Income Distribution

This mundane, utilitarian process is quite different from the vision of "income distribution" projected by those among the intelligentsia who invest that vision with moral angst.  If there really were some pre-existing body of income or wealth, produced somehow - manna from heaven, as it were - then there would of course be a moral question as to how large a share each member of society should receive.  But wealth is produced.  It does not just exist somehow.  Where millions of individuals are paid according to how much what they produce is valued subjectively by millions of other individuals, it is not at all clear on what basis third parties could say that some goods or services are over-valued or under-valued, that cooking should be valued more or carpentry should be valued less, for example, much less than not working at all is not rewarded enough compared to working. ...

Where people are paid for what the produce, one person’s output can easily be worth a thousand times as much as another person’s output to those who are recipients of that output...

The fact that one person’s productivity may be a thousand times as valuable as another’s does not mean that one person’s merit is a thousand times great as another’s.  Productivity and merit are very different things, though the two things are often confused with one another.  Moreover, an individual’s productivity is affected by innumerable factors besides the efforts of that individual - being born with a great voice being an obvious example.  Being raised in a particular home with a particular set of values and behavior patterns, living in a particular geographic or social environment, merely being b born with a normal brain...can make enormous differences in what a given person is capable of producing.

More fundamentally, third parties are in no position to second-guess the felt value of someone’s productivity to someone else, and it is hard even to conceive how someone’s merit could be judged accurately by another human being who "never walked in his shoes."  An individual raised in terrible home conditions or terrible social conditions may be laudable for having become an average, decent citizen with average work skills as a shoe repairer, while someone raised from birth with every advantage that money and social position can confer may be no more laudable for becoming an eminent brain surgeon.  But that is wholly different from saying that repairing shoes is just as valuable as being able to repair maladies of the brain. ...

If one prefers an economy in which income is divorced from productivity, then the case for that kind of economy needs to be made explicitly.  But that is wholly different from making such a large and fundamental change on the basis of verbal virtuosity in depicting the issue as being simply that of one set of "income distribution" statistics today versus an alternative set of "income distribution" statistics tomorrow.


Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, pp. 50-51