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Strange, I was just thinking about this story yesterday... The best stories are puzzles of neverending questions. I'm finally satisfied with most of my answers

Strange, I was just thinking about this story yesterday... The best stories are puzzles of neverending questions. I'm finally satisfied with most of my answers to Harrison Bergenon, but then I started wondering: when the weights are removed, why is the selection of dancers actually good? Wouldn't they be weighed down during their auditions too? And their practice and training? Why did it turn out that the dancers that remained are the highest skilled? In any case, I'm pretty satisfied with my own answers to the Harrison Bergenon puzzle: yes, we should give people artistic, leadership, and engineering roles based on their merit. We should even reward those who can do these jobs at a high level. But maybe the difference in rewards doesn't need to be quite so enormous. So Jeff Bezos gets more money than I do, but maybe not 100,000 times as much money. Maybe just 100x is ok.

DemocracyFTW 5y ago
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: at €$10,—/h minimum wage and say 50h/week of work you'd go home with €$2000,—/month from which you have to pay rent, taxes, insurance. This is a plausible sum to get by in much of Europe and the US, especially given that 50h/week is a tall order already, and rents and health insurance combined alone will cost you above €$500,—..1000,— in many places, so it's not like fortunes. If the managers and lawyers and so on get up to 100x this sum, they can go home with €$200.000,— each month, which is over two million currency units per year. This, in dollars and Euros, is so much money it's completely beyond me how any greater differential could be justifiable in any society. Yet this is exactly what we're doing.