4 ms·

As someone who fits into the top 1% of income, I find these analyses as inherently discriminatory against individuals in market positions that generate high inc

As someone who fits into the top 1% of income, I find these analyses as inherently discriminatory against individuals in market positions that generate high incomes, a la Obama's "you didn't build that" statement. In other words, is it morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less than what the physician owner takes home in salary/dividends? The analysis intuits this position, and pessimistically states at the end that nothing will change for the secretary, attributed earlier to a political economy working against their interests. Individuals make decisions throughout their life, especially early on, that determine the course of their futures. Do they have teenage pregnancy? Do they study hard in high school or trade school or professional school or engineering school? Do they have business intuition to start their own business? I think the indictment should be against the University-government complex which tricks young people into taking substantial debt to chase degrees in fields with no long term potential for high earnings.

eevilspock 9y ago
> is it morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less than what the physician owner takes home in salary/dividends? To the extent that their differing roles are circumstances of birth and life, and that fairness is part of your morality, yes, it is. > Do they have teenage pregnancy? Do they study hard in high school or trade school or professional school or engineering school? Do they have business intuition to start their own business? Those are all circumstances of birth, be it nature or nurture. We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no?
- unethical_ban 9y ago
  Supply and demand is a strange notion? And yes, the secretary would suddenly have a valuable set of skills that would command more in terms of "wealth". Generous social safety nets are a compromise between "everyone gets the same because all inequality is wrong" and "If you're not doing something important you should die in poverty".
- assblaster 9y ago
  >We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no? Does being a physician require a higher level of emotional intelligence, memory, reasoning, spatial intelligence, determination, stamina, moral conscientiousness, compassion, and a lower amount of mental illness, physical illness? Not everyone can become a physician. Those who lack in any particular dimension have to compensate in other ways to succeed in medicine. It's why medical school admission is so competitive and multifactorial, to weed out those who can't make it, and shouldn't make it in the case of lack of compassion. What do physicians deserve for an income? What do basketball and football players deserve? What do CEOs deserve? It's all from the same mindset: someone else has something I do not have.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    One the reasons "not everyone can become a physician" is because physicians have one of the strongest protectionist unions in America, limiting access to the field and driving customers to fake doctors (chiropractic, naturopath, homeopath), hurting health outcomes.
    - shameshame 9y ago
      Do you have some research/information you can share about this? It's a fascinating concept to me.
nerdponx 9y ago
I don't disagree with you, but I'd encourage you to try to be a little more empathetic in thinking about how "individuals make decisions...that determine the courses of their futures." Sometimes their decision set is unfavorable. Other times things happen that are beyond their control. Yet more people just make bad decisions. People are the product of their environments.
- assblaster 9y ago
  Ben Carson, despite growing up in the slums to a single mother, became a world renowned neurosurgeon. Statistically, Ben Carson's success is a rarity, but there were factors in his success that were not related to his upbringing, otherwise he would have failed as others in his position would have failed. Should hard work, natural intelligence and giftings be punished in the grand scheme of things because others might not have that same inherent benefit? Should family wealth, connections, social status be punished because others lack? Should Ben Carson be more deserved of his income because he came from worse background compared to his neurosurgeon colleagues? I spent 15 years of my life studying my craft (medicine), while my contemporaries drank alcohol, smoked marijuana, traveled extensively, spent rather than saved, and otherwise wasted their gifts. Should they be rewarded and me punished? And we can cut right to the meat of it: punishment versus reward, because this is exactly the direction that modern politics takes these studies and attitudes. It was part of Obama's class warfare tactics when pushing for tax increases on individuals making over $400k. I don't know how much you earn, but if you're in the 1% like me, you would feel the constant antipathy simply because you have a certain income (but a fraction of the wealth because of delayed gratification, student loans, opportunity costs, etc).
  - scroot 9y ago
    > Should hard work, natural intelligence and giftings be punished in the grand scheme of things because others might not have that same inherent benefit? Should family wealth, connections, social status be punished because others lack? Rather than thinking of earning slightly less as "punishment," you should consider it as the price paid for civilization and the foundations upon which your very ability to earn a high wage are built.
scroot 9y ago
As a general statement of fact, American companies do not pay their workers enough. We know this because aggregate corporate profits are their highest share of GDP ever, and wages from labor are at or near the lowest. There are whole sectors of business that exist by paying poverty level wages to their employees. This is not about it being "morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less" than the physician owner. It's about the secretary not getting appropriate wages in the first place. As for "decisions throughout life," you might want to take a closer look at what poverty is actually like in America.
- assblaster 9y ago
  >This is not about it being "morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less" than the physician owner. It's about the secretary not getting appropriate wages in the first place. Are you suggesting instituting wage price controls? Are you suggesting physicians, nationwide, are paying below market rates? Isn't it a contradiction to say it's below market rate when the market determined that the wage being paid is fair? What sectors of business pay below poverty rates? Has the standard of living been adjusted upwards over the last 20-30 years, with the development of technology, and widely available affordable energy? >you might want to take a closer look at what poverty is actually like in America. Teen/single mother pregnancy is the best predictor of poverty. What better example of a bad decision than to have sexual intercourse out of wedlock resulting in pregnancy? It was voluntary, yet it was a decision that can change the rest of her life for the worse. Is single mother pregnancy caused by people with bad morals?
  - eevilspock 9y ago
    > Isn't it a contradiction to say it's below market rate when the market determined that the wage being paid is fair? Circular logic / begging the question. The crux of the debate is whether the free-market is a good arbiter of fairness. > Teen/single mother pregnancy is the best predictor of poverty. Poverty is the best predictor of teen/single mother pregnancy. Circumstances of birth are the best predictor of poverty.
    - 9y ago
plandis 9y ago
It’s inherently unfair from the beginning. If you’re poor you go to a public school. Even if you are get a perfect GPA, it probably isn’t good enough to get into good universities. Anecdotally. my high school had several students that were AP scholars, national merit scholars, great SATs, etc... and all of them went to Ohio State after getting rejected from better schools. I don’t think anyone that went to my high school had been accepted to a prestigious university in several years. Your teachers are also trying to teach 30 other kids so that will hurt compared to better public schools/private schools. Hell, you might even have to skip doing extra curricular activity’s entirely in favor of work, which will hurt your chances of going to a good college. Additionally, your parents don’t have “legacy” status at good universities which will probably hurt you. If you’re poor your family probably doesn’t have connections that will hurt you after your formal education has ended. If your family is poor then taking business risks are also less likely to happen and more financially risky. The list can go on and on. I don’t know how to fix that and it wont be solved solely by wealth redistribution.

