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http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0310alperovitzdaly.html The Undeserving Rich Collectively produced and inherited knowledge and the (re)distribution of income and wealth. By Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest men in the nation, is worth nearly $50 billion. Does he “deserve” all this money? Why? Did he work so much harder than everyone else? Did he create something so extraordinary that no one else could have created it? Ask Buffett himself and he will tell you that he thinks “society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.” But if that’s true, doesn’t society deserve a very significant share of what he has earned? When asked why he is so successful, Buffett commonly replies that this is the wrong question. The more important question, he stresses, is why he has so much to work with compared to other people in the world, or compared to previous generations of Americans. How much money would I have “if I were born in Bangladesh,” or “if I was born here in 1700,” he asks. Buffett may or may not deserve something more than another person working with what a given historical or collective context provides. As he observes, however, it is simply not possible to argue in any serious way that he deserves all of the benefits that are clearly attributable to living in a highly developed society. Buffett has put his finger on one of the most explosive issues developing just beneath the surface of public awareness. Over the last several decades, economic research has done a great deal of solid work pinpointing much more precisely than in the past what share of what we call “wealth” society creates versus what share any individual can be said to have earned and thus deserved. This research raises profound moral—and ultimately political—questions. (clip) http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/computers/technical_inheritance.htm Gar Alperovitz on Technical Inheritance "Many times a day," wrote Albert Einstein, "I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow-men, both living and dead." The genius of an earlier era saw clearly how contemporary knowledge and technological advance depend to an extraordinary degree on the efforts of many contributors, not to mention a continuing cultural investment in science and numerous other areas of human endeavor. In fact, very little of what we as a society produce today can be said to derive from the work, risk, and imagination of citizens now living. Achievements from earlier eras, including fundamental ideas such as literacy, movable type, simple arithmetic, and algebra, have become so integrated into our daily lives that we take them for granted. What we accomplish today stands atop a Gibraltar of technological inheritance. Seemingly contemporary transformations inevitably build on knowledge accumulated over generations. For example, Richard DuBoff, an economic historian at Bryn Mawr College, observes that "synthesizing organic chemicals...could not have been done without an understanding of chemical transformations and the arrangement of atoms in a molecule. After 1880, this led to the production of coal tar and its derivatives for pharmaceuticals, dyestuffs, explosives, solvents, fuels, and fertilizers, and later petrochemicals...By the early 1900's the new chemicals were already becoming an essential input for metallurgy, petroleum, and paper." Present-day entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, one of the world's richest individuals with a personal fortune estimated at $8 billion and hailed as a technological genius for inventing software for the personal computer, should therefore be seen as beneficiaries of this long and fruitful history as well as of significant public investment. The personal computer itself--without which Gates's software would not be possible--owes its development to sustained federal spending during World War II and the Cold War. "Most of [the] 'great ideas in computer design' were first explored with considerable government support," according to historian Kenneth Flamm in a Brookings Institution study. Now a specialist in technology policy in the Department of Defense, Flamm estimates that 18 of the 25 most significant advances in computer technology between 1950 and 1962 were funded by the federal government, and that in most of these cases the government was the first buyer of new technology. For example, Remington Rand Corp. delivered UNIVAC, the original full-fledged U.S. computer, under contract to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951. The government's shouldering of huge development costs and risks paved the way for the growth of Digital Equipment Corp., which created its powerful PDP line of 1960s computers. In turn, Gate's colleague [and now fellow billionaire] Paul Allen created a simulated PDP-10 chip that allowed Gates to apply the programming abilities of a mainframe to a small, homemade computer. Gates used this power to make his most important technical contribution: rewriting the BASIC language, itself funded by the National Science Foundation, to run Altair, the first consumer-scaled computer. And indeed, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Altair's developer, could never have placed a microcomputer of any variety on the market without the long preceding period of technological incubation. Thousands of links in a chain of development--our shared inheritance- -were in fact required before Bill Gates could add his contribution. But if this is so, why do we not reflect more full on why Gates, or any other wealthy entrepreneur, should personally benefit to such a degree? If we admit that what any one person, group, generation, or even nation contributes in one moment of time is minuscule compared with all that the past bequeaths like a gift from a rich uncle, we are forced to question the basic principles by which we distribute our technological inheritance. (Opening paragraphs from Gar Alperovitz's article "Distributing Our Technological Inheritance" in Oct. 94, Technology Review) ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
