Comment on Rebasing Ethics

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:01:37 GMT

You could certainly make a consistent argument along those lines. To the extent that waiters get consistent tips, this should lead to either one of two outcomes:

1. Their employers will pay them less, correctly reasoning that since their effective income is boosted from an external source, the employer can pay them a lower nominal wage and still attract the same quality of employees.

2. If 1. doesn't happen for whatever reason (e.g. because they're already at the minimum wage), this will effectively push the waiter job into a higher pay grade, leading to job gentrification (i.e. restaurants will hire more competent and expensive employees, and the people currently doing waiting will no longer be qualified for the job).

Tipping might make sense if you did it selectively - if you tipped people proportionally to the quality of the service they gave you personally, and made sure the tip doesn't exceed the gains you got through the better-than-baseline waiting. That would motivate them to produce more positive-sum gains while waiting you, and actually make society better off. But the trick here is the selective rewards, not the tipping.

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