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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.
I inhale at the thought of such a dreadful fate. What horror!
Seriously though, most countries already have progressive taxation and a welfare system. Wealth is redistributed from the most capable and luckiest to the less lucky and capable. That already cushions the blow for people who end up poor, regardless of whether that's from poor life choices or poor talent. I think it also serves to shore up social stability aside from moral concerns.
There should be some kind of balance between meritocracy and redistribution which is what I think we appreciate but DeBoer does not:
It looks like he's beginning to believe HBD but is trying to retroactively justify his earlier highly egalitarian beliefs anyway, which leads us disturbingly close to Handicapper-Generals.
The fact that this is such a common reaction is part of why I think that (absent other incentives) middle managers would be undersupplied.
I agree, though of course wealth distribution is a continuous variable, not a discrete one. My view is that as societies become richer they become more and more capable of providing poor people with welfare. This is one of the benefits of being a rich society and part of the argument for why we shouldn't jeopardize the things that drive our societal wealth (though I realize that increasing welfare benefits can hurt that goal; there's some tradeoff and it's not always easy to decide what exactly the best path is).
Good point.
I don't think deBoer believes in HBD per se, but he clearly believes that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability and he has believed this for a while (it's a major part of the premise of his first book). I don't think he's trying to retroactively justify his egalitarian beliefs; I think he really just sincerely thinks it's unfair that people who are kind but stupid will not do great in a meritocratic society and has somehow failed to see the reasons why a meritocratic society might be good despite that.
I thought that believing that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability is believing in HBD, at least insofar as HBD is what people who use the term generally claim it to be and not just a euphemism for emotion-driven racism.
The way that HBD is used around here seems to imply some amount of believing that racial differences in traits like intelligence (1) exist and (2) are significantly heritable. This is an idea that deBoer clearly rejects while still agreeing that on an individual level such differences exist and are significantly heritable. But perhaps I've misunderstood the term.
Would he really disagree with this? It's basic statistics. The sketchy part is attempting to map a distinct population onto some kind of "race". Since our populations are not as isolated as they were five hundred or five thousand years ago, race is a muddy lens today.
It may not be a top-level Zeiss, but it's still got plenty of clarity even if there is some vignetting around the edges. And self-identified race correlates well and robustly to objective measurements.
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