More on the Deserves

To say a bit more about TheStreet.com's primer for millions, my objection is partially articulated by commenter DivGuy, who writes, "the problem here is that thestreet is creating the conditions for one to believe that people with less wealth, less financial stability, deserve their situation in the same way that the wealthy fundamentally deserve their wealth due to their financial acumen. I find that position ethically indefensible."

My problem goes a bit further: It's economically indefensible as well. To offer one of many possible examples, take this bit on the economic importance of social networks from Malcolm Gladwell's Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg:

The sociologist Mark Granovetter examined this question in his classic 1974 book "Getting a Job." Granovetter interviewed several hundred professional and technical workers from the Boston suburb of Newton, asking them in detail about their employment history. He found that almost fifty-six per cent of those he talked to had found their jobs through a personal connection, about twenty per cent had used formal means (advertisements, headhunters), and another twenty per cent had applied directly.[...]

If you think about the world in this way, the whole project of affirmative action suddenly starts to make a lot more sense. Minority-admissions programs work not because they give black students access to the same superior educational resources as white students, or access to the same rich cultural environment as white students, or any other formal or grandiose vision of engineered equality. They work by giving black students access to the same white students as white students -- by allowing them to make acquaintances outside their own social world and so shortening the chain lengths between them and the best jobs.

Lists like the one at TheStreet.com simply erase social networks from the equation. These networks, which have repeatedly proven utterly critical to economic mobility, are not the products of prudence, or virtue. But they are powerful governing forces in economic life.

But we don't actually think an economy run on the principle of "who you know" is fair, and if we were to conclude that our economy was such a place, and thus the poor and the marginal and the rural and the shy were heavily disadvantaged, we might have to think about how to rectify some of those inequities. By instead pushing the myth that riches come from virtues, that we live in a pure-ish meritocracy, that wealth is the direct product of the puritan work ethic, we assuage that guilt, ignore those questions, and set into motion myths that are bad for public policy. If wealth is deserved, redistribution is immoral. If it is lucked into, redistribution is just. The answer, of course, lies somewhere between the two, but attempts to frame economic mobility entirely or even largely in terms of virtue should be resisted.

Update: From comments, this is pretty funny. Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later.