Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for April 30, 2010

One of my son’s friends suggested going across the state line to play slots.

My son’s answer was, they could throw their money out the car windows and not have to drive so far.

I’m so happy my state teaches a work ethic with lotto. If they let you use your credit card, the poor and ignorant could have their huge winnings credited to their bank accounts and credit balances, thereby redistributing the wealth.

Baldo, bienvenidos a la vida!

What Tia Carmen said actually does make sense. It’s a variation on “You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get.” – a fundamental principle of economics, thermodynamics, and science in general.

set a goal, and do your best to reach it

scaaty, but always remember, “Any thing you get for free is worth what you pay for it.”

I think that’s what I just said, hausof7mau. :) But thanks.

I’d (respectfully) disagree both with what Tia Carmen said and some of the comments above. By that argument, you’d conclude that nobody can ever be overpaid nor underpaid. Is a single All-Star athlete of as much importance to society as 1,000 elementary school teachers? If you volunteer your time and energy for a useful cause, is that worthless?

Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime, but now his canvasses sell for millions of dollars. Is the “worth” of Vincent’s labors to be determined by the economic benefits *he* received from their production, or from the profits reaped by others? And although I’m a firm believer in the importance to society of Art and Culture (and Entertainment), the laborers who clean the sewers and pick the crops would be missed a lot more if they disappeared. That they could be more easily replaced, too, accounts for the disparity between their wages and their worth.

Oscar Wilde said “A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”; to treat the value of something as nothing more than the money that can be made off it (or paid out for it) is miss something of fundamental importance.

^Well said, fritzoid.

To once again whip my personal favorite target, if Paris Hilton’s “wealth” depended on her “worth”, she’d have to hope the customers she waited on were generous tippers…

fritzoid said: “I’d (respectfully) disagree both with what Tia Carmen said and some of the comments above. By that argument, you’d conclude that nobody can ever be overpaid nor underpaid. Is a single All-Star athlete of as much importance to society as 1,000 elementary school teachers? If you volunteer your time and energy for a useful cause, is that worthless?”

Oscar Wilde answered your questions already. :) He might have said, “a cynic, or an economist” (yes, I’m an economist by profession) – classical economics is deliberately value-free, and considers only prices. Strictly speaking, given the restrictive assumptions about the free market in classical economics, market prices simply reflect what the market considers to be fair relative values…which simply means that the assumptions of classical economics seldom hold in the real world. From that point of view, if someone is willing to pay an All-Star athlete as much as 1,000 teachers earn, then the one paying is clearly getting what he thinks is his money’s worth, or he wouldn’t do it, and economics has nothing more to say. The problem, of course, is that athletes and school teachers don’t even belong in the same marketplace, for any number of reasons that I won’t bore everyone with.

Taking off my professional hat, of course, I think it stinks. But it is what it is.

In any case, society is still getting what it pays for (1 superstar athlete = 1,000 school teachers) and paying for what it gets (a handful of overpaid, drug-addled superstar athletes, and millions of undereducated kids). An unregulated market can be a nightmare; a centrally-planned economy can be a different nightmare. We live in an imperfect world, friends.

Again, I respectfully disagree. That is to say, I understand your argument, but I reject its applicability to to the strip. When we use the terms “worth” and “deserve”, we certainly can limit their meanings to a monetary context, but (forgive me for saying so), only an economist would be so dismal.

I understand the market forces that allow superstar entertainers to become multimillionaires, but I will not concede that they deserve to make 1,000 times more than an elementary school teacher. Yes, they have put forth a great deal of effort to get where they are, but for each one there are hundreds of people who have put forth equal effort in fields which are not as financially remunerative (yet of far more lasting value; again, I cite Van Gogh).

In a competitive society with limited resources, it is perhaps inevitable that there will be unequal distribution of the spoils, but it does not neccessarily follow that the differences must therefore be inequitable (perhaps even iniquitous). By saying that the wealthy invariably deserve to be rich, it would seem to follow that the poor likewise deserve to be poor. There are people who do not try, certainly, and there are people who try as hard as they can but do not have “what it takes”, but I’ve also seen the difference between a “successful” person and a “failure” come down to connections, or just dumb luck (and the luckiest break anyone will ever get is to have the right parents). (Which leads to the related question of whether those who have inherited their wealth have done anything to “deserve” it.)

