The difference between statistical categories and actual people affects moral, as well as empirical,
issues. However concerned we might be about the economic fate of flesh-and-blood human beings,
that is very different from being alarmed or outraged about the fate of statistical categories.
Michael Harrington’s best-selling book The Other America, for example, dramatized income
statistics, lamenting “the anguish” of the poor in America, tens of millions “maimed in body
and spirit” constituting “the shame of the other America,” people “caught in a vicious circle” and
suffering a “warping of the will and spirit that is a consequence of being poor.” But investing
statistical data with moral angst does nothing to establish a connection between a transient
cohort in statistical categories and an enduring class conjured up through verbal virtuosity.
There was a time when such rhetoric might have made some sense in the United States, and there
are other countries where it may still make sense today. But most of those Americans now living
below the official poverty line have possessions once considered part of a middle class standard of
living, just a generation or so ago. As of 2001, three-quarters of Americans with incomes below
the official poverty level had air-conditioning (which only one-third of Americans had in 1971),
97 percent had color television (which fewer than half of Americans had in 1971),
73 percent owned a microwave oven (which fewer than one percent of Americans had in 1971)
and 98 percent of “the poor” had either a videocassette recorder or a DVD player
(which no one had in 1971). In addition, 72 percent of “the poor” owned a motor vehicle.
None of this has done much to change the rhetoric of the intelligentsia, however
much it may reflect changes in the standard of living of Americans in the lower income brackets.
Typical of the mindset of many intellectuals was a book by Andrew Hacker which referred
to the trillions of dollars that become “the personal income of Americans” each year, and said:
“Just how this money is apportioned will be the subject of this book.”
But this money is not apportioned at all. It becomes income through an entirely different
process. The very phrase “income distribution” is tendentious. It starts the economic story
in the middle, with a body of income or wealth existing somehow, leaving only the question as
to how that income or wealth is to be distributed or “apportioned” as Professor Hacker puts it.
In the real world, the situation is quite different. In a market economy, most people
receive income as a result of what they produce, supplying other people with some goods or services
that those people want, even if that service is only labor. Each recipient of these goods and
services pays according to the value which that particular recipient puts on what is received,
choosing among alternative suppliers to find the best combination of price and quality—both
as judged by the individual who is paying. This mundane, utilitarian process is quite different
from the vision of “income distribution” projected by those among the intelligentsia who invest that
vision with moral angst. If there really were some pre-existing body of income or wealth,
produced somehow—manna from heaven, as it were—then there would of course be a moral
question as to how large a share each member of society should receive. But wealth is produced.
It does not just exist somehow. Where millions of individuals are paid according to how much what
they produce is valued subjectively by millions of other individuals, it is not at all clear on what
basis third parties could say that some goods or services are over-valued or under-valued,
that cooking should be valued more or carpentry should be valued less, for example,
much less that not working at all is not rewarded enough compared to working.
Nor is there anything mysterious in the fact that at least a thousand times as many people
would pay to hear Pavarotti sing as would pay to hear the average person sing. Where people
are paid for what they produce, one person’s output can easily be worth a thousand times
as much as another person’s output to those who are the recipients of that output—if only because
thousands more people are interested in receiving some products or services than are interested in
receiving other products and services—or even the same product or service from someone else. For
example, when Tiger Woods left the golf tournament circuit for several months because of an injury,
television audiences for the final round of major tournaments declined by varying amounts,
ranging up to 61 percent. That can translate into millions of dollars’ worth of advertising revenue,
based on the number of television viewers. The fact that one person’s productivity may be a
thousand times as valuable as another’s does not mean that one person’s merit is a thousand times
as great as another’s. Productivity and merit are very different things, though the two things are
often confused with one another. An individual’s productivity is affected by innumerable factors
besides the efforts of that individual—being born with a great voice being an obvious example.
Being raised in a particular home with a particular set of values and behavior patterns,
living in a particular geographic or social environment,
merely being born with a normal brain, rather than a brain damaged during the birth process,
can make enormous differences in what a given person is capable of producing.
Moreover, third parties are in no position to second-guess the felt value of someone’s
productivity to someone else, and it is hard even to conceive how someone’s merit could
be judged accurately by another human being who “never walked in his shoes.” An individual raised
in terrible home conditions or terrible social conditions may be laudable for having become an
average, decent citizen with average work skills as a shoe repairer, while someone raised from
birth with every advantage that money and social position can confer may be no more laudable for
becoming an eminent brain surgeon. But that is wholly different from saying that repairing shoes
is just as valuable to others as being able to repair maladies of the brain. To say that merit
may be the same is not to say that productivity is the same. Nor can we logically or morally ignore
the discrepancy in the relative urgency of those who want their shoes repaired versus those in need
of brain surgery. In other words, it is not a question of simply weighing the interest of one
income recipient versus the interest of another income recipient, while ignoring the vastly
larger number of other people whose well-being depends on what these individuals produce.
If one prefers an economy in which income is divorced from productivity,
then the case for that kind of economy needs to be made explicitly. But that is wholly different
from making such a large and fundamental change on the basis of verbal virtuosity
in depicting the issue as being simply that of one set of “income distribution” statistics today
versus an alternative set of “income distribution” statistics tomorrow. As for the moral question,
whether any given set of human beings can be held responsible for disparities in other people’s
productivity—and consequent earnings—depends on how much control any given set of human
beings has maintained, or can possibly maintain, over the innumerable factors which have led to
existing differences in productivity. Since no human being has control over the past,
and many deeply ingrained cultural differences are a legacy of the past, limitations on what can
be done in the present are limitations on what can be regarded as moral failings by society.
Still less can statistical differences between groups be automatically attributed to “barriers”
created by society. Barriers exist in the real world, just as cancer exists. But acknowledging
that does not mean that all deaths—or even most deaths—can be automatically attributed to cancer
or that most economic differences can be automatically attributed to “barriers,”
however fashionable this latter non sequitur may be in some quarters. Within the constraints
of circumstances, there are things which can be done to make opportunities more widely available,
or to help those whose handicaps are too severe to expect them to utilize whatever opportunities
are already available. In fact, much has already been done and is still being done in a country
like the United States, which leads the world in philanthropy, not only in terms of money but also
in terms of individuals donating their time to philanthropic endeavors. But only by assuming that
everything that has not been done could have been done, disregarding costs and risks,
can individuals or societies be blamed because the real world does not match some vision of
an ideal society. Nor can the discrepancy between the real and the vision of the ideal
be automatically blamed on the existing reality, as if visionaries cannot possibly be mistaken.