Somewhere along the way, equality of opportunity has been confused with equality of results. Democracy, in theory, creates equality of opportunity. A level playing field, a fair shake. However, democracy cannot guarantee equality of outcome. For instance, giving every citizen one million dollars would be no guarantee of equality of outcome. Thus…
- PERSON A invests their $1 million and makes it $2 million.
- PERSON B squanders their $1 million and goes bankrupt.
Equal opportunity, different outcome.
This is why you can’t force parity.
I was thinking about this recently, not because of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street nonsense, but because of the nixed trade of NBA star Chris Paul to the Lakers. Many experts and fans see this as a blatant attempt by the NBA to force parity. Stung by LeBron Jame’s decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers (small market team w/ no other superstars) for the Miami Heat (big market team w/ other superstars), NBA commissioner David Stern appears determined to spread the love, er, talent around.
Has Stern been brainwashed by the Occupy Movement, or what?
Listen, Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert had LeBron for 7 years. Not only did Gilbert fail to re-sign the star, he never got LeBron any great help. (Antawn Jamison? Really?) Whose fault is that?
- Parity will not help Dan Gilbert be a better owner.
- Parity will not help the Cleveland Cavaliers be a better-coached team.
- Parity will not help Cleveland be a more attractive area for an athlete to play.
- Parity will not, ultimately, guarantee Cleveland any championships.
Hey, I don’t blame LeBron for leaving. With apologies to Ohioans, if you had a choice, would you rather live and work in Miami, Florida (beaches, babes, posh spreads, and bling) or Cleveland, Ohio (beaches, babes, posh spreads, and bling)? That’s what I thought. Cruising in a Lamborghini convertible along South Beach seems a tad better than trolling the shores of Lake Erie.
And, by the way, LeBron still doesn’t have a ring.
This parity thing is over-rated. In truth, Big market teams keep small market teams in business. It works across the board. For instance…
Midlist authors benefit from best-selling authors. Statistics tell us that about 7 out of 10 book titles do not earn back their advance. In turn this means that roughly 30% of the industry is keeping the rest afloat. Which means that authors and genres you don’t like or read are making it possible for you to continue writing and reading.
Parity will not really change how the market works.
Think about it: Would giving the same amount of marketing and promotion to every author increase sales for authors? Possibly. But it still would not guarantee equal outcome. No matter how much you tell me to buy a book, I will still buy what I want. Furthermore, if publishers were forced (which is basically what you’d have to do to implement parity) to spend the same amount on every author, it would actually lead to less money per author and more mediocrity.
Or fewer contracted authors.
A big budget and slick advertising is no guarantee of increased sales. Heck, a $200 million production budget and who knows how many millions in advertising could not prevent The Green Lantern from being one of the biggest flops of 2011. Same is true of the book industry. Just because you throw money at a book does not guarantee it will become a best-seller.
Besides, NOTHING IS STOPPING ME FROM BUSTING MY ASS TO SELL BOOKS.
And that’s what overturns the parity paradigm. Individual achievers. You can start with as level a playing field as you want, but certain people and organizations will always rise to the top. Jerry Buss is just a better owner than Dan Gilbert and no amount of parity will ever change that.
So the Occupy Wall Street folks want to redistribute wealth (which is like me saying that Stephen King should give me a cut of his royalties). Perhaps they should consider that…
Even God does not equally distribute wealth.
Ever heard of The Parable of the Talents? That pesky parable depicts God as distributing different sums of gold to different servants. Then those servants are judged not by how much they have, but — listen — by how well they used what they had. Hello.
Maybe the issue isn’t what we DON’T have, but how we use what we DO have.
Which is why…
- Some kids will always be better students than others.
- Some teams will always make more money than others.
- Some states will always be more popular than others.
- Some businessmen will always make more profits than others.
They are — ahem — the 1%.
There’s a reason why more people live in California than North Dakota. And forcing people to move to North Dakota just to keep things “fair,” is stupid.
Good post, Mike! Socialism will never work.
Except in the New Earth, which is pretty much a socialist utopia.
Not sure it is, Katherine. The Bible seems to teach that believers will be rewarded differently according to their works (II Cor. 5:10, Rev. 22:12), that some will suffer loss of rewards (1 Cor 3:10-15), and that different “crowns” even exist for believers. It might be socialist in the sense that God’s Government will be complete, but not that everyone is completely equal.
Something that I don’t think many people are considering when they support the redistribution of wealth is a global perspective. From what I’ve seen so far, those in the Occupy movement are wanting redistribution because they will get more money, since they’re part of the 99%, and stand to gain from the 1%. Problem: people in United States (and Canada, where I’m from) are among around the 9% richest in the world. If everyone in the Occupy movement were truly serious about redistribution as the way to go for the greatest economic equality, then they can’t just restrict it to their own country or continent, because that would create a disparity of equality. They must be serious about redistribution of wealth for the entire world. If that takes place, then every single person in the Occupy movement will lose money, and lots of it, to make up for the disparity of the entire world. I’m not saying everyone in the movement is selfish or greedy, I’m only wondering how much of the big picture they are taking into consideration when they support what they do.
As for me, I’m entirely comfortable with the fact that the world isn’t fair. Just because something isn’t fair doesn’t mean it’s immoral. After all, if God wanted to be perfectly fair, he would have insisted that we pay for our sins. Instead, he had mercy on us and gave us the chance to have all the good things he intended for us, even if we didn’t deserve them. He’s the one I look to for my example on how to live and treat others. He sees our potential even when we don’t. Just because we start with nothing doesn’t mean we are destined to end up with nothing.
Anyways, those are my thoughts. Your mileage may vary. 🙂
Great thoughts, Thea. Even America’s 99% is in the top 10% of the world’s rich. Perhaps we should consider another slogan for the Occupy Movement: You are the 9%.
