Einstein

Is Equal Unfair?

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JDN 2457492

Much as you are officially a professional when people start paying you for what you do, I think you are officially a book reviewer when people start sending you books for free asking you to review them for publicity. This has now happened to me, with the book Equal Is Unfair by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook. This post is longer than usual, but in order to be fair to the book’s virtues as well as its flaws, I felt a need to explain quite thoroughly.

It’s a very frustrating book, because at times I find myself agreeing quite strongly with the first part of a paragraph, and then reaching the end of that same paragraph and wanting to press my forehead firmly into the desk in front of me. It makes some really good points, and for the most part uses economic statistics reasonably accurately—but then it rides gleefully down a slippery slope fallacy like a waterslide. But I guess that’s what I should have expected; it’s by leaders of the Ayn Rand Institute, and my experience with reading Ayn Rand is similar to that of Randall Monroe (I’m mainly referring to the alt-text, which uses slightly foul language).

As I kept being jostled between “That’s a very good point.”, “Hmm, that’s an interesting perspective.”, and “How can anyone as educated as you believe anything that stupid!?” I realized that there are actually three books here, interleaved:

1. A decent economics text on the downsides of taxation and regulation and the great success of technology and capitalism at raising the standard of living in the United States, which could have been written by just about any mainstream centrist neoclassical economist—I’d say it reads most like John Taylor or Ken Galbraith. My reactions to this book were things like “That’s a very good point.”, and “Sure, but any economist would agree with that.”

2. An interesting philosophical treatise on the meanings of “equality” and “opportunity” and their application to normative economic policy, as well as about the limitations of statistical data in making political and ethical judgments. It could have been written by Robert Nozick (actually I think much of it was based on Robert Nozick). Some of the arguments are convincing, others are not, and many of the conclusions are taken too far; but it’s well within the space of reasonable philosophical arguments. My reactions to this book were things like “Hmm, that’s an interesting perspective.” and “Your argument is valid, but I think I reject the second premise.”

3. A delusional rant of the sort that could only be penned by a True Believer in the One True Gospel of Ayn Rand, about how poor people are lazy moochers, billionaires are world-changing geniuses whose superior talent and great generosity we should all bow down before, and anyone who would dare suggest that perhaps Steve Jobs got lucky or owes something to the rest of society is an authoritarian Communist who hates all achievement and wants to destroy the American Dream. It was this book that gave me reactions like “How can anyone as educated as you believe anything that stupid!?” and “You clearly have no idea what poverty is like, do you?” and “[expletive] you, you narcissistic ingrate!”

Given that the two co-authors are Executive Director and a fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute, I suppose I should really be pleasantly surprised that books 1 and 2 exist, rather than disappointed by book 3.

As evidence of each of the three books interleaved, I offer the following quotations:

Book 1:

“All else being equal, taxes discourage production and prosperity.” (p. 30)

No reasonable economist would disagree. The key is all else being equal—it rarely is.

“For most of human history, our most pressing problem was getting enough food. Now food is abundant and affordable.” (p.84)

Correct! And worth pointing out, especially to anyone who thinks that economic progress is an illusion or we should go back to pre-industrial farming practices—and such people do exist.

“Wealth creation is first and foremost knowledge creation. And this is why you can add to the list of people who have created the modern world, great thinkers: people such as Euclid, Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and a relative handful of others.” (p.90, emph. in orig.)

Absolutely right, though as I’ll get to below there’s something rather notable about that list.

“To be sure, there is competition in an economy, but it’s not a zero-sum game in which some have to lose so that others can win—not in the big picture.” (p. 97)

Yes! Precisely! I wish I could explain to more people—on both the Left and the Right, by the way—that economics is nonzero-sum, and that in the long run competitive markets improve the standard of living of society as a whole, not just the people who win that competition.

Book 2:

“Even opportunities that may come to us without effort on our part—affluent parents, valuable personal connections, a good education—require enormous effort to capitalize on.” (p. 66)

This is sometimes true, but clearly doesn’t apply to things like the Waltons’ inherited billions, for which all they had to do was be born in the right family and not waste their money too extravagantly.

“But life is not a game, and achieving equality of initial chances means forcing people to play by different rules.” (p. 79)

This is an interesting point, and one that I think we should acknowledge; we must treat those born rich differently from those born poor, because their unequal starting positions mean that treating them equally from this point forward would lead to a wildly unfair outcome. If my grandfather stole your grandfather’s wealth and passed it on to me, the fair thing to do is not to treat you and I equally from this point forward—it’s to force me to return what was stolen, insofar as that is possible. And even if we suppose that my grandfather earned far vaster wealth than yours, I think a more limited redistribution remains justified simply to put you and I on a level playing field and ensure fair competition and economic efficiency.

“The key error in this argument is that it totally mischaracterizes what it means to earn something. For the egalitarians, the results of our actions don’t merely have to be under our control, but entirely of our own making. […] But there is nothing like that in reality, and so what the egalitarians are ultimately doing is wiping out the very possibility of earning something.” (p. 193)

The way they use “egalitarian” as an insult is a bit grating, but there clearly are some actual egalitarian philosophers whose views are this extreme, such as G.A. Cohen, James Kwak and Peter Singer. I strongly agree that we need to make a principled distinction between gains that are earned and gains that are unearned, such that both sets are nonempty. Yet while Cohen would seem to make “earned” an empty set, Watkins and Brook very nearly make “unearned” empty—you get what you get, and you deserve it. The only exceptions they seem willing to make are outright theft and, what they consider equivalent, taxation. They have no concept of exploitation, excessive market power, or arbitrage—and while they claim they oppose fraud, they seem to think that only government is capable of it.

Book 3:

“What about government handouts (usually referred to as ‘transfer payments’)?” (p. 23)

Because Social Security is totally just a handout—it’s not like you pay into it your whole life or anything.

“No one cares whether the person who fixes his car or performs his brain surgery or applies for a job at his company is male or female, Indian or Pakistani—he wants to know whether they are competent.” (p.61)

Yes they do. We have direct experimental evidence of this.

“The notion that ‘spending drives the economy’ and that rich people spend less than others isn’t a view seriously entertained by economists,[…]” (p. 110)

The New Synthesis is Keynesian! This is what Milton Friedman was talking about when he said, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

“Because mobility statistics don’t distinguish between those who don’t rise and those who can’t, they are useless when it comes to assessing how healthy mobility is.” (p. 119)

So, if Black people have much lower odds of achieving high incomes even controlling for education, we can’t assume that they are disadvantaged or discriminated against; maybe Black people are just lazy or stupid? Is that what you’re saying here? (I think it might be.)

