Do You Deserve Your Income?
Basically no, according to Robert Frank, writing in the New York Times. Luck, not hard work and dedication, determines a lot of people's success in life, he says – citing winner-take-all salary differentials in sports and in music. Yet the one field he and I know the most about is economics. Did Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson win Nobel Prizes because of luck? Not a chance. Frank says childhood environment and genes explain nearly everything – and you didn't choose either one. So if you don't deserve your income, who does deserve it? Frank doesn't say, but he implies that if you don't deserve it, it's okay for the government to grab it.
Economics doesn't answer ethical questions. It does tell us that in efficient systems people receive their marginal product (their contribution to GDP). And if they don't get their marginal product, society as a whole will produce less and consume less. Think North Korea, Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Just one more liberal trying to talk you out of what’s yours.
Answer to your question: Yes, I deserve my income.
Aren’t we entitled to the product of luck? Aren’t gambling casinos based on the premise that the winners are entitled to their winnings and the losers do not, by virtue of their losses, have a claim to the winnings of the winners?
As luck would have it, I happen to have Milton and Rose Friedman’s autobiography sitting here, titled “Two Lucky People.”
Very good, Bart. They did have some luck. But getting a Nobel Prize was not part of it.