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Notes -
The Virtue Theory of Money
Recently, Freddie deBoer published an essay called "What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers" complaining about how unfair "equality of opportunity" is. The main point is that since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. It's a little hard to tell exactly what way of distributing resources Freddie would prefer instead, but he seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role. In Freddie's words: "it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control."
I think Freddie's essay is a good example of a misunderstanding about the benefits of equality of opportunity—a misunderstanding I've come to think of as the Virtue Theory of Money. Basically, this is my name for the belief that the main purpose of money is to reward people for being good.
In my experience, many people seem to have some sort of implicit belief that people should be rewarded by society according to how virtuous they are. This takes different forms: some people emphasize hard-work, conscientiousness and so on. Others emphasize the difficulty or social value of the job that someone is doing. For example, some people argue that affirmitive action is bad because it prevents talented, hardworking people from getting the jobs/university spots that they deserve. As another example, some people argue that teachers should be paid more because of how important their jobs are. The labor theory of value also seems to be partially motivated by this idea.
Read in this light, Freddie is basically complaining that talent is not a virtue and so we should not reward people for being talented. (He also seems to believe that the reason talent is not a virtue is because it is influenced by genetics, which is outside our control. I find that idea somewhat incoherent—all sorts of other apparent virtues like generosity or open-mindedness are also influenced by genetics, but that's irrelevant to my main point.)
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
As an example, I believe that the best argument against affirmitive action is not that it personally hurts the individual people denied positions because of it (though I do feel sympathy for them) but because it deprives society of having the most capable people in the most important jobs. The reason that we want to select the most talented people to become doctors is because it's good to have good doctors not because being a doctor is a nice reward for being a top student. Likewise, the best argument for paying teachers more is if doing so would lead to better educational outcomes of enough magnitude to be worth the extra cost. I agree that plenty of teachers (though far from all) are nice, hard-working people who do a demanding job. But again, a job is not supposed to be a reward for being a good person, it's supposed to be a way to get something useful done.
I also think this is a serious issue. Basing hiring decisions and salaries on how virtuous people seem can cause resources to be poorly allocated in a way that hurts everybody. If we followed the Virtue Theory of Money then too many people would want to be teachers (it's already a popular job even without a major salary boost) and not enough would want to be middle managers or accountants. We would have worse doctors, engineers and scientists.
So my main response to Freddie complaining about "equality of opportunity" leading to talented people being rewarded more is: that's exactly the point! We want talented people to be incentivized to apply their talents instead of doing some routine job that almost anyone else can do. Stop trying to use the virtue theory of money and think about the long-term conseuqences of policy decisions.
Now, I do want to add a couple caveats to this. First, I think it's bad to let people suffer a lot when society has sufficient resources to help them. So I think it's reasonable for the government to give some help to people who don't have the ability to get high quality jobs. But I think we should be aware that the government is only able to do this because of how rich our society is and that this wealth depends on incentivizing talented people to use their talents. Second, I do think that there is some value in rewarding people purely for their virtue. I want to live in a society of virtuous people and so I would like virtue to be incentivized even if the economic benefits are not always easy to measure. However, I think this should usually be a secondary concern.
DeBoer, in this essay, does not claim that we should use money to reward people for being good. He claims that we should ensure that even stupid and untalented people still have some minimal level of material comfort. He does not seem to mention anything about them being good or not.
His main point, I think, is that equality of opportunity is not sufficient to bring about a world in which everyone has that minimal level of material comfort. Which, really, is pretty obvious. Maybe there are a few people who have never thought about the matter before or who are extremely ideologically blinkered and so do not realize it but for the rest, DeBoer's essay just states something obviously true. I am not sure why he felt like spelling it out.
Your idea of focusing on better social outcomes is an interesting one, however. It provides some form of justification for allowing practices such as inheritance that are anti-meritocratic. In defense of inheritance, one could argue that letting parents pass on their wealth to their children encourages the parents to work harder and thus leads to better social outcomes overall.
I'm not convinced that his point is this simple. First, stupid and untalented people do have some minimal level of material comfort in every rich country around the world today. You could argue that it's not enough comfort or that it leaves out people who are psychotic (and children of people who are psychotic) or who have other problems much larger than "lack of talent" but then it becomes mostly a question of what is the necessary "minimal level of comfort." Second, and more importantly, I have never, ever heard someone who argues for "equality of opportunity" say that they want stupid/untalented people to not have some minimal level of material comfort. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand the debate about "equality of opportunity" vs "equality of outcome." If this is Freddie's whole point then it's like weighing in on an argument about taxation to say that we shouldn't execute people who don't pay their taxes. It's fighting a complete strawman of a position. Third, deBoer is an avowed socialist, of the pretty-much-a-communist type and I'm not convinced he doesn't favor a pretty radical program of wealth redistribution.
At the very least, he seems to think that most people arguing for equality of opportunity think this. Otherwise it's hard to explain this line: "Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual." My point is that, no, that notion is not at all core to the argument for "equality of opportunity" and also, the best argument for "equality of opportunity" is not really about "justice" in the way that people normally use the word.
I agree that this is a reasonable argument for allowing inheritance (and for not taxing it too heavily). It's also an argument easily overlooked by people too invested in the "virtue theory of money." The children who inherit their parents' money did not do anything virtuous to earn it so (some people think) why should they get it?
So yes, this is true to some degree. But as I mentioned before they are manipulated into' like spending their money on fast food, building credit card debt, financing cars at ruinous interest rates, and you quickly see how it's quite difficult for these people to handle themselves in the modern economy.
Effectively while the poor do have a minimum level of comfort, they need more protection from rapacious capitalists who see them as cattle to be exploited. The underclass are consistently manipulated and coerced into ruining their own lives, and we sit back and do nothing to stop it.
Do you want to make stupid people wards of the state, including having their decisions made by the state? Because that's what it would take to keep them from making bad decisions. You cannot protect them without confining them.
No, as a start I want to stop credit card companies and other financial entities from knowingly pursuing people they don't think will pay them back and will likely struggle with debt. I know that's kind of the business model, but I think it's evil.
We can absolutely do more to protect the consumer - look at the reforms in mortgages after 2008 for instance. It's not a binary where we either take away all the freedom of the underclass or give them maximal freedom. We find a balance between the two.
As long as your laws do not distinguish between stupid people and everyone else, this is basically just making everyone a ward of the state. As long as they don't do that, your "balance" results either in everyone being restricted as is appropriate for the stupid, or the stupid being unprotected from things the not-stupid don't need protection from.
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I am far from convinced that regulators can actually protect stupid people from getting taken advantage of by clever marketing tricks- attempts to prevent alcohol and tobacco advertising to teens have been a dismal failure because alcohol and tobacco companies made ads disguised as psa’s against teen drinking and smoking that were more effective than just running normal ads, for just one example.
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