“Payroll taxes alone amount to 15.3 percent of your income; money that is taken from you and handed out to the elderly. This means that you have to spend more than a month and a half each year working without pay in order to fund other people’s retirement and medical care.” (p. 127)

That is not even close to how taxes work. Taxes are not “taken” from money you’d otherwise get—taxation changes prices and the monetary system depends upon taxation.

“People are poor, in the end, because they have not created enough wealth to make themselves prosperous.” (p. 144)

This sentence was so awful that when I showed it to my boyfriend, he assumed it must be out of context. When I showed him the context, he started swearing the most I’ve heard him swear in a long time, because the context was even worse than it sounds. Yes, this book is literally arguing that the reason people are poor is that they’re just too lazy and stupid to work their way out of poverty.

“No society has fully implemented the egalitarian doctrine, but one came as close as any society can come: Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.” (p. 207)

Because obviously the problem with the Khmer Rouge was their capital gains taxes. They were just too darn fair, and if they’d been more selfish they would never have committed genocide. (The authors literally appear to believe this.)

 

So there are my extensive quotations, to show that this really is what the book is saying. Now, a little more summary of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

One good thing is that the authors really do seem to understand fairly well the arguments of their opponents. They quote their opponents extensively, and only a few times did it feel meaningfully out of context. Their use of economic statistics is also fairly good, though occasionally they present misleading numbers or compare two obviously incomparable measures.

One of the core points in Equal is Unfair is quite weak: They argue against the “shared-pie assumption”, which is that we create wealth as a society, and thus the rest of society is owed some portion of the fruits of our efforts. They maintain that this is fundamentally authoritarian and immoral; essentially they believe a totalizing false dichotomy between either absolute laissez-faire or Stalinist Communism.

But the “shared-pie assumption” is not false; we do create wealth as a society. Human cognition is fundamentally social cognition; they said themselves that we depend upon the discoveries of people like Newton and Einstein for our way of life. But it should be obvious we can never pay Einstein back; so instead we must pay forward, to help some child born in the ghetto to rise to become the next Einstein. I agree that we must build a society where opportunity is maximized—and that means, necessarily, redistributing wealth from its current state of absurd and immoral inequality.

I do however agree with another core point, which is that most discussions of inequality rely upon a tacit assumption which is false: They call it the “fixed-pie assumption”.

When you talk about the share of income going to different groups in a population, you have to be careful about the fact that there is not a fixed amount of wealth in a society to be distributed—not a “fixed pie” that we are cutting up and giving around. If it were really true that the rising income share of the top 1% were necessary to maximize the absolute benefits of the bottom 99%, we probably should tolerate that, because the alternative means harming everyone. (In arguing this they quote John Rawls several times with disapprobation, which is baffling because that is exactly what Rawls says.)

Even if that’s true, there is still a case to be made against inequality, because too much wealth in the hands of a few people will give them more power—and unequal power can be dangerous even if wealth is earned, exchanges are uncoerced, and the distribution is optimally efficient. (Watkins and Brook dismiss this contention out of hand, essentially defining beneficent exploitation out of existence.)

Of course, in the real world, there’s no reason to think that the ballooning income share of the top 0.01% in the US is actually associated with improved standard of living for everyone else.

I’ve shown these graphs before, but they bear repeating:

Income shares for the top 1% and especially the top 0.1% and 0.01% have risen dramatically in the last 30 years.

top_income_shares_adjusted

But real median income has only slightly increased during the same period.

US_median_household_income

Thus, mean income has risen much faster than median income.

median_mean

While theoretically it could be that the nature of our productivity technology has shifted in such a way that it suddenly became necessary to heap more and more wealth on the top 1% in order to continue increasing national output, there is actually very little evidence of this. On the contrary, as Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel Laureate, you may recall) has documented, the leading cause of our rising inequality appears to be a dramatic increase in rent-seeking, which is to say corruption, exploitation, and monopoly power. (This probably has something to do with why I found in my master’s thesis that rising top income shares correlate quite strongly with rising levels of corruption.)

Now to be fair, the authors of Equal is Unfair do say that they are opposed to rent-seeking, and would like to see it removed. But they have a very odd concept of what rent-seeking entails, and it basically seems to amount to saying that whatever the government does is rent-seeking, whatever corporations do is fair free-market competition. On page 38 they warn us not to assume that government is good and corporations are bad—but actually it’s much more that they assume that government is bad and corporations are good. (The mainstream opinion appears to be actually that both are bad, and we should replace them both with… er… something.)

They do make some other good points I wish more leftists would appreciate, such as the point that while colonialism and imperialism can damage countries that suffer them and make them poorer, they generally do not benefit the countries that commit them and make them richer. The notion that Europe is rich because of imperialism is simply wrong; Europe is rich because of education, technology, and good governance. Indeed, the greatest surge in Europe’s economic growth occurred as the period of imperialism was winding down—when Europeans realized that they would be better off trying to actually invent and produce things rather than stealing them from others.

Likewise, they rightfully demolish notions of primitivism and anti-globalization that I often see bouncing around from folks like Naomi Klein. But these are book 1 messages; any economist would agree that primitivism is a terrible idea, and very few are opposed to globalization per se.

The end of Equal is Unfair gives a five-part plan for unleashing opportunity in America:

1. Abolish all forms of corporate welfare so that no business can gain unfair advantage.

2. Abolish government barriers to work so that every individual can enjoy the dignity of earned success.

3. Phase out the welfare state so that America can once again become the land of self-reliance.

4. Unleash the power of innovation in education by ending the government monopoly on schooling.

5. Liberate innovators from the regulatory shackles that are strangling them.

Number 1 is hard to disagree with, except that they include literally everything the government does that benefits a corporation as corporate welfare, including things like subsidies for solar power that the world desperately needs (or millions of people will die).

Number 2 sounds really great until you realize that they are including all labor standards, environmental standards and safety regulations as “barriers to work”; because it’s such a barrier for children to not be able to work in a factory where your arm can get cut off, and such a barrier that we’ve eliminated lead from gasoline emissions and thereby cut crime in half.

Number 3 could mean a lot of things; if it means replacing the existing system with a basic income I’m all for it. But in fact it seems to mean removing all social insurance whatsoever. Indeed, Watkins and Brook do not appear to believe in social insurance at all. The whole concept of “less fortunate”, “there but for the grace of God go I” seems to elude them. They have no sense that being fortunate in their own lives gives them some duty to help others who were not; they feel no pang of moral obligation whatsoever to help anyone else who needs help. Indeed, they literally mock the idea that human beings are “all in this together”.

