Hollywood actors can bring home paychecks as astounding as $50 million dollars! We all know this. Pro-league sports stars can also bring in paychecks larger than you can accurately imagine, as Mr. Mankiw pointed out to the NY Times. Does this fact make you mad? Does it strike you as a great injustice? Does it make you want to take to the streets in protest?
Well... yeah. Sort of, yeah, Mr. Mankiw. Yes. It does make me mad. These celebrities have talent, this is true. And I am not against their being compensated for their skills. However, there comes a point when compensation become gluttony.Robert Downy Jr. and LeBron James are not the only people in the world with talent. But the way our system is set up, they are the only ones who profit from their skills. Are they the best? In the case of James, maybe. But Robert Downy ain't the best actor. Acting is not so as objective as that. He's just the one who was chosen to be Iron Man. He's just the one who was born with his look, and his string of lucky coincidences which led to being Iron Man on the silver screen.
That's all it takes, sometimes. Luck. We live in a world where a shitty video game from the year 2000 (or earlier) can be repackaged with classically designed, Mario-esque graphics and characters, worse game-play, and make $50,000 a day on advertising. Not on actually doing anything valuable. On advertising. Which, in a modern context, is a lot more synonymous with brainwashing than with edification.
Now, Flappy Bird can go on to support the careers of a lot of writers, discussing what this means. (answer: nothing. People are kinda dumb (granted). Dumb games on phones can be wonderful ways to waste time (obvious). Advertisers spend way to much money on nothing (but no one believes it).)
And while Drew Brees (the Saints) makes $40 a year, Alfred Morris (running back, Washington Redskins) makes only $510,000. Which, while a lot, is at least an understandable amount of money (when I say 'understandable', I mean you can comprehend how much 500 thousand is. 40 million is conceptually beyond the human imagination.) Alfred Morris is still a phenomenal football player. He plays for the NFL. And he is still important to this lucrative entertainment. But he's one of those who might have trouble coping with his medical bills 20 years after he retires. Kobe Bryant can make $30 million a year, but Mario West only pulls in $20,103. The MLB has a minimum salary of $480,000 in 2012; and A-Rod (whom, I'm told, hasn't done shit for several seasons... I don't know. I don't care about sports) made $30 million.
Perhaps in a society which understood the need for a little wealth re-distribution (a necessary for the historical-social science of anthropology), it would be more acceptable for someone to bring home a few million dollars a year. But in our world, where wealth is kept, forever, and it becomes part of a persons intrinsic value: yes, it makes me mad. I don't know who Mankiw talks to, who is unperturbed by the loot an actor, musician, or athlete can haul in so quickly, but they are not in my circle. If economics were truly a science, then we would all know that correlation is not causation (lesson one) and just because you observe something in your world does not make it a common experience (lesson two). That is what studies and data are for. There are 7 billion people on this ball of rock. More than anyone can comprehend. And sometimes they travel in like-minded groups. So we don't always get good communication with people who are different from us. It seems quite probable that the Internet is making this worse because you can peruse only the news that you want to hear.
Mankiw goes on to explain all this flooy about massive corporations and companies overseeing billions of dollars and the risks inherent in the financial market. I will preempt that discussion with my assumption that monopolies and big, giant groups are worse for us all, over all, than having a diverse ecosystem of smaller and local companies. Communities. Steve Jobs has helped Apple make billions and billions of dollars as a tech company. But Apple is a childish company who doesn't like to share. Apple wants everyone to be Apple, which might be ok if everyone wanted to be Apple. But there are huge numbers of people who really, really don't want to be Apple and I can't blame them. The rise of the iPhone is kind of a let down to anyone who doesn't want an iPhone. It makes everyone else's life (and yours...) kinda a little bit more difficult. Is it valuable to our society? Well, those who live on their iToy's will emphatically argue yes. But I wonder. With every creation, there is also destruction. What have we lost? Sometimes there is immense, and calculated, value in the commons. Which is slowly being eroded away by a focus on profit margins and stocks. Really just financial bullshit that keeps our lopsided and blindfolded economy hurtling along like an asteroid. Or inflating like a thin water balloon...
I can't say that Gregory Mankiw is not paying attention. But I must wonder what his motives are. Betting on the rich is a lot like betting on government. Socialism tends to fail because it concentrates power into the hands of a few, which is what our monopoly market system is doing over here. It's not at all different.Edward R. Morrison
scholar and activist
primary email: Edward.Morrison@WesternAlum.Org
phone: 720-480-6197
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Effect: Change
On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 11:17 AM, Edward R Morrison <edward.morrison@westernalum.org> wrote:
Can the Wealthy be THAT Deserving?
