Quote from: JoelKatz on July 19, 2011, 05:35:09 PM

Exactly. So why are you obsessively focused on one small factor and ignoring the universe of other much more significant factors? The only explanation I can think of is that you think of progress as a zero sum game and therefore you focus on the cases where X gets something rather than Y. But you are missing the forest for the trees. The world is not a zero sum game, and the important factors are the ones that lift society as a whole. You are obsessed with helping the ditch digger at the expense of the CEO and missing the fact that fact that real progress lifts everyone and that is what you should be focusing on -- how can you lift all of society further and faster.

Congratulations. You've missed the entire point of my argument whilst spotting why I wasn't complaining about the existence of wealth disparity in general. The issue here is not that the ditch digger has more money than the CEO, but that the poor have to justify their money in the eyes of the market in a way that the rich don't. If a ditch digger fails to dig efficiently they'd get the sack, but there's no way of sacking the wealthy if they enrich themselves at the expense of real progress - the only way they can lose their wealth is through gross incompetence. This doesn't really help "lift all of society further and faster". (Edit: Also, there's a lot more opportunity for someone who'd be better at digging ditches to replace someone who's worse at it than for someone who'd be better at investing large sums of money usefully to replace someone that's worse at it.)

CEOs are actually a good example. They can run company after company into the ground through bad management and still leave each job with lots of money, because the other board members that appoint them are also members of the CEO class and in on the take. You've got an entire group of people enriching themselves at the expenses of driving others down.

As an example of the other side of things, I actually have a lot of respect for Warren Buffett. He really does seem to have got where he is by investing money sensibly in a way that benefits society in the long run. Of course, he's not very popular on these forums...