If I’m rich it’s because I delayed consumption, allowing others to invest the capital that I had earned. Should we not allow these people some return on their investment?
To be clear, I’m not very sure the answer is yes; but nor do I think it’s clear that ‘wealth’ falls into the category of ‘things that should not influence CEV’, where things like ‘race’, ‘eye colour’ etc. live.
Fair point about delayed gratification, but you may also be rich because your parents were rich, or because you won the lottery, or because you robbed someone. Judging people by their bargaining power conflates all those possible reasons.
If you didn’t delay gratification and had expensive tastes, you’d spend the money quickly, regardless of how you got it.
Even if everyone did have expensive tastes, people who started off with less money would need to delay their gratification more. A very poor person might need to delay gratification an average of 80% of the time, since they couldn’t afford almost anything. A sufficiently rich person might only need to delay gratification 10% of the time without running into financial trouble. So if you wanted to reward delaying of gratification, then on average the poorer that a person was, the more you’d want to reward him
If I’m rich it’s because I delayed consumption, allowing others to invest the capital that I had earned. Should we not allow these people some return on their investment?
To be clear, I’m not very sure the answer is yes; but nor do I think it’s clear that ‘wealth’ falls into the category of ‘things that should not influence CEV’, where things like ‘race’, ‘eye colour’ etc. live.
Fair point about delayed gratification, but you may also be rich because your parents were rich, or because you won the lottery, or because you robbed someone. Judging people by their bargaining power conflates all those possible reasons.
No; if you didn’t delay gratification you’d spend the money quickly, regardless of how you got it.
The funniest counterexample I know is Jefri Bolkiah =)
If you didn’t delay gratification and had expensive tastes, you’d spend the money quickly, regardless of how you got it.
Even if everyone did have expensive tastes, people who started off with less money would need to delay their gratification more. A very poor person might need to delay gratification an average of 80% of the time, since they couldn’t afford almost anything. A sufficiently rich person might only need to delay gratification 10% of the time without running into financial trouble. So if you wanted to reward delaying of gratification, then on average the poorer that a person was, the more you’d want to reward him