I’ve been accused in the past of calling for a completely egalitarian society wherein a brain surgeon and a ditch digger have the same standard of living, provided they work equally hard at their jobs, but I’ve never actually said anything like that, and I certainly don’t believe that. I heartily approve of the profit motive, and those with exceptional and/or unique skills ought to be able to reap the benefits. But the degree of economic disparity in our society is an obscenity to me. That this disparity is the result of market forces, I understand. But I do not see the perpetuation of these economic dynamics to be inevitable, as if attempting to counter them were as futile (or worse, unnatural) as attempting to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics. We live in an imperfect world, I agree. But why can we not work to improve it? I don’t remember the Latin for it, but “It has always been, therefore it will always be” is not sound logic.

That’s just one of the reasons it’s called the “dismal science”, Fritzoid. :)

I honestly think we’re agreeing with each other on the fundamentals: human life as it is, i.e. frequently arbitrary and unfair, is not human life as it ought to be, i.e. fair, just, and compassionate. Our calling as decent human beings – I’m deliberately avoiding religious or theologically moral terminology – is to supply for each other the fairness, justice, and compassion that life fails to. When we fail to do that as individuals, we have to create governments and other institutions to do it for us, and we put up with whatever loss of individual liberties inevitably follows from that. Every reasonable argument that follows is only one of degree, not the real nature of the situation.

“Fair” in this sense is itself a human concept that, I would insist, has no basis in the natural universe – which actually is quite fair on its own terms: if you jump off a building, gravity and height will kill you completely reliably and impartially. :) (Mariners have an old saying: the sea doesn’t care. The wisdom is actually quite ancient.) But insisting that we recognize that that’s the way it is in no way means that I like it, or approve of it, or consider that the (humanly speaking) unfairness of physical reality is not naturally repugnant clear down to the marrow of our bones.

As I suspect you know, C. S. Lewis called on our innate feeling that natural universe should be nicer than it is as an indication that we somehow know, necessarily from some source outside of the natural universe, that the natural universe is not all that there is. Without going into the religious implications, if we carry within us a higher standard of what “ought to be”, we’re obligated to live accordingly, in ourselves and toward each other.

And now, it’s way past my bedtime. :) Good night!

Fritzoid, you may not call for a completely egalitarian society or believe it would be good, but I think (with the knowledge that it will NEVER happen in this imperfect world) that said society would be ideal. Do what you do with all your ability and everyone will be rewarded and happy. As I said, not going to happen, but a nice dream.

Oh, and Joe? From my reading of the situation, Tia Carmen doesn’t say that there will be a million dollar pay-out for Bingo. She says that if you play every week, there is potential to win a million dollars, over time. Can you see that as a possible correct interpretation?

People who use “Life isn’t fair” as a justification for the status quo, rather than an explanation for it, seem to me to be tremendously short-sighted. By the same token, “Life isn’t just”, but that has never prevented human beings from attempting (with greater or lesser degrees of success) from imposing at least an approximation of Justice in our society.

A little over 200 years ago, it was considered unnatural and impossible for human beings to govern themselves without a hereditary King. The hierarchy running from “annointed royalty” to “penniless prole” (or even to slave) was justified as a reflection of the Great Chain of Being, part of not merely the “natural order” but God’s Will. Well, we got rid of that (the vestigial – and limited – monarchies in some European countries notwithstanding). In 2010, we’re still fine-tuning some elements, but on the whole it’s working out well, certainly better than would have been expected by some who said that oligarchies/aristocracies/monarchies were just “The way it is.” Can we not now recognize that we’re heading towards plutocracy, and “That’s just the way it is” is no more an insurmountable obstacle than before? When Jesus said “The poor will be with you always”, perhaps he was stating an unfortunate truth (perhaps not), but must we therefore take it as a Mission Statement?

cutiepie, the reason I don’t call for complete egalitarianism is simply because I also believe that it can never happen. I don’t think Utopia can ever be achieved, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work towards better than what we’ve got. I don’t believe in the perfectability of Man, in part because I can’t imagine what “perfect” Humanity would be. But I believe not only in the capacity for improvement, but that improvement (again, I don’t mean ‘perfection’) is attainable (the optimist in me believes that progress will be achieved, the pessimist believes it must be).

