The Desert of the Rich

Other things being equal, people deserve bad things for bad things that they do and good things for good things that they do – that they themselves do. A daughter does not deserve punishment for something her father did before she was born, neither does she deserve a reward for good things her mother did. No matter how much the parents may have deserved their wealth, the children do not deserve their inheritance.

Of course, the daughter in question may be entitled to receive some or all of her parents’ fortunes. She would not be entitled to any part that her mother stole, of course. Deserved status is not heritable. Entitlement is heritable under the right conditions. Bequeath or give away something to which you were not entitled, however, and your beneficiary will also be unentitled except under rare circumstances. If an heir is entitled to wealth, it is not because of her merit, but simply because her parents so chose to give her assets that they possessed and that were not subject to superior claims of others.

Entitlement is usually all or nothing, but desert is always a matter of degree. Salieri deserved praise, but Mozart deserved more. The shoplifter deserves punishment; the murderer greater punishment. The rich may deserve some but not all of their wealth. 

Benefit to the society, innovation, even effort in a failed project, deserve something. The greater the benefit, the more ingenious the innovation, the harder the effort, the greater is the desert. 

When it comes to social benefit and innovation, it is often the modestly paid mid-level engineer who has the greatest desert. The CEO may have exercised genius in organization that made it all possible, but may also possess only charisma and political savvy, and have made policy more likely to impede than to forward the innovation of the engineers.

Some of the tobacco executives have no doubt worked hard and effectively, perhaps even with genius. What desert they would thereby have accrued, however, is swamped by the evil they did and do. None of them deserve the wealth to which they are legally entitled. Whether they, or their heirs and assigns, are entitled to the wealth as a matter of justice is a question for another time.

Reward for risk taking gets a lot of press. However, not all risk taking deserves reward. Oscar stints on food for his family to buy lottery tickets. He wins millions. He is entitled to those millions, but he does not deserve them because of his risk taking. He ought not have taken that risk. The business owner who risks the company, her own retirement, and the jobs of her employees may deserve something on that basis, but not if the object of the risk was too modest or the probabilities too slim – even if she lucked out.

Then it is often implied, or even set out as if it were a theorem of economics, that the distribution that free markets generate is what is deserved. Put aside that free markets exist only in economic theory, and that real world markets are less than free in ways that almost always favor those with more over those with less. To say that markets determine desert is, at best, to confuse entitlement with desert.There  are robust markets for tobacco, meth, bump stocks, underage children, and politicians.  

A particularization of the view that markets determine desert is that CEOs deserve their extraordinary salaries because they would otherwise be hired away by other companies. Some would; many would not. It is not rare for a CEO to leave a multimillion dollar salary in one company and never find another company interested in making any kind of offer. The market for CEOs is, in any event, a textbook case of a badly distorted market. CEOs tend to have substantial influence over, if not outright control of, the body that sets their compensation. 

It is fun to speculate how much money it would take to motivate the CEO to work as hard as he does now were there no potential competing offers for his services. My guess is that he would max out on time and effort at three or four times what his engineers are paid. Those other millions are likely not purchasing any enhanced CEO performance.

So the rich are more likely to be entitled to their wealth than to deserve it, although the questions of a flawed entitlement history and of new superior claims can call even entitlement into serious question. Many, although certainly not all, of the wealthy, doubtless deserve some portion of their wealth, almost always, however, somewhat less than what they deeply and sincerely believe they deserve.