I closed out a recent post with the following observation from David Schmidtz:
Here, Schmidtz puts his finger on something about the social justice movement that’s always bugged me. So many driving ideas behind what is labeled as “social justice” these days seem to have little to do with justice, and far more to do with spite or pettiness.
One reason we’re often told we should be worried about income inequality in wealthy nations, where even the (relatively) poor are by world and historical standards fantastically well-off, is because people are more concerned about their relative well-being than their absolute well-being. Michael Shermer once described a particularly dramatic illustration of this:
Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.
Surprisingly — stunningly, in fact — research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?
Shermer goes on to describe how this is one of many cases where our baser instincts drive us to make others and ourselves worse off in the name of vague notions of fairness – similar behavior can be observed in other primates. But the simple fact that a particular instinct is evolved does not give us a reason to rate it as good, let alone build social conventions or political institutions to reinforce it. After all, there are all kinds of other similarly evolved primate behaviors that are widely recognized as bad and are subject to social sanction for that reason, however “natural” they may be.
This particular knee-jerk reaction is a very destructive one. To say “I would prefer to live in a world where I have half as much as I otherwise could, as long as I can make sure everyone else gets even less” is pettiness to an extreme degree. A world where real per capita income is $250k is very different from a world where real per capita income is $25k. To be willing to reduce everyone else’s income to one-tenth of what it otherwise would be and to cut your own income in half in the process in the name of relative well-being comes close to preferring that millions of your fellow humans die in an earthquake in order to save your own little finger.
Certain key concepts from John Rawls strike me as equally petty. Rawls’ original position stipulates that if we didn’t know what position we’d be born into in a given society, we’d prefer a world that maximizes the well-being of the least well-off person in that society. This means that if given a choice between two worlds, one where everyone lives in Star Trek level abundance, free from scarcity, aside from one unfortunate person who lives in terrible poverty, and another world where everyone equally lives at a just-slightly-above-terrible level of poverty, everyone in the original position would prefer the second world. Think about that for a moment.
Imagine God makes a rare public appearance and says to you: “Hey, I’ve decided to reboot the world. I’m going to let you choose which new world I create. In the first, you’ll be terribly poor, but everyone else in the world can enjoy incredible prosperity. In the second, you’ll be slightly less poor but still very, very poor, and instead of being prosperous and wealthy, everyone else in the world will be just as poor as you.” I’m rarely accused of being excessively altruistic, but I’d feel like an absolute monster if I chose to create that second world and condemned billions of other people to lives of poverty just to make myself slightly better off. That’s not justice. That’s pettiness.
As a final example, Rawls’ notion of the natural lottery has always struck me as petty, too. In Rawls’ view, nobody deserves to benefit from their natural endowments. He doesn’t simply mean the more milquetoast claim that someone born to wealthy parents who pour massive resources into giving them every possible benefit has gained some kind of unfair advantage as a result. Even if someone was born poor to uneducated parents but, through intelligence, hard work, and sheer dedication manages to become very wealthy, that too is unjust. After all, that person doesn’t deserve to be a smart, dedicated, hardworking person, so the benefits they gain from these having attributes is fundamentally unjust.
More than anything, this kind of attitude reminds me of what Boromir says to Frodo when attempting to take the Ring of Power for himself:
To Tolkien, these are the words of someone whose mind has been corrupted under the influence of a demonic evil. But to Rawls, this is merely what justice requires due to the unfairness of benefitting from your own attributes. As far as I’m concerned, Tolkien has more genuine wisdom to share with the world than Rawls.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Aug 6 2023 at 5:04pm
False choices. Huge majority arent complaining about the inequality but how it was achieved, so let’s rephrase the question. Would you rather make $50,000 rather than $100,000 in a world where the people making $100,000 are given an unfair advantage or live in a world where you make $50,000 and other people make $100,000 where you all have an equal opportunity to make the $100k. Social justice would aim to create the second world where you might not end up winning but you would have an equal chance. Note that there are few complaints about Mahomes making so much money or Buffett, Gates and even Elon for the money he has made in Tesla and SpaceX.
Steve
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 6 2023 at 7:51pm
Hey Steve –
It’s not at all clear to me what you think you’ve demonstrated by speculating about the answers you think people might give if they were asked some other, hypothetical question, but nonetheless, that is not the question people were in fact asked. People were simply asked if they would prefer to be well off with everyone else being very well off, or if they would prefer to be worse off with everyone else being even worse off, and the majority of people preferred to be worse off than they otherwise could be, as long as everyone else was even worse off than that. All the other stuff you brought up is just a series of red herrings, as far as I can tell.