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals…

What is a man If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unus’d.

– William Shakespeare

“There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

– Robert F. Kennedy

The man in the silk suit hurries by, As he catches the poor old lady’s eye Just for fun he says “Get a job.” ”That’s just the way it is,* *Some things will never change.” ”That’s just the way it is,” But don’t you believe it.

– Bruce Hornsby

Who are we to say what can or cannot be achieved, if we choose to attempt it? They certainly cannot be achieved if we are convinced a priori that they are unreachable.

Again, the “laws” of supply and demand aren’t the same as the laws of physics or even the laws of nature. Economics is a science, I’ll grant you that, but it’s a science along the lines of sociology or behavioral psychology. What we reward and what we do not reward, as a society, is a matter of mass opinion. Except for certain industrial uses (which are of recent origin), diamonds are valuable because people have agreed that they are valuable. Supply and demand can be manipulated, and regularly are, both for the public good and for private gain. Even Adam Smith warned against the excesses that go hand in (invisible) hand with free-market capitalism.

fritzoid said: “People who use ‘Life isn’t fair’ as a justification for the status quo, rather than an explanation for it, seem to me to be tremendously short-sighted. By the same token, ‘Life isn’t just’, but that has never prevented human beings from attempting (with greater or lesser degrees of success) from imposing at least an approximation of Justice in our society.”

I agree with you completely – and that was, I think, precisely what I said. We’ve been given a heart, a brain, and free will; if we choose to do no better toward each other than a mindless, indifferent cosmos does toward us, the shame is all ours. (Shakespeare, of course, put it better than either of us…but hey.)

Great minds *do* think alike. :)

As an economist, my greatest source of annoyance is to hear people discuss the merits (and faults) of a free market, without being able to state, if their lives depended on it, what a free market is, what it requires, or what it means. A “free market” is to economics what a “perfect gas” is to classical physics: a simplified approximation of reality that makes the math easier, but that does not exist in nature, and cannot. The molecules in a gas don’t care whether it’s perfect or not, but since economics is a social science and we have a preternatural ability to care about each other, the gap between economic theory and reality should matter to us a great deal. Not to be harsh, but anyone who thinks any theory matters more than a single person’s pain is a damned fool. IMHO.

SCAATY, as you’ve no doubt figured out I’m not an economist, or very much of anything, but I’m a little of lots of things. I’m a polymath (to put a good face on it), or a dabbler (bad face). I’m very often prone to misuse the terminology of a field which is encompassed within the breadth of my interests but to no great depth, so if I’ve misused “free market” I apologize. In High School, my teacher used to talk about “Physics Land”, where the only variables you needed to worry about were the ones you could control, and if that’s what the “Free Market” is (or something like it), then I now have a better understanding.

As you say, we’re probably not so far apart, but what was my primary concern with your first posts (and Tia Carmen’s line) is still unresolved: the idea that what we earn is necessarily what we deserve to earn. If we are obscenely wealthy, then we “deserve” to be so. If we struggle (or even fail) to make ends meet, then we “deserve” our poverty. The Horatio Alger “Work hard, play fair, and you’ll make it to the top” storyline happens often enough in real life that those who already occupy the upper reaches of the ladder can dangle those examples to the huddled masses struggling to get a leg up on the first rung. But if, in Anne Richards’ memorable observation of G.W. Bush, some are “born on third base and think they hit a triple”, there are hundreds of times as many who, because of accident of birth, will never even get a chance to stand at home plate and swing the bat. (I’m not talking about myself; I exist comfortably, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, about the waist or middle of Fortune’s favours, in her secret parts, for she is truly a strumpet.) To say that “What you get is exactly what you deserve” is to render the word “deserve” meaningless. (Although, “Use every man after his desert, and who would ‘scape whipping?” – Hamlet, again.)

