I came across this article recently that explores something I'd recently begun thinking about. In part I was thinking about it because of recent conversations and also the persistent thought that there must be a limit to how much one can spend in a lifetime and perhaps that should inform a policy about how much one should accumulate.
“I contend,” Robeyns argues, “that for people who live in a society with a solid pension system, the ethical limit [on wealth] will be around 1 million pounds, dollars or euros per person.”
This lines up with what I had started out thinking. Partly noting that when I was a kid, being a millionaire was a big thing. No-one was, as far as know /knew a billionaire. It seemed to me that multimillionaires had more than enough for a rather nice looking life in material terms.
A lot of people say: ‘I’ve been thinking this all my life.’
There is even some recognition among some of the ultra wealthy that something must change:
Some, such as the Irish-American billionaire Chuck Feeney, who made his money from a monopoly of duty-free shops at airports, have enjoyed nothing so much as giving all their money away. Mackenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, has been shedding billions of her divorce settlement a year, on the basis that “she is giving it back to [society] where it came from”. Others, such as the entertainment heiress Abigail Disney, or the British-based group “Patriotic Millionaires”, are sympathetic to the fundamentals of Robeyns’s ideas, recognising that “policies that favour the richest are unsustainable”.
All of which reinforces my sense that perhaps we should be talking and thinking about this way more than we do. The thing that I'm most interested in at this point, is the reasons for proposing this and making sure we have a solid basis for making the proposal founded in ethically defensible insights. And I think this bit gets us started on that.
... the idea that any discussion of a limit to wealth must be born out of envy, for example; or that most seductive of all myths, that people somehow deserve the wealth (or poverty) of their lives – that multimillions are made mostly by hard work and talent, not by luck and vast inequalities of opportunity... Despite the fact that “trickle down” economics has long been discredited as an idea, we apparently remain in thrall to the mythology of “wealth creators”
So what sorts of principles would soundly and ethically undergird a limitarian set of policies? Taking the hints above into account. We'd need to have a good sense of 'desert' in relation to wealth 'creation' or accumulation. This would include considerations of 'luck' and social-positionality (aka. systemic factors relating to opportunity). I guess also that the vast multiples in relation to basic wages being gained by the very rich also need to be questioned in relation to the influence power that such wealth buys; it accumulates power because to a large degree wealth is power. In a democracy, we can't ignore this.
However, I think that there are some other fairly fundamental things to pay attention to. Most fundamental of all is to think about how wealth is created and distributed. Another story: when I started work at around 13 years old (part time, I think there was a maximum of 12 hours or so a week we could legally work because we were also at school) I began to think about why it was pay rates were so different. We were told that a different shop further down the mall paid their workers much better (but then their prices were higher too). I became aware that the more senior one was, the more pay people got. But I wasn't entirely sure why. I had gained the impression that hard work was praiseworthy and so I had an idea that hard work ought to be better rewarded. 'Hard' work being work that was physically or mentally more tiring -and that would include longer hours. I came to appreciate that there may be a case for paying someone for responsibility, that is if they had to make decisions which could affect other people's well-being to some degree. I guess that would amount to a form of 'hard work' in terms of emotional labour -especially anxiety.
In the light of such musings, it does feel ridiculous that someone should be paid multiples of many thousands in relation to the lowest paid. It is hard to find some kind of justification in terms of hard work or even rewarding risk or innovation for such differentials. On the other hand, what it does seem that such differentials are 'rewarding' is the holding of power: power to set rates (whether by rent or positional/hierarchical means). However, power is not necessarily fair, and usually is not unless held to account. Obviously, this consideration of pay and reward, shades into thinking about monopolistic power in markets which is a helpful reference point, I suspect.
Relatedly, there is sometimes an argument made to pay higher rates to attract people to do jobs that might be hard to recruit for otherwise. But it seems to me that this manifestly does not work in the case of menial and dirty jobs which are often among the worst paid and I can't really see why a CEO is 'worth' so much more than a sewage worker. In fact, to me, by standards of hard work and slog it seems to me they may be the wrong way round in remuneration. Furthermore, in terms of the anxiety-labour mentioned above, it seems to me that in actual fact, many CEO's are being rewarded for not caring and are in fact rewarded for failure oftentimes: they "fall upward".
I've just sketched out my concerns about concerns regarding reward and pay. I think that a lot of differentials are actually about social and hierarchical power in a way that is fundamentally similar to the power of monopolies or oligopolies to be rate setters in a market. My concern going forward from here, is to consider what kind of basis there might be for limiting the pay and wealth of the richest. It seems to me that this most fundamentally requires a consideration of 'just' 'rewards'. This would also require us to think about what unjust rewards are and how they work -which I've begun to alight on in considering hierarchical power ("controlling the purse strings", in popular saying).
It feels now like this is a kind of introduction. I think that I will try to develop some of these threads a bit further is subsequent posts rather than here.
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PS -as many blogs no longer link to an article or other web address at the title, I think that there's a danger that some readers may not be aware of this former custom that you can click on the title to be taken to the main post or article or page being commented on. In case that's so, the article quoted above at several points can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/how-much-personal-wealth-is-enough-ingrid-robeyns-limitarianism
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