I posted a joke about this last year, but this video makes the point much more effectively. When you tax and redistribute income or grades, you penalize those who achieve and work hard.
Kudos to the college kids who put this together. The volume sometimes is inadequate, but the overall message comes through loud and clear.
Your post begs the question of whether or not the same degree of hard work always produces the same results.
If we’re basing whether or not someone is worthy of keeping wealth based on units of hard work output, perhaps we should tax capital gains at a higher rate than someone who creates it performing surgeries, since capital gains are basically passive income while the surgeries were actual work performed during the year in exchange for payment.
its not the same thing.
Grades are indicators. They rank how good you are at the particular topic according to a given scale. The only reason why we have the system with tests and grades is the information asymmetry: The professors who grade you dont know how skilled you actually are in the subject.
It does not make sense to redistribute an indicator.
Money is very different. The share of the economies money that you have give you command over a proportionate part of the economy’s resources. The income that you get is determined by your skills and by this system. In a democracy the majority can determine that the amount of money that you get from your skills in this system is unacceptable according to some moral standard and thus that you should give or receive redistributed income.
Conclusion: it does not make sense to redistribute indicators, but it can make sense to redistribute resources.
Funny video though, but you wont prove a point by catching people off guard with unexpected questions.
What GPA was Paris Hilton born with?
Some students are privileged b/c they have parents who are better educated. It is a fact that first-generation college students have a harder time succeeding in college, so asking “What GPA was Paris Hilton born with?” is a red herring.
@drot: Money is likewise an indicator in many, many areas of our society. Actors who makes $20M or more/film do so b/c they have a track record of doing well at the box office. Michael Jordan made millions playing b-ball b/c he was the best at it. Salesmen who work on commission make more the more they sell.
BTW, this approach to challenging the progressive view of taxation has been proposed and practiced before:
http://suncoastpinellas.tbo.com/content/2011/apr/28/291219/PIVIEWO1-a-life-lesson-in-gainesville/c_1/
http://thepeoplescube.com/dr-palimpsest/grade-points-fair-redistribution-among-the-less-gifted-t71.html
And I’m sure I could find more
[...] this week, Dan Mitchell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, posted the above video with his comments on his blog on the same topic as the below joke so I decided to share them [...]
The problem is a diploma is worth the same regardless of your GPA. In some cases zero.
We can still draw some lessons by comparing grades and income when it comes to the concept of redistribution.
The question at hand is, why should a person, *through no fault of their own*, fail a class when we could in theory reduce an A-student’s grade to a B, (while raising the F to a D) thereby allowing both of them to graduate and get their degrees? In the long term, the A-student’s life will not be affected by such redistribution, yet the F student’s life will be significantly improved by getting the degree over not getting it. The economic equivilent of this question is, why should a person, through no fault of their own, live in filth, when we can take, say $200,000 from someone with $1,000,000 and give it to them? The lifestyle difference between $1,000,000 and $800,000 is very small, but the difference between zero and $200,000 is enormous.
The liberal’s main objection to this question is the view that the earning of money and the earning of grades are fundamentally different. There main argument is that grades are merely an indicator of knowledge. Not only is this view incorrect, there is another, hidden viewpoint that you won’t hear.
Certainly, hard work translates into higher grades. The student that goes to the beach will tend to have lower grades than the one that works on their reports. ‘Luck’ can also play a significant role. Some people may just be better at remembering facts, and others might have difficulty with a particular subject. Some very knowledgeable students may get nervous during tests. These inequalities could be attributed to ‘luck,’ and we might say it’s not ‘fair’ that a student should be ‘punished’ with bad grades in math, for instance, if they don’t have an aptitude for it and end up failing the class. Knowledge, work, luck, aptitude, all factor into the grade, as they do in wealth.
However, I believe this is a smokescreen for why liberals are for the redistribution of money, but not of grades. It is based on the perception of how each are achieved. The liberal attitude is that for every rich hard-working job-creator in the economy, there is a wealth-hoarder who has gained his money by taking advantage of (or downright cheating) other people. While the act of earning a grade is an individual task, they see the businessman as *taking* money from another person, that wealth is a zero-sum game, with winners and losers.
But even if you subscribe to this belief, it only takes a few moments to realize that redistribution of money is just as bad an idea as the redistribution of grades. In the economy as well as in the classroom, there are hard-workers and cheaters at the top. There are also hard-workers and slackers at the bottom. Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell by the grade which F-student is a hard-worker and which one is a slacker. By setting up a system of redistribution, those who were working hard but failed would have a very natural inscentive to stop working hard, in the classroom as well as in life.
It’s funny how poor individuals who receive assistance for basic needs get “incentivized” to stop working hard, but Vikram Pandit and John Stumph and Patricia Woertz et al just keep plugging away, nose to the grindstone.
[...] posted a video making this point earlier in the year, and I also posted a version of this joke back in 2010, but here’s another version [...]
some people are saying that this doesnt compare, forgetting that the problem is not that rich people need to get taxed more to fulfill the deficit in the treasury, its that most of the people in the lower classes dont pay their taxes at all and their lack of payment is increasing taxes of all that do, including the lower middle class where i am at, taxes could be lower if more people paid them, so right now taxes are increasing for those who pay it and decreasing for those who dont….
[...] And if you want to see a real-world example of how students react to this idea, here’s another good video. [...]
[...] posted a video making this point earlier in the year, and I also posted a version of this joke back in 2010, but here’s another version that’s worth [...]