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Lumifer comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
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I've got a couple things to say here.
Most of us really are income satisficers, not income optimizers. That is, if you offered me a $350k/year salary to do my current job (grad-student), I would end up distributing most of that money to charity. Not that charity isn't great, but you could have just given the money to charity yourself instead of taking the wasteful intermediate step of paying me.
Why is this true? Because we train ourselves to make it true: frugality is a large component of financial responsibility. For instance, I'm so used to living at a grad-student's standard of living that money above and beyond the cost of that standard of living is pure luxury: I spend it on frivolous bullshit or put it in my retirement account. I'm fairly sure I'm the only 24-year-old grad-student with a Roth IRA topped-up for 2012-2014, and this is because when I got extra money, it went into the retirement account rather than towards consumption, or even towards extra charity.
HOWEVER (yes, the capital letters are justified there), there is an IMMENSE component of class privilege in this whole subject. I am literally the only person I know with this much money at my age who isn't working for a tech company! Other grad-students have far less money, and everyone who didn't major in Computer Science from my undergrad is semi-impoverished and has student loans to pay off.
And then we talk about the people who came from such systematic disadvantage that they never even got to the point of a university education in a potentially lucrative upper-middle class field in the first place. There are millions of such people, far more than there are of us computery types, even if we restrict ourselves to only consider First World countries. Income inequality is high, in some places higher than it ever has been, and rising all across the developed capitalist world. Public support for things like medicine, housing, and education is falling, with the result that people are finding themselves having to dip deeper and deeper into their private funds just to make it through life.
If we want to talk about how money is awesome, we should also be talking about how to make sure that people who aren't like us actually get some of it. I mean it: no amount of Tumblry "checking our privilege" is actually going to make the people who work in, say, our favorite food trucks or hole-in-the-wall falafel joints, anywhere near as wealthy as us. We'll need to actually exercise our intelligence for that.
"Some" of it they generally do. But if you're going for equality, do note that people are usually paid for the value they produce and that individuals' capability to produce value differs GREATLY. Even if you control for things like socio-economic status.
I half-agree. I'm actually starting to believe that factors like trade, industrial policy, and public regulation of economic rents and public goods (take the preceding concepts apolitically, for the moment, please) have more to do with our current economic crises than any notion of individual "merit". That's not to say there's no such thing, merely that in particular, policies regarding trade, industry, and economic rent seem like much stiffer variables than the relatively loose factors of individual work-ethic or education, or even things like national work-hours.
For instance, a country that exports large amounts of capital-intensive goods while strongly regulating its financial sector (say, current day Australia or Germany) seems to be able to afford uneducated individuals, expensive social programs, or short work hours much more easily than a country that theoretically has higher per-hour productivity but suffers a trade deficit and has largely financialized its economy (say, current day America or the UK).
What we end up with is that America and the UK suffer massive income inequality, while Australia and Germany are more equal and stable -- even though they're all First World countries with their own top-level educational institutions, labor expertise, and companies. A theory which treats macroeconomic policy as a stiffer (more strongly predictive) variable than individual/company-level merit therefore seems more likely.
I don't understand what do you mean -- I can't see any connection between "individual merit" (and by "merit" do you mean the productive value of a person?) and current economic crises.
I don't understand that either. It's not that, say, Germany can afford a more generous welfare system than the US -- after all per-capita GDP is higher in US than in Germany -- it's just that Germany chooses to reallocate more of the wealth produced in this way.
Equality isn't a good yardstick -- the old USSR had much more equality than any Western country. And I don't see the stability you're talking about. Stable in which sense?
Some might say that exactly that is the problem. (Not necessarily myself.)
To these people I would point out the difference between reality and various imaginary universes one can construct.
Is that a new version of the is-ought fallacy?
Kinda. It's really more of a confusion between what the world is and what you would like it to be.
do note that people are usually paid for the value they produce and that individuals' capability to produce value differs GREATLY
That's true, but I still care about people who don't produce much value, and I don't like to see them being impoverished and miserable.
Sure. Nobody says you have to not care about less productive people.
So redistribute some of your value to them.