They also don’t even seem to believe in public goods, or somehow imagine that rational self-interest could lead people to pay for public goods without any enforcement whatsoever despite the overwhelming incentives to free-ride. (What if you allow people to freely enter a contract that provides such enforcement mechanisms? Oh, you mean like social democracy?)

Regarding number 4, I’d first like to point out that private schools exist. Moreover, so do charter schools in most states, and in states without charter schools there are usually vouchers parents can use to offset the cost of private schools. So while the government has a monopoly in the market share sense—the vast majority of education in the US is public—it does not actually appear to be enforcing a monopoly in the anti-competitive sense—you can go to private school, it’s just too expensive or not as good. Why, it’s almost as if education is a public good or a natural monopoly.

Number 5 also sounds all right, until you see that they actually seem most opposed to antitrust laws of all things. Why would antitrust laws be the ones that bother you? They are designed to increase competition and lower barriers, and largely succeed in doing so (when they are actually enforced, which is rare of late). If you really want to end barriers to innovation and government-granted monopolies, why is it not patents that draw your ire?

They also seem to have trouble with the difference between handicapping and redistribution—they seem to think that the only way to make outcomes more equal is to bring the top down and leave the bottom where it is, and they often use ridiculous examples like “Should we ban reading to your children, because some people don’t?” But of course no serious egalitarian would suggest such a thing. Education isn’t fungible, so it can’t be redistributed. You can take it away (and sometimes you can add it, e.g. public education, which Watkins and Brooks adamantly oppose); but you can’t simply transfer it from one person to another. Money on the other hand, is by definition fungible—that’s kind of what makes it money, really. So when we take a dollar from a rich person and give it to a poor person, the poor person now has an extra dollar. We’ve not simply lowered; we’ve also raised. (In practice it’s a bit more complicated than that, as redistribution can introduce inefficiencies. So realistically maybe we take $1.00 and give $0.90; that’s still worth doing in a lot of cases.)

If attributes like intelligence were fungible, I think we’d have a very serious moral question on our hands! It is not obvious to me that the world is better off with its current range of intelligence, compared to a world where geniuses had their excess IQ somehow sucked out and transferred to mentally disabled people. Or if you think that the marginal utility of intelligence is increasing, then maybe we should redistribute IQ upward—take it from some mentally disabled children who aren’t really using it for much and add it onto some geniuses to make them super-geniuses. Of course, the whole notion is ridiculous; you can’t do that. But whereas Watkins and Brook seem to think it’s obvious that we shouldn’t even if we could, I don’t find that obvious at all. You didn’t earn your IQ (for the most part); you don’t seem to deserve it in any deep sense; so why should you get to keep it, if the world would be much better off if you didn’t? Why should other people barely be able to feed themselves so I can be good at calculus? At best, maybe I’m free to keep it—but given the stakes, I’m not even sure that would be justifiable. Peter Singer is right about one thing: You’re not free to let a child drown in a lake just to keep your suit from getting wet.

Ultimately, if you really want to understand what’s going on with Equal is Unfair, consider the following sentence, which I find deeply revealing as to the true objectives of these Objectivists:

“Today, meanwhile, although we have far more liberty than our feudal ancestors, there are countless ways in which the government restricts our freedom to produce and trade including minimum wage laws, rent control, occupational licensing laws, tariffs, union shop laws, antitrust laws, government monopolies such as those granted to the post office and education system, subsidies for industries such as agriculture or wind and solar power, eminent domain laws, wealth redistribution via the welfare state, and the progressive income tax.” (p. 114)

Some of these are things no serious economist would disagree with: We should stop subsidizing agriculture and tariffs should be reduced or removed. Many occupational licenses are clearly unnecessary (though this has a very small impact on inequality in real terms—licensing may stop you from becoming a barber, but it’s not what stops you from becoming a CEO). Others are legitimately controversial: Economists are currently quite divided over whether minimum wage is beneficial or harmful (I lean toward beneficial, but I’d prefer a better solution), as well as how to properly regulate unions so that they give workers much-needed bargaining power without giving unions too much power. But a couple of these are totally backward, exactly contrary to what any mainstream economist would say: Antitrust laws need to be enforced more, not eliminated (don’t take it from me; take it from that well-known Marxist rag The Economist). Subsidies for wind and solar power make the economy more efficient, not less—and suspiciously Watkins and Brook omitted the competing subsidies that actually are harmful, namely those to coal and oil.

Moreover, I think it’s very revealing that they included the word progressive when talking about taxation. In what sense does making a tax progressive undermine our freedom? None, so far as I can tell. The presence of a tax undermines freedom—your freedom to spend that money some other way. Making the tax higher undermines freedom—it’s more money you lose control over. But making the tax progressive increases freedom for some and decreases it for others—and since rich people have lower marginal utility of wealth and are generally more free in substantive terms in general, it really makes the most sense that, holding revenue constant, making a tax progressive generally makes your people more free.

But there’s one thing that making taxes progressive does do: It benefits poor people and hurts rich people. And thus the true agenda of Equal is Unfair becomes clear: They aren’t actually interested in maximizing freedom—if they were, they wouldn’t be complaining about occupational licensing and progressive taxation, they’d be outraged by forced labor, mass incarceration, indefinite detention, and the very real loss of substantive freedom that comes from being born into poverty. They wouldn’t want less redistribution, they’d want more efficient and transparent redistribution—a shift from the current hodgepodge welfare state to a basic income system. They would be less concerned about the “freedom” to pollute the air and water with impunity, and more concerned about the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water.

No, what they really believe is rich people are better. They believe that billionaires attained their status not by luck or circumstance, not by corruption or ruthlessness, but by the sheer force of their genius. (This is essentially the entire subject of chapter 6, “The Money-Makers and the Money-Appropriators”, and it’s nauseating.) They describe our financial industry as “fundamentally moral and productive” (p.156)—the industry that you may recall stole millions of homes and laundered money for terrorists. They assert that no sane person could believe that Steve Wozniack got lucky—I maintain no sane person could think otherwise. Yes, he was brilliant; yes, he invented good things. But he had to be at the right place at the right time, in a society that supported and educated him and provided him with customers and employees. You didn’t build that.

Indeed, perhaps most baffling is that they themselves seem to admit that the really great innovators, such as Newton, Einstein, and Darwin, were scientists—but scientists are almost never billionaires. Even the common counterexample, Thomas Edison, is largely false; he mainly plagiarized from Nikola Tesla and appropriated the ideas of his employees. Newton, Einstein and Darwin were all at least upper-middle class (as was Tesla, by the way—he did not die poor as is sometimes portrayed), but they weren’t spectacularly mind-bogglingly rich the way that Steve Jobs and Andrew Carnegie were and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are.

