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open-socialism / open-socialism-site

The Open Socialism website
https://opensocialism.com
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Income feedback #54

Open UtopicGreens opened 5 years ago

UtopicGreens commented 5 years ago

Some credits should be set aside to reward people that make valuable contributions to the society with their own innovations according to how useful they were to the society. Just having a maximum salary gap of 5 to 1 doesn't seem equitable enough to incentivize innovative behavior.

AlistairB commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

https://opensocialism.com/open-socialism/arguments/people-will-be-incentivized-to-work is my general take on excessive reward not being necessary.

Also bear in mind a lot of innovation has come out of open source software, such as the linux operating system, where there is little financial reward. A lot of inventions have also come out of university, not business eg the internet was largely invented by various people at universities.

Having said that, it is certainly possible that 5 to 1 is not right. I guess the risk of making such things too high is too many people will focus on innovation as the main way to get ahead, when we probably still need a lot of other sorts of work to be done. Too low and people may just tune out and be disillusioned by their ability to attain reward.

UtopicGreens commented 5 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

The ideal wealth distribution that this video claims Americans want (92% of them) is about 11 to 1. What do you think of that? That seems pretty fair for a Socialist society, at least to me.

AlistairB commented 5 years ago

I think 11 to 1 is quite reasonable. I really don't know what the right ratio is. I think the benefits of increasing the ratio are incentivizing great work by individuals. However, there are diminishing returns to increasing the inequality. Also, the downside is more inequality adds to the classist nature of society and can promote general unhappiness.