Economic Rewards and Morality
Question for the day: is it fair to discriminate against stupid people? Case in point: the Colorado Lottery, often described as a “tax on stupid people”, has done good things for the budget of the state. So it’s been good for me – at the cost of making quite a few poor people poorer. Yes, they play the lottery of their own free will – I understand that – but still, is this really fair?
(On a side note, I have all kinds of cynical thoughts about how weird is the anti-tax mentality of our times laying down side-by-side with our love of lotteries, but I’ll save those for another time.)
Turn the question around, somewhat, and it becomes: “Is it fair that intelligent people earn more money than less intelligent people?”
If you have a hard-core, utility-based morality, then the answer is obviously yes. Intelligence lets you be more productive, and more productive people deserve to be paid more. And this answer is also correct in the sense of asking which morality will optimize our economy. You get better economic performance by making rewards correlate with production. Our society benefits greatly by rewarding production.
Let’s apply the question back three hundred years, when the average person was a peasant, and the most important quality to have was not intelligence (although it was never irrelevant) as much as physical strength. Was it fair that stronger people had an economic advantage? In our time, of course, we would not say that one person deserves more than another because he or she is stronger. Do we in the present say that sort of discrimination would have been fair three hundred years ago? Possibly; maybe even probably, but I don’t think we would feel good about it.
I guess a lot of it has to do with the circumstances. If some person A was strong because he/she took care of him/herself, and person B was weak from sitting around all day, getting drunk, and eating marshmallows, then we probably wouldn’t have too many qualms about declaring A more deserving than B. But if the differences were beyond their control, then what?
Beats me. It’s something I wonder about.
(On a side note, I have all kinds of cynical thoughts about how weird is the anti-tax mentality of our times laying down side-by-side with our love of lotteries, but I’ll save those for another time.)
Turn the question around, somewhat, and it becomes: “Is it fair that intelligent people earn more money than less intelligent people?”
If you have a hard-core, utility-based morality, then the answer is obviously yes. Intelligence lets you be more productive, and more productive people deserve to be paid more. And this answer is also correct in the sense of asking which morality will optimize our economy. You get better economic performance by making rewards correlate with production. Our society benefits greatly by rewarding production.
Let’s apply the question back three hundred years, when the average person was a peasant, and the most important quality to have was not intelligence (although it was never irrelevant) as much as physical strength. Was it fair that stronger people had an economic advantage? In our time, of course, we would not say that one person deserves more than another because he or she is stronger. Do we in the present say that sort of discrimination would have been fair three hundred years ago? Possibly; maybe even probably, but I don’t think we would feel good about it.
I guess a lot of it has to do with the circumstances. If some person A was strong because he/she took care of him/herself, and person B was weak from sitting around all day, getting drunk, and eating marshmallows, then we probably wouldn’t have too many qualms about declaring A more deserving than B. But if the differences were beyond their control, then what?
Beats me. It’s something I wonder about.
posted by Jim at
9:59 PM
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