Some people clearly have more talent than others, and some people clearly work harder than others, and some people clearly produce more than others. But I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that a single man can work so hard, be so talented, produce so much that he can deserve to have as much wealth as a nation of millions of people produces in a year. Yet, Mark Zuckerberg has that much wealth. Remind me again what he did? Did he cure a disease that was killing millions? Did he colonize another planet? Did he discover a fundamental law of nature? Oh yes, he made a piece of software that’s particularly convenient for talking to your friends. Clearly that is worth the GDP of Latvia. Not that silly Darwin fellow, who only uncovered the fundamental laws of life itself.

In the grand tradition of reducing complex systems to simple numerical values, I give book 1 a 7/10, book 2 a 5/10, and book 3 a 2/10. Equal is Unfair is about 25% book 1, 25% book 2, and 50% book 3, so altogether their final score is, drumroll please: 4/10. Maybe read the first half, I guess? That’s where most of the good stuff is.

How to change the world

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JDN 2457166 EDT 17:53.

I just got back from watching Tomorrowland, which is oddly appropriate since I had already planned this topic in advance. How do we, as they say in the film, “fix the world”?

I can’t find it at the moment, but I vaguely remember some radio segment on which a couple of neoclassical economists were interviewed and asked what sort of career can change the world, and they answered something like, “Go into finance, make a lot of money, and then donate it to charity.”

In a slightly more nuanced form this strategy is called earning to give, and frankly I think it’s pretty awful. Most of the damage that is done to the world is done in the name of maximizing profits, and basically what you end up doing is stealing people’s money and then claiming you are a great altruist for giving some of it back. I guess if you can make enormous amounts of money doing something that isn’t inherently bad and then donate that—like what Bill Gates did—it seems better. But realistically your potential income is probably not actually raised that much by working in finance, sales, or oil production; you could have made the same income as a college professor or a software engineer and not be actively stripping the world of its prosperity. If we actually had the sort of ideal policies that would internalize all externalities, this dilemma wouldn’t arise; but we’re nowhere near that, and if we did have that system, the only billionaires would be Nobel laureate scientists. Albert Einstein was a million times more productive than the average person. Steve Jobs was just a million times luckier. Even then, there is the very serious question of whether it makes sense to give all the fruits of genius to the geniuses themselves, who very quickly find they have all they need while others starve. It was certainly Jonas Salk’s view that his work should only profit him modestly and its benefits should be shared with as many people as possible. So really, in an ideal world there might be no billionaires at all.

Here I would like to present an alternative. If you are an intelligent, hard-working person with a lot of talent and the dream of changing the world, what should you be doing with your time? I’ve given this a great deal of thought in planning my own life, and here are the criteria I came up with:

  1. You must be willing and able to commit to doing it despite great obstacles. This is another reason why earning to give doesn’t actually make sense; your heart (or rather, limbic system) won’t be in it. You’ll be miserable, you’ll become discouraged and demoralized by obstacles, and others will surpass you. In principle Wall Street quantitative analysts who make $10 million a year could donate 90% to UNICEF, but they don’t, and you know why? Because the kind of person who is willing and able to exploit and backstab their way to that position is the kind of person who doesn’t give money to UNICEF.
  2. There must be important tasks to be achieved in that discipline. This one is relatively easy to satisfy; I’ll give you a list in a moment of things that could be contributed by a wide variety of fields. Still, it does place some limitations: For one, it rules out the simplest form of earning to give (a more nuanced form might cause you to choose quantum physics over social work because it pays better and is just as productive—but you’re not simply maximizing income to donate). For another, it rules out routine, ordinary jobs that the world needs but don’t make significant breakthroughs. The world needs truck drivers (until robot trucks take off), but there will never be a great world-changing truck driver, because even the world’s greatest truck driver can only carry so much stuff so fast. There are no world-famous secretaries or plumbers. People like to say that these sorts of jobs “change the world in their own way”, which is a nice sentiment, but ultimately it just doesn’t get things done. We didn’t lift ourselves into the Industrial Age by people being really fantastic blacksmiths; we did it by inventing machines that make blacksmiths obsolete. We didn’t rise to the Information Age by people being really good slide-rule calculators; we did it by inventing computers that work a million times as fast as any slide-rule. Maybe not everyone can have this kind of grand world-changing impact; and I certainly agree that you shouldn’t have to in order to live a good life in peace and happiness. But if that’s what you’re hoping to do with your life, there are certain professions that give you a chance of doing so—and certain professions that don’t.
  3. The important tasks must be currently underinvested. There are a lot of very big problems that many people are already working on. If you work on the problems that are trendy, the ones everyone is talking about, your marginal contribution may be very small. On the other hand, you can’t just pick problems at random; many problems are not invested in precisely because they aren’t that important. You need to find problems people aren’t working on but should be—problems that should be the focus of our attention but for one reason or another get ignored. A good example here is to work on pancreatic cancer instead of breast cancer; breast cancer research is drowning in money and really doesn’t need any more; pancreatic cancer kills 2/3 as many people but receives less than 1/6 as much funding. If you want to do cancer research, you should probably be doing pancreatic cancer.
  4. You must have something about you that gives you a comparative—and preferably, absolute—advantage in that field. This is the hardest one to achieve, and it is in fact the reason why most people can’t make world-changing breakthroughs. It is in fact so hard to achieve that it’s difficult to even say you have until you’ve already done something world-changing. You must have something special about you that lets you achieve what others have failed. You must be one of the best in the world. Even as you stand on the shoulders of giants, you must see further—for millions of others stand on those same shoulders and see nothing. If you believe that you have what it takes, you will be called arrogant and naïve; and in many cases you will be. But in a few cases—maybe 1 in 100, maybe even 1 in 1000, you’ll actually be right. Not everyone who believes they can change the world does so, but everyone who changes the world believed they could.

Now, what sort of careers might satisfy all these requirements?

Well, basically any kind of scientific research:

Mathematicians could work on network theory, or nonlinear dynamics (the first step: separating “nonlinear dynamics” into the dozen or so subfields it should actually comprise—as has been remarked, “nonlinear” is a bit like “non-elephant”), or data processing algorithms for our ever-growing morasses of unprocessed computer data.

Physicists could be working on fusion power, or ways to neutralize radioactive waste, or fundamental physics that could one day unlock technologies as exotic as teleportation and faster-than-light travel. They could work on quantum encryption and quantum computing. Or if those are still too applied for your taste, you could work in cosmology and seek to answer some of the deepest, most fundamental questions in human existence.

