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> Also consider that dragging down the rich doesn't uplift the lower and middle classes. You're pretty confident about your view of human motivation. 1. There
by dctoedt 7y ago
> Also consider that dragging down the rich doesn't uplift the lower and middle classes.
You're pretty confident about your view of human motivation.
1. There's a certain motivational boost that comes from feeling that "we're all in the same boat." There's a reason that highly-paid NFL quarterbacks make a point of buying watches for their linemen, hosting banquets for them, etc. It's the same reason that military officers are taught never to ask your troops to do something you wouldn't be willing to do yourself if necessary — along with principles such as officers should only eat after they've made sure the troops are being fed, and they should sleep only when they've made sure the troops are getting sack time.*
* In reality, of course, there are circumstances when that won't be the case, e.g., when standing watch in a 24-hour rotation.
2. On the other hand, resentment, triggered by a feeling of being ignored and abandoned, is "a thing," whether we like it or not (probably programmed by natural selection). Moreover, people tend to view their well-being in comparison with that of their neighbors [0]; failing to keep up with the Joneses can be a real demotivator. That's especially true if you've come to believe that what you see the Joneses have, and you don't, is not a luxury but a necessity. For good or ill, most of us have that tendency, to one degree or another — ask any parent who has heard, But Dad, I NEEEEED a [whatever]!
3. The rich didn't get that way entirely on their own merits (and sometimes not even principally that way). If you haven't seen or read Elizabeth Warren's famous remarks, here they are: <QUOTE> "There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along." </QUOTE> This is spot on.
[0] https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/relative.pdf https://users.nber.org/~luttmer/relative.pdf
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/439207-there-is-nobody-in-this-country-who-got-rich-on https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/439207-there-is-nobody-in-t... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60fQCDqXfq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60fQCDqXfq0
- nosianu 7y agoAbout your 3rd point, it's even worse: You forgot the network in time. Almost all our current productivity is made possible by knowledge, processes, culture, and tools created by dead people. For the rest of us, the only reason you can "make million" (or billions) is because you are at a favorable location in the human network in space and in time, and you get to control a sizable section of that network. You didn't build that network, nor did you build the capacity of the nodes, and not the vast majority of the connections. How much a human can achieve is very much a function in that network. Even in science. Newton or Einstein, what would they have accomplished 1000 years earlier? Most of what we produce we owe to dead people, and since that is so, we can relax about distributing those gains that the current generation mostly just inherited. Nobody needs to be worried that "something is taken away from them" that they "worked hard for" when they have to pay taxes. Put a "self-made" man in the middle of nowhere and let them keep the result of their "hard labor" tax free. They can keep their entirely self- and literally hand-made mud hut. For the same reason those who control larger sections of the human network benefit more from government than those who do not. Because it is government of one kind or another that enables it. If there is no government those who want to be rich and powerful create one. Which is exactly what happened - it wasn't the poor, the workers and farmers who created government. It was the rich and powerful. First local lords, then kings, then Britain and their parliament, forced by the new economic upstarts, not by the peasants. And some "redistribution" down to the lower levels was only introduced to pacify the masses (people like Bismarck in Germany, who introduced a pension scheme, are under no suspicion of communism), to let the wealth increase continue undisturbed. Just like the bee keeper has to give the bees something to live on.
- dctoedt 7y agoNot entirely sure about your last paragraph, but the rest is intriguing — reminiscent of Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" remark [0]. Or: Imagine a variation on the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: The grape pickers show up at the end of the growing season and do their thing. They demand to be paid the lion's share of the entire crop yield, because it was their specialized skill and hard work that produced the harvest. They conveniently forget about the earlier workers who had patiently planted and tended the vines — without which there'd have been no harvest .... [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Workers_in_the_Vineyard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Workers_in_the_...