Contra Jen Cole Wright re extreme wealth

Jen Cole Wright, a professor of psychology at the College of Charleston, has a piece this week, The moral paradox of extreme wealth: Why people oppose it yet are reluctant to take steps to reduce it, in The Conversation, another online publication seemingly fearful of criticism, as it has disabled comments.

So my comment is here. I’ll keep it short.

Wright starts by confusing wealth (she talks about Elon Musk as a trillionaire) and income (surveys about what people in various positions ought to earn). What people earn for their labor is an entirely different thing from investment value. Wages are the result of market supply and demand for skills, ability, and effort. Investment values are stocks of value, not flows of value. The survey evidence she cites is about pay ratios, yet she uses it to support claims about wealth. Whether a wage is “fair”, independent of supply and demand, has nothing to do with the value of industrial enterprises such as Mr. Musk’s car and rocket factories, and how that value depends on investor decisions. This is not a “moral problem”.

Second, she mischaracterizes “libertarian morality” by claiming it focuses on the degree of harm necessary to justify state intervention. It does not – libertarian morality focuses on who is harmed, not the degree of harm. As J.S. Mill pointed out, the essence of freedom is the ability to make unpopular choices, provided that the consequences fall on the chooser. Individual circumstances differ, and actions that are harmful in some circumstances may be beneficial in others – libertarians allow competent adults to take their own gambles and win or lose accordingly. Per Mill, restrictions are acceptable only to prevent harm to third parties, not to paternalistically prevent adults from taking their own risks.

And she links to Iyer et al, which contradicts her. Iyer did not find libertarians drawing a line at a different degree of harm. It found that libertarians value liberty while showing “weaker endorsement of all other moral principles,” with a more cerebral, less emotional style. That is a different moral architecture, not a difference of calibration.

Probably her most effective argument is that extreme wealth can lead to political power, which may be used to entrench relative positions of wealth. There’s an entire academic field devoted to studying this – Public Choice – of which she seems unaware. To the extent the wealthy persuade voters via media they control, that is because voters are convinced by the arguments made; their votes have not been purchased. If the wealthy instead buy influence with officials, the returns scale with the discretionary favors the state has to sell, and so argues for limitations on government power.

Despite The Conversation’s claimed “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”, they’ve made the cowardly decision to disable comments. I try to do better. I’m sending a link to this post to Professor Wright, and invite her to reply.