Wealth and Excess
I agree with Rachel on the point that nobody with extraordinary talent should be constrained simply because other people aren’t performing at his or her level. However, I think that the issue of “making suitable assignment of initial endowments” (i.e., initial allocation of resources in society) is more complicated than moving the starting blocks so that everyone ends up in exactly the same place.
To cross the finish line holding hands is not exactly a suitable arrangement for American society. For almost all of us, there will always be someone who is paid more, lives in a nicer neighborhood, a bigger house or whose title holds more prestige than our own. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. It’s important for a healthy society to recognize greatness and motivate excellence. I don’t think many Americans would be able to function efficiently in a world without leaders and bosses, but I don’t think those leaders and bosses should be honored or paid in excess, while their followers and employees go completely unrecognized and can hardly pay for their groceries.
It’s the excess in our society that bothers me when it comes to allocation of wealth and resources. It’s not about stripping America’s wealthiest of all the assets they’ve accumulated over generations and plopping them down in a 3-bedroom colonial with the rest of middle-class America. That would make the wealthiest Americans very unhappy, I imagine. Pareto improvements are supposed to make others better off without diminishing anyone else’s satisfaction. However, because of our culture of rampant consumption and excess, I think so many people have a horribly skewed vision of what makes them unhappy. I think that, realistically, many of the wealthiest families in America could stand to pay a lot more taxes and not suffer terribly crippling lifestyle changes.
An awesome little video that explains our culture of excess and the resulting mindset is Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff.
