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How do you think “income equality” is a good idea in a society where some people work harder than others. I can’t comprehend this common mentality.

• rayiner 10y ago
  I'd be pretty happy if wages were proportional to how hard people worked. I.e. the executive working 80-hour weeks gets paid twice as much as the line worker working 40.
  • zip1234 10y ago
    What about skill, responsibility, etc? Also, working hard is not necessarily working on the things that are important. Do not confuse activity with progress. The private sector is much better at allocating capital than the public sector.
    • rayiner 10y ago
      > skill Only to the extent that its the product of effort rather than innate factors.
      • Slaul 10y ago
        So somebody that takes 5 hours to complete a task that I can do in 1 should be paid the same? Wouldn't this lead to people trying to take longer in completing tasks and making things seem "harder" than they are?
        • rayiner 10y ago
          I'm sensitive to the potential for gaming -- all systems can be gamed. But look at the big picture. The average guy putting in an honest day's work is never going to be an engineer at Google, no matter how hard he tries. Those who are getting paid $300k at Google are largely being compensated not for the hours they put in, but the fact that they were born with a certain level of intellectual ability and aptitude. Surely you can recognize the unfairness of compensating people dramatically different based on qualities they have no control over?
          • grinnbearit 10y ago
            It also incentivises the google engineer to be as productive as they possibly can, assuming that salaries are indicative of marginal utility. Otherwise the engineer could spend his brain power on his own hobby projects while mowing grass for income.
          • r_smart 10y ago
            Wouldn't it then be unfair to pay the best person the same as the worst person? The incentive there is clear: Be the worst person and save your energy for something else. If your outcome is the same regardless of your effort, then you remove the desire to strive. That eventually leads to stagnation and collapse. If we actually care about fairness, we should focus on social mobility and doing our best to create equality of opportunity. A lot of this begins with fixing public schools (in the US at least).
          • hx87 10y ago
            By those criteria, isn't "effort" an innate factor? After all, people only have so much control over things like stamina and motivation.
            • rayiner 10y ago
              More reason for income equality. Studies show that things like impulse control have a significant innate component too.
              • tnl_ord3 10y ago
                On the contrary, more reason for income inequality. If we are concerned for the future population, that low-time preference people with good impulse control are payed more shouldn't trouble us. Whence come this desire to destructively level everyone?
                • hx87 10y ago
                  It's the classic efficiency vs justice tradeoff. IMO the best way to approach it is the "socialism below, capitalism above" approach combining a strong tax-funded UBI with a free-market, low-regulation (except environmental regulation) economy and a cultural move from individual ownership to collective but capitalist ownership (e.g. own REITs instead of homes, shares in Uber/GM instead of cars).
• richmarr 10y ago
  Not sure many would believe in literal income equality... suspect where people use that term they mean a mixture of (a) a cooling of executive pay & similar, and (b) structural changes to reduce the cumulative advantage high levels of wealth have in securing future income, e.g. lobbying, tax avoidance, access to education.
• realusername 10y ago
  Income is absolutely not proportional to harder work at all, not sure what is your point.
  • omginternets 10y ago
    His point, I think, is more general: there is a strong underlying assumption that inequality is inherently bad. This assumption is often lacking in nuance, even for a progressive like myself. Excessive inequality is undoubtedly bad. Debating quality vs quantity is a very different beast indeed. To be fair, people might mean "excessive income inequality" and just shorten it to "income inequality", but I've found this to be less and less true in recent years.