The New Yorker 'splains it all.

This is a much less obnoxious article than many that have recently explained to us how the forces of evil inexplicably took over the polling booths last month.  It's nevertheless very nearly as clueless as the rest.  Here is our President's take on the social justice challenges the country faces as automation proceeds on the same track it's been on for the last several hundred years, if not the last several millennia:
[A]t some point, when the problem is not just Uber but driverless Uber, when radiologists are losing their jobs to A.I., then we’re going to have to figure out how do we maintain a cohesive society and a cohesive democracy in which productivity and wealth generation are not automatically linked to how many hours you put in, where the links between production and distribution are broken, in some sense. Because I can sit in my office, do a bunch of stuff, send it out over the Internet, and suddenly I just made a couple of million bucks, and the person who’s looking after my kid while I’m doing that has no leverage to get paid more than ten bucks an hour.”
In other words, the problem with the distribution of wealth in this country is that the people who receive and pay for services with their own money have a different judgment of their worth than the valuation that the smart and virtuous people would like to impose on the rest of us. How else can you explain why some guy who writes popular material enjoyed by millions of people with disposable income can get paid more than someone who provides a straightforward temporary service to a single family that can be pulled off by almost anyone? Why not pay the childcare worker $10 million and the popular author $10? Surely they'd both keep doing their jobs tomorrow and next week, right?  (Not to mention, Mr. President, that if you feel guilty about accepting the $10 million you could always decline it instead of bragging about it.)

Much of the rest of the article bemoans the fact that voters don't have to agree with the smart people any more, as if they ever did.  The President is appalled that certain things can be said publicly now without the speaker's losing any chance of public support.  He can say something like that without reflecting for a moment on how surprised half the country was to find that a man could win the White House after being exposed as the acolyte of Saul Alinsky or the Rev. Wright.  I'm not sure it will ever occur to him that those parallel situations could ever be more than a "false equivalence."

4 comments:

Grim said...

Obama’s mockery of Trump began as early as the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, largely as the result of Trump’s support of the “birther” conspiracy theory, which claims that Obama was born in Africa and so impugns the legitimacy of his office. Into the final stretch of this year’s campaign, moments of serene assurance were plentiful.

I wonder if the Trump Presidency isn't Obama's doing. People have mocked Trump as President since the 1980s -- Bloom County and Doonesbury both had strips about it -- but being mocked to your face as unworthy is provocative.

E Hines said...

...the problem with the distribution of wealth in this country is that the people who receive and pay for services with their own money have a different judgment of their worth than the valuation that the smart and virtuous people would like to impose on the rest of us.

This may misstate the case. It's more that the smart and virtuous see a different valuation per unit of productivity between the poor and the better off. The poor get a unit productivity premium because of their poverty.

It's nearly biblical, really.

Eric Hines

Christopher B said...

I believe that everybody thinks wealth distribution to themselves is justified but finds problems with it both up and down the scale.

Cassandra said...

Well, I don't think wealth distribution to me is justified at all.

We were eligible for all sorts of public assistance when we were first married, but we wouldn't have dreamed of applying for or accepting it. According to someone else's definition, we were "poor".

We didn't feel poor - we felt lucky. And all heck would have frozen over before we ever allowed some outside entity to determine the amount of money we had to live on. What is given can be taken away, and I consider it morally reprehensible for one person to think they have a right to the fruits of another's labor (or even good luck) :p