The Incredibles?

[Shreyas Sampat]

OK. I'm kind of slightly to the left of most people in the USA. As in, I think that garbagemen should probably be paid more than CEOs...snip rhetoric

Oh yeah, I'll bite.

So, um, I don't really understand how this can be the case with reference to individuals.

But the real world seems, to me, to produce your desired result, when viewed ecologically rather than individualistically. I have a hunch that the average income of people who are trying to be CEOs is noticeably lower than (at best equal to) that of those who are trying to be garbage men.

Anyway, it seems staggeringly plebian to me to say that a profession that involves large risks, substantial resource investment, and significant education should be paid less than a menial task that any able-bodied person can do. The cost in time alone (I spent twelve years paying for college while you built your garbage nest egg!) reduces the over-time income of the CEO dramatically.

[Vaxalon]

Shreyas: That might have been true a while back, but for more than a decade, the garbage man's income has been (inflation adjusted) almost flat, while the CEO's has been growing by leaps and bounds.

http://www.faireconomy.org/research/Economic_Apartheid_Data.html#p42

In fact, a CEO's salary, as a multiple of an average factory worker's went from 30x in 1980 to 130x (or more) in 1991.

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/4Inequality.htm

That means that in his FIRST YEAR as a CEO, in 1991 he earned more money than the factory worker did in his ENTIRE CAREER.  He earned more money in his first year as CEO than the factory worker would have had if he had banked 10% of his salary at 5% interest.

And yes, the data on these pages is out of date... since then, things have gotten even MORE disparate than these statistics show.

[Shreyas Sampat]

You're not looking at this ecologically enough. I'm thinking in spans of the decline and fall of empires, here.

[Vaxalon]

Yeah, and I'm looking at them in terms of a human lifespan.

[Anonymous]

Garbagemen make, in the United States, $6,000 more per annum then teachers, on average. It's not a badly compensated line of work and it's by no means dishonorable: society needs its garbage taken out.

I believe that, as a baseline, all human beings should receive exactly the same amount of monetary compensation for their work per unit time. Deviations from that need to be justified.

One form of justification for such deviations is of course providing an incentive. I don't mind some incentive pay, but the amount we have - especially when coupled with fringe benefits like social status and more interesting work - seem way out of line with the value that the work provides society.

Another reason for differential pay could be that a line of work is socially necessary but not particularly desirable. The higher pay for such work would be meant to get people to choose it.

I'm aware that there are huge problems involved with trying to design an economy for fairness (though not with 'planned economies' per se - all economies are planned economies, and with good reason - unfettered economic exchange ('pure capitalism' as some incorrectly call it) is like a game of poker. Once someone wins all the money, you can do something else, but you can't play poker any more). I am not, furthermore, trained in economics.

What I am saying is that I believe that there's a prima facie right for every human being to receive (a) roughly equal economic reward for genuine contributions to society and (b) food, clothing, and shelter, no matter what.

This position is generally associated with 'leftism', though there's no reason you couldn't have a 'rightist' basis for it as well. My basis is that most retrograde of ideals, the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. I'm aware that I don't have a full argument from first principles; the 'garbagemen' thing was meant as an illustrative example of the kind of reasoning I endorse, not a substantive thesis about how any particular actual society ought to be run.

[Callan S.]

Anyway, it seems staggeringly plebian to me to say that a profession that involves large risks, substantial resource investment, and significant education should be paid less than a menial task that any able-bodied person can do.

It's a menial task...so why would a person want to waste their life on that when they could be managing large risks, substantial resource investment, matters of import, etc. Surely the only reason they would want to do it would be that you earn more money doing it?

That, of course, assumes their choice as a human is the primary concern to take into account.

On the other hand, when you treat humans as a resource that you make choices over, it makes sense that the more one resource handles in terms of work, the more it is paid in order to maintain its functioning as part of that machine. You don't deny oil to the rare cog. Not to the rare ones.

