Social equality through the death of goats

There's an old Czech joke that goes like this :

God and Saint Peter were walking the Earth. It was a cold night and they were looking for a place to put their heads down. Everywhere they were refused, until they reached a dilapidated cottage where they were received with kindness and even a share of simple food. God revealed himself and offered their hosts anything they could possibly wish for. "Lord, we have nothing but a pair of old hens, while our neighbour has a nice, young goat. Every day it gives them two litres of milk..." "You'd like the same ?" interrupts God. "No," replies the villager. "We want their goat to die."

Which brings me on to these two contrasting articles about envy and billionaires. The first is much more in line with my own sympathies and presents a decent little overview of the problems of extreme wealth inequality.

The CEOs of America's largest companies make something like 300 times as much as the typical worker. Is anyone willing to defend the idea that any human being is really able to provide society with labor that is 300 times more useful than another's? Keep in mind the lowest paid workers in the U.S. include jobs such as farm workers and personal home health care aids. These are the people who sweat and toil to make our food; the people who care for our family members or ourselves when we can no longer walk or exercise or shower or take our medicine or use the bathroom on our own.

Does anyone need to be CEO of Apple? That company is staffed by thousands of workers and software engineers and more. They're all perfectly intelligent people. Under a different arrangement, a form of worker-elected committee could run the company just fine. (Some oddball worker co-ops already operate this way.) Does anyone really think that Apple could not possibly function without Tim Cook, or some other individual of similar oligarchical baring, at its head? 

I would probably spin this somewhat differently. A single individual may well create something which is millions - not mere hundreds - of times more useful than someone else. A scientist may invent a new medical treatment, a footballer might entertain millions, whereas a single refuse collector doesn't do anything which directly benefits more than a handful of people. I don't have a problem with the idea that some people create enormously disproportionate beneficial influence, and that some individuals are enormously important. I doubt very much you would have had SpaceX without Elon Musk, and committees are often just another word for indecisiveness. The consequences of changing managerial structure are not going to be simple.

But there are three major caveats as far as the "deserving" aspect of extreme inequality goes. The first is that not everyone gets rich through creating beneficial products - plenty of people get rich by creating enormously destructive products, like arms manufacturers and oil tycoons. Others get rich through simple birthright and don't have to earn a damn thing. Perhaps worst of all are those that receive enormous bonuses as standard despite leaving an institute in a worse state than which they found it, which is laughably stupid. But even those who do do something very useful often require a good dose of luck.

Which brings me to the second caveat : everyone is to some extent dependent on everyone else. Would Jeff Bezos have become a billionaire if he'd been orphaned on the streets ? Possibly, but all of our actions are affected by and dependent on the actions of millions of others. The indirect value of each action is extremely hard to quantify.

And that leads to the final caveat : that we have limited choices. We cannot simply will ourselves to become more creative or more resilient. Yes, there are times in all our lives when we simply have to "man up" and deal with problems - but only to a point. Different people can do this to different degrees, but no-one chooses to have low creativity or intelligence or endurance. We cannot simply decide one day to have boundless energy, enthusiasm or networking skills or whatever other key factors you need to become a billionaire. That some people have different innate abilities does not reflect badly on them - it is simply a fact.

So why on Earth should we reward or punish people according to things they have little choice over ? Incentive is the obvious answer, but do we need to have the top earners this far above the lowest to incentivise them ? I think not. And :

One thing just about everyone agreed on was that the existence of billionaires is offensive in the context of a society also beset by inequality, poverty and deprivation of opportunity. 

Which, provided billionaires (like Bezos) get rich through the exploitation of others, keeping themselves at the top through the action of keeping others at the bottom, is a serious concern. Okay, maybe they create jobs and keep people employed. Fine. But keeping them in shitty jobs while they themselves grow rich as Croesus is obscene. Most importantly of all though :

Billionaires shape our politics. This is not simply a matter of donations, though that certainly plays a role. It's that, as a matter of raw social gravity, billionaires command politicians' time and focus and social circles. Inevitably, politicians come to see the world more like billionaires see it. Which basically means being a billionaire means having enormous influence with which to convince your fellow citizens that billionaires are necessary. This does not require anyone to be an evil genius or a malevolent villain. It simply requires billionaires to be flawed, solipsistic, everyday human beings just like the rest of us, only imbued with wildly disproportionate sway in society.

