Annals of anti-egalitarian hyperbole

Oh look. There’s Chris Bertram. One more person who doesn’t understand the point of analogies in ethical philosophy. Shocking.

The argument goes like this: we might think that it’s okay to transfer resources from one person to another, yet we wouldn’t kill one person to provide organs to 5 others who will die without them. Resolve this dilemma.

FWTW, I don’t agree with this analogy. I think the reluctance to kill comes from some notion of the sanctity of a person’s body, or a desire to not be an active killer. I don’ agree with taxation-is-theft crowd, and support progressive taxation (subject to not crossing the optimal) purely on the principle that the rich have the lowest marginal utility for money. However, I’d try to understand an argument before I dismiss it. This kind of dismissal is cheap.

Every time Mankiw made an assertion in this paper I found myself telling him that he couldn’t say that! Or that were at least 3 other things that would be equally as arguable.

Take his kidney argument. Rather than have a contract that says everybody would want an agreement that they should get at least one good kidney, isn’t it much more the case that his argument says that people would want a universal health system?

CEOs should be paid for the value that they can be shown to have created? Isn’t Mankiw straying uncomfortably close to the Labour Theory of Value? Perhaps he has been ‘listening to the Left’ even more than he thinks he has.

Navin Kumar, you do know that Chris Bertram is a philosopher, right? And that the kind of analogy you mention is philosophy 101? I think you might try to think before telling someone that they’ve failed to understand how analogies are used in philosophy. Lest you be accused of a cheap dismal based on a failure to understand.

not having read the paper, maybe those who’ve read it could answer:

Is this a realistic organ-donation analogy where there are substantial costs to selecting donors, transplantation process, and followup/maintenance, and the organs thus donated have a relatively short lifespan once donated (much shorter than allowing them to remain in the original owners’ bodies, anyway)? Or is this a more facile analogy whereby it just happens without saying anything about the infrastructure and resource costs required to sustain such a program?

Because if the former, I might have to go out of my way to read it.

I believe that the Journal of Economic Perspectives is not peer-reviewed, hence no referees to catch any Mankiw recycling of Nozick. There is an interesting post related to this at an economics blog

http://cherokeegothic.com/2013/04/29/peer-review-it-still-matters/

(in the context of the Rogoff Reinhart JEP article)

This leaves the JEP editor, Tim Taylor. He seems to be a pretty nice guy (in the technical research-seminar-attending sense of “non-arrogant”). Why not ask him? He might even be willing to write a Crooked Timber guest contribution, perhaps on Ingrid’s question of “So what should political philosophers do who read this paper?”

conversableeconomist@gmail.com
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com

My own guess is that few economists take many philosophy courses beyond a 101 introduction (unlikely to include Nozick), and that Brad deLong doing an inter-disciplinary major is unusual for undergraduates planning to go on to economics graduate school. But the JEP is designed for a non-specialist audience. Perhaps as a general principle it doesn’t wish to burden the text with references.

At least Mankiw admits in the passage on bottom p.2 and top p.3 that he is playing role of “amateur political philosopher.” (Very amateur, apparently.)

I’m beginning to wonder if our fair essayist isn’t a liberal plant. If that’s the best a Harvard economist can do to support the notion that redistributionist policy is flawed, well, those of us on the other side of the argument barely have to get out of bed.

I mean, really. I was waiting for a stoned 3AM dorm room hypothetical like, what if the trolley hurtling at the pedestrians could only be diverted by a bond trader who was going to lose money that might save a passel of needy orphans? But we didn’t even get that far before organs.

Sure it’s a fine analogy, kidneys are obviously just like profits. Of course I prefer such finely honed arguments as Steve Schwarzman’s view that raising taxes on “producers” such as himself is akin to the Nazis invading Poland. Or Grover Norquist’s moral equivalency between the Estate Tax (“the tax where they come and look at how much gold is in your teeth”) and the Holocaust (“that’s the morality of the Holocaust. ‘Well, it’s only a small percentage,’ you know. ‘I mean, it’s not you, it’s somebody else.’”)

I knew Mankiw’s argument was going to be the usual tortuous bullshit by the second paragraph, where his 1% are entrepreneurs, exemplified by Steve Jobs (as always), J.K. Rowling and Steven Spielberg. He says he is not “convinced” by Joseph Stiglitz’ view that rent-seeking is a primary driving force behind the growing incomes of the rich. And when he finally does get around to the finance industry, where the likes of John Paulson can glom more in one year rigging the Wall St. casino than McDonald’s entire global annual profits, he says this: it makes sense that a nation would allocate many of its most talented and thus highly compensated individuals to this activity. On the other hand, some of what occurs in financial firms does smack of rent seeking…

Some… smacks of. Take my kidney. Please. Just shoot me first.

