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Jorg's avatar
Feb 3Edited

A tricky problem, indeed. But perhaps that not only cannot be solved but should not be. Why should anyone truly care about whether or not the proper amount of redistribution is either known or achieved.

Your examples are in line with my experience. I was born in a poor rural (mostly tenant -- we owned a small acreage) farm family. We had a small but adequate house, made lots of our own clothing, had plenty of good food (that we mostly raised ourselves) and plenty of love.

The rest of my family moved into the lower middle class (second from bottom quintile income) well after I left for military service.

I got married and got into that same second quintile, never got into the middle quintile.

Then I got divorced and rapidly fell into the bottom quintile again, but did gain some acquaintance with, let's say, the gray labor market.

Met a girl, went to grad school with her, remained in the bottom quintile for nearly a decade, then armed with advanced degrees we each got nice professional jobs and moved from the bottom quintile to the top in one step over a two year period.

We spent 25 years in the top quintile, occasionally in the top 10 percent, lived frugally, invested well, and now are comfortably upper middle class. How the heck to you map such a journey that both makes sense and says anything about redistribution?

Anyway, redistribution is now essentially pushed by Marxists and other Leftists who use it as a cudgel to try to beat the average American into feeling guilty enough to allow thenselves to be overtaxed in order to satisfy the lust for power that underlies all Leftist regimes.

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Mr. Doolittle's avatar

"The simplest is the change over time in the value of different abilities. Being physically strong is still useful in some jobs but less valuable and in fewer than it was a century or more ago."

I believe that physical strength is just as good and likely much better than it was a century ago. Time and labor saving machines are significantly better than they were 100 years ago. A single coal miner can operate an underground mining system pulling many tons of coal out per shift, compared to a guy with a pick doing backbreaking labor producing far less in previous eras.

The difference is that intellectual labor has gotten much much more valuable with time.

Physical labor has an essentially static level of value. That's not to say that every laborer is equally capable or efficient, but in the big picture of the economy, it's relatively safe to assume that one laborer is approximately equal to another. These values are also necessarily low.

Let's make up some numbers to show what I mean. Say that a laborer can produce between 1 and 10 units of work in a day. That's a huge variation! That would mean some laborers are worth 10 times as much as another! A force multiplier for labor (such as a shovel or a backhoe) can also increase the amount of productivity, maybe making one person 2-10X more productive than otherwise - big differences!

But the CEO may make a decision on a phone call at lunch that determines the outcome of 10,000 units of work (which is a very small thing at a company with 100,000 employees, one tenth of one day's output - that CEO should work harder!).

Intellectual labor is a force multiplier. One guy with an Excel program and an email account can affect many multiples of what a laborer can even theoretically do. An accountant can be worth hundreds of individual workers fairly easily by moving a few numbers around in the right direction (for instance, by lowering the taxable income of the company by a few million dollars).

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