Well... yeah. Sort of, yeah, Mr. Mankiw. Yes. It does make me mad. These celebrities have talent, this is true. And I am not against their being compensated for their skills. However, there comes a point when compensation become gluttony.
Hollywood actors can bring home paychecks as astounding as $50 million dollars! We all know this. Pro-league sports stars can also bring in paychecks larger than you can accurately imagine, as Mr. Mankiw pointed out to the NY Times. Does this fact make you mad? Does it strike you as a great injustice? Does it make you want to take to the streets in protest?
Robert Downy Jr. and LeBron James are not the only people in the world with talent. But the way our system is set up, they are the only ones who profit from their skills. Are they the best? In the case of James, maybe. But Robert Downy ain't the best actor. Acting is not so as objective as that. He's just the one who was chosen to be Iron Man. He's just the one who was born with his look, and his string of lucky coincidences which led to being Iron Man on the silver screen.
That's all it takes, sometimes. Luck. We live in a world where a shitty video game from the year 2000 (or earlier) can be repackaged with classically designed, Mario-esque graphics and characters, worse game-play, and make $50,000 a day on advertising. Not on actually doing anything valuable. On advertising. Which, in a modern context, is a lot more synonymous with brainwashing than with edification.
Now, Flappy Bird can go on to support the careers of a lot of writers, discussing what this means. (answer: nothing. People are kinda dumb (granted). Dumb games on phones can be wonderful ways to waste time (obvious). Advertisers spend way to much money on nothing (but no one believes it).)
And while Drew Brees (the Saints) makes $40 a year, Alfred Morris (running back, Washington Redskins) makes only $510,000. Which, while a lot, is at least an understandable amount of money (when I say 'understandable', I mean you can comprehend how much 500 thousand is. 40 million is conceptually beyond the human imagination.) Alfred Morris is still a phenomenal football player. He plays for the NFL. And he is still important to this lucrative entertainment. But he's one of those who might have trouble coping with his medical bills 20 years after he retires. Kobe Bryant can make $30 million a year, but Mario West only pulls in $20,103. The MLB has a minimum salary of $480,000 in 2012; and A-Rod (whom, I'm told, hasn't done shit for several seasons... I don't know. I don't care about sports) made $30 million.
Perhaps in a society which understood the need for a little wealth re-distribution (a necessary for the historical-social science of anthropology), it would be more acceptable for someone to bring home a few million dollars a year. But in our world, where wealth is kept, forever, and it becomes part of a persons intrinsic value: yes, it makes me mad. I don't know who Mankiw talks to, who is unperturbed by the loot an actor, musician, or athlete can haul in so quickly, but they are not in my circle. If economics were truly a science, then we would all know that correlation is not causation (lesson one) and just because you observe something in your world does not make it a common experience (lesson two). That is what studies and data are for. There are 7 billion people on this ball of rock. More than anyone can comprehend. And sometimes they travel in like-minded groups. So we don't always get good communication with people who are different from us. It seems quite probable that the Internet is making this worse because you can peruse only the news that you want to hear.
Mankiw goes on to explain all this flooy about massive corporations and companies overseeing billions of dollars and the risks inherent in the financial market. I will preempt that discussion with my assumption that monopolies and big, giant groups are worse for us all, over all, than having a diverse ecosystem of smaller and local companies. Communities. Steve Jobs has helped Apple make billions and billions of dollars as a tech company. But Apple is a childish company who doesn't like to share. Apple wants everyone to be Apple, which might be ok if everyone wanted to be Apple. But there are huge numbers of people who really, really don't want to be Apple and I can't blame them. The rise of the iPhone is kind of a let down to anyone who doesn't want an iPhone. It makes everyone else's life (and yours...) kinda a little bit more difficult. Is it valuable to our society? Well, those who live on their iToy's will emphatically argue yes. But I wonder. With every creation, there is also destruction. What have we lost? Sometimes there is immense, and calculated, value in the commons. Which is slowly being eroded away by a focus on profit margins and stocks. Really just financial bullshit that keeps our lopsided and blindfolded economy hurtling along like an asteroid. Or inflating like a thin water balloon...
I can't say that Gregory Mankiw is not paying attention. But I must wonder what his motives are. Betting on the rich is a lot like betting on government. Socialism tends to fail because it concentrates power into the hands of a few, which is what our monopoly market system is doing over here. It's not at all different.
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