(From August 27, 2014)

In dealing with the socioeconomic realm, no factors that determine who we are can ever be truly isolated for examination. Too many things concerning the individual and society are overdetermined, meaning, that a great many things go into making any one thing what it is, and it’s hard to tease out any one factor independent of others. In the last post I did try to isolate a factor of wealth and income determination—and social class—that is seldom discussed. That factor was the historical period into which we were born, over which we obviously have no choice. Now we can try to isolate that single factor (birth era or epoch) in a discussion or treatment but in the real world it is obvious that many more factors go into making a person what they are. One, for example, is the social class into which we are born. We can discuss any one of the social factors, however, all the while acknowledging that many more are present for any individual or social group.

I have thought about the first part of this discussion in my first post. At first could not find any way around the notion that the wealth and income we can earn or deserve in our lifetimes is at least partly determined by the historical period into which we are born. I did, however, come up with what may be a counter-argument.

One way around it is by perhaps by person-to-person comparison. True, we are bound by the development level of our era, but within that era, cannot some earn more in comparison to others? Of course they can. Those persons who claim that they deserve all they have earned could argue that given the available resources of a given historical epoch, today’s for example, they deserve their higher earnings because they worked harder and smarter than others with the same available resources. They are the winners in the competition for scarce resources (note: the economic meaning of scarcity is that really no material goods of any kind are available in infinite supply) and as such to them go the spoils. In fact, any discussion of earning and deserving is by definition comparative, and one might argue that the only fair comparison is among people within your own present, the world we now live and work in. It would not be fair, one could continue argue, to compare individuals with persons of other historical periods for the same reason that I wanted to compare people in the first place: they have no control over when they were born. Why should a comparison be made with someone from a different historical period, past or future? An individual only has the chance to compete with someone in their own lifetime. So the only discussion of earning and deserving that should take place is how they do in competition with their contemporaries. Does this not undermine the entire argument made in the first post? No, I do not think that it does.

For one, the whole argument was based on comparing historical periods and what people are able to earn and accumulate within them. A given level of talent and personal application in the past would lead to less material wealth than a given period in the present. This is still true. Historical periods were being compared, not individuals within a given period. Regardless of the seemingly fair comparison among contemporaries, almost all of them—winners and losers—are materially better off than those in the past. The “winners” of the past therefore, can be worse off with the same level of effort. Since it is not prohibited to discuss or make comparisons of persons or groups of different historical period, in a free country anyway, I am going to do it. And the fact is that different levels of effort, self-application, and talent are historically bound when we make comparisons of what can be earned in order to accumulate personal or private property. Yes, the word earn is by definition only valid in comparison to other persons, but this does not mean that we cannot make comparisons within and across time periods as well as within our own time; those comparisons, or juxtapositions, across time periods will show that people worked harder for less in the past and will probably work less for more in the future. Therefore to ask questions of individual earning and desert in comparison to other human beings—who were and who will be no less human than us—is valid. One’s earnings are indeed at least partially not one’s own doing—it matters when you were born. It also matters where on the globe you were born. That is what I had argued. Even if comparisons of earnings among contemporaries of any historical period are valid—they can be, actually—comparisons across decades or centuries are valid too.

In the next post I plan to conclude this discussion on…comparative earning and deserving across the many decades or centuries…can anybody suggest a short-hand term for what I’m trying to discuss here, whether I’m right or wrong? What are needed are some examples of what I’ve been talking about.

For now, that is all. I am going to dark-sky site to camp, wait for nightfall, and set up my telescope and also wonder if our species—or whatever form we may take—will live on the planets of faraway stars many millennia from now. I hope we do, as long as we don’t kick anybody out or fuck up another planet in doing so.