Occupy Wall Street is a front movement for a global communist organisation. Many of them do not realise this, however.
The first move is to talk about redistributing the wealth within our borders; subsequent movements will be exactly what you talk about–a global realignment.
With the economic crash, Communist countries like the PRC and Cuba lost a great deal of money from the United States. (Cuba received U.S. trade monies by way of the PRC.) The Communist Party is very invested in going back to their models of forced parity now that they are seeing the downside of Free Trade.
Greetings, Mike. I’m trying to do a better job of blogging, so that is why I have suddenly appeared out of nowhere to pay you a visit. Very interesting post. Yeah, this California kid wants no part of being forced to relocate to…another state.
Have a good week.
-Jimmy
Hah..I just sort of posted about this today, about the CEO-to-lowest-wage-earner in a company:
http://www.jaydinitto.com/?p=3525
But, correct: hyper-egalitarianism requires central planning, which does not achieve the intended goal because of the economic calculation problem. Not to mention that egalitarianism essentially is a non-entity.
Besides that…a free market redistributes wealth anyway, and more justly and more effectively, than any bureaucrat could dream of.
Well said Mike D. You make a great point!
While I agree with you Mike, that some will always be better than others, the OWS movement’s argument is that the sheer level of disparity cannot be adequately explained by ability alone. So I think you kind of misunderstood the point when you referenced them. The truth is that many of the people there are there through problems with the system. I’m not saying everyone should be the same, but the system needs to have more equality of opportunity.
Thanks for commenting, Michael. I’m not sure OWS has an articulate, uniform argument, nor a substitute system to set in place. (Although most of the proposed substitutes veer dangerously close to socialism.) Frankly, there will never be a level playing field, which means some will have to work harder to get to where they want. But that’s what’s great about our country. Nothing is stopping you from working harder. Heck, some of the OWS protesters were squatting for weeks… time they could have spent, um, working.
Yes, but their argument is that the system is rigged, and that even if they did work hard, there are factors beyond their control affecting their situation, keeping them down. While I agree that they don’t have much in the way of substantive outlined principles, most of them who have spoken on the news who aren’t the crazies suggest that they would like to see America move closer to the Scandinavian model, which has a very high level of social mobility.
“…there are factors beyond their control affecting their situation, keeping them down.”
Sorry, I just don’t buy the OWSers overall premise or proposed solutions. Of course, the system is rigged! But it is not so rigged as to keep someone from succeeding if they really want. My wife and I were low income, poverty level, when we were married. I barely graduated high school and did not go to college. We’ve come a long way, but the biggest thing we had to overcome was the sense of victimhood. Blaming the system is an easy way out. Appreciate your thoughts, Michael.
Their argument seems to be that they paid $100K in student loans for degrees in art history and basketweaving and now can’t get a decent job to pay back the loans. No system is fair–this is why Christ had to die for our sins. But sometimes you (i.e. the OWS) have to accept that your actions have consequences.
The “Scandinavian Model” has a lot of forced leave, forced retirement, forced time off. In other words, people get what they want because they force other people to do things they don’t want. The economics of bullying…
Also, I think you need to reconfigure your argument to the OWS protesters. Many of them are unemployed and in the process of looking for jobs. Some of them have since found jobs and continue protesting in their off hours.
I know publishing isn’t as sexy to most people as the Occupy movement, but you have brought up one of my favourite topics–publishing marketing. (who’s a nerd with two thumbs? this girl.)
Yes, most books won’t earn out their advance. But I get so tired of this argument from the New Marketers in the Publishing world. Before they started this new style of guerilla marketing in the mid-90s, a larger percentage of books DID earn out their advances. Because the marketing budget was divided more equally across the entire list.
Say you had a publishing house in 1985. Your marketing budget would pay for a cardboard stander in every Waldenbooks that would hold all your list titles. So all 16 fiction books you released for that quarter would be in one place, getting the same exposure. When that happened, something like 2/3rds of books earned out their advance. However, given the fact that advances were around $5k apiece, that’s not a lot of money for the publisher. You’d have 16 books each quarter selling roughly 50K copies apiece. It’s money, but it’s not BIG money.
So a few years before Harry Potter came out, the publishers started moving toward the current blitz style of marketing. Instead of spending their money advertising the whole list at a basic level, they would pick one book and pour 90% of the marketing dollars into that book. TV ads, full page magazine ads, radio interviews, front placement at bookstores. (If you see a book in the front of a bookstore that costs the publisher a LOT of money.) And of course, the biggest thing of all–buying places on the best-seller list.
I get so angry whenever an author talks about being a New York Times Best Selling Author. That doesn’t mean they’re a great writer. That means that they wrote a book the publisher bought a slot for. List slots are bought by paying for placement in stores and a publishing house second buying the book in lots. (Kat’s Publishing House publishes the book; Kat’s Book Distributors buys 500K copies of the book at a discount and then resells as many of them as she can. Those she can’t resell to Barnes & Noble she sells to book discounters. Or dumps in the recycling. This is how books start off at the top of the NYT bs list.)
So why do they do it this way? Because it’s a gamble, but one that pays off bigger than the old way–more often than not. Instead of 16 books that sell 50K copies apiece (total sales for the quarter=800,000 copies) they have 1 book that sells a million copies. All the other books could sell _no copies at all_ and the publisher is still ahead.
So it’s great the publisher makes money, but it kinda bites if you are one of the other 15 books.
No, you can’t force parity, but it was still nice when publishing houses were run by people who loved books and liked making money. Now that it’s run by people who love money and don’t mind making books….we’re down to this old saw about titles not earning out their advances and authors being made to feel guilty for being treated badly by their houses.