“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – Johnny Rotten

“A hungry man is an angry man.” – Bob Marley

I don’t know exactly how to go about it, but if redistribution of wealth does not occur in a peaceful and orderly fashion, it will surely happen in a violent and disorderly fashion.

Interesting fact(oid): Both the Beatles and the Sex Pistols played their last concerts in San Francisco. Beatles, August 29, 1966, Candlestick Park. Sex Pistols, January 14, 1978, Winterland Ballroom.

Of course, the Beatles gave an impromptu “concert” from the roof of Apple in 1970, and the Pistols did reunion tours in the ’90s and ’00s, which is why the above might not be considered an actual “fact” (see “Ink Pen” for 5/1/10).

fritzoid said: “…what was my primary concern with your first posts (and Tia Carmen’s line) is still unresolved: the idea that what we earn is necessarily what we deserve to earn. If we are obscenely wealthy, then we ‘deserve’ to be so. If we struggle (or even fail) to make ends meet, then we ‘deserve’ our poverty.”

I can’t speak for Tia Carmen, of course, but I was pretty careful, I think, not to say that.

“You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get” are valid general principles, all other things being equal – along the lines of “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Something free to you is either worthless to you, or the cost is being borne by someone else for your benefit; and if you end up with something valuable, it will cost you something in some way. (Benefit and cost, of course, may not have to do with money, but may be emotional, psychological, etc. …even an economist would hesitate to say that it all comes down to money!)

The kicker is that all other things are not equal. Some people really are “born on third base”, while others work hard and never have anything but bad luck. Again, many a decent person lives a lonely life because circumstances never brought them together with a partner, while someone who’s a stupid, ugly slug ends up with a supermodel.

Do good people deserve to have bad things happen to them? They happen regardless. That’s the way it is. Life isn’t fair – so we are called to be fair to each other in its place. How we do that as individuals is on us; how we do that as a society is how you start an argument about politics.

You didn’t use Carmen’s words, but you linked them to your own, in your first post:

”What Tia Carmen said [‘You deserve what you get, and you get what you deserve’] actually does make sense. It’s a variation on ‘You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get.’ – a fundamental principle of economics, thermodynamics, and science in general.”

It’s Carmen’s use of the word “deserve” which, however much her phrase might resemble “You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get”, renders her maxim either meaningless or patently false. It may very well be that, in terms of supply and demand, “desert” is irrelevant, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist.

Your first post was also where you equated (perhaps jokingly, perhaps not) economics and thermodynamics. The laws of thermodynamics are not responsive to mass opinion; they can’t be voted down, they can neither be violated nor enforced. “TANSTAAFL”, on the other hand, can be circumvented simply by handing out sandwiches to passersby on the streetcorner. That a cost for the sandwiches (and perhaps an emotional benefit of giving them) must be born by the giver has no bearing on it truly being “free lunch” for the recipients. “You get what you pay for, and you pay for what you get” is circumvented every time somebody short-changes a customer (or even misreads a price tag).

The fact that people are born into different circumstances, and suffer or enjoy life-events over which they have no control, is precisely why it seems to me that “You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get” is not only false but pernicious. It is used by the “haves” against the “have-nots”.

Accidents happen to everybody. On that we certainly agree. In that respect, “Life isn’t fair”. However, the effects of accidents can be mitigated; that’s also certain, and we already have institutionalized ways of doing so (insurance syndicates, for example, where the catastrophic losses of one subscriber are spread out amongst those who likewise risked (but escaped) the same loss). Or simply canned-food drives for natural disaster relief. In that respect, we certainly can make life “fairer” than it is.

Most people would agree, to a certain extent at least, that those who’ve been battered by the fates through no fault of their own (i.e. they got that which they didn’t deserve, they “got” something they didn’t “pay for”) may be given a boost by their fellows without overthrowing the “laws” of economics or nature. Few indeed, however, would be comfortable with the flip side of that coin: those who’ve been favored by the fates (i.e. they got that which they didn’t deserve, they “got” something they didn’t “pay for”) might be required to uplift their fellows without overthrowing the “laws” of economics or nature. But that’s what I’m calling for.