Social justice as defined by whom? That’s certainly not what social justice means in the Rawlsian tradition. It definitely doesn’t accord with social justice by the egalitarian standard of G. A. Cohen in his book Rescuing Justice and Equality. Nor does it reflect the dominant thread of the modern social justice movement that is heavily focused on equity over equality. Indeed, they explicitly reject your idea that the ideal is where everyone has an equal chance but some people end up winning and losing. Equity, we are told, is setting things up so every receives exactly equal results – not equal chances at getting a good result, but the actual same result for everyone. Unequal results, no matter how they came about, are by definition inequitable and therefore by definition unjust.
Perhaps not in your sphere, but I hear such complaints all the time. Well, about Buffet, Gates, and Musk at least. (I admit I hadn’t heard of Mahomes at all before just now – I had to turn to Google to figure out who that was.) But it’s not exactly a secret that people like AOC and Bernie Sanders have millions of people who agree with them and cheer along when they say “billionaires should not exist.” Not that it’s wrong to become a billionaire through unfair means – they literally, explicitly say billionaires should not even exist. The reason they have achieved such star power in the Democratic Party lately is because this is a very popular view, that lots of people have been openly and explicitly saying, loudly, for a long time. (Bernie used to similarly rail against the existence of millionaires as well, but millionaires suddenly disappeared from his rhetoric shortly after he himself became a millionaire.)
steve
Aug 9 2023 at 10:54am
You are choosing the worst arguments from the weakest people to make your case. It’s good for winning arguments. There has been more emphasis on equity recently because of the assumption that equality has been achieved. If you are willing to work back from equity then you are able to find areas of inequality.
“All the other stuff you brought up is just a series of red herrings, as far as I can tell.”
Fasle choices is a well known fallacy. The question is valid but if you want to apply the findings to social justice then they are false choices. You need to ask questions that would relevant to the issue.
Steve
rick shapiro
Aug 10 2023 at 9:24am
Think about what it takes to become a billionaire. Not just willingness to work as hard as the millions of people who work two full-time jobs in order to make ends meet. It requires opportunity to exploit enormous network effects or mass markets that exist only because masses of people agree to govern themselves with Leviathan in order to have a society that protects themselves, as well as the billionaire, from violent anarchy. Not to mention the luck or adventitious opportunity to be the one clever person (out of similar millions) who successfully navigates the path to billions. Don’t you think that society that creates the Leviathan and the mass market deserves a large piece of that action?
Dylan
Aug 6 2023 at 6:30pm
A few things jump to mind with this post, and the first is I think it really helps clarify where I differ from you and perhaps libertarians more broadly. I 100% agree with Rawls that no one deserves to benefit from their natural endowments, those come from luck just as much as anything else we have. However, I do think that believing that we deserve to benefit from certain natural endowments is kind of necessary from a motivating factor. One of those examples of things that are useful despite them not being true.
As for Rawls, it has been a long time since I read him, but I thought one of the beautiful parts about the Veil of Ignorance was that it focused at least somewhat on absolute well-being instead of relative well-being? Like, we want to have a world that is the best for the worst off on an absolute basis, which allows for a level of inequality if that is what is necessary to make the worst off better than they would be in another kind of world?
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 6 2023 at 8:16pm
Hey Dylan –
Good comment – and clarifying points of disagreement is always a good thing, because that definitely helps move conversations forward! That said, I just want to drop a quick aside on something else that I think needs clarifying. You said:
Here, I think you’re misunderstanding the libertarian position – or, at least my particular flavor of the libertarian position. (Obviously I speak only for myself, I wouldn’t be much of a libertarian if I claimed otherwise!) But at least for me, the concept of whether or not one deserves to benefit from those attributes is besides the point, because it’s not a question about desert at all. I can only unpack this briefly, because, you know, blog comments are a limited forum, but a much fuller and better explanation can be found in Dan Moller’s excellent book Governing Least: A New England Libertarianism. (Give the book a read – Moller’s prose is much better than my summary of it.) But the very short version is – it’s not a question of desert (whether or not one deserves something) but it’s actually down to the weaker concept of entitlement (whether one can justly claim to be entitled to something). For example, you and I both go to Vegas and go to the roulette wheel. I bet some money on black, you bet some money on red, and it comes up on black. As a result, I win some money and you lose some money. In this case, I think it’s reasonable to say that I don’t “deserve” my winnings in some grand philosophical sense – but nonetheless, I am still entitled to them, even though I gained them through pure luck. Moller points out that “desert [is] vulnerable to luck” and “luck destroys the claim to have gotten something in virtue of your own actions and choices. This is why we laugh at the trust-fund heir who claims to deserve what he has.” But even if the trust fund heir doesn’t “deserve” his inheritance in some cosmic sense, nonetheless, he is entitled to it. If a friend of mine suddenly won the Powerball and decided to gift me a million dollars as repayment for my excellent supply of puns over the years, I would not “deserve” the money, but I would still be entitled to it.
