This is a pretty good point, I think. France lost almost an entire generation of young men in WWI, and they survived. The plague killed a third of Europe, and it survived. Losing 2% of the population, even if they are disproportionately talented, will be a shock but not even close to insurmountable.
Losing their money, as pointed out, will shock the financial system, but not much else.
If they manage to somehow take all of some natural resource with them, then shame on us for letting them do it. Hell, shame on us for letting them have 40% of the wealth in the first place, but that’s a whole other debate.
I don’t have time to calculate what the tax impact of spreading the money more widely would be. Certainly more people would pay taxes, making conservatives little hearts go pitty-pat. And a small tax increase wouldn’t hurt. As mentioned, very few productive assets would be gone.
Not only did Europe survive, but it forced modernization. With fewer people, the value of the labor of each peasant became greater, and they no longer could be held to the land as near slaves.
I just had the thought that the reaction of the rest of the country would be a certain degree of hatred for the rich, which might mean that those moving to fill their economic niche might be a bit more humble, and less willing to screw everyone else for that extra million or so. But maybe I’m being optimistic.
Only completely true in classical economics fantasy land. Plenty of CEOs get paid based on political factors and in no way based on productivity as measured by shareholder value. Since the rich tend to be older than average, most companies have succession planning which would go into effect. The biggest ones might lose a couple layers of management, but lots would lose only 1. Most of the younger, poorer people are closer to the business, and who would probably be more productive.
Even for Hollywood there are plenty of high paid stars who can’t open movies any more. Getting rid of them might reduce budgets and ticket prices.
Excellent point. The only additional thought I had had was on the specific point of the speed of bricklayers. Aren’t the older bricklayers going to be making more than the younger? Now, some element of speed of bricklaying is in the techniques, to be sure, so the older and higher salaried guy has the advantage there (presumably), but a good bit of it is also physical strength and stamina.
I suppose a larger point is that we probably have very, very few bricklayers making 250K. Although I’m starting to get the impression that conservatives would anticipate a good number of them. All the top scientists making 250K? Not by a long shot.
I realize that this question highlights a fundamental difference between left and right - the left generally believes that the rich are undeserving of what they have, that they got where they are because they are the lucky ones who floated to the top of the system, that people are all the same, that rich people have no special abilities that justify them earning much more than others, etc.
I don’t happen to believe that. I believe that what happens throughout a free economy is a process of filtering - the best bubble up to the top as they prove themselves better than their peers at many steps in their career, and that in general the people at the top of industry, sports, entertainment, and other fields of human endeavour are where they are because they have demonstrated superior ability in their field.
Ask yourself this: Let’s say there was a world hockey league, and the current NHL played in it. Now let’s assume that every single member of the NHL - all the players AND all the coaches - vanished tomorrow, and you moved up all the farm teams to take their place. What do you think would happen to the standings of the U.S. teams in the world league? How long do you think it would take them to rise back to the level they were at before? Bear in mind that all the coaches are gone, so there’s no one to impart that level of wisdom on the next players.
You apparently think that such a league would suddenly rise to the same level of performance as the previous NHL players - that the farm players are just as good, but are kept down on the farm by the NHL players hogging the big salary. But what I think is that the farm league exists as a filter to find the truly exceptional players capable of winning at the top level, and the large majority of farm players will never play at a top pro level with the best in the world.
The same goes for entertainment. When I said that the people you see on TV and in the movies today would be gone, I obviously wasn’t talking about the extras and the gaffers. I’m talking about the on-air talent on network TV, the big producers, the top cameramen, the best writers, etc. The people who win Emmys and Oscars for outstanding acting, directing, writing, cinematography, etc. All gone. These people didn’t get where they are and command the kinds of salaries they do because they are interchangeable with people who make less. They are where they are because they’ve proven themselves to be better at their jobs to the extent that they can command huge salaries.
if you think that a new Spielberg or a new Coppola will just rise up out of the crowd and fill the gap of excellence, ask yourself this: How come there aren’t more of them NOW? Why are their so many bad directors making a living in Hollywood if there are Spielbergs in the wings waiting their shot? Why isn’t every movie as exciting as Indiana Jones or as technically brilliant as a Kubrick film? It’s because there is a shortage of talent. Not everyone can do this stuff.
The same is true in business. Steve Jobs is the most obvious example - when he left Apple, to be replaced by a CEO from Pepsi (under the theory that a CEO is a CEO), Apple tanked. A lot of analysts thought it was actually going to die. Then Jobs came back, and turned the company around. It’s now the most profitable company in the world, and Jobs’ fingerprints are all over every success they’ve had.