What the purpose of that machine is, I can not say. Nor can I say exactly as what sort of creature one would make choices, when you treat humans as a resource.

No, I don't have much investment in this aguement. Just love noting perceptual shifts when I see them.

Edit: Actually, I just realised that the former example is how most games treat the players choice. While no one would play the second as a game unless forced or as a top cog.

[contracycle]

I see this as something a little more problematic with the left and the right these days. Traditionally, the left has been more concerned with civil rights (the 1960s, and gay rights now), and in the past religion has been a central part of that - Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X both being religious leaders. Lately, the left has begun to eschew religion despite the tradition of religiousity supporting many of the left's causes - Liberation Theology in Latin and South America, the American Civil Rights Movement, and so forth. The right, in its effort to reinvent itself, has gladly taken up this more religious aspect of Civil Rights and has begun subverting it. Can you imagine a message that Martin Luther King was a conservative, and the Klansman that burned down churches were the liberals?  I can, and it's a scary piece of revisionist history.

No, the left has a long tradition of opposing religion, and religion has an even longer tradition of maintaining social status quo's, including the right to rule of the aristocracy, and the right to own slaves, to name but two.  Religion and progressive politics are diametrically opposed; religion is a form of obgscurantism, replacing the material and tangible with invisible fairies in the sky.   Leftist politics are very much based on the rationalist, ant-aristorcratic tradition that criticises the church as laybpuotys, liars and thieves.

The Liberation Theologists were the aberration, not the Lefts position re the church, which has strong precedent.

Which is all to say that the values espoused in The Incredibles are neither left nor right, but the right is attempting to label them as exclusively conservative values - making it seem that the left lacks them.

Some of which is fair enough.  Not all values are universal, and arguably claiming that they are is itself normative.  And certainly, Disney does have a long record IMO of essentially acting as a propaganda organ and disseminating reactionary values, and if that is occurring in this instance it would not be against type.

[contracycle]

Anyway, it seems staggeringly plebian to me to say that a profession that involves large risks, substantial resource investment, and significant education should be paid less than a menial task that any able-bodied person can do. The cost in time alone (I spent twelve years paying for college while you built your garbage nest egg!) reduces the over-time income of the CEO dramatically.

Bah.  What risks does a CEO take - the risk that other peoples money might be lost?  Or that they might be reduced to the pauperdom of a mere million?  Boo hoo hoo.

What resource investment?  Going to school?  Lots of people do that - doctors and nurses, for example, who actually do something useful and valuable, unlike the thieving scum that run corporations.

And lastly, the interesting thing is that this objection is being raised precisely to a projected logical result of supply and demand - an unpleasant job SHOULD be paid higher than the happy life of luxury, deep leather chairs and wealthy golf courses that CEO's enjoy.   But of course this does not occur in practice - like so much of capitalist dogma - becuase of the manufacture of poverty always ensuring that there is competition among workers for even the most menial of jobs.

No group of people are as much a drag on our economy as the alleged "entrepreneurs", parasites the lot of 'em.

[contracycle]

This position is generally associated with 'leftism', though there's no reason you couldn't have a 'rightist' basis for it as well.

I'm afraid there is.  Knowingly or not, you have just advanced a proposition very similar to Marx' labour theory of value.  This is consistently rejected by capitalist ideologues, in favour of the perceived value theory.  Thats not too surprising through, as the percieved value model leaves the initiative and decision in the hands of those with the most wealth, and thus the most ability to enter only transactions they choose.  That is, the chosen value theory specifically supports the subordination of society to the interests of the rich.  Seeing as your proposal would in fact be much fairer, and would reward people commensurate to their inputs, it is impossible for capitalism to adopt, as capitalism exists precisely to redistribute wealth from those who produce to those who merely own.

[Sean]

Right, contracycle. ('Guest' is me.)