Regarding Rawls, you ask if
I say no, because as I point out in my post, that leads to what seems like plainly absurd conclusions. Again, if “we” were given a choice between a Star Trek abundant world where ten billion people live at utility level 1000 except for one person who lives at utility level 1, or a second world where all ten billion people live at utility level 1.0001, the Rawlsian position says “we” would think the second world is a better world and want to live in it. I take that to be a reductio ad absurdum of the Rawlsian position – and if I was given a choice between which world to create, knowing I personally would be the least-well-off person in either world, I’d still pick the first world in an instant. I’m not okay with the idea of making other people massively worse off to make myself a tiny bit better off, and if that’s what Rawlsian justice demands, then so much the worse for Rawlsianism.
Dylan
Aug 7 2023 at 7:55am
Thanks for the reply, Kevin. I really like the idea of distinguishing between entitlement and deserving. I think that opens the door to ideas of taxes for redistribution on moral grounds. Like, I think you’re entitled to what you get from your hard work, but not necessarily 100% of it. Where the right balance is, I think, partially a morals question and partially pragmatic, which leads into Rawls.
My recollection of Rawls, or at least how I understood the theory when I was first exposed to it, was that it was largely interested in semi-realistic states of the world where balancing out perhaps competing moral claims of absolute utility maximization and absolute egalitarianism into some kind of happy medium. And then worked backwards to see what such a world would look like. So, I find reductio ad absurdum less compelling here than I do in some other cases.
That being said, I’m not sure I agree with your take. Let’s reframe your hypothetical without resorting to cold, impersonal utils. Let’s imagine a world where the gods will shower the world in abundance, but in exchange we must first torture and then murder 10 children a year. If we don’t, the gods will get very angry and destroy the world and everyone on it. To me, it seems clear that we must make the 2nd choice. And, contra to the veil of ignorance, I’d make that call even (especially!) knowing I was one that would live in the world of abundance.
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 7 2023 at 9:39am
Hello again Dylan –
I agree that entitlement is a stronger concept than desert. You may not be “deserving” of the attributes you have and thus what you gain from those attributes, but it seems clear to me that you are nonetheless entitled to it. As for me, I have a hard time making sense of the idea that for at least some portion of what results from your attributes, I can become more entitled to it than you are.
Of Rawls, you say:
I think you’ve got the wrong reading of Rawls. Regarding how realistic states of the world should be – here, Rawls was incredibly inconsistent. When evaluating the social institutions he preferred (property-owning democracy) he explicitly argued against using realistic assumptions and that it should be evaluated using “ideal theory.” But when arguing that alternate institutions (like free market capitalism) would fail to achieve justice as he defined it, he evaluated those institutions not according to unrealistic but ideal assumptions and instead by realistic and non-ideal assumptions. So he equivocated on that point a lot. He acknowledged that in the real world, property-owning democracy would have issues of rent seeking and corruption and all the rest, but that was irrelevant to the argument because he’s doing ideal theory. Then in the next breath, he’d say that free market capitalism wouldn’t be just, because in the real world it suffers from corruption and rent seeking and all the rest.
Regarding the “happy medium” between utility maximization and absolute egalitarianism, Rawls rejects this in his work pretty forcefully. Indeed, in the preface he even explains on of his goals is to present an alternative to utilitarianism and to force out any room for utilitarian considerations. He also says within the first couple pages that “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.” It’s hard to get much less accommodating of utilitarianism than that.
Dylan
Aug 7 2023 at 12:59pm
Thanks again for taking the time to write a comprehensive reply, Kevin. I knew that it was unwise to base my description of Rawls primarily on some 25 year old philosophy classes. Appreciate you setting me straight on that. By way of mild defense though, I’d say that my conception is at least non inconsistent with the Veil of Ignorance considered in standalone form. My take, if you were designing a world from scratch, knowing what we know about humans, you want to take some consideration of both equality and utilitarian ends. Of course, I’m likely just rationalizing based on my priors.
nobody.really
Aug 7 2023 at 12:48pm
“It is often contended that the belief that a person is solely responsible for his own fate is held only by the successful. This in itself is not so unacceptable as its underlying suggestion, which is that people hold this belief because they have been successful. I, for one, am inclined to think that the connection is the other way round and that people often are successful because they hold this belief. Though a man’s conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill, and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most beneficial effects on his energy and circumspection. And if the smug price of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become.”
Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, at 82-83 (1978) (emphasis added).
I largely share this view. John Locke’s social contract theory starts from a premise that people own whatever they happen to possess and then enter into a hypothetical social contract negotiated from their relative bargaining positions. Locke desired a social contract to protect him from the tyranny of a king–but did not seem to desire a contract to protect him from a slave-owner, abusive spouse, debilitating disease, natural disaster, ignorance, poverty, etc. Arguably Locke developed his philosophy with a myopic focus on the things that threatened HIM based on his standing in society, and turned a blind eye to the threats faced by those who did not share his standing.