The opposite example is Microsoft. Since Gates stepped down, Microsoft has floundered. It’s now run by a guy who has no particular vision, and the company is fractured by many middle managers and division heads without a singular driving leader at the top. And it shows. Their product line meanders all over the place, they build workmanlike software that doesn’t inspire anyone, and they’re basically in a holding pattern trading on the market share they have as their main value.
Now look at Google. Google’s hiring strategy is to wait for other companies to sift through engineers, then pick off the ones at the top by offering them big salaries - often over our $250,000 threshold. All those people would be gone. But the point is that Google certainly seems to think that the best people are worth paying that much money, which implies that there is a real shortage of people who can operate at that level. If engineers were interchangeable, none of them would be making more than maybe $70,000-$100,000.
And it’s not that these people are simply filling all the positions and keeping others down, and if they all left you’d get others simply taking their place and operating at the same level. The fact that these people make what they do is the best sign that there is a real shortage of human capital when you’re talking about those kinds of performance levels.
Take programming, the field I know most about. Do you think programmers are interchangeable? If so, you might like to read this. There have been numerous studies over the years measuring the quality and quantity of output of programmers, and they always find huge differences between the best and worst. The best programmers are generally 10X better than the worst. And I guarantee you that the subset of programmers making over $250,000 aren’t making those salaries out of luck - they’re making them because they’re the guys who are 10X more productive. You lose them all.
Also from the cite:
That number is even a little low compared to other studies. The Pareto Effect says that in a large complex system, 80% of the effects will come from 20% of the causes. Applied to the working class, 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of the workers. 80% of your management problems also come from 20% of the workers - the bottom 20%.
The other thing you lose is the knowledge locked up in their heads. German rocket scientists weren’t smarter than American or Russian rocket scientists. But what they had was experience. They had actually been building and flying rockets for a long time, and had worked thought the millions of little issues that other teams would yet have to discover. This knowledge is locked up in the heads of the best people in a way that can’t just be put down in a blueprint or a technical manual, and the U.S. and the Soviets went to great lengths to get these people, and both countries formed the core of their space programs around them. How much value do you think was represented by that small group of scientists and engineers?
Now imagine that a magic wand comes along, and cleans out the top 1% - the best of the best. The people who have proven to have very unique and valuable insights, skills, organization ability, artistic talent, etc. The effect of this loss would be profound and long-lasting.
You mean leave America like Swiss Bank Accounts, Cayman Island and Bahamian banks for tax evasion? You mean like corporations who do the same?
In many ways they have left and taken jobs with them.
Why can’t it be both? Of the set of people who CAN reach the top, a certain percentage do, and a certain percentage are held back by bad luck, and a certain percentage are sitting in the nearly-top slots waiting for a shot.
I mean, AAA ball and vice-presidents and department directors exist. Those guys are not so much worse than the starting lineup that it’d be catastrophic if the starters disappeared.
One would hope. If 1% of the citizenry holds so much wealth that their disappearance can shake us that badly, then it would make sense to realize that it’s probably wiser to decentralize wealth even more than it is now.
Really? So if you vanished all the pro baseball players and coaches in the U.S. tomorrow and replaced them with AAA players, how do you think that new league’s standings in our hypothetical world baseball league would fare? Do you think they’d win about as much? Or would they fall? Would they fall a little, or a lot?
Let’s say you gutted the U.S. Olympic system of all its star athletes and top coaches. What do you think would happen to the U.S.'s medal count in the next Olympics? How many Olympics do you think it would take before the U.S. was at the same level as it was before? Remember, we not only took away the athletes, but all the people who have proven to be the best at training those athletes.
Why do you think smaller countries generally have weaker Olympic teams? Some of these countries spend far more per Athlete than does the U.S., but can never hope to win as many medals. How come? In my opinion, the answer is in sheer numbers. Mark Spitzes and Bruce Jenners are literally one-in-a-million people. If you have a nation of 300 million to draw from, you can find enough of those kinds of people to field a kick-ass Olympic team. If you’ve only got 2 million to draw from, it’s going to be that much harder to find enough people who can compete successfully at a world level.
The point being that extremely high levels of talent are very valuable, and very rare. They’re also the people making over $250,000. It will be very costly to a country to lose them.
Now, are there lemons in that bunch who got there through inheritance, connections, and luck? Of course. Someone has to win the lottery. But as a group, the top 1% of Americans are responsible for a hell of a lot more than 1% of the nation’s productivity.
