Yeah, of course you're right... I don't know what I was thinking.... :)

By that standard, there are probably dozens or even hundreds of employees who should be paid top dollar at a given company. Many if not most workers at companies are specialists at what they do, and without them, the company probably would not be able to function.

Most businesses don't tend to hire a lot of interchangeable nobodies with no expectation that they have or will ever have skills that would be important to the function of the company -- except maybe for really crappy entry-level positions that require no training or experience. Everybody else in the company has a good chance of serving some function -- otherwise, why bother employing them?

Actually, several recent studies (like this one) seem to suggest that larger salaries and benefits may actually HURT a company's chances of getting a valuable CEO.

Yeah, actually the CEOs, like heads of federal government organizations, tend NOT to be fired because they're "not good enough." They get fired because bad stuff happens. It doesn't really matter if they are responsible when the company fails to perform -- it could be a bad economy or a bad business to begin with or crappy products or actual bad management at the top... if the business does bad enough, the CEO takes the blame.

That's pretty much the CEO's job: make random decisions and take the blame for really big problems (even when it's not his fault).

I'm not at all saying that there aren't good CEOs out there. But I think you're vastly overestimating how important their talents are compared to other people at companies. If you start reading around in some recent studies on this stuff, you'll find some folks who understand randomness and probability noting that claiming that CEOs largely get promoted or hired or fired according to random whims of the economy. Yes, they can make really terrible decisions or really good ones, but often those are mostly just lucky. And if they're lucky, they get promoted or hired at an even bigger company, if they aren't, they get fired.

It's mostly the mid-level management folks where you tend to find a sprinkling of real talent that is driving the company forward on an everyday basis. CEOs with exorbitant salaries are just a fixture in companies because we think we need them. I think the jury is actually out about whether that's the best form of governance for successful companies -- in many cases, you'd probably be just as good choosing any random CEO at that level (or maybe even just putting a magic 8-ball at the helm).

It isn't. But excessive income inequality can be.

History is full of examples, like feudalism. Basically, really concentrated money tends to go with really concentrated power, and that rarely ends up well for the poor people.

Yeah, the only people who say that are truly crazy extreme egalitarians, not the majority of political and economic theorists.

Very few people talk about taking "the difference" and redistributing things until we're all equal. In such a situation, there's no incentive for anyone to work harder or do better than anyone else, and thus innovation fails. This is bad for everyone, but especially the poor, who tend to benefit the most from continued improvements in overall infrastructure, standard everyday access to things that lead to a better quality of life, etc.

One of the more popular formulations in political theory is John Rawls's "difference principle" (or "Maximin" principle). In Rawls's formulation of Justice as Fairness, he discusses two primary criteria for a just society: (1) basic liberty, and (2) basic equality. The second does not imply that everyone has equal outcomes, but rather incorporates two additional elements: (1) equal opportunity for everyone, and (2) inequality will not lead to degradation of the worst-off (this is the "difference principle").

There's a lot to the theory, but the basic idea is that allowing some inequality gives an incentive for innovation and hard work and in general improving society overall, which will include benefits for the poorest members.

But at some point, the additional accumulation of wealth among the richest will stop raising the standard of living among the poorest and can even decrease it.

Rawls postulates that inequality is beneficial as long as that inequality is raising the overall standard of living for everyone. When greater inequality ceases to do so, it's no longer just. You can think about this on a smaller scale in terms of running a business -- to some degree, paying management and executives more will draw more talented and skilled people who will make the company do well, and if the company does well, all employees will reap the benefits in terms of better salaries, working conditions, and job stability. But at some point executives can become a drain on the companies resources if they take too much, which hurts everyone else, but generally especially those at the bottom.

And that is generally the point at which we should say that we need to tax the rich a little more or put in place some sort of regulations to redistribute some to the worst-off.

In the real world, not everyone is born equal. Some people are smarter, or have more valuable natural talents, or whatever. That's the justification for Rawls -- he says to imagine you had to design a just and fair society without knowing in advance where you'd fall within it. (Rawls calls this the "original position" or the "veil of ignorance.") You might be the smartest and most talented person, or you might be a complete idiot compared to everyone else in that society. You just don't know.

And if you were in a position, how would you come up with fair rules for society? You probably wouldn't want to set up a system so if you were the dumbest person that you could be enslaved and exploited for your entire life, right?

Rawls thus formulates his "difference principle," which allows inequality to exist for the talented or skilled, but only if it results in society's improvement overall.

I dispute!

I'm having trouble following this argument, but since it's been rated as "+5 Insightful" I suppose there's supposed to be some truth here.

I can only assume you are referring to the "last 30 years" (as in the quote from GP you are discussing) as a time when "our economy has become less capitalist."