Rawls said, in effect, if we’re going to describe justice based on a hypothetical contract, let’s start with a contract negotiated from BEFORE anyone possessed anything–including personal attributes–so everyone starts from an equal bargaining position. We might expect that kind of negotiation to produce policies designed to shield the individual against a wider variety of threats.
If we understand justice from this basis, then the failure to shield/compensate people for the vagaries of chance reflects not merely a regrettable but understandable expression of self-interest by the powerful. Rather, it represents the breach of a contract. And, as a libertarian might acknowledge, if you breach a contract with someone, that person is entitled to compensation. Ergo redistribution.
That said, various people–including Kevin Corcoran–argue that Rawls’s maximin (minimax?) theory for fashioning a remedy goes too far. I share that perspective–though I haven’t found a better formula for articulating the damages for breach.
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Woody Allen
In this matter, I do not share Dylan’s perspective. For example, I would not be surprised to learn that climate change resulted in 10+ children suffering and dying each year (say, in floods, mudslides, famines and the resulting efforts to flee them, etc.), that people COULD do more to mitigate climate change, and that the costs of many of those mitigation efforts exceed their benefits (as measured by, say, the numbers of kids suffering and dying each year).
In Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From the Omelas,” a utopian society exists only because of the perpetual sacrifice of an innocent child. Everyone in that society is aware of this fact; no one can claim ignorance. And, motivated by this realization, some choose to simply walk away. Their departure does nothing to alleviate the child’s suffering, but at least they can tell themselves that they are not benefiting from the child’s suffering.
I don’t walk away. I live with knowledge of the brokenness of the world, and strive to make it better, but I don’t harbor any illusion that I will ever succeed completely.
In The Screwtape Letters, Letter XV (1941), C.S. Lewis wrestles with reconciling deontology and utilitarianism, and ultimately praises the “man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him.” If that makes a person complacent and complicit–well, I’ve been called worse.
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 7 2023 at 1:11pm
Hey nobody.really –
Just a quick observation or two (maybe more later, maybe not, it’s a busy day), but you’ve got John Locke’s theory wrong. I can’t say whether or not Locke’s motives were in fact what you attribute to him, but it’s incorrect to say his theory starts “from a premise that people own whatever they happen to possess and then enter into a hypothetical social contract negotiated from their relative bargaining positions.” Locke does not describe a hypothetical social contract theory. Locke argued that there really once was an actual social contract that was explicitly made and agreed upon, as a real historical event. Furthermore, Locke argues that even we who were born later are bound by this contract, because when it was created all the citizens actually bequeathed all their property and possessions to the state, to be owned by the state in perpetuity, and therefore anyone who comes along later is, by virtue of using that property bound by the original contract. Suffice it to say, the ahistorical nature of the argument is just one reason why Lockean social contract theory is not generally taken seriously.
Of course there are other routes to social contract theory that could be made besides the Lockean one – like the hypothetical social contract theory you allude to. I think hypothetical social contract theory fails, but that’s an entirely different rabbit hole I lack time to descend at the moment.
nobody.really
Aug 7 2023 at 2:08pm
Ha–thanks for that explanation. I’ll have to look into that further someday. (Currently I’m engrossed in the EconTalk discussion of The Theory of Moral Sentiments!)
As ever, an edifying discussion.
David Seltzer
Aug 6 2023 at 6:51pm
Kevin: Your post brought to mind Pareto Efficiency. As I understand the concept, Pareto Efficiency implies resources are allocated in the most efficient manner, but does not imply equality or fairness. The individual is worse off when economic efficiency isn’t achieved, resulting in market failure. In which world do I choose to live? Rawls’ or Adam Smith’s? Unreservedly, Smith’s!
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 6 2023 at 8:25pm
Hey David –
Pareto distributions operate slightly differently than that. There are two concepts – Pareto efficiency, and Pareto optimality. A transaction is Pareto efficient when it can make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off. A state of affairs is Pareto optimal when there are no Pareto efficient transactions available. That is, there’s no way to make even one person better off that doesn’t at least make one person worse off.
But this is a pretty odd metric. After all, if I was Emperor of the World, owner of absolutely everything and everyone else was my slave, that would a Pareto optimal situation. After all, it would be impossible to make anyone else better off without making me worse off in the process! A world consisting entirely of Pareto efficient transactions would be world robbed of the creative destruction of the market process – and as a result, Pareto efficiency would create a much worse world for everyone in the long run.
And the short run too.