This does look like a minor scandal to me; as Chris says, at the very least there has been a colossal failure of refereeing to allow an article which is basically about the Nozick/Wilt Chamberlain question to not even cite Nozick. If a student produced a paper in which one of the most famous arguments in philosophy was presented as if it was the student’s own work, they could be in all sorts of academic trouble, couldn’t they?

What dsquared @20 says – I’d drag a student in front of an academic honesty committee for the first page of the paper. Not that I think there is any hope of that happening here.

And it really is at a (bad) undergraduate level: He doesn’t even understand Nozick’s point in the Chamberlain example, which is really directed at a very specific, quite narrow (and I’d argue quite strawmanish) argument about justice as Julian Sanchez (a Nozick fan) explains here http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/06/21/nozick-libertarianism-and-thought-experiments/

Maybe Mankiw has heard of James Heckman (one of them has a Nobel Prize)? He wrote recently in the Boston Review:

“How do these early and persistent differences in abilities arise? Some people think that the explanation lies primarily in our genes. In The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray trace differences in adolescent achievement test scores back to genetic differences. If the primacy of genetics is correct, we should be skeptical about the efficacy of any interventions.

But the test scores Herrnstein and Murray used have been shown to be caused in part by schooling and family environments. More broadly, evidence from epigenetics, which studies how environmental factors affect gene expression in ways that are heritable, suggests that the gene-environment distinction that shaped The Bell Curve and so much other discussion about the origins of inequality is obsolete (as is the practice, common in social science, of additively partitioning outcomes due to “nature” and “nurture”). An extensive recent literature suggests that gene-environment interactions may be central to explaining human and animal development. For example, neuroscientist Avshalom Caspi and his colleagues have shown that the adverse impact of the absence of one gene—a particular variant of the Monoamine Oxidase-A gene, which has been associated with antisocial behavior and higher crime rates—is triggered by growing up in a harsh or abusive environment. Geneticist Mario Fraga and his colleagues have shown how life experience substantially differentiates the genetic expression of adult identical twins: their experience gets under their skin—and stays there. Related research shows that isolation affects the expression of genes that moderate adverse health outcomes, and that environment has a powerful role in determining heritability of IQ.

The precise impact of these gene-environment interactions on the life course of individuals remains to be determined. But they undermine purely genetic arguments about outcomes and require that we look to the social environment—especially the families—in which children are raised.”

The only political philosopher I know that who attended to the misuse of heritability estimates is Brian Barry in Why Social Justice Matters.

CEOs should be paid for the value that they can be shown to have created?

If you’re suggesting a massive pay cut for CEOs, I’m right there with you. Although we should probably pay them the minimum wage even when they can’t be shown to have created any value (on average, half the time they will have destroyed value rather than created it, and even when they have created value it won’t always be provable).

At least it would be a step forward over asking their friends how much they deserve to be paid and taking their word for it (and then asking them how much their friends deserve to be paid etc.), which is basically the current system. Conflict of interest doesn’t begin to describe the current state of corporate governance.

his 1% are entrepreneurs, exemplified by Steve Jobs (as always), J.K. Rowling and Steven Spielberg.

It’s worth pointing out for the benefit of people who missed the point (which apparently includes Mankiw) that Rowling’s work, like Chamberlain’s, would never have reached the number of people it has without the efforts of hundreds, probably thousands of less famous and less well paid others. Spielberg’s wouldn’t even *exist* without them.

Jobs’s very early work may be more like Rowling than like Spielberg (in that he could have created the work itself in isolation and possibly even did), but most of what he is rich and famous for now is largely designed — and *definitely* made, distributed and marketed — by people who aren’t him. The structure that allows him to control and profit from their efforts is created and sustained by the not at all invisible hand of the state.

Attributing the result of a complex, multi-person effort to the most proximate or visible person or the one with the most authority is a common error, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid. People who claim to be practicing an academic discipline ought to be capable of a little more discernment.

Shorter Chris @ 20: they didn’t build that.