eevilspock 9y ago

> is it morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less than what the physician owner takes home in salary/dividends? To the extent that their differing roles are circumstances of birth and life, and that fairness is part of your morality, yes, it is. > Do they have teenage pregnancy? Do they study hard in high school or trade school or professional school or engineering school? Do they have business intuition to start their own business? Those are all circumstances of birth, be it nature or nurture. We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no?

unethical_ban 9y ago
Supply and demand is a strange notion? And yes, the secretary would suddenly have a valuable set of skills that would command more in terms of "wealth". Generous social safety nets are a compromise between "everyone gets the same because all inequality is wrong" and "If you're not doing something important you should die in poverty".
assblaster 9y ago
>We have a strange notion of "deserve" in our society, that someone deserves more simply because they have a skill or circumstances that are in lower supply compared to demand. So physician skills are in shorter supply than secretary skills. But if they were shipwrecked on a desert island, and the secretary knows how to fish and keep them alive, suddenly he can command a greater share of income on that island. Arbitrary no? Does being a physician require a higher level of emotional intelligence, memory, reasoning, spatial intelligence, determination, stamina, moral conscientiousness, compassion, and a lower amount of mental illness, physical illness? Not everyone can become a physician. Those who lack in any particular dimension have to compensate in other ways to succeed in medicine. It's why medical school admission is so competitive and multifactorial, to weed out those who can't make it, and shouldn't make it in the case of lack of compassion. What do physicians deserve for an income? What do basketball and football players deserve? What do CEOs deserve? It's all from the same mindset: someone else has something I do not have.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  One the reasons "not everyone can become a physician" is because physicians have one of the strongest protectionist unions in America, limiting access to the field and driving customers to fake doctors (chiropractic, naturopath, homeopath), hurting health outcomes.
  - shameshame 9y ago
    Do you have some research/information you can share about this? It's a fascinating concept to me.