The issue is the fuzziness in 'left' and 'right' though. If you take 'right' = 'laissez-faire capitalist', then what you say is true enough. If you take 'right' = 'conservative' = 'defender of the status quo who bases his morality/politics on tradition instead of reason', then you could in fact have a 'right-wing social justice movement.' In the Christian tradition it would be something like Liberation Theology, with all that scripture about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry and such. Since Jesus doesn't talk about capitalism (heck, there's even that incident with the Citibank ATM in the temple), this could even be put together with a very different regulation of the flow of money than we see today.

I would still consider such a movement in a certain sense 'conservative', though, if it rooted itself in the passages of an old book, words passed down from our savage past, rather than our best judgment about what is conducive to human happiness and flourishing at the present time.

[Vaxalon]

People who call themselves conservatives nowadays are anything but.

Likewise with liberals.

[contracycle]

The issue is the fuzziness in 'left' and 'right' though. If you take 'right' = 'laissez-faire capitalist', then what you say is true enough. If you take 'right' = 'conservative' = 'defender of the status quo who bases his morality/politics on tradition instead of reason', then you could in fact have a 'right-wing social justice movement.'

Sure, that kind of thing is possible.  But equally, it has always been possible, and does not undercut the identities of left wing and right wing.  

The point is that capitalism is defended as a status quo tradition - those two facets of the right are hardly mutually exclusive.  Another common aspect of the Right that arises from the "defence of tradition" trope is racism or xenophobia.  Sure, they may SEE themselves as a social justice movement... but that does not in any way invalidate their allocation to the right.

I would still consider such a movement in a certain sense 'conservative', though, if it rooted itself in the passages of an old book, words passed down from our savage past, rather than our best judgment about what is conducive to human happiness and flourishing at the present time.

Well, sure.  If its using a romantic, Idealist mode of analysis based on the presumed validity of tradition, then I would still consider it reactionary, as a direct contradiction of the modern trend toward physical sciences, indendepent verifiability, and material cause and effect.  Those arguments have some basis for us thinking they are true - they are methodologically sound.  Arguments to sacred tradition are not.

I've never claimed that the right wing was incapable of human emotion, or indeed, was "evil" (see other deconstructions of the term).  Such organs can indeed do good works.  I'm just inclined to think these rare accidents are not worth holding your breath for.

[daMoose_Neo]

Just a note- Disney and Pixar are quite different. Disney has the distribution rights and handles the marketing wing of Pixar productions, but in terms of writing and developing Pixar is its own creature. Tis akin to Disney and Studio Ghibli - their work stands on its own, but Disney has the american distribution rights.
That said, a Disney agenda and a Pixar agenda aren't one and the same. Even Pixar "agendas" can vary from show to show, as most are creator driven as opposed to company driven.

[DevP]

I listened to the NPR bit, and it makes me really want to see the movie! But also... give that I'm all political, I can see how some people got worked up about the individualist themes that the excerpts mentioned, since I could *see* them being spouted by a Randroid. That's its own category, there.

Aside from questions of the social justice of how to reward CEOs / working class workers / etc., I still don't think most liberals/leftists are actually opposed to an individual freedom to be truly excellent, and a lot of that is motivated by a society harming an individual. While rightists often see the market as a big free space that is therefore good, many leftists see it as a monolithic authoritarian entity that this therefore bad; implicit in both of these is support for the individual trying to rock out and live well.

So, neither side of the politics should have a "monopoly" on the idea that people should try to be all they can.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

To lighten things a bit, did you know that Sarah Vowell did the voice of Violet in the movie? Did you know that Sarah Vowell makes my heartstrings pluck like a well-tuned ukulele? Did you know that that made me feel odd during the movie, as the voice that makes me all swoony belonged to, like, a 13-year-old girl?

Also, did you know that the audiotape of her book The Partly Cloudy Patriot is like the best album ever? It's filled with They Might Be Giants music, and Norman Lear's on it. Really.

Man, Sarah Vowell. I can't figure out what it is about her, but man, oh man.