Again, I want to make it clear that I’m not calling for total economic and social levelling. It’s the degree of disparity (“unfairness”, if you will) that is insupportable, not the disparity per se. And of course it will lead to political arguments. And religious arguments, as well. It’s easy to convince someone that they shouldn’t suffer from their own bad luck, but hard to convince them that others shouldn’t either. It’s easy to convince someone that others don’t deserve their good luck, but hard to convince them that they don’t deserve their own. It’s also easy to get people to agree in an ideal (“Wouldn’t it be great if life were fair?), but damned difficult to get them to move towards one, if they’re the ones benefitting from the status quo (“Life isn’t fair, and that suits me just fine”).

Ah…Economics 101. This is going to be fun.

First: as I said, economics is, as such, value-free – anyone with deeply-held values may find this deplorable, but we like to think of it as a science. Science, as a generalization, concerns itself with things as they are, not as they ought to be, which is a matter of personal values and opinions.

Economics seeks to understand and analyze how a society allocates scarce resources among competing purposes. It does not attempt to rationalize or justify any particular distribution of wealth, although anyone may choose to interpret its findings for that purpose. (A sub-specialty, welfare economics, came along later to try to address the latter issue, with mixed results.)

Another point: economics considers how people in the aggregate behave to allocate resources, etc. It does not, strictly speaking, address what individuals do, or what happens to them – it can’t, because what goes on in the individual’s heart and mind is unknowable to an outsider. The most that economics can say is that people, in large numbers or individually, behave as if their inner processes followed certain simple mathematical rules.

I hope it’s clear that any questions of what one “deserves” are simply outside the purview of economics as a discipline. I think that anything we say further on that will be riding the horse into the ground. That may be fun (except for the horse), but we won’t get anywhere further.

Moving on, “deserve” is, itself, a slippery term, and it’s unfortunate that I ever used it in an ambiguous way. It’s slippery because it supposes that we can know what every person, inwardly and outwardly, is, and has done, and is likely to do, and therefore what everyone merits. But that is not humanly possible. (That’s one reason why we’re so strongly enjoined not to judge others.) The most that we can do is treat others as we would want others to treat us, because that’s all that we can know.

And apart from questions of true merit, prescriptions based on our conclusions are hard to enforce. Does a drowning person, whether good or bad, rich or poor, deserve to drown? And yet they may.

This gets to another aspect of economics: it recognizes events only as relatively good or bad, depending on what you have to give up to encourage or prevent them. This concept, of trade-offs and diminishing returns, is a practical one: you only pursue a goal as long as it’s (broadly speaking) worth it.

So even if you can know who deserves what, how far will you insist that society – which is made of mostly of people who will disagree with you – should reasonably go to realize your vision, in the face of recurring bad luck and bad timing afflicting individuals randomly?

These aren’t just issues of semantics or academic abstractions. If you want to prescribe what society should do based on what people deserve, how do know what individuals actually deserve in every set of circumstances? And how far will you insist that society go to make everything right for everybody?

That what someone “deserves” is outside of economics’ purview is precisely why I object to economics being treated as the final authority in the distribution of resources. That defining “desert” is slippery (and I fully acknowledge that it is) is the meat of the nut.

Perfect “fairness” is not attainable, I agree. Neither is perfect justice. But we regularly strive for approximation of the latter, and it seems to me that an approximation of the former would be both possible and beneficial. Exactly how? I don’t know. But if I have three apples, Fred has ten apples, and George has no apples, I’ll give one of my apples to George first, but try to convince (if possible) or strongarm (if neccessary) Fred into coughing up some apples as well. Fred’s going to have a hard time convincing me that this course would be “unfair”.

We can’t have perfect agreement between what people earn and what they deserve. We can’t have perfect fairness. But we have to be able to do better we’re doing now.

We’re instructed to “do unto others…” etc. We’re also enjoined to follow the example of the Good Samaritan, and aid the afflicted regardless of their “desert.” We’re instructed to love our neighbors as ourselves (we’re instructed to love even our enemies). We’re told “As you do unto the least of these my brethren, so you do unto me”. We’re told “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“From those to whom much is given, much will be required.” (Luke 12:48) “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” (Karl Marx)

We ARE our brothers’ keepers.

Yes. We are.

A philosophy comic? Cool! Thanks, EDG.