The Questioning Christian

Inequality can be good for society — until it isn't

I'd always accepted the assumption that a certain level of inequality was good for society because it helps to motivate less-well-off individuals to get busy and up their game. But studies seem to suggest that the "machinery" of a sports team, a company, a community, etc., can be thrown out of whack by too much inequality. It sounds like the way that the machinery of the human body can be thrown out of whack by too much salt, too much vitamin D, etc.

Here's an excerpt from a June 5 piece on this subject in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof, What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Fairness:

... Consider baseball: Some teams pay players much more disparately than others do, and one might think that pay inequality creates incentives for better performance and more wins.

In fact, economists have crunched the data and found the opposite is true. Teams with greater equality did much better, perhaps because they were more cohesive.

What’s more, it turned out that even the stars did better when they were on teams with flatter pay. "Higher inequality seemed to undercut the superstar players it was meant to incentivize, which is what you would expect if you believed that the chief effect of pay inequality was to reduce cooperation and team cohesion," Payne notes.

This might well raise doubts whether laissez-faire, libertarian, free-market economics is really the best way to promote human progress.

Breathing, Photosynthesis, and the Continuing Creation

Think about what happened the last time you took a breath, and consider the cosmic machinery that made it possible:

• Within your body, the oxygen that you inhaled got combined with the energy-storing molecules in your food to release energy. That energy was used by your brain, your muscles, etc., to leave the cosmos just a tiny bit different than the way it was before.
• The energy you used to make that cosmic change had to be packed into your food somehow.  As we know from high-school biology, plants stored that energy in the food's constituent molecules, using CO2 from the air and sunlight as "feedstocks" for photosynthesis.
• One of the byproducts of your changing the cosmos was your release of a certain amount of carbon dioxide back into the air when you exhaled.
• Your exhaled CO2 will eventually be recycled by other plants — again using solar-powered photosynthesis — into still more molecules that will show up in foods, building materials, etc.
• Oh, and this:  All those molecules we've been talking about?  Every single molecule on the planet (apart from hydrogen and maybe some of the helium) is composed of atoms from the ashes of one or more exploded stars.
• And those dead stars? They came about as a result of a titanic process that's been in progress for billions of years, starting with the unimaginably-huge release of energy at (what we call) the Big Bang.

So let's sum up:  We humans are part of a very-long-term process by which the energy from the Big Bang is being busily transformed into an ever-evolving universe.  

If we wanted to speculate, we might even call this process a project — a continuing creation — in which we get to participate.

(Inspired by an NPR commentary yesterday by astrophysicist Dr. Adam Frank reminding us of the wonder of photosynthesis.)

Now it's Africa's turn to get new job opportunities for low-skilled workers

This seems like a long-term Good Thing:  Chinese workers' expectations are rising, and so some Chinese manufacturers are starting to export their jobs to Africa, whose poorer workers can certainly use the income and a chance to get a foot on the economic ladder.  Here's an excerpt from a NY Times report:

... Global brands flocked to China to tap into the country’s cheap and willing labor pool.

Today, Chinese workers are less cheap and less willing. More young people are going to college and want office jobs. The blue-collar work force is aging. Long workdays in a factory no longer appeal to those older workers, even with the promise of overtime pay.

* * *

Citing labor costs and the country’s foreign investment push, Huajian is building a sprawling complex of factories, office buildings and a hotel on the southern outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Mr. Zhang’s shoe factories there already have 5,000 employees. ...

(Keith Bradsher, Chinese Maker of Ivanka Trump’s Shoes Looks for Cheaper Labor, NY Times, June 1, 2017.)