Anna, as a general matter, changes in social stigmas tend to be the results of changes in underlying social conditions more than their causes. The vanishing stigma on divorce, illegitimacy, etc., which you mention, is one case in point. To some extent a reduction in the stigma preceded the change in policy (redefining marriage in law from a permanent bond to a meaningless piece of paper) and facilitated it. However, the causation in the other direction was much more powerful. The stigma against divorce declined much more after divorce was redefined in law (as a result of that redefinition) than it did before it (as a cause).
The topic of income disparities is another example. If you want to understand this phenomenon, you have to start with the fact that the aggregate inequality numbers everyone’s freaked out about are really driven by an explosive growth in incomes for a tiny number of people. A combination of very long-term structural and cultural changes (most of them good, such as greater freedom to choose marriage partners and greater educational opportunities) is coming together to dramatically increase both the development and the economic deployment of certain highly specialized human abilities. Most of these gifts fall into one of two categories: various forms of the ability to create and use systems of symbols (such as images, words and mathematical formulae) and various forms of the ability to predict and influence human decisionmaking. A small portion of the population possesses these gifts in extreme measure, and our civilization is getting better and better at helping this population nurture their gifts and put them to good use in ways that (in most cases) bring incalculable benefit to all of us.
No force on earth is going to prevent those people from making very large sums of money. It’s quite simple: The number of people in the world who are capable of doing a good job running Apple or Exxon or Wal-Mart is extremely small; the consequences of those companies being poorly run would be catastrophic for millions of people; therefore the tiny group of people capable of running those companies well is going to command extreme salaries. This would be true regardless of our economic system, law, policy, or what set of moral values predominated in the culture.
While Lindsey is right that hatred of the social outsider did create some stigmatization of the rich during the postwar generation, Krugman’s suggestion that executive salaries were kept in check mostly by fear of stigma is laughable. That generation of executives was magnificently indifferent to public opinion; they bear no resemblance to today’s executives, who grovel before the cameras, cringe at any slightest word that might make them look bad in the press, and offer themselves up as diligent servants to any politician who threatens to make them a public scapegoat. The postwar titans of industry didn’t care what you thought of their salaries.
Executive salaries were kept in check during that time mostly because the executives were much less capable. They weren’t worth paying as much. If you doubt it, consider the fact that almost all the dominant industries of that era are now either extinct or lining up for endless government bailouts, primarily as a result of poor decisionmaking by their executives during the postwar generation.
To the extent that high salaries are being stigmatized now, that represents not the return of an old stigma (well, not primarily that) but the introduction of something new. It’s a response to a new situation in the underlying social structure—the emergence of an overclass of extreme achievers. The Occupy Wall Street response was unhelpful, but they were not wrong to percieve that society is now run by people who don’t seem to be part of the same culture they are, and who therefore may not share their values or have an interest in their well-being.
All this is expertly canvassed in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and anyone who’s worried about the problem of the new overclass should read that book.
February 21st, 2013 | 11:24 am
What about the saying of Jesus that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven? Was that just hyperbole? Or do we count those of us who can afford an Internet connection, a computer, cable tv, and so on as rich?
February 21st, 2013 | 11:39 am
The issue here is income, not accumulation. As far as I know, even the minority of theologians who take a very “strong” reading of that camel-through-the-eye passage (i.e. they hold that it forbids us to be wealthy) interpret it to mean that you aren’t allowed to accumulate wealth. You can definitely make as much money as you can, as long as you give it away as fast as you make it. In fact, they typically prefer that you make more money, so you’ll have more to give away! That approach is confirmed by the numerous other passages admonishing us to work hard and do honest labor so that we’ll have something to share with others (see for example Ephesians 4:28). John Wesley, for example, was one of the strongest proponents of the “strong” reading of this passage, and the motto he’s famous for is “work all you can, save all you can, give all you can.”
February 21st, 2013 | 1:12 pm
And even on the “strong” reading of the passage, it is a warning to the rich man to look to the danger to his own soul; it is not a license for others to despise him for his wealth. That is the sin of envy, regardless of how sinful the rich man might also be.
February 21st, 2013 | 1:19 pm
“It’s quite simple: The number of people in the world who are capable of doing a good job running Apple or Exxon or Wal-Mart is extremely small”
You’re taking outlier cases to prove a point about about executive compensation. This is a weak argument.
Yes. Very few people have the ability to run the world’s largest corporations. This does not alter the fact that executives in average companies and corporations are getting compensated well above their staff even though their expertise, education, and product knowledge is often much less critical to productivity. This is the the typical executive. This is not Tim Cook, but Tim Jones who runs an organization with less than 500 employees and cuts jobs and outsources labor while in order to cut costs by maintains a salary many times his average staff.
