BECAUSE INEQUALITY IS EXCITING, AND YOU WANT TO HEAR MORE ABOUT IT. Today's posts by the mysterious J. Goodrich and "magnificent Mark Schmitt" aptly illustrate why I'm so happy to have them on the site. Mark's effort to refocus the inequality conversation on proper compensation for the work of individuals is a crucial one. I genuinely can't imagine the world view that makes anyone think that, say, an academic making $120,000 a year works 400% harder than a hotel maid flipping 100+ pound Sealy Posturpedic mattresses all day for $30,000 (and no health benefits). It's certainly true society values the work of the academic more, but that's neither here nor there so far as its difficulty. Indeed, that's the issue here: How we, as a society, value certain kinds of work, and how willing we are to override the Magic Market's judgment. It's a pernicious fallacy that a maid's salary is somehow related to the virtue or necessity of the position, rather than its skill level and the supply of labor willing and capable of filling it. As such, there's every reason for a society to rise up and decide that, indeed, the floor for such workers should be higher than the market dictates, or the government should provide dignified and robust benefits the market won't, or we need to in some other way modify compensation to better accord with our beliefs about the dignity of the work and the just desserts of the individual. Meanwhile, I agree with J. that the issue of happiness is neither here nor there so far as inequality is concerned. Folks who want to blunt concern over inequality tend to digress onto unrelated ground, like how much better a low income worker does than his paleolithic forebears, or whether they're "happy." You may think inequality is a problem or you may not. But arguing that the poor aren't much happier than the rich is not particularly relevant to whether liberals should tax all their money away to fund gay marriages among low-income workers. --Ezra Klein