Papers like this just reinforce the argument of conservatism as a justification for selfishness. Still wondering when we can create libertarian/conservative reservations and let these people build the perfect societies they dream of, unfettered by the grasping hand of the state.

Among the sentences that need footnotes —

By contrast, the educational and career opportunities available to children of the top 1 percent are, I believe, not very different from those available to the middle class. My view here is shaped by personal experience. I was raised in a middle-class family; neither of my parents were college graduates. My own children are being raised by parents with both more money and more education. Yet I do not see my children as having significantly better opportunities than I had at their age.

Mankiw’s examples in his Nozick plagiarism are all of entrepreneurs that depend on intellectual property for their income, that is, on “political decisions” that may have something to do with “the income inequality we see”.

Does Mankiw deliberately try to write stuff as stupid as possible?

I’m not going to bother with Mankiw, but isn’t the Nozick thing kind of dumb? I’m not a philosopher but I’m pretty sure the problem of people’s self-interested behavior leading to outcomes that none would have chosen is pretty well known. There’s no reason to assume something is benign just because it’s emergent or spontaneously organized.

Jobs couldn’t have made his billions without shipping tens of thousands of jobs overseas to places like Foxconn in China, where they make 70 cents an hour. Apple routinely sends 9 out of 10 manufacturing jobs to cheap labor, no regs nations.

If he had kept all of those jobs in America, he might have made millions, given the 400 to 1 ratio of ownership to rank and file — which is unconscionable — but he wouldn’t have made billions. He needed those slave wage numbers to steal his billions.

Chris Mealy @37 –
Nozick’s point is rather narrow. He is taking on one particular conception of justice – he calls it “patterned”. According to this view, whether a society/social order is just depends on a specific distribution of wealth. IIRC one of the problems of Anarchy, State, and Utopia is, that he seems to believe that this view is much more common than it is – e.g. I think he believes Rawls ToJ is much closer to the patterned view than it is (I think it’s a bit of a strawman), but he a) doesn’t believe that it’s the only conception of justice and b) doesn’t believe his Chamberlain example addresses anything but this very specific conception of justice.

So he says to his patterned strawman – I give you your perfectly just society. You get to pick whichever initial distribution of wealth you want. And now that distribution changes through entirely voluntary exchanges – how do you justify taking money from the ones who benefitted in those exchanges? One can still argue with that, but it’s a pretty good argument. It is, of course, not at all, an argument against redistribution in general, and Nozick realized that. It’s bitter that Manikw doesn’t.

The Wilt Chamberlain parable appears a bit thin even for when it was proposed. Sports team payrolls today structured to cover a percentage of receipts. Sports unions have always had the goal of obtaining as large a percentage as possible of the receipts.

So how far off the turnip truck do you have to fall before realizing that the price you pay for a ticket pays the contracts of the players? (NCAA excepted of course. There you are providing a couple of bucks per ticket to the coach)

In short, if this is a meaningful parable for libertarians they are commuting from Mars, but we knew that, yes?

I can’t see why anyone would read past the first few paragraphs; it is so obviously a silly econ trick – posit an imaginary state of affairs that would never occur, and then deduce logical theorems.
And even in that Alice world, Mankiw is alogical; he says that if we all give 100 dollars to Apple, it is voluntary so we are all better off…surely, any smart college junior should be able to rip that to shreds.

And if you are unable to see that, then the almost pathological avoidance of class as an issue should make the reader pause.
eg , top of page 9, mankiw: I was raised by middle class parents without college education; my own children have no more opportunities.
yeah, right

OMG – page 2 (and that will be as far as I get):

“In my view, this thought experiment captures, in an extreme and stylized way, what has happened to US society over the past several decades. Since the 1970s, average incomes have grown, but the growth has not been uniform across the income distribution. The incomes at the top, especially in the top 1 per cent, have grown much faster than average. These high earners have made significant economic contributions, but they have also reaped large gains.”

Significant contributions? They turned financial markets and then the housing market into a gambling racket…

Oh yeah, and how many sales folk work on commission. Nozick was a waif, Mankiw is an idiot.

Here’s the real comparison with Robinson and Acemoglu…well, at least, from a Gramscian perspective.

. Mankiw’s approach fails in the project of bourgeois hegemony. That can’t be established by telling those who feel invisible in the shadow of the 1% that they have no economically or morally valid criticisms to make. That is a school-boy exercise; it comes across as vulgar apologetics, worse than Nassau Senior.