Obviously one has always to define what "capitalist" means, but I suppose most people tend to equate it with economic freedom. And, well, we actually have indices designed to measure how this is changing, such as the Index of Economic Freedom, which is a scoring system created by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal (and thus should presumably have some meaning for "capitalists," since they based their index on principles derived from Adam Smith).

So, let's look at their historical rankings for the past 20 years.

Basically, the U.S. has consistently ranked from 4th to 10th in the world in terms of economic freedom since this index was inaugurated in 1995. The overall world has become slightly more free over this period, so the U.S.'s small decline in ranking is over a period where its score has remained relatively consistent. (And if you want to visualize the data compared to other countries, you can do so here.)

I think most people would agree that the various policies of the U.S. in the 1980s led to greater economic freedom overall, and here we have stats designed by organizations at the heart of capitalism who say that we've been basically static since 1995.

Meanwhile, most indicators show that income inequality has been consistently increasing for at least the past 30 years in the United States.

Except there's no negative correlation, certainly not in the past 30 years you seem to be responding to. Economic freedom in the U.S. is pretty darn high compared to most countries in the world, and it's been consistently scored high for the past few decades.

That's not to say that capitalism is the sole or major cause of income inequality, but the "negative correlation" you claim is not borne out by the actual data.

That's a "catchword." They were used by binders to be sure pages or gatherings (i.e., groups of pages sewn as a unit) were in the correct order.

They decreased in use significantly over the 1800s as printing machinery became more automated. You can still sometimes find them (or related marks to number gatherings) in handmade books in the early 1900s.

Pretty sure GP didn't actually say that. He said he wanted a kid to be happy. One can be ambitious but happy about what you've achieved, or one could be less ambitious and happy where you are. Being able to be satisfied in where you are at the moment does NOT imply that you can't have ambition or desires to also do other things.

On the other hand, some people are unhappy anywhere.

Judgmental much? What exactly is a "better person" according to your criteria?

Lots of people work hard, even in a "menial" blue-collar job. Lots of laborers take pride in their work. Also, for lots of people, life is not about work -- work is what you do to get money to do the REST OF THINGS, which is your ACTUAL LIFE (like "bumming around with friends" perhaps).

Yeah, I agree with GP -- I'd rather have a kid who could be satisfied and happy in his life, even if he worked what you call a "dead-end job" and had good relationships with friends. As long as he's happy and able to support himself, why do you care what he does? What makes him a "bad person"?

I'd rather have that than some ambitious jerk who cheated, stole, and was an overall ass to do whatever it took to get ahead, and then was never satisfied with his life anyway. There are lots of depressed millionaires in the world. I would sincerely hope my kids don't become them.

Yes, but the situation could also work the opposite way. For example, there are a number of tax credits and deductions that are available only if the spouse works, especially child care credits or FSAs for dependent care. Depending on the spouse's income, this could be enough to offset the extra tax bracket effects.

Your reasoning is only valid in a limited number of scenarios, such as where the spouse's earning potential is REALLY low and the overall family income is high enough to already cut off the possibility of some child credits, or in areas with exorbitant childcare costs. In most cases where the spouse is capable of making any decent income, the family will probably end up with more money overall -- the question then mostly comes down to how much that second salary is reduced by childcare costs. I'm not saying your scenario doesn't exist, but for most families the tax benefits go both ways... So the decision is mostly about actual amount of second salary vs. child care cost. Taxes and brackets are only relevant to a much smaller number of families in this.

No, not quite.

Early typesetting practices up to the late 1600s or so varied considerably according to local style. By the early 1700s, the standard practice emerged that larger spaces were placed after punctuation by typesetters to mark the ends of important parts of a sentence (which would allow readers to parse the meaning easier). The standard ultimately adopted in much of Europe was putting an M-quad (a square spacer the size of an 'M' in the font) after a period, an N-quad (the size of 'N', about half an M-quad) after lesser punctuation like commas, and a normal spacer (now called a "thick space") after words, which traditionally was about 1/3 of an em.

Note that these were the way a typesetter would begin to space a line, but most typeset matter was justified, which means various spaces in the lines had to be modified and squeezed or stretched, which might in some cases involve adding extra spacers in places. (The rules for which spaces to add width to were often quite complex, for those typesetters who wanted to obtain an optimal result.)

When typewriters first came into use in the late 1800s, people tried to imitate proper typesetting as best as they could by using 2 or 3 spaces after periods, and sometimes 2 spaces after other punctuation. Ultimately, the standard typesetting rule of 2 spaces after a period came about as an approximation to proper typeset text in the late 1800s.

In the period of roughly the 1920s to 1960s, a little war among publishers to decrease publication costs in books led to poorer cheap materials being used, as well as anything to minimize costs, so interword spaces got squeezed to 1/4-em in many houses, margins got smaller, line spacing decreased, etc. Obviously the large sentence spaces now looked out of place, so they were also reduced gradually to an N-quad and then just a standard interword space. (This was previously known as "French spacing" -- not as anything to do with the Germans, as asserted by the GP. It was practiced in the 19th century in a small number of French publishing houses.)