Chemists could be working on stronger or cheaper materials for infrastructure—the extreme example being space elevators—or technologies to clean up landfills and oceanic pollution. They could work on improved batteries for solar and wind power, or nanotechnology to revolutionize manufacturing.

Biologists could work on any number of diseases, from cancer and diabetes to malaria and antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. They could work on stem-cell research and regenerative medicine, or genetic engineering and body enhancement, or on gerontology and age reversal. Biology is a field with so many important unsolved problems that if you have the stomach for it and the interest in some biological problem, you can’t really go wrong.

Electrical engineers can obviously work on improving the power and performance of computer systems, though I think over the last 20 years or so the marginal benefits of that kind of research have begun to wane. Efforts might be better spent in cybernetics, control systems, or network theory, where considerably more is left uncharted; or in artificial intelligence, where computing power is only the first step.

Mechanical engineers could work on making vehicles safer and cheaper, or building reusable spacecraft, or designing self-constructing or self-repairing infrastructure. They could work on 3D printing and just-in-time manufacturing, scaling it up for whole factories and down for home appliances.

Aerospace engineers could link the world with hypersonic travel, build satellites to provide Internet service to the farthest reaches of the globe, or create interplanetary rockets to colonize Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They could mine asteroids and make previously rare metals ubiquitous. They could build aerial drones for delivery of goods and revolutionize logistics.

Agronomists could work on sustainable farming methods (hint: stop farming meat), invent new strains of crops that are hardier against pests, more nutritious, or higher-yielding; on the other hand a lot of this is already being done, so maybe it’s time to think outside the box and consider what we might do to make our food system more robust against climate change or other catastrophes.

Ecologists will obviously be working on predicting and mitigating the effects of global climate change, but there are a wide variety of ways of doing so. You could focus on ocean acidification, or on desertification, or on fishery depletion, or on carbon emissions. You could work on getting the climate models so precise that they become completely undeniable to anyone but the most dogmatically opposed. You could focus on endangered species and habitat disruption. Ecology is in general so underfunded and undersupported that basically anything you could do in ecology would be beneficial.

Neuroscientists have plenty of things to do as well: Understanding vision, memory, motor control, facial recognition, emotion, decision-making and so on. But one topic in particular is lacking in researchers, and that is the fundamental Hard Problem of consciousness. This one is going to be an uphill battle, and will require a special level of tenacity and perseverance. The problem is so poorly understood it’s difficult to even state clearly, let alone solve. But if you could do it—if you could even make a significant step toward it—it could literally be the greatest achievement in the history of humanity. It is one of the fundamental questions of our existence, the very thing that separates us from inanimate matter, the very thing that makes questions possible in the first place. Understand consciousness and you understand the very thing that makes us human. That achievement is so enormous that it seems almost petty to point out that the revolutionary effects of artificial intelligence would also fall into your lap.

The arts and humanities also have a great deal to contribute, and are woefully underappreciated.

Artists, authors, and musicians all have the potential to make us rethink our place in the world, reconsider and reimagine what we believe and strive for. If physics and engineering can make us better at winning wars, art and literature and remind us why we should never fight them in the first place. The greatest works of art can remind us of our shared humanity, link us all together in a grander civilization that transcends the petty boundaries of culture, geography, or religion. Art can also be timeless in a way nothing else can; most of Aristotle’s science is long-since refuted, but even the Great Pyramid thousands of years before him continues to awe us. (Aristotle is about equidistant chronologically between us and the Great Pyramid.)

Philosophers may not seem like they have much to add—and to be fair, a great deal of what goes on today in metaethics and epistemology doesn’t add much to civilization—but in fact it was Enlightenment philosophy that brought us democracy, the scientific method, and market economics. Today there are still major unsolved problems in ethics—particularly bioethics—that are in need of philosophical research. Technologies like nanotechnology and genetic engineering offer us the promise of enormous benefits, but also the risk of enormous harms; we need philosophers to help us decide how to use these technologies to make our lives better instead of worse. We need to know where to draw the lines between life and death, between justice and cruelty. Literally nothing could be more important than knowing right from wrong.

Now that I have sung the praises of the natural sciences and the humanities, let me now explain why I am a social scientist, and why you probably should be as well.

Psychologists and cognitive scientists obviously have a great deal to give us in the study of mental illness, but they may actually have more to contribute in the study of mental health—in understanding not just what makes us depressed or schizophrenic, but what makes us happy or intelligent. The 21st century may not simply see the end of mental illness, but the rise of a new level of mental prosperity, where being happy, focused, and motivated are matters of course. The revolution that biology has brought to our lives may pale in comparison to the revolution that psychology will bring. On the more social side of things, psychology may allow us to understand nationalism, sectarianism, and the tribal instinct in general, and allow us to finally learn to undermine fanaticism, encourage critical thought, and make people more rational. The benefits of this are almost impossible to overstate: It is our own limited, broken, 90%-or-so heuristic rationality that has brought us from simians to Shakespeare, from gorillas to Godel. To raise that figure to 95% or 99% or 99.9% could be as revolutionary as was whatever evolutionary change first brought us out of the savannah as Australopithecus africanus.

Sociologists and anthropologists will also have a great deal to contribute to this process, as they approach the tribal instinct from the top down. They may be able to tell us how nations are formed and undermined, why some cultures assimilate and others collide. They can work to understand combat bigotry in all its forms, racism, sexism, ethnocentrism. These could be the fields that finally end war, by understanding and correcting the imbalances in human societies that give rise to violent conflict.

Political scientists and public policy researchers can allow us to understand and restructure governments, undermining corruption, reducing inequality, making voting systems more expressive and more transparent. They can search for the keystones of different political systems, finding the weaknesses in democracy to shore up and the weaknesses in autocracy to exploit. They can work toward a true international government, representative of all the world’s people and with the authority and capability to enforce global peace. If the sociologists don’t end war and genocide, perhaps the political scientists can—or more likely they can do it together.

And then, at last, we come to economists. While I certainly work with a lot of ideas from psychology, sociology, and political science, I primarily consider myself an economist. Why is that? Why do I think the most important problems for me—and perhaps everyone—to be working on are fundamentally economic?

Because, above all, economics is broken. The other social sciences are basically on the right track; their theories are still very limited, their models are not very precise, and there are decades of work left to be done, but the core principles upon which they operate are correct. Economics is the field to work in because of criterion 3: Almost all the important problems in economics are underinvested.

