and later you wrote:
> <snip>...For the most part
> we ought to socialize people into thinking of differential compensation as
> incentives, social engineering. "We have too many lawyers, salaries drop, go
> into teaching, salaries rise." (The reverse of my own course.) It hasn't to
> do with in intrinsic worth of the actitivies, but just how many lawyers vs.
> teachers we need, given how many capable people there are to do these
> things. Of course this would take a big socio-psychological change.
Justin, here's another view of things from the bleachers.
I haven't seen such heresy since Herb Gintis got booted off pen-l for nonchalantly (well, thats probably not quite the right word) suggesting that all the talk about exploitative production and unequal distribution was so much hogwash in the absence of an economic blueprint that might could sustain both a high standard of living and an equitable distribution.
Junk the evolutionary functionalism of Davis & Moore and you have just what you propose: meritocracy with a conscience. You are no doubt corrrect that there's a real consensus over the virtues of differential rewards - from trust-fund trash all the way to the lumpen-lumpenites. But it takes no education, nay even prodding, for them to issue forth the rationale for their favored form of distributive justice: just rewards for effort, incentives to do the effort, both of which culiminate in an undying faith in the workings of competition. And this ethical theory always sits atop a slipper slope that ends in claims about how things work now (and not just what the alternatives might be). So these notions exist very much in context and that context is very much ideological.
In any event, what we don't need more of is socialization along these lines. This is a key ideological support for capitalism, as I'm sure you'd agree, and it is one that manifests itself with even greater intensity among Americans. That people seek out and respond to incentives is a bland enough statement nowadays and one that has considerable enough capitalization to support several disciplines, let alone theories. But separating claims about human psychology and its consequences for a post-capitalism society and the present system we live in - which supplies the context for making those claims in the first place is way too difficult for me.
I honestly don't know how much the value of people's work, especially as expressed in their wages, reflects _productivity_ (which I thought was a settled matter referring to how much - how much more - workers produce of whatever it is management wants them to produce which might be widgets and wazoos or an enthusiastic attitude that whatever the boss says is God's truth), some _functional contribution_ to either everyone's well-being or upper-class twits ability to replace their hot tubs yearly, some _economic return_ on human capital investment, merit, hard work, skill acquisition, educational attainment, the prestige (or lackof) of the means to educational attainment, credentials, the relative privileged or not so of one's social networks connections, or physiological/psychological grounded abilities. Or supply and demand.
But there's also a no small element of capitalist exploitation at work, fashioning the kind of work available, the numbers of jobs available to do the work, and the sorting of who can or will do what jobs. So differential rewards may not necessarily entail exploitation and oppression, but then again I shy away from too much universalizing in my theoretical preferences and prefer to fixate on particular contexts. Put simply, the answers to the questions about the who, what, when, where, and why of work, for example, generally involve a lot of exploitation.
Which is why one needs to be careful in substituting differential for unequal.
DB