Dissent Magazine has a fascinating interview with Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, the authors of the new book Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
. The book's argument is well-expressed in this passage on Warren Buffett, who famously asked what his income would have been had he been born in Bangladesh:
For all his gifts, he's telling us that his billions are largely an accident of when and where he was born—that if he were the same person he is today (with the same amount of effort and intelligence) but was born in a poor country or transported back to early America, he would not have the wealth he has today or even a tiny fraction of it. So why then should we think of the wealth he “owns” as entirely, or even largely, his and, therefore, as being immune from other kinds of claims such as social need?
It's not clear how far you want to take this reasoning, but it's a good intervention on the question of whether success is perspiration or inspiration. Alperovitz and Daly are arguing that it's beyond simple luck and effort: It's also the product of our communal inheritance of knowledge, labor, infrastructure, and so forth. When you're asking after a just economic system, then, you have to recognize that that debt must be paid too. They neatly illustrate this by reference to the phenomena of "simultaneous invention."
Popular culture and much of our education promotes a “heroic” view of progress that obscures how most technologies really develop. The heroic view sees progress simply as a sequence of great achievements by extraordinary individuals. It is the view that Albert Einstein rejected when he famously said “many times a day I realize how much my inner and outer life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead.” The reality is much closer to Einstein's view of building on others' labor over a long duration. From transportation, to medicine, to computers, technological progress is much less about isolated “eureka” moments than about recombining existing knowledge in new ways. An individual may hit upon something new that adds to existing knowledge and makes it more effective, but really the key is how the existing knowledge predisposes the individual to look for certain things within a narrow range of possibilities—a condition that makes discovery almost an automatic process over time.This is plainly illustrated in the very common phenomenon of “simultaneous invention,” where two or more people working independently invent or discover the same thing at roughly the same time. So, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time. Or take the telephone. The very day Alexander Graham Bell's lawyer filed for his patent on the telephone in 1876, so did Elisha Gray, and it's possible that the only reason another inventor, Antonio Meucci, didn't beat them both is that he didn't have enough money to file for the patent several years earlier. None of these individuals “invented” the telephone in any strict individualistic sense. Bell's “heroic” contribution was simply that he won the race to obtain legal title to an invention that was about to happen anyway.
The argument that an individual inventor deserves an incredible payday for his unique achievements is somewhat trickier to countenance if his work was not so unique after all. The consideration given to speed should probably be less than the consideration given to unique innovation. On the other hand, speed is worth incentivizing too, and a good economist would argue that the beckoning payday is incentivizing all the inventors, and you can't remove it for one without discouraging them all. But even so, there's probably a midway point between taking incentives seriously and taking the moral case for egalitarianism seriously, and we're not there.
