The starting line/finish line metaphor is not perfect, but no metaphor is. It does show Friedman's gift for synthesizing big concepts. Precious few people in the liberty movement know how to use the kinds of crystallizing metaphors Milton Friedman did. So the next time you hear someone talk about income inequality, remember the finish line analogy. It helps us unpack the idea that, instead of fretting about who has what, we can ask ourselves how we can better help any given person find the opportunity to be upwardly mobile and to find happiness.
But is it "equality of opportunity" what we're looking for (if we're not looking for equality of outcome)?
Are we going to run out of food, resources and green space? Does trade make one party worse off? Is inequality the root of the world's problems? Is the world going to overheat and cause catastrophe?
Matt Ridley answers these questions and more in the best writing on the relationship between resources, markets and well-being since Julian Simon. What's superb about Ridley's work is that he not only slays the doommongers with flair, but he explains the beautiful processes set in motion by people serving each other creatively.
Here's a great video for the libertarian philosophers among you. The question is: if value is subjective, how can we have a system of objective rights and rules? Aeon Skoble lays it out nicely in this video. And I think for an introduction to the question, this is a tidy talk. I do, however, have some concerns.
The John Locke Foundation's Fergus Hodgson offers perspective on poverty. Some people may be politically offended by how much the rich have in the U.S. But in great swaths of the world, people would go to extraordinary lengths to be in the bottom quartile of earners in developed countries. And they do.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have assembled data they think show inequality -- in and of itself -- causes social problems. The most unavoidable problem with Wilkinson and Pickett’s case is that, when it comes to “the evidence,” they arrive at their conclusions about 'social well being' by comparing aggregated data from different countries.
Thomas Sowell argues that formal education is not for everyone. By contrast, President Obama thinks everybody should go to college. Presidential candidate Rick Santorum suggested Obama's proposal* is a species of "elitist snobbery". Santorum wasn't being very tactful. But he was probably right -- at least if we believe Tom Sowell. Indeed, a lot of smart people are starting to see that higher education is the next bubble -- a bubble that any "college for all" policy would only blow up more.
Are people basically self-interested or basically altruistic? The answer is not so simple. If you get through the ten minute Leavitt and Dubner (Freakonomics) video above, you might ask whether it's better to be altruistic or to seem altrustic -- a question that goes back thousands of years.
Then, you might enjoy this excerpt from an article I wrote in The American magazine on the subject of the Ultimatum Game and wider implications for questions about envy and equality:
Noam Chomsky embodies the problem with progressivism: He confuses the symptoms of state power with the disease. Government power is the problem, after all, because there is no such thing as corporate power without state power. Without the state's favor, you have to be responsible to an army of customers. With a large, powerful state, it's always possible to buy favors. That's a tough thing to swallow if you're worldview is pegged to loathing corporations. But Chomsky has built his own intellectual empire on a notion that gets the causal story precisely backwards.
They're back! Dutch liberty maven Tomasz of Red Shift Media has just created another excellent little animation on the minimum wage. If the title of this post doesn't explain it, the video will. The punchline? The minimum wage is an idea born from good intentions, but the unintended consequences can be pretty devastating. (Consider this on Martin Luther King's birthday.) Who is the most negatively affected by the minimum wage?
