I was listening to a recording by Earl Nightingale about the book Think and Grow Rich, that was written a long time ago by Napoleon Hill. This is an old recording that I had Andy convert into an MP3 file so that I wouldn't wear out the cassette tape. I love Earl. Anyway, in this recording Earl is talking about how you could take any one hundred men and follow them from early adulthood to retirement and by the time they reached sixty only five of them would be rich. He said this with great surprise, implying that they could all be rich if they only knew the secret.
But, as much as I love Earl, it isn't true. Our system isn't set up that way. If they all started from the same place and took those principles to heart and they all worked exactly the same way, they might end up with the same amount of money, but they couldn't all be rich. It doesn't work that way. In order for some to be winners others have to be losers. If everybody did what Earl told us too then some of us would do it better than others and those people would be the five who got to be rich.
It's all good. We don't all need to be rich, after all. My problem is with the curve. If you think about economics like the results of a classroom test and you think about the whole country as the students taking that test, then you can try and figure out how that test is graded. We've been led to believe that everybody has the same shot. We are told that socialism is an unfair curve but capitalism gives everybody the grade they deserve, but I don't think that's entirely true.
Take health care, for example. Getting a C plus shouldn't mean you can't afford cancer treatment. Someday we will all have an equal shot at being the socio-economic winners, no matter the color of our skin or the social class of our parents. Some day there will be no parent who has to choose between groceries and antibiotics. Until then, we still have to work at making the system more fair.
Anyway, that's what's on my mind this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
3 comments:
I always thought that socialism was meant to correct the curve, that compassion should trump competition, and that this trumping was proof that we were no longer savages.
But there are many savages among us.
Excellent and thought-provoking analysis. I like this kind of thinking on any day, and particularly on this day.
Sandy: I guess if you think of the curve as the normal bell curve, which is where the whole thing originated, then that's true. I was sort of thinking of the curve from the perspective of a student who always thought it was unfair that some kids got it easier than others. I was looking at it like it was almost the opposite of what the curve actually does, which is to give C's to kids that would normally get F's. Economically speaking the curve we seem to have gives F's to people who don't deserve them and gives them disproportionally to minorities and people who don't have the "right" parents. Anyway, what seemed a simple analogy when I wrote it, now seems all complicated and strange.
Travis: Thank you!
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