nerdponx 9y ago

I don't disagree with you, but I'd encourage you to try to be a little more empathetic in thinking about how "individuals make decisions...that determine the courses of their futures." Sometimes their decision set is unfavorable. Other times things happen that are beyond their control. Yet more people just make bad decisions. People are the product of their environments.

assblaster 9y ago
Ben Carson, despite growing up in the slums to a single mother, became a world renowned neurosurgeon. Statistically, Ben Carson's success is a rarity, but there were factors in his success that were not related to his upbringing, otherwise he would have failed as others in his position would have failed. Should hard work, natural intelligence and giftings be punished in the grand scheme of things because others might not have that same inherent benefit? Should family wealth, connections, social status be punished because others lack? Should Ben Carson be more deserved of his income because he came from worse background compared to his neurosurgeon colleagues? I spent 15 years of my life studying my craft (medicine), while my contemporaries drank alcohol, smoked marijuana, traveled extensively, spent rather than saved, and otherwise wasted their gifts. Should they be rewarded and me punished? And we can cut right to the meat of it: punishment versus reward, because this is exactly the direction that modern politics takes these studies and attitudes. It was part of Obama's class warfare tactics when pushing for tax increases on individuals making over $400k. I don't know how much you earn, but if you're in the 1% like me, you would feel the constant antipathy simply because you have a certain income (but a fraction of the wealth because of delayed gratification, student loans, opportunity costs, etc).
- scroot 9y ago
  > Should hard work, natural intelligence and giftings be punished in the grand scheme of things because others might not have that same inherent benefit? Should family wealth, connections, social status be punished because others lack? Rather than thinking of earning slightly less as "punishment," you should consider it as the price paid for civilization and the foundations upon which your very ability to earn a high wage are built.

scroot 9y ago

As a general statement of fact, American companies do not pay their workers enough. We know this because aggregate corporate profits are their highest share of GDP ever, and wages from labor are at or near the lowest. There are whole sectors of business that exist by paying poverty level wages to their employees. This is not about it being "morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less" than the physician owner. It's about the secretary not getting appropriate wages in the first place. As for "decisions throughout life," you might want to take a closer look at what poverty is actually like in America.

assblaster 9y ago
>This is not about it being "morally wrong for the secretary in a medical office to be paid less" than the physician owner. It's about the secretary not getting appropriate wages in the first place. Are you suggesting instituting wage price controls? Are you suggesting physicians, nationwide, are paying below market rates? Isn't it a contradiction to say it's below market rate when the market determined that the wage being paid is fair? What sectors of business pay below poverty rates? Has the standard of living been adjusted upwards over the last 20-30 years, with the development of technology, and widely available affordable energy? >you might want to take a closer look at what poverty is actually like in America. Teen/single mother pregnancy is the best predictor of poverty. What better example of a bad decision than to have sexual intercourse out of wedlock resulting in pregnancy? It was voluntary, yet it was a decision that can change the rest of her life for the worse. Is single mother pregnancy caused by people with bad morals?
- eevilspock 9y ago
  > Isn't it a contradiction to say it's below market rate when the market determined that the wage being paid is fair? Circular logic / begging the question. The crux of the debate is whether the free-market is a good arbiter of fairness. > Teen/single mother pregnancy is the best predictor of poverty. Poverty is the best predictor of teen/single mother pregnancy. Circumstances of birth are the best predictor of poverty.
  - 9y ago

plandis 9y ago

It’s inherently unfair from the beginning. If you’re poor you go to a public school. Even if you are get a perfect GPA, it probably isn’t good enough to get into good universities. Anecdotally. my high school had several students that were AP scholars, national merit scholars, great SATs, etc... and all of them went to Ohio State after getting rejected from better schools. I don’t think anyone that went to my high school had been accepted to a prestigious university in several years. Your teachers are also trying to teach 30 other kids so that will hurt compared to better public schools/private schools. Hell, you might even have to skip doing extra curricular activity’s entirely in favor of work, which will hurt your chances of going to a good college. Additionally, your parents don’t have “legacy” status at good universities which will probably hurt you. If you’re poor your family probably doesn’t have connections that will hurt you after your formal education has ended. If your family is poor then taking business risks are also less likely to happen and more financially risky. The list can go on and on. I don’t know how to fix that and it wont be solved solely by wealth redistribution.