David Seltzer
Aug 7 2023 at 11:59am
Hey Kevin, Thanks for the comment. Another thought. Pareto Efficiency measures the efficiency of commodity allocation on the PPF. Any point within the PPF curve is inefficient because the total output of commodities is below the output capacity. Aren’t producers trying to allocate resources via technology with the result being creative destruction? In the applied world, the maker of buggy whips and blacksmiths were replaced by Henry Ford’s innovations. If you are the “Emperor of the World, owner of absolutely everything and everyone else was my slave, that would a Pareto optimal situation. After all, it would be impossible to make anyone else better off without making me worse off in the process!” That would depend on whether you are a philosopher king, a benevolent dictator, or Joseph Stalin. If you were Stalin it would be much better that the slaves were better off while you were worse off. Worse off for Stalin would him being sentenced to life in a Siberian gulag. The slaves would be better off because of no murderous Stalinist policies. Of course I could be wrong.
Joseph K
Aug 6 2023 at 8:59pm
I think it’s even worse than this because (this is something that Robin Hanson somewhere pointed out), there’s more than one reason why it might be bad to be poor: (1) low absolute wealth (that is, it’s worse to earn $25k than $30k, no matter what anyone else earns), (b) low relative wealth (it’s worse to earn $25k if everyone else earns $250k than to earn $25k if everyone earns $100k), or (c) low percentile rank (it’s worse to earn $25k and be in the 10th percentile than to earn $25k and be in the 25th percentile). I think all three matter, but I think it’s under appreciated how much (c) matters (and to be sure, income isn’t the only facet of status. I just use income for illustration). And this is important because there’s nothing that can be done about it at the societal level because it’s a zero-sum game (you can only raise a persons’s status by lowering someone else’s). In fact, social Justice seems mostly about raising up the status of some people by lowering that of others.
Dylan
Aug 7 2023 at 8:27am
I agree with you that this fact tends to be underappreciated. But I also think that mixing up status with income is part of what is going on with these survey results. Particularly in the U.S. we tend to think of them as synonymous, but they really aren’t. I wonder if you added in a bit more color to the survey, and said in the second case you’re a university professor making $100K and that the $250K people are electricians and plumbers if you’d get different results?
David Henderson
Aug 6 2023 at 9:14pm
Excellent post.
Monte
Aug 6 2023 at 10:46pm
These things and so much more. Broadly speaking, SJ is a movement whose endgame is the reconstitution of our republic into a classless society via Gramsci’s Three Moments of Hegemony. We lose sight of this when chivvied into discussions about income inequality, CRT and DEI, which are mere distractions from the grand scheme of the SJ movement (a.k.a. Cultural Marxism):
SJWs have successfully exploited the most controversial element of Rawl’s theory of social justice, the Difference Principle:
Ultimately, there is no choice but to eradicate inequality, no matter how it’s defined. And this, I believe, is Kevin’s main point.
Monte
Aug 6 2023 at 11:00pm
To clarify, there is no choice but to eradicate inequality, no matter how it’s defined, according to Cultural Marxists.
BC
Aug 7 2023 at 12:41am
I would doubt the cited “research”, especially if it is based on surveys. Suppose someone lives in a poor neighborhood earning $50k while the average income is $25k. He is offered job doubling his salary to $100k but requiring (allowing?) him to move to an affluent neighborhood with an average income of $250k. Many people in those situations would and do take the new job. Not only that, the fact that they will be surrounded by affluent neighbors earning more rather than poor neighbors earning less would often be viewed as a *benefit* rather than a drawback. And, often prices of goods and services would *not* remain the same. Rather, they would be higher in the affluent neighborhood, but that still wouldn’t deter the move unless the increased cost of living was so large as to almost completely negate the higher income.
Another example: immigrants that are high-status doctors and professionals in poor countries that migrate to the US to take jobs as Uber drivers. The (may) earn more in absolute terms but earn less than their new neighbors. Not only do many people take that deal, there is a long line of other people waiting to take that deal if only our immigration system would let them.
Actual behavior, as opposed to answers to hypothetical questions, seem to suggest that high-income peers and neighbors are viewed, if anything, as creating positive externalities rather than negative emotional/psychological externalities. Most people aren’t nearly as petty as some are motivated to show they are.
BC
Aug 7 2023 at 1:05am
Another example: suppose a talented and bright student has been offered full-ride, tuition-free admissions to two schools:
(A) an elite university with a student body even more talented than himself. Graduating from this university, he would expect to earn a salary of 100k but he would expect his more talented peers to do even better, earning an average of 250k. He would have a comfortable life but would not be the “star” at reunions.
(B) a community college where he would be among the most talented students. He would expect to earn 50k upon graduation while his peers would earn an average of only 25k. He could reasonably be expected to receive an Alumnus of the Year award in 10 years, or at least Honorable Mention.
If you think most students in this situation would and have chosen (B) over (A), then our problems of trying to make elite universities more inclusive and accessible to more people have just been solved.
Dylan
Aug 7 2023 at 8:22am
Oddly, I did choose option B over A, although I don’t think I really made an assessment of lifetime earnings potential, but did think that I’d do better in a school where I was smarter than average instead of way below the average. Counterfactuals are hard of course, but pretty sure I made the wrong choice.
robc
Aug 7 2023 at 12:10pm
While not exactly this situation, I made the opposite choice.