Meanwhile, typists were (and are) some of the few to attempt to retain the old larger sentence spaces that imitated the way things had been done in typesetting in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Umm, no.

Making the sentence space the same size as the interword space is called "French spacing," which was a minority practice that was originally only common in some French publishing houses in the late 18th and 19th centuries. I also have no idea what 2009 has to do with it, since French spacing became the norm in most Americans and Western European publishing houses around 1950 or so.

Yes, $20 is the standard in the US, which is fairly reasonable. I'm almost never embarrassed having to pay with a $20 bill, even for something that costs a dollar or two.

In Europe, though, you'll often get 50 Euro notes if you withdraw anything more than that at an ATM. It's very annoying, because some countries in Europe are much more up-tight about making change than the US. (I'm looking at you, Germany!) Seriously -- there's a truly insane "we don't want to make change" culture in many places in Europe. And I'm not talking about something outlandish, like trying to pay for a 2 Euro bill with a 50. I'm talking about trying to pay for a 35 or 40 Euro bill with a 50.

When I've spent extended time in Europe, I've often strategically planned my expenditures to figure out ways to get rid of the darn 50s the ATMs spit out without getting dirty looks or weird objections from random people. Why there's such a disconnect between the standard bills the ATMs give out and what most businesses are willing to accept, I just don't know.

Sorry to interject in your debate with this other user, but yeah -- actually, this IS a virally spreading INACCURATE idea, i.e., that Wikipedia is "almost as good as" or "just as good as" or (in some sources) "even better than" Britannica in terms of accuracy, on the basis of this particular study.

A meme is a meme if it is a meme. Whether or not you personally have learned of this information through subsequent viral spreading is irrelevant to whether it is, in fact, a meme or not. If you happen to post a link to Rick Astley's song as a joke being completely unaware of the phenomenon of Rickrolling, you can't just say, "Oh, it isn't a meme, because I didn't know it was a meme."

And regardless of how you learned of the information, the fact is that you are reporting it and its conclusions inaccurately, which also happen to correspond with the way the (false) meme tends to report it.

Actually, YOU are the one who is NOT agreeing with the study. Your opponent in this debate has acknowledged multiple times what the study actually DOES say, i.e., a limited, non-randomly selected, non-peer reviewed, small sample of mostly somewhat obscure science articles (which tend to be some of Wikipedia's most accurate, since they are non-controversial, tend to be written by geeks who were the predominant editors in Wikipedia's early days, etc.) were not significantly worse than Britannica in terms of reliabililty, according to some measures of errors that have been acknowledged in many subsequent peer-reviewed expert studies of this issue to be somewhat problematic. There was no intention in the authors of your study to be exhaustive in comparing the two encyclopedias, nor even to have a random sample. There was no statistical analysis of the results. Even calling it a "study" is a bit of a stretch, since it implies a sort of methodological rigor which wasn't present.

Neither I nor your opponent in this discussion are claiming that this "study" meant nothing -- only that it's not reasonable to conclude a general statement that "Wikipedia is about as good as Britannica" from it. If I went to some local bookstore, found a particular area of local authors the store was strongly know for, and compared their inventory to Amazon's offerings, it would not follow that simply having one strong section of the store meant that this local bookstore was "as good as Amazon" in general. I know this analogy is not precise, but it's the same type of comparison -- saying, "X is as good as Y" when talking about something as broad as an encyclopedia requires a detailed comparison of the entirety, or at least a random sampling of the contents. Neither was done here -- and thus your reported conclusion is invalid.

That simply is not a reasonable conclusion from the data at hand -- and the fact that the internet thinks that was the conclusion when it wasn't is what makes it a meme, regardless of how you came upon your particular misleading interpretation of it.

At some point, you may wish to actually read the study you're talking about, to see what it does actually prove. You could even learn what the original authors actually said, such as where they noted reviewers' significant comments on style, organization, etc. which greatly decreased readability in the articles on Wikipedia, even if they didn't contain as many factual errors as people at the time might have thought.

And, better yet, maybe you should take some time to look at some of the dozen or so (maybe more) subsequent studies of accuracy and comparisons that had better methodology and often were peer-reviewed... it's true that some of those also came to conclusions that Wikipedia was almost as good as older print encyclopedias in terms of accuracy, but a number of others found significant deficits in their comparisons. Wikipedia is a very different thing from what it was a decade ago, so it's hard to even know what the point of citing a study that old is -- other than to carry on the meme status of this common (and misleading) claim.

Yes, and GP is also wrong about Columbus being a "Spaniard." His journey may have been financed by Spain but he was from Genoa (in modern-day ITALY).

Both Cabot and Columbus were Italians.