"I can't justify it" a case for Limitarianism

 It's funny sometimes how things that are related pop up together and yet there's no intrinsic necessary connection, or it's that, alerted, a mind notices what it might otherwise have shrugged off. Either way, Chris O'Shea is the head of British Gas (now Centrica) and was given a £4.5m pay deal this year.

“You can’t justify a salary of that size,” O’Shea told BBC Breakfast on Friday. “It’s a huge amount of money; I am incredibly fortunate. I don’t set my own pay; that’s set by our remuneration committee.” (report here)

At least he has the grace to say its 'fortunate' and not try to make out he's super gifted or somesuch. The last post I put up introduced limitarianism, and this report advances the argument a little. One of the things I mentioned was that a big part of such high pay is power. In this case O'Shea disavows that power but it is set by a committee. So the power thing needs some tweaking.

He went on to say,

All of us sitting here on this sofa will make substantially more than £30,000. It’s not for me to set my own pay. It’s not for you to set your own pay.

Typically, such remuneration committees will justify their decisions by talking about "attracting talent" or some kind of idea of "benchmarking" -that is setting pay or bonuses in line with others in the same sort of work. What this reveals, I think, is a kind of oligopolistic mindset. So it is still about power, it's just that the power is diffused but we should notice it is still exercised  on behalf of those who are well paid -normally by people who themselves are well-paid. There're elements of groupthink, arms-length self-justification and a kind of closing ranks, all cloaked in a pseudo-objectivity. Someone in the kind of position that O'Shea is in can be sure that such a committee is going to set pay awards high because they know that the people making it will tacitly benchmark first by their own remuneration (as a baseline) and will be quite untroubled about whether 'the going rate' is actually justified in terms other than a vague sense of 'the market' in CEOs. It's a bit of a vicious circle: they pay high because others pay high and because they can since they hold the purse strings. And if they didn't pay high, what would that say by implication about their own high pay? It's grounded in little more than the idea that the wealthy should be paid wealthily. The fact that a committee makes the disbursement decision does not overcome the mindset they begin with or the power that they have to operationalise it. These are often the same people who are content to pay ordinary workers less than minimum wage if they can get away with it. It's about mindset, notions of value, ideas of 'markets', class solidarity.

To be fair to O'Shea, he claims that he'd turned down previous years' bonuses: it was “the first bonus I’ve taken in my time at Centrica; for a number of years, I’ve given up bonuses because of hardships that customers were facing”. Well, good for him. But ... why accept now? -Apparently he's not forced to have it. Presumably he could insist that they pay him a lesser 'fairer' amount. He could take it and set up a democratic committee to disburse the rest to, say, alleviate poverty -and challenge fellow high earners to do the same with a limitarian narrative. He could challenge the committee to come up with a justification for paying so highly that is grounded in more objective standards related to work: hours, productivity, responsibility ... and ultimately social cohesion. They'd hate it of course, because it'd require them to consider their own wealth accumulation.

I note that much of this is covered briefly in the remarks at the end of the article by someone representing a thinktank called the High Pay Centre,

“... one would expect someone paid such a huge sum to show greater leadership and responsibility and actively challenge the pay-setting process rather than saying he doesn’t deserve it, before shrugging and accepting it anyway. ... how much an executive is paid is rarely aligned with how well their company has served its customers and wider society. Mandating workers on boards would be one step towards ending this culture of rewarding failure.”

It's not just 'rewarding failure' but also over-rewarding effort and ability that many people could actually do. These are not people with superhuman abilities or extraordinary work efforts. There are millions of people with similar abilities and even more millions whose work rates and efforts put these execs to shame but without the power to set their rates their efforts go relatively unrewarded. It is much about power and the class solidarity of the rich.

 

Starting to think about Limitarianism

 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

Poor talkative Christianity and its discontenteds

 I found this informal survey being reported and the result seemed to me to be something really significant. Something that those of us interested in the future of Christian faith probably need to pay attention to.

We recently asked our Upworthy audience on Facebook, "What's something that you really enjoy that other people can't seem to understand?" and over 1,700 people weighed in. ... one answer dominated the list of responses. It came in various wordings, but by far the most common answer to the question was "silent solitude." Here are a few examples:

"Feeling perfectly content, when I’m all alone."

"Being home. Alone. In silence."

"That I enjoy being alone and my soul is at peace in the silence. I don't need to be around others to feel content, and it takes me days to recharge from being overstimulated after having an eventful day surrounded by others."

"Enjoying your own company. Being alone isn’t isolating oneself. It’s intentional peace and healthy… especially for deep feelers/thinkers."

I think this is significant because it sounds like it ought to be something that religious groups and organisations can offer, encourage and nurture. Yet I suspect that this is not how it's perceived. I suspect that Christians and our churches are perceived as rather talkative, noisy and not having much to offer the more contemplative or any real understanding of silence. 

This despite a history replete with silent, hermit-inclined figures and much teaching about the use of silence and the ways of meditation and self-understanding. What we appear to have managed to project to the wider world is rather more 'busy' and social. 

And it is fine to have that, but I can't help feeling that we could do with expressions of church that lead with the contemplative offer and give support to the intentionally solitary or the solitude and quietness that many people clearly crave.

There's a pitfall to this in terms of strategy. Of necessity a huge amount of what this would look like would not make it to the spreadsheets of church statisticians. It probably wouldn't show up directly in church attendance figures or similar measures of 'engagement' in church life. These might well be people, in the main, who would find many of the main services offered by churches to be too distracting and fast-paced, and find the sermons insufficiently reflective or supportive of meditative spirituality. They may well find the over-certain, and over-defined talkative kataphatic style of worship too hard to bear.

Maybe I'm projecting. But if I am, it's from a background of loving that noisy and social Christianity and now finding it doesn't nourish the deepest parts of my soul. I now find relative quiet and dwelling in the slow reflective sort of spiritual practice to be important. I suspect that this informal survey opens a window onto what we should be sharing from the churches in addition to the other offer.

I'd always felt some pull towards the more contemplative, even in my noisier days. And I do still find I can worship among the noisier and more content-driven. However, it seems like the balance has shifted. I do think we need both celebratory and quiet dimensions to our spiritual practice and we each need to find our own balance and be prepared for that balance to shift and its contents to change over time. There's a definite change in the relation to words in worship and reflection. At one point for me the language was important, it pointed me and helped me to home in on God (at least at its best). Now less so, and I'm more aware of how inadequate the words are; that they cannot contain God or the experience of God and God's world. Again, it's a shift of balance not a total dichotomy.

The other thing in that survey that I find interesting is the appearance of ordinary things (and the assumption that others will not understand the attraction). This is another element of contemplative spirituality:paying attention to 'little' and 'ordinary' things, discovering the joy or at least contentment in the mundane and appreciating it. Again, it's not unknown to Christian traditions, just not presented so much or signposted or even valued, it seems. But if we could simply help it to be known that there are Christ-following ways to integrate these appreciations of the ordinary into spiritual practice and awareness, we'd be a lot more use, I suspect.