In fact, I chose to pay out-of-state tuition at a prestigious engineering school (I did have some scholarship money, but not that much) over taking free tuition at my local state school’s good engineering program and living at home.
If I had taken the more financial prudent option, I probably would have failed out.
I needed, 1 – the challenge, and b – getting away from home.
My college gpa was significantly higher than my HS gpa.
Dylan
Aug 7 2023 at 2:00pm
I know we only have a sample of two here, but my experience bears that out. My college GPA was significantly worse than my HS one, so much so that I almost flunked out (and did lose my academic scholarship).
In fact, there was a post recently here that had a graph with the relationship between test scores and college grades. One of the embarrassing situations from my sophomore year was being in an intro Psych class which showed this nice linear relationship for last years’ class of Freshmen, and my extreme outlier of test scores vs GPA being clearly visible on the chart (even from the back row of that giant seminar class.)
Todd Ramsey
Aug 7 2023 at 11:37am
Another example to support BC’s argument that observed behavior is a better indicator of belief than are surveys: unskilled laborers who migrate to the United States expect to earn more than in their home country, but do not expect to be at the top of the United States income distribution.
nobody.really
Aug 7 2023 at 1:56pm
Somewhat off-topic, but still related to measuring status relative to different peer groups in academia: What are the qualities of an engineering student?
You might imagine that one of the predictors of getting into a competitive program would be a high GPA/SAT score–and you would be right. But high relative to what? Not relative to the nation, but relative to your classmates. That is, many schools have an engineering program, and they tend to select the most qualified students among the student body and “weed out” the rest. So if you have a reasonably good GPA/SAT, you may well get into the engineering program at your local state school–but at Harvard, you won’t be able to compete and would instead become a communications major. In short, there’s a sorting process relative to your peers at the same school, not necessarily relative to the intellectual requirements of the program.
So what? Consider affirmative action, which tends to help some members of minority groups to enter into more competitive colleges than GPA/SAT scores might otherwise indicate. If a student goes to the more competitive school, the student may gain the prestige of being associated with that school–but will also be more likely to become a communications major. If the student instead attends a less competitive school, the student will forego the benefits of the prestige–but the student will be more likely to enter the engineering program.
In the long run, which is the better outcome?
Dylan
Aug 7 2023 at 8:19am
Good observations, and I think largely right. However, I’m not sure the neighborhood is the right comparison, especially in the modern world. I’m probably wealthier than the average in my neighborhood (I certainly was when I originally moved here, but the neighborhood has gotten a lot richer, so I’m probably closer to the median now while I started out in the 90th percentile). But, I don’t really compare myself to the people in the neighborhood, my point of comparison is someone like Elon Musk (on the bad side, I haven’t made billions and billions of dollars, on the positive side, half the internet doesn’t hate me). Communications technology keeps making the world a smaller place, and I can feel closer to people I’ve never met, than to my literal neighbors.
john hare
Aug 7 2023 at 4:02am
Somewhere in this discussion is that being around more successful people tends to make one more successful. I wouldn’t have dropped out of the 6th grade and worked ever since if I had been around people that respected education. I’ve done alright, but see roads not traveled that could have been better.
MarkW
Aug 7 2023 at 7:04am
Surprisingly — stunningly, in fact — research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?
To be charitable, I don’t think people are thinking of this question as being asked about which would be a better, more just world, but rather gauging which situation they think would make themselves happier. Which I think is the intent behind the question. And in some sense, it’s also an empirical question. Are people — right now — who make double the median income in lower income countries happier or less happy than those making half the median income in the wealthiest countries? I don’t actually know the answer.
And asking it in terms of sheer dollar amounts probably doesn’t get at the right issues. I think you’d need to explain what people couldn’t afford in the hypothetical $50K ‘rich person in a poor society’ situation vs ‘poor person in a rich world’. So, in the former situation you might say — you’re relatively rich but lack modern medical care (for your children!) or air conditioning or indoor plumbing or the internet, etc. I think then people would reflect more accurately about what they’d lose in the ‘poor world’ scenario and might choose more wisely.
Still, for better or worse (mostly worse) humans are intensely status-conscious creatures, so the survey answers aren’t crazy. But I agree that it’s something we collectively need to try to discourage rather than blithely accept as natural or even good (after all, all kinds of other nasty things come naturally too — tribal animosity and violence, superstition, conspiracy theories, sexism, racism, not to mention the seven deadly sins)
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 7 2023 at 9:48am
Hey MarkW –
Yes, I agree that the question about which income distribution you’d prefer is people saying what would make them happier, rather than more just. My point there was that people intensely concerned with social justice argue that we shouldn’t care how well off people are in absolute terms, but in relative terms, and that I think that is a petty concern. And I take that survey to be an example of it. So in one case, people are saying “Having half as much as I otherwise could have would make me happy as long as I can make sure everyone else gets even less.” In the Rawlsian social justice paradigm, by example, people would say “In the name of justice I prefer to make billions of other people massively worse off in order to make things for myself a tiny bit better.” Both ways of looking at the world strike me as very messed up, in the name of either happiness or justice.
nobody.really
Aug 8 2023 at 12:08am
“[Maybe Christ is not the only path to heaven. Then why must we Christians still have to] bear, day by day, the whole burden of ecclesiastical dogma and ecclesiastical ethics?
