongst themselves. It’s terribly unfair and immoral, but at least it doesn’t cause the better workers to get disgruntled about being paid as little as the losers and adjust their work quality downward accordingly.
How can you even measure how hard someone is working? How do you know if someone is “working as hard as they can”? In many jobs you can’t tell just by watching.
I’ll assume this is sarcasm, in which case :). If not, and you’re really opposed to evolution itself, :rolleyes: .
**Rumor_Watkins ** - Your “give everyone an A+ for effort” society is immoral because it rewards incompetence. Ultimately the purpose of all work is to produce something of value to society. It can be direct work like a doctor treating patients or a builder building houses or it can be indirect like the accountants, computer programmers and other people who maintain the information and decision making networks. We don’t reward on effort because no one cares how much effort you put into something if it isn’t translating into results. And how do you measure “effort” anyway? You can’t.
If a person is talented such that they can produce the same amount of results with less effort, it allows them to put that effort into something else and take on additional tasks and responsibilities. They get paid more because they can do things that other less skilled people can’t.
Should we live in the world of Harrison Bergeron?
Can we just put our average minds on it and reward them for trying?
Whoosed.
Thank goodness. Spelling aside, well done.
I thought so, but you never know with the some of the clowns on this board.
From before there was much mobility, there was a noticeable bias in the pay scales in jobs traditionally held by the different genders. This includes not only nursing and teaching, which could arguable fall in your definition, but also in professions such as secretarial which would not.
You simply can’t afford to pay teachers like you can investment bankers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the argument was simply made to justify the status quo.
You are correct, historically. When women were socially limited in the jobs they could take, those jobs tended to pay significantly less. So why do women still choose these fields now that the social pressure limiting them is reduced? Anecdotes are not data, but my wife got her masters degree in clinical social work for two main reasons: 1) she valued helping people over earning a higher paycheck, and 2) one of her unstated assumptions was that when she got married, her lifestyle would be set by her husbands salary, not hers. From talking to other women of our generation (born in the late sixties to early seventies) this is fairly common. Women have a socialized expectation that their income is secondary and that allows them to choose a career based on things other than money.
I realize that you can’t pay teachers like you do investment bankers. I think the point is that everyone takes a job based on balancing rewards vs. cost. I would not clean septic tanks for 100k per year, but I would taste test ice cream for minimum wage. The person I was talking to was trying to say that he wanted teachers how had more than a money motive to teach. Personally I think we need to provide at least a high enough salary for the teachers to live in the area the are serving (not including schools in places like Woodside, CA where “starter homes” are $5 million mini mansions)
Jonathan
Let me take a stab and answer the OP as he has stated:
No…I do not think it would be a fair society. I, for one, would be extremely pissed off at the unfairness…much more so than in our current society. There are just too many things left out for it to be fair/just
To be blunt…
I am not the best looking guy in the world. I’m not horribly ugly…but I am not a hunk. I am alos on the short side (5’8"). Because of this, hot chicks throughout my single life did not see me.
Now, I am, IMHO, a superproducer. I output (and am not exaggerating) probably about 10 times what equivalent people have done around me. Because of this, I have been promoted and compensated nicely.
Now…I am married. My wife, though not extremely hot chick material is attractive…damned attractive to me. I do believe she loves me and has stuck by me for awhile now.
Do you honestly think she would have chosen me if I was compensated roughly the same as every other schmoe? Maybe…but probably not. Part of the reason I was attractive to her was because I brought in the bacon.
Now, is that fair to take that away from me? If you do so…then you had damn well hand out hot chicks in the same way…so that guys don’t get them because they are tall and good looking.
Ok, I am going over the top deliberately…but the point stands. If you take something away from me then you had better give me something back. If you take awy what I am good at then you had better give back to me in what I am bad at.