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Zoulapia

Quote of the Day: Inequality of Wages

Quoth Francois Tremblay

Saying that inequality of capacities must lead to inequality of wages would only make sense if all work was the same, in which case the person with lower capacities should be paid more (for having to do a work more difficult than he can actually do) and the person with higher capacities should be paid less (for having to expand less effort for the same work). But in reality, the variety of work to be done is as great as the variety of capacities that exist in people’s natures. Since people can always find some work that suits them, or is at least proportional to their capacities, inequality of capacities coupled with a proportional inequality of work leads us back to equality of wages.

Succinctly said.

Francois has written an excellent short series of articles on the necessity of equality in society which make a solid case for what I always say in that you cannot have liberty without equality. Make sure you read part 1 and part 2 as well.



Quote of the Day: Scientific Boobytrap

Quoth Michael Greer

There’s a boobytrap hidden inside the scientific method. The fact that you can get some fraction of nature to behave in a certain way under arbitrary conditions in the artificial setting of a laboratory does not mean that nature behaves that way left to herself. If all you want to know is what you can force a given fraction of nature to do, this is well and good, but if you want to understand how the world works, the fact that you can often force nature to conform to your theory is not exactly helpful.

And this is exactly the boobytrap that economics dive into head first. In fact it's even worse than that since economics is not even interested in setting up artificial conditions at all. Rather, they are content to think of fantastical, often impossible examples of societies and then simply build an economic theory from that.