….If we are raising the question … then this can easily conceal a sidelong glance at what we suppose to be the easier and more comfortable life of other people, who will also get to heaven.
We are too much like the workers taken on in the first hour whom the Lord talks about in his parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20:1-6). [In the parable, a man hires workers throughout the day, and at the end of the day pays each of them a full day’s wages—much to the chagrin of the workers who worked a full day.] When they realized that the day’s wage of one denarius could be much more easily earned, they could no longer see why they had sweated all day….
[W]hat a strange attitude that actually is, when we no longer find Christian service worthwhile if the denarius of salvation may be obtained even without it! It seems as if we want to be rewarded, not just with our own salvation, but most especially with other people’s damnation—just like the workers hired in the first hour. That is very human, but the Lord’s parable is particularly meant to make us quite aware of how profoundly un-Christian it is at the same time. Anyone who looks on the loss of salvation for others as the condition, as it were, on which he serves Christ will in the end only be able to turn away grumbling, because that kind of reward is contrary to the loving-kindness of God.”
Fr. Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (1964) (later, Pope Benedict XVI), published in What It Means to Be a Christian (2006) (emphasis added).
MarkW
Aug 8 2023 at 6:58am
My sense of the social justice folks is not so much that they’re in favor of a poorer, more equal world over a richer, less equal one, but that they mostly neglect to see any tradeoff. They are prone to zero-sum thinking, and take societal wealth as a given — the main problem they see is how to divide it up. Some do have an anti-growth mindset, but they take this position as citizens of wealthy countries where having enough money for food and childhood vaccinations and earthquake resistant buildings, etc is simply a given, and would remain a given even if economic growth stagnated. Many further think that wealthy countries are wealthy only because of a history of exploiting poor countries, and that if the global rich were convinced (or forced) to make reparations, then everybody on earth would have enough, and we could all live in a sort of Rawlsian utopia. To them, the problem is insufficient sharing, not insufficient growth and wealth.
I guess I see a lot of bad, faulty economics and political naivete on the social justice left (which predictably lead to disasters when implemented), less than I see pettiness. I live in a college town. Most of my neighbors are (well-to-do) lefties. They’re generally lovely people on an individual level, their politics and economic thinking notwithstanding.
Andre
Aug 7 2023 at 3:50pm
“How irrational is that?”
Not irrational at all. One’s reproductive odds are greater (ceteris paribus) making double the average income (as a guy), and your children’s competitive odds of success are way higher with double the resources (for a female). Competitively speaking, one is unquestionably worse off making more money if you make less than most other people. In the long run game of life, anyway.
So, no, it’s a perfectly rational attitude. In order to prevent redistribution down to socialism/communism, however, what we need are rules in place that don’t allow anyone to hijack the system for redistributive purposes. Allow for a safety net and that’s it.
nobody.really
Aug 7 2023 at 4:14pm
For what it’s worth, we discussed this years ago on Steven Landsburg’s blog. Asked whether he’d prefer to live in a neighborhood full of wildly productive people—brain surgeons and tech innovators, say—who would pay him more than his current compensation to work full-time driving a riding mower over their lawns, he said that he would not.
(Admittedly, this was years ago. As he approaches retirement, he might feel differently. I get a real sense of accomplishment from seeing a freshly-mowed lawn—a sense I so rarely get from most work projects.)
“The rules which we learn to observe are the result of cultural evolution. We can endeavor to improve the system of rules by seeking to reconcile its internal conflicts or its conflicts with our emotions. But instinct or intuition do not entitle us to reject a particular demand of the prevailing moral code, and only a responsible effort to judge it as part of the system of other requirements may make it morally legitimate to infringe a particular rule.
There is, however, so far as present society is concerned, no ‘natural goodness’, because with his innate instincts man could never have built the civilization on which the numbers of present mankind depend for their lives. To be able to do so, he had to shed many sentiments that were good for the small band, and to submit to the sacrifices which the discipline of freedom demands, but which he hates. [Modern] society rests on learnt rules and not on pursuing perceived desirable common objects: and wanting to do good to known people will not achieve the most for the community, but only the observation of its abstract and seemingly purposeless rules. Yet this little satisfies our deeply engrained feelings, or only so long as it brings us the esteem of our fellows….
