Comment by nhaehnle
10 years ago
Along the line of relevant analyses, there was an insightful post by Brad DeLong recently: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/is-the-problem-one-of...
Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.
It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.
The larger point of that article is an important frame for this discussion: Everyone's income is based on the total economic surplus. No one's value to society is equivalent to their income.