Tim Jones is typically not a superstar. He usually didn’t create any product. He is a business school graduate with an MBA who has moved up the corporate ladder typically by changing from company to company often switching fields, because the actual product doesn’t matter as much as maintaining dramatically high rates of profitability regardless of the effect of those rates on employees.
I am not at all convinced that these executives deserve the level of compensation that they receive.
February 21st, 2013 | 1:19 pm
Well, pentamom, one could morally oppose his accumulation of wealth without despising him or envying him for it. Hate the sin, love the sinner and all that.
Personally I think accumulations of wealth are godly when they’re well stewarded, but you can disagree with that position without necessarily falling into pride or envy.
February 21st, 2013 | 1:22 pm
Petro, leaving aside all the other issues raised by your sweeping generalizations, my main response is that the Tim Joneses of the world are not the ones driving the big income inequality statistics that people like Paul Krugman are freaking out about. The Tim Joneses of the world may or may not “deserve” their salaries (that’s a longer discussion) but their salaries are just not what Krugman and those folks are talking about.
February 21st, 2013 | 2:33 pm
“The Tim Joneses of the world may or may not “deserve” their salaries (that’s a longer discussion) but their salaries are just not what Krugman and those folks are talking about.”
This is false. While Krugman uses well-known CEOs in his examples, the article is really about this:
“For at least the past 15 years it has been hard to deny the evidence for growing inequality in the United States. Census data clearly show a rising share of income going to the top 20 percent of families, and within that top 20 percent to the top 5 percent, with a declining share going to families in the middle. Nonetheless, denial of that evidence is a sizable, well-financed industry.”
Nowhere does Krugman specify that he is only talking about the CEOs of the largest corporations. He does mention them as part of the introduction to the article in reference to those well-known CEOs, but the economic data following covers a far wider group who are continuing to rise and create greater inequality.
He goes on to say:
“The C.B.O. study found that between 1979 and 1997, the after-tax incomes of the top 1 percent of families rose 157 percent, compared with only a 10 percent gain for families near the middle of the income distribution”
The incomes of the 1% start at $386,000 dollars. The average income of the 99%–99.9% is $717,000.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html
You are restricting your analysis to a very specific group at the top of the chain. Although Krugman does point out the disproportionally of growth continues as you continue to move up the ladder, he regularly uses the 1% in the article.
This points the finger at the executives that I mention. The 99.0%–99.9% group makes, on average, three times that of the 90%–99% and twenty times the bottom 90%. And, while the 1%, which…
February 21st, 2013 | 2:57 pm
FYI on cut-off comments on this thread: As recently noted here, we cannot allow multiple-part comments. If a commenter would like us to delete a cut-off comment and instead submit a version that fits, please just note that in the second version that you submit.
February 21st, 2013 | 3:08 pm
“Well, pentamom, one could morally oppose his accumulation of wealth without despising him or envying him for it. Hate the sin, love the sinner and all that.”
Yes, you could. But that is not precisely what I see going on in our current situation. I see a kind of stigmatizing that amounts to despising. In fact, whether or not it ought to be possible, I can’t think of any situation in which a society has managed to broadly stigmatize an undesirable behavior without it turning into most people feeling justified in despising those who do it. Single motherhood would be a good example — there have always been those who have sought to have compassion for those in such situations, but generally speaking social stigma has equaled a fairly bitter social condemnation and a perceived license to despise unwed mothers.
I don’t at all mean to suggest that therefore we shouldn’t take a negative position toward that which is clearly immoral, but it seems to me that it gets pretty tricky to justify “social stigma” without justifying some sort of uncharitable behavior, which is just as forbidden as the sin we want to criticize. I think there is an important distinction between strongly denouncing sins, and encouraging public deprecation of all particular sinners.
February 21st, 2013 | 8:16 pm
“The number of people in the world who are capable of doing a good job running Apple or Exxon or Wal-Mart is extremely small”
In fact, it is probably much smaller than the number of companies… my observation, as someone who has worked for large company for many years, is that many executives have NO IDEA how to really run a company… they come in, change the org chart around to make it look like they’re doing something, and then move on to the next position after 2-3 years, before anyone can tell whether the changes they made were a good thing or not. But we are stuck paying these fakes the same big salaries as all the other guys, most of which are largely unjustified, or unable to be justified because you can’t judge the real performance after only 2-3 years.
February 22nd, 2013 | 11:55 am
Why single out executives? What about sports figures and movie stars, some of whom have incomes at least as high as top executives. Sure, they’re talented and, sure their time to earn big money is often limited, but you don’t seem to hear the same level of criticism from the usual suspects. How come?
February 22nd, 2013 | 2:12 pm
@David Nickol
Keep reading a verse or two. With men it is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
You bring up a good point about what it takes to be rich. Simply being born in America is like hitting the lottery. Very few in the US would have much of a leg to stand if they claim not to be rich if they are judged not by NYC or SFO standards, but by world standards–much less the standards of history, in which no generation that has ever lived has had it so easy materially.
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