Though [progress] produces … much that we did not foresee and do not like when we see it, it does bring to ever-increasing numbers what they have been mainly striving for. We often do not like it because the new possibilities always also bring new discipline. Man has been civilized very much against his wishes. It was the price he had to pay for being able to raise a larger number of children…. The indispensable rules of the free society require from us much that is unpleasant, such as suffering the competition from others, seeing others being richer than ourselves, etc., etc.”
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 3 (1979), “Epilogue: The Three Sources of Human Values,” at 528-29 (emphasis in original)
MarkW
Aug 8 2023 at 7:09am
Asked whether he’d prefer to live in a neighborhood full of wildly productive people—brain surgeons and tech innovators, say—who would pay him more than his current compensation to work full-time driving a riding mower over their lawns, he said that he would not.
But this is not crazy or irrational. Money is not all that people want out of a job — nor is it all that they should want. Well all spend a huge fraction of our lives working, and it matters much how we spend all those hours, not just the size of our paychecks. Lots of smart, rational people choose work that is more interesting but less lucrative than they might have had otherwise. University faculties are full of people like that. And, yes, status is part of the equation, too. But that is also rational — people are happier when they enjoy higher rather than lower status.
Dylan
Aug 8 2023 at 3:31pm
Just wanted to comment that my cousin retired early from a fairly high status job, and has now been mowing the grass for a golf course for a couple of years and couldn’t be happier with his decision.
john hare
Aug 7 2023 at 6:01pm
Interesting conversation here. I prefer to live in a lower income area with the lower cost of living. I prefer to associate with higher income people that I mostly relate to better. No idea where that puts me on the spectrum.
Jim Glass
Aug 12 2023 at 2:01am
They don’t believe that, aren’t serious about it at all – and the same for the chorus they sing to.
Here’s a simple test to try out on somebody who claims to really, really hate inequality: Just ask, “What’s the worst, most brazen example you can name of someone getting billionaire wealth, totally unearned and undeservedly, at the cost of the poor?” You’ll probably get an answer like ‘CEOs getting 1,000 x the pay of the average worker’ or somebody inheriting a family fortune, or some such.
Then ask, “What about last month’s $1.08 billion Powerball winner? Who did absolutely nothing to earn that billion dollars, other than buy a ticket probably while picking up smokes and a six-pack. With that money coming right from the poor. Tickets are heavily marketed to the poor, the payout is terrible, as low as 50%, way illegally low for any real gambling business, and it’s all driven by advertising that also is flatly illegally for anyone but the government. So that utterly unearned $1 billion came right from a tax on the poor.”
My experience wagers the person will never have thought of the lottery like that, then speak to defend it, “The poor deserve a chance to get rich too”, or the like. Case closed. BTW, winners up to $2 billion are becoming common, there’s now been eight >$1 billion, plus the big number in 9-figures. And the government is doing this. AOC’s and Bernie’s own states! Are AOC and Bernie objecting?
Moreover, the anti-rich mob somehow never marches through Hollywood protesting producers with billion-dollar contracts and actors paid deca-millions for a few weeks work to make bad movies … or to sports stadiums to curse athletes with 9-figure contracts playing children’s games … or to picket in front of the homes of Tim Cook, Warren Buffet or Bill Gates. Because …they don’t care, they aren’t serious.
When Piketty’s book on inequality came out in 2013 it was a huge hit on the left, and the talk of all the media. The Crisis of Inequality! The Democrats made it a main issue in the 2014 election – and got crushed. Google showed searches on the book towered in NYC, DC, Cambridge, and LA, and were nonexistent everywhere else in the USA . Amazon said it was least read best-selling download ever (with Steven Hawking’s book on time). People don’t care.
Of course. People really enjoy thinking that they care, posing like they care. What Democrats do care about is having their i-phones, enjoying their movies and sports teams, and thinking that they care about inequality.
But people who really do care about an issue invest it, and are willing to pay a real or social cost. Those who really want zero-carbon say, “We need nuclear now, the poor are going to suffer, and it’s going to cost us a lot” – and take the heat from ‘Team All Windmills’ … those who really care about the poor volunteer in poor urban public schools (like I did when young) and support charter schools, instead of walking around in “I love the poor!” T-shirts … and who really care about inequality say “State Lotteries Suck”, and take the heat from AOC and Bernie and their friends, who enjoy giving the poor to have a chance to get rich!
William Bell
Aug 13 2023 at 6:22pm
There are compelling reasons for preferring to have a $50,000 annual income in a society where no one else gets more than half of that than to get $100,000 annually in a society where everyone else gets substantially more. In the first situation you’d have high social status — much higher than you’d otherwise have, anyway — as a consequence of being twice as wealthy as anyone else, and if you’re of the male sex you’d find it far easier to mate with highly attractive women. In the second situation you’d be able to buy more stuff, but you’d have low social status and would be low man in the mating game.
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