Macroeconomics is where we are doing relatively well, and yet the Keynesian models that allowed us to reduce the damage of the Second Depression nonetheless had no power to predict its arrival. While inflation has been at least somewhat tamed, the far worse problem of unemployment has not been resolved or even really understood.

When we get to microeconomics, the neoclassical models are totally defective. Their core assumptions of total rationality and total selfishness are embarrassingly wrong. We have no idea what controls assets prices, or decides credit constraints, or motivates investment decisions. Our models of how people respond to risk are all wrong. We have no formal account of altruism or its limitations. As manufacturing is increasingly automated and work shifts into services, most economic models make no distinction between the two sectors. While finance takes over more and more of our society’s wealth, most formal models of the economy don’t even include a financial sector.

Economic forecasting is no better than chance. The most widely-used asset-pricing model, CAPM, fails completely in empirical tests; its defenders concede this and then have the audacity to declare that it doesn’t matter because the mathematics works. The Black-Scholes derivative-pricing model that caused the Second Depression could easily have been predicted to do so, because it contains a term that assumes normal distributions when we know for a fact that financial markets are fat-tailed; simply put, it claims certain events will never happen that actually occur several times a year.

Worst of all, economics is the field that people listen to. When a psychologist or sociologist says something on television, people say that it sounds interesting and basically ignore it. When an economist says something on television, national policies are shifted accordingly. Austerity exists as national policy in part due to a spreadsheet error by two famous economists.

Keynes already knew this in 1936: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Meanwhile, the problems that economics deals with have a direct influence on the lives of millions of people. Bad economics gives us recessions and depressions; it cripples our industries and siphons off wealth to an increasingly corrupt elite. Bad economics literally starves people: It is because of bad economics that there is still such a thing as world hunger. We have enough food, we have the technology to distribute it—but we don’t have the economic policy to lift people out of poverty so that they can afford to buy it. Bad economics is why we don’t have the funding to cure diabetes or colonize Mars (but we have the funding for oil fracking and aircraft carriers, don’t we?). All of that other scientific research that needs done probably could be done, if the resources of our society were properly distributed and utilized.

This combination of both overwhelming influence, overwhelming importance and overwhelming error makes economics the low-hanging fruit; you don’t even have to be particularly brilliant to have better ideas than most economists (though no doubt it helps if you are). Economics is where we have a whole bunch of important questions that are unanswered—or the answers we have are wrong. (As Will Rogers said, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”)

Thus, rather than tell you go into finance and earn to give, those economists could simply have said: “You should become an economist. You could hardly do worse than we have.”

Is marginal productivity fair?

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2456963 PDT 11:11.

The standard economic equilibrium that is the goal of any neoclassical analysis is based on margins, rather than totals; what matters is not how much you have in all, but how much you get from each new one. This may be easier to understand with specific examples: The price of a product isn’t set by the total utility that you get from using that product; it’s set by the marginal utility that you get from each new unit. The wage of a worker isn’t set by their total value to the company; it’s set by the marginal value they provide with each additional hour of work. Formally, it’s not the value of the function f(x), it’s the derivative of the function, f'(x). (If you don’t know calculus, don’t worry about that last part; it isn’t that important to understand the basic concept.)

This is the standard modern explanation for Adam Smith’s “diamond-water paradox“: Why are diamonds so much more expensive than water, even though water is much more useful? Well, we have plenty of water, so the marginal utility of water isn’t very high; what are you really going to do with that extra liter? But we don’t have a lot of diamonds, so even though diamonds in general aren’t that useful, getting an extra diamond has a lot of benefit. (The units are a bit weird, as George Stigler once used to argue that Smith’s paradox is “meaningless”; but that’s silly. Let’s fix the units at “per kilogram”; a kilogram of diamonds is far, far more expensive than a kilogram of water.)

This explanation is obviously totally wrong, by the way; that’s not why diamonds are expensive. The marginal-utility argument makes sense for cars (or at least ordinary Fords and Toyotas, for reasons you’ll see in a minute), but it doesn’t explain diamonds. Diamonds are expensive for two reasons: First, the absolutely insane monopoly power of the De Beers cartel; as you might imagine, water would be really expensive too if it were also controlled by a single cartel with the power to fix prices and crush competitors. (For awhile De Beers executives had a standing warrant for their arrest in the United States; recently they pled guilty and paid fines—because, as we all know, rich people never go to prison.) And you can clearly see how diamond prices plummeted when the cartel was weakened in the 1980s. But Smith was writing long before DeBeers, and even now that De Beers only controls 40% of the market so we have an oligopoly instead of a monopoly (it’s a step in the right direction I guess), diamonds are still far more expensive than water. The real reason why diamonds are expensive is that diamonds are a Veblen good; you don’t buy diamonds because you actually want to use diamonds (maybe once in awhile, if you want to make a diamond saw or something). You buy diamonds in order to show off how rich you are. And if your goal is to show how rich you are, higher prices are good; you want it to be really expensive, you’re more likely to buy it if it’s really expensive. That’s why the marginal utility argument doesn’t work for Porsches and Ferraris; they’re Veblen goods too. If the price of a Ferrari suddenly dropped to $10,000, people would realize pretty quickly that they are hard to maintain, have very poor suspensions, and get awful gas mileage. It’s not like you can actually drive at 150 mph without getting some serious speeding tickets. (I guess they look nice?) But if the price of a Prius dropped to $10,000, everyone would buy one. For some people diamonds are also a speculation good; they hope to buy them at one price and sell them at a higher price. This is also how most trading in the stock market works, which is why I’m dubious of how well the stock market actually supports real investment. When we’re talking about Veblen goods and speculation goods, the sky is the limit; any price that someone can pay is a price they might sell at.

But all of that is a bit tangential. It’s worth thinking about all the ways that neoclassical theory doesn’t comport with reality, all the cases where price and marginal value become unhinged. But for today I’m going to give the neoclassicists the benefit of the doubt: Suppose it were true. Suppose that markets really were perfectly efficient and everything were priced at its marginal value. Would that even be a good thing?

I tend to focus most of my arguments on why a given part of our economic system deviates from optimal efficiency, because once you can convince economists of that they are immediately willing to try to fix it. But what if we had optimal efficiency? Most economists would say that we’re done, we’ve succeeded, everything is good now. (I am suddenly reminded of the Lego song, “Everything is Awesome.”) This notion is dangerously wrong.

A system could be perfectly efficient and still be horrifically unfair. This is particularly important when we’re talking about labor markets. A diamond or a bottle of water doesn’t have feelings; it doesn’t care what price you sell it at. More importantly it doesn’t have rights. People have feelings; people have rights. (And once again I’m back to Citizens United; a rat is more of a person than any corporation. We should stop calling them “rats” and “fat cats”, for this is an insult to the rodent and feline communities. No, only a human psychopath could ever be quite so corrupt.)