On the other hand, if you lose the top 1% and suddenly find that the mail isn’t being delivered on time, that quality is falling and prices are going up, that TV and movies suck really badly, and that your country is now being out-competed heavily by everyone else, maybe you’ll realize that there might be a reason why the top 1% have what they do, and learn to moderate your class warfare tendencies a bit.
I’ll certainly agree that many people at the top are there because they earned their way there. But that isn’t true of all of them, and it’s far from the whole story even when it is true.
And yes, with a fair few exceptions I’m actually quite certain that there are people being shafted within each company that would lose its top earners who could immediately step up and, if not take the company to new heights, at least maintain it and keep it from imploding.
There’s only so much space at the top. Once that space is filled, hard work and intelligence alone aren’t going to get you into it.
And by the way, I’m not advocating changing wealth redistribution such that income is a completely flat line. I do think a flatter curve than what we have now (as in, something less asymptotic and perhaps a little more linear) would be healthier for the country without breaking anyone’s back. I fail to see how that isn’t moderate. That is, unless you’re of the opinion that “moderate” means “my way.”
Funny how it’s only called class warfare when the people without money do it. When the people WITH money decide they don’t have enough and set things up to funnel all the rest of the money their inefficient government-regulated market allowed the peasantry to retain, it’s just smart business.
And when those dire Randian-esque consequences didn’t happen, you’d re-evaluate your model for making economic predictions right? I mean, you do look at the outcomes in reality for the economic models you strongly advocate for here, right?
If, for instance, your model were to lead to a decade of failure, you’d re-evaluate, right?
That’s middle class thinking. The middle classes believe the way to “get to the top” is through education and hard work. Don’t get me wrong. That can get you far. But for the most part, it only gets you to the middle because it places you in a position where success is based on the constant approval of the institutions you aspire to belong to - schools, large corporations, so on and so forth. That path to the top fills up long before most people can maximize their hard work and intelligence.
Other people get to the top through their own creativity and entrepreneurship. These are people who start companies and basically create a place at the top for themselves. But this way is also difficult and riskier because it totally depends on you.
Basically, yes, we can do without millions of corporate mid-level executives, overpaid investment bankers, lawyers and consultants thinking of big ideas to put into Powerpoint decks to make themselves seem more valuable. But it would be a lot harder to do without millions of inventors and entrepreneurs and people who actually build something out of nothing.
As I said, ten years. If that. That’s all it would take.
If the minor leagues are so shitty, then why do AAA ballplayers get moved up all the time?
If the seconds-in-command and VPs of industry are so shitty, what the hell succession plan does ANY company have in the event their CEO quits or retires?
To use a fantasy sports analogy, I think the depth chart the country collectively is using is far, far deeper than you give it credit for.
Granted. But here’s the thing, and I’m straying into anecdotal personal territory here:
I am not a creative. I’m not an entrepreneur. I work best within existing structures and refining them and making them better. I’m an editor, not an author, in other words.
So no, I certainly couldn’t jump to the top of the heap like Gates or Jobs or any other brilliant risk-takers. I won’t disagree that’s middle-class thinking.
But that 1% at the top? They’ve already had their ideas. They’ve already created their companies. The frameworks exist now. I may not be able to grow a company year over year, but I’m actually fairly confident I can steward an existing company that finds itself CEO-less until we can find someone who is clever enough to grow the business. The exception is for companies whose success is based on the personality of a single person; I think Apple will die when Jobs does, for instance.
In the meantime, there are still millions of entrepreneurs out there who haven’t had their big break yet and so didn’t take their ball and go home. And now that the current big-time entrepreneurs have gone, there’s space for them to either make themselves known and be hired into existing corporate structures guys like me are maintaining or else start their own business and take market share when they couldn’t before.
I think if any industries would be hit hardest, it would be the entertainment industries. You can’t replace actors and athletes nearly as easily as you can replace CEOs and CFOs.
I was with you until you brought up the ‘decade of failure’, which I assume is your way of bringing this back around to Bush and his policies. At that point, you lost me because it has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about.
Another non-sequitur. The minute the people at the top start advocating for the extermination of heavy taxation of people who don’t make as much because they don’t ‘deserve’ it, I’ll agree that there’s class warfare at the top as well.
You don’t think “welfare queens” was class warfare? What about “50% of people don’t pay any taxes at all!!!”? Both of these are class warfare waged from the top, IMO.