Focus On The Wielder, Not the Wielded
Every time a shooter pulls a gun nowadays and uses it with lethal force, donations to political organizations dedicated to restricting firearms in some way skyrocket. No one can blame the donors; they see an out-of-control situation and seek a means to staunch the bloodshed
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Does income inequality cause those things, or are those things and income inequality all effects of some other causative factor? Treating a symptom rather than the cause may actually result in a worsening of the cause, and a negative long-term result.
It reminds me of the wage gap between men and women. Many folks are upset by that, and quite a few have proposed legislation that would force companies to pay men and women equally.
The problem, though, is that the gender-based gap is a symptom, not in and of itself a cause. A man and a woman, each with the same educational background, earn about the same amount. The reason that there is a gender gap in wages is because there's a gender gap in education. Mandating equal pay would mean that women were being paid more for less, actually enforcing inequality rather than ending it.
The solution to the problem of wage differences between men and women is not to mandate identical pay, irrespective of educational background, but to work for educational equality between men and women; equal pay will follow suit. We can discuss and debate the best ways to achieve that, but a rational debate cannot exist if we are not discussing the actual cause of the issue.
Does CEO pay actually cause problems, or is it a symptom of some other causal factor? It's pointless to discuss it as a problem to be solved, unless it has actually been identified as such by more than just conjecture and correlation.
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Does CEO pay actually cause problems, or is it a symptom of some other causal factor?
CEO pay is not really the problem, as the authors of The Spirit Level note. Those CEOs were taking advantage of a societal shift that judged what is and is not appropriate compensation, a shift that followed a massive PR campaign questioning the same. (See the Powell Memorandum.)
The problem is the accumulation of wealth at the top. The Spirit Level proposed some conjecture about why the correlation between income inequality (as measured by the GINI coefficient) and various social situations, but did not make any firm and fast declarations about why this is happening. Why? There are no studies, or at least at the time of the publication there were no such studies.
And the problem is the problem because of the incredibly tight correlations between the GINI and the problems. It came as a surprise to the researchers when they first goofed around with the spreadsheet programs and stumbled upon them.
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