Of course when you sell a product, the person selling it cares how much you pay, but that will either trace back to someone’s labor—and labor markets are still the issue—or it won’t, in which case as far as I’m concerned it really doesn’t matter. If you make money simply by owning things, our society is giving you an enormous gift simply by allowing that capital income to exist; press the issue much more and we’d be well within our rights to confiscate every dime. Unless and until capital ownership is shared across the entire population and we can use it to create a post-scarcity society, capital income will be a necessary evil at best.

So let’s talk about labor markets. If you’ve taken any economics, you have probably seen a great many diagrams like this:

supply_demand2

The red line is labor supply, the blue line is labor demand. At the intersection is our glorious efficient market equilibrium, in this case at 7.5 hours of work per day (the x-axis) and $12.50 an hour (the y-axis). The green line is the wage, $12.50 per hour. But let’s stop and think for a moment about what this diagram really means.

What decides that red labor supply line? Do people just arbitrarily decide that they’re going to work 4 hours a day if they get paid $9 an hour, but 8 hours a day if they get paid $13 an hour? No, this line is meant to represent the marginal real cost of working. It’s the monetized value of your work effort and the opportunity cost of what else you could have been doing with your time. It rises because the more hours you work, the more stress it causes you and the more of your life it takes up. Working 4 hours a day, you probably had that time available anyway. Working 8 hours a day, you can fit it in. Working 12 hours a day, now you have no leisure at all. Working 16 hours a day, now you’re having trouble fitting in basic needs like food and sleep. Working 20 hours a day, you eat at work, you don’t get enough sleep, and you’re going to burn yourself out in no time. Why is it a straight line? Because we assume linear relationships to make the math easier. (No, really; that is literally the only reason. We call them “supply and demand curves” but almost always draw and calculate them as straight lines.)

Now let’s consider the blue labor demand line. Is this how much the “job creators” see fit to bestow upon you? No, it’s the marginal value of productivity. The first hour you work each day, you are focused and comfortable, and you can produce a lot of output. The second hour you’re just a little bit fatigued, so you can produce a bit less. By the time you get to hour 8, you’re exhausted, and producing noticeably less output. And if they pushed you past 16 hours, you’d barely produce anything at all. They multiply the amount of products you produce by the price at which they can sell those products, and that’s their demand for your labor. And once again we assume it’s a straight line just to make the math easier.

From this diagram you can calculate what is called employer surplus and worker surplus. Employer surplus is basically the same thing as profit. (It’s not exactly the same for some wonky technical reasons, but for our purposes they may as well be the same.) Worker surplus is a subtler concept; it’s the amount of money you receive minus the monetized value of your cost of working. So if that first hour of work was really easy and you were willing to do it for anything over $5, we take that $5 as your monetized cost of working (your “marginal willingness-to-accept“). Then if you are being paid $12.50 an hour, we infer that you must have gained $7.50 worth of utility from that exchange. (“$7.50 of utility” is a very weird concept, for reasons I’ll get into more in a later post; but it is actually the standard means of estimating utility in neoclassical economics. That’s one of the things I hope to change, actually.)

When you add these up for all the hours worked, the result becomes an integral, which is a formal mathematical way of saying “the area between those two lines”. In this case they are triangles of equal size, so we can just use the old standby A = 1/2*b*h. The area of each triangle is 1/2*7.5*7.5 = $28.13. From each day you work, you make $28.13 in consumer surplus and your employer makes $28.13 in profit.

And that seems fair, doesn’t it? You split it right down the middle. Both of you are better off than you were, and the economic benefits are shared equally. If this were really how labor markets work, that seems like how things ought to be.

But nothing in the laws of economics says that the two areas need to be equal. We tend to draw them that way out of an aesthetic desire for symmetry. But in general they are not, and in some cases they can be vastly unequal.

This happens if we have wildly different elasticities, which is a formal term for the relative rates of change of two things. An elasticity of labor supply of 1 would mean that for a 1% increase in wage you’re willing to work 1% more hours, while an elasticity of 10 would mean that for a 1% increase in wage you’re willing to work 10% more hours. Elasticities can also be negative; a labor demand elasticity of -1 would mean that for a 1% increase in wage your employer is willing to hire you for 1% fewer hours. In the graph above, the elasticity of labor supply is exactly 1. The elasticity of labor demand varies along the curve, but at the equilibrium it is about -1.6. The fact that the profits are shared equally is related to the fact that these two elasticities are close in magnitude but opposite in sign.

But now consider this equilibrium, in which I’ve raised the labor elasticity to 10. Notice that the wage and number of hours haven’t change; it’s still 7.5 hours at $12.50 per hour. But now the profits are shared quite unequally indeed; while the employer still gets $28.13, the value for the worker is only 1/2*7.5*0.75 = $2.81. In real terms this means we’ve switched from a job that starts off easy but quickly gets harder to a job that is hard to start with but never gets much harder than that.

elastic_supply

On the other hand what if the supply elasticity is only 0.1? Now the worker surplus isn’t even a triangle; it’s a trapezoid. The area of this trapezoid is 6*12.5+1/2*1.5*12.5 = $84.38. This job starts off easy and fun—so much so that you’d do it for free—but then after 6 hours a day it quickly becomes exhausting and you need to stop.

inelastic_supply

If we had to guess what these jobs are, my suggestion is that maybe the first one is a research assistant, the second one is a garbage collector, and the third one is a video game tester. And thus, even though they are paid about the same (I think that’s true in real life? They all make about $15 an hour or $30k a year), we all agree that the video game tester job is better than the research assistant job which is better than the garbage collector job—which is exactly what the worker surplus figures are saying.

What about the demand side? Here’s where it gets really unfair. Going back to our research assistant with a supply elasticity of 1, suppose they’re not really that good a researcher. Their output isn’t wrong, but it’s also not very interesting. They can do the basic statistics, but they aren’t very creative and they don’t have a deep intuition for the subject. This might produce a demand elasticity 10 times larger. The worker surplus remains the same, but the employer surplus is much lower. The triangle has an area 1/2*7.5*0.75 = $2.81.

elastic_demand

Now suppose that they are the best research assistant ever; let’s say we have a young Einstein. Everything he touches turns to gold, but even Einstein needs his beauty sleep (he actually did sleep about 10 hours a day, which is something I’ve always been delighted to have in common with him), so the total number of work hours still caps out at 7.5. It is entirely possible for the wage equilibrium to be exactly the same as it was for the lousy researcher, making the graph look like this:

inelastic_demand

You can’t even see the top of the triangle on this scale; it’s literally off the chart. The worker had a lower bound at zero, but there’s no comparable upper bound. (I suppose you could argue the lower bound shouldn’t be there either, since there are kinds of work you’d be willing to do even if you had to pay to do them—like, well, testing video games.) The top of the triangle is actually at about $90, as it turns out, so the area of employer surplus is 1/2*(90-12.5)*7.5 = $290.63. For every day he works, the company gets almost $300, but Einstein himself only gets $28.13 after you include what it costs him to work. (His gross pay is just wage*hours of course, so that’s $93.75.) The total surplus produced is $318.76. Einstein himself only gets a measly 8.9% of that.