This is not to say that all billionaires influence politics - but enough do. Does anyone deserve to command such vastly disproportionate resources ? I think not. Being able to earn it is not nearly enough to guarantee that it will be used wisely. I think on this point I'm more worried about the actions of megacorporations than individuals though. How can you possibly have a free market, in, say, the telecommunications sector, which is dominated by just a few gigantic companies ? What hope does a small fish have in that dangerous ocean ?


On then to the second article, which I find altogether stranger.

Often, it [jealousy] can lead to changes, help identify our values, and allow us to reflect on some of our life choices. When this becomes dangerous, and when we become susceptible to manipulation, however, is when those in power attempt to go beyond jealousy and weaponize our envy. Should the NBA be forced to lower their standards so that I had a chance? Should NASA compromise the quality of their rockets so that I can be given a job? Should we take money from rich people so that [insert shrewd politician’s name] can give every person in America/Australia/the UK a job? These questions all have the same themes: “Who should be pulled down so that I might be pulled up?”

On the first point, a desire to change doesn't always lead to an actual change - sometimes it does, but sometimes it can't (I also wouldn't characterise jealousy as being part of aspiration, but that's another matter). But who actually wants NASA or the NBA to lower standards ? Literally no-one. Whereas economics is quite different. We all want to improve our own skills; no-one wants other people to become stupider instead. That particular goat should be left well alone. Money, though, is not a skill, but an essential resource. Limiting the wealth of the 1% would not diminish their own life satisfaction in any meaningful way. Once you've got a billion dollars, what need have you for more ? Literally none (for a demonstration try this). Yet if the limitation of the uppermost wealth enriches those at the bottom, then I cannot see any serious objection to it. Not that this necessarily means anything as blunt as limiting wealth - it's more of a comment on the economic forces that allow vast wealth to flow into the hands of such a small group.

(EDIT : And of course, economics is not well-approximated as a zero-sum game where giving someone a job demands you take money off someone else. Unless you actually throw money into a fire, employing someone to do a job will generate revenue as well as consume it - sometimes more, sometimes less than you put in, and sometimes hard to quantify.)

Envy is destructive in that it promotes not only the acquisition of the possession of another but also a pleasure response from seeing that person torn down. As such, envy is the indiscriminate comparison between ourselves and others, regardless of whether that person "deserves" what they have. In order to achieve happiness, the envier believes they must acquire that which the person they envy has.

True as far as it goes. But when it comes to wealth, the desire to restrict it need not be from envy at all, but just the opposite : from a desire to help those at the top, not hurt them.

When a populist politician takes to the stand and gleefully suggests that everyone should go to college, that everyone should have a job, and that the government will provide you one if you can’t find one, at a livable wage, you should think very carefully about who will have to be bought down to make that a reality, and what freedoms would need to be sacrificed to achieve this "utopia." 

Good God, sir ! If the prospect that everyone should be educated and employed constitutes a Utopia, then you suffer a serious imagination deficit. Where's the blackjack and hookers ? Where are the giant robot dinosaurs and sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads ? Where's my solid gold house ? Utopia my foot, sir ! In fact I feel quite sorry for the author, who clearly doesn't realise that other parts of the world have long since managed this rather mediocre fantasy (I mean employment, not the bit about the robot dinosaurs). I don't think I even want to get started on the nonsensical comment about "freedom", the author doesn't understand what that means anyway.

The problem with this article is that it's not so much wrong as it is devoid of context. The issue is not whether it's right or wrong but surely the conditions under which it applies. Yes, you can indeed desire to hurt other people who have done you no wrong, who have earned their wealth as fairly as possible. And it's so obvious that this is a bad thing that it doesn't need stating. But you can also want more equality not because you want the goat to die, but because they've got ten goats and you think everyone would be better off it they had at least one each.

As a rule, extreme wealth inequality harms those at the top as much as it does those at the bottom. Just take a look at what having buckets of cash has done to the Tory party and then tell me it's been good for their mental health. They think themselves free, whereas their inactions indicate they are anything but. They are living almost literally in a gilded cage, bouncing off the bars of prosperity so hard they appear to have done themselves a mischief in the process.