Wim and Platt,
I am going to have to chime in with Platt on this one...
WIM wrote:
The gap
between rich and poor should not be wider than the gap between their effort.
ROG:
You are very intelligent Wim, so it hardly seems necessary to point out the
problems with your equal pay for equal effort model. However, I will take the
bait and state the obvious in the hope of learning something from your
response.
It is not enough to give equal pay for equal effort, because you must also
recognize the physical riskiness of a task, the risk of the task not
accomplishing its objective, the investment required to do the task, the
education and experience necessary to do the task, the task's desirability vs
other tasks, the task's required degree of supervision -- or absence thereof
-- and its impact to influence (a lot more people may want to run Microsoft
and make big decisions than dig ditches) etc, etc.
Even assuming we could collectively figure out how to weigh out or offset the
above factors across millions of varying people and employers across thousand
s of towns and cities, we still face two overwhelming problems. First, we
have left out Quality -- the value of a task. The above system would pay as
much for useless effort as useful -- we would pay as much for someone to move
rocks back and forth all day -- from this pile to that one and back again --
as to work on producing medicine to fight off the Aids virus.
Even assuming you could somehow build in a process to evaluate the value of
everyone's effort, you would still face the even more daunting task of making
your system dynamic, responsive to change, creative and evolutionary. Who's
effort goes to making useful inventions or new techniques? Who decides the
new inventions are now needed? What is it that reallocates the old buggy
whip production efforts to the new auto production efforts? How do we respond
to changing tastes and desires on a local or even individual level?
We are back to a situation where central command can't work. It has never
worked and is incapable of working in any reasonably complex situation. We
need to revert back to a decentralized, distributed control system. In other
words, a complex adaptive system much like what we have in free enterprise
countries today. It ain't perfect, but it is much more dynamic than what I
am reading into your above comment.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, on a macro level, wages actually track extremely
well with productivity. Low wage countries are low productivity countries,
lower wage workers tend to be lower in productivity, etc. And those
countries that have been able to raise the productivity of their work force
have been rewarded in kind.
Rog
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