So here we have three research assistants, who have very different levels of productivity, getting the same pay. But isn’t pay supposed to reflect productivity? Sort of; it’s supposed to reflect marginal productivity. Because Einstein gets worn out and produces at the same level as the mediocre researcher after 7.5 hours of work, since that’s where the equilibrium is that’s what they both get paid.

Now maybe Einstein should hold back; he could exercise some monopolistic power over his amazing brain. By only offering to work 4 hours a day, he can force the company to pay him at his marginal productivity for 4 hours a day, which turns out to be $49 an hour. Now he makes a gross pay of $196, with a worker surplus of $171.

monopoly_power

This diagram is a bit harder to read, so let me walk you through it. The light red and blue lines are the same as before. The darker blue line is the marginal revenue per hour for Einstein, once he factors in the fact that working more hours will mean accepting a lower wage. The optimum for him is when that marginal revenue curve crosses his marginal cost curve, which is the red supply curve. That decides how many hours he will work, namely 4. But that’s not the wage he gets; to find that, we move up vertically along the dark red line until we get the company’s demand curve. That tells us what wage the company is willing to pay for the level of marginal productivity Einstein has at 4 hours per day of work—which is the $49 wage he ends up making shown by the dark green line. The lighter lines show what happens if we have a competitive labor market, while the darker lines show what happens if Einstein exercises monopoly power.

The company still does pretty well on this deal; they now make an employer surplus of $82. Now, of the total $253 of economic surplus being made, Einstein takes 69%. It’s his brain, so him taking most of the benefit seems fair.

But you should notice something: This result is inefficient! There’s a whole triangle between 4 and 7.5 hours that nobody is getting; it’s called the deadweight loss. In this case it is $65.76, the difference between the total surplus in the efficient equilibrium and the inefficient equilibrium. In real terms, this means that research doesn’t get done because Einstein held back in order to demand a higher wage. That’s research that should be done—its benefit exceeds its cost—but nobody is doing it. Well now, maybe that doesn’t seem so fair after all. It seems selfish of him to not do research that needs done just so he can get paid more for what he does.

If Einstein has monopoly power, he gets a fair share but the market is inefficient. Removing Einstein’s monopoly power by some sort of regulation would bring us back to efficiency, but it would give most of his share to the company instead. Neither way seems right.

How do we solve this problem? I’m honestly not sure. First of all, we rarely know the actual supply and demand elasticities, and when we do it’s generally after painstaking statistical work to determine the aggregate elasticities, which aren’t even what we’re talking about here. These are individual workers.

Notice that the problem isn’t due to imperfect information; the company knows full well that Einstein is a golden goose, but they aren’t going to pay him any more than they have to.

We could just accept it, I suppose. As long as the productive work gets done, we could shrug our shoulders and not worry about the fact that corporations are capturing most of the value from the hard work of our engineers and scientists. That seems to be the default response, perhaps because it’s the easiest. But it sure doesn’t seem fair to me.

One solution might be for the company to voluntarily pay Einstein more, or offer him some sort of performance bonus. I wouldn’t rule out this possibility entirely, but this would require the company to be unusually magnanimous. This won’t happen at most corporations. It might happen for researchers at a university, where the administrators are fellow academics. Or it might happen to a corporate executive because other corporate executives feel solidarity for their fellow corporate executives.

That sort of solidarity is most likely why competition hasn’t driven down executive salaries. Theoretically shareholders would have an incentive to choose boards of directors who are willing to work for $20 an hour and elect CEOs who are willing to work for $30 an hour; but in practice old rich White guys feel solidarity with other old rich White guys, and even if there isn’t any direct quid pro quo there is still a general sense that because we are “the same kind of people” we should all look out for each other—and that’s how you get $50 million salaries. And then of course there’s the fact that even publicly-traded companies often have a handful of shareholders who control enough of the shares to win any vote.

In some industries, we don’t need to worry about this too much because productivity probably doesn’t really vary that much; just how good can a fry cook truly be? But this is definitely an issue for a lot of scientists and engineers, particularly at entry-level positions. Some scientists are an awful lot better than other scientists, but they still get paid the same.

Much more common however is the case where the costs of working vary. Some people may have few alternatives, so their opportunity cost is low, driving their wage down; but that doesn’t mean they actually deserve a lower wage. Or they may be disabled, making it harder to work long hours; but even though they work so much harder their pay is the same, so their net benefit is much smaller. Even though they aren’t any more productive, it still seems like they should be paid more to compensate them for that extra cost of working. At the other end are people who start in a position of wealth and power; they have a high opportunity cost because they have so many other options, so it may take very high pay to attract them; but why do they deserve to be paid more just because they have more to start with?

Another option would be some sort of redistribution plan, where we tax the people who are getting a larger share and give it to those who are getting a smaller share. The problem here arises in how exactly you arrange the tax. A theoretical “lump sum tax” where we just figure out the right amount of money and say “Person A: Give $217 to person B! No, we won’t tell you why!” would be optimally efficient because there’s no way it can distort markets if nobody sees it coming; but this is not something we can actually do in the real world. (It also seems a bit draconian; the government doesn’t even tax activities, they just demand arbitrary sums of money?) We’d have to tax profits, or sales, or income; and all of these could potentially introduce distortions and make the market less efficient.

We could offer some sort of publicly-funded performance bonus, and for scientists actually we do; it’s called the Nobel Prize. If you are truly the best of the best of the best as Einstein was, you may have a chance at winning the Nobel and getting $1.5 million. But of course that has to be funded somehow, and it only works for the very very top; it doesn’t make much difference to Jane Engineer who is 20% more productive than her colleagues.

I don’t find any of these solutions satisfying. This time I really can’t offer a good solution. But I think it’s important to keep the problem in mind. It’s important to always remember that “efficient” does not mean “fair”, and being paid at marginal productivity isn’t the same as being paid for overall productivity.