Robinson and Acemoglu’s work will however prove to be more effective as they make a sweeping, entertaining and plausible case that the institutions that serve one class (namely, finance capital which requires the inclusion of the entrepreneurs that they finance even when these entrepreneurial upstarts challenge extant industrialists) over, and the expense of, other classes are actually the best institutions for the nation as a whole, given the possible (extractive) alternatives.

Mankiw is not really contributing to bourgeois hegemony, and may actually damage it. But you make arguments like Mankiw’s when you have lost confidence in the project of bourgeois hegemony; Mankiw can’t even resist social Darwinism. A sure sign of a period of reaction. The progressive spirit of the bourgeois revolutions actually does animate Acemoglu and Robinson’s work even to the point that they defend the revolutionary violence of the Glorious and French Revolutions. Marx actually thought bourgeois apologists would obscure the role of revolution in the establishment of bourgeois institutions in order to discredit any further such activity. Acemoglu and Robinson prove Marx wrong on this point.

Of course Acemoglu and Robinson do not recognize Robert C. Allen’s argument that the Russian Revolution was necessary to destroy Tsarist institutions and make possible relatively high living standards. There are limits on their support of revolutions.

I’ll continue to read Acemoglu and Robinson, not Mankiw (though I think Martin Feldstein’s analysis of the state of the economy is often helpful).

What’s truly bizarre is that Mankiw’s kidney argument applies much more directly to the proposal that poor people should be able to enter into enforceable private contracts to sell their kidneys, something that his intellectual allies (Barro, for example) routinely advocate.

The thing I always wondered about Nozick’s point is, why doesn’t he get that the person who actually makes money in his pretend scenario isn’t Wilt Chamberlain, or any of his teammates, or even the guy who runs or manages the team, but the fellow who figures out how to build a fence around the court and exclude people who don’t pay admittance money? That is to say, I may have wondered whether Nozick’s point would seem a heckuva lot more logical if an economist rather than a philosopher had made it.

Along comes Mankiw to disabuse me of my suspicions.

There’s a certain symmetry, however, in the economist Mankiw not getting what even the philosopher Nozick would have recognized (Salient at 19 got this first), namely that under the veil of ignorance, the typical participant in society would not choose to live in a society wherein he or she would be subject to random forcible organ harvesting. Kind of a big miss, that.

As I said at the start. Promethean liver. And now the Eagle.

I think it would be a great idea to rip out ALL the internal organs of a few 0.1 percenters. Pour encourager les autres, you see.

Jay at 53: Magnificent!

“why should it supersede the right of a person to the fruits of his own labor?” Isn’t there enough evidence to show that the exhorbitant rewards are not the fruits of one’s own labor? Is Mankiw seriously claiming that a billion dollars yearly income is the fruit of the hedge fund manager’s own labor? For what definition of the word “labor”?

Mankiw fails to make the point of why it would be a bad thing if he did not work as hard, and what that would entail. Would the quantity of his nonsense decrease, or would the quality (if possible)? Would he write less, or would he spend less time developing his glibertarian arguments? Enquiring minds really don’t care if they know or not. As far as I am concerned, the argument that Mankiw advances is based on the
questionable hypothesis that it would be a bad thing if the rich worked less hard.
I have always heard that no one is irreplaceable. I suppose the “job creators” could be an exception, but personally I doubt it.
No offense to the economists, but to me a large part of what they do is to create a thought experiment and apply it to real economic activity. Being a long time fan of
science fiction, I am well acquainted with application of thought experiments to
everyday life. However, too many economist seem to actually believe that their thought experiments are the way real-life economies actually work, or at least pretend they do. Somehow, I doubt the Schrodinger actually thought he had a cat that was both dead and alive at the same time, nor did Frederik Pohl think that a future economy of plenty would work out as he postulated in “The Midas Plague”.

The drive to justify wealth inequality on the basis of genetic determination is identical to kings trying to trace their lineage to deities

Layman @45 quotes this from Mankiw:

“If a national system of taxes and transfers is designed to move resources from Palm Beach, Florida, to Detroit, Michigan, shouldn’t a similar international system move resources from the United States and Western Europe to sub-Saharan Africa? Many economists do support increased foreign aid, but as far as I know, no one has
proposed marginal tax rates on rich nations as high as the marginal tax rates imposed on rich individuals.”

1) I’m fairly sure that some people have proposed, if not precisely “marginal tax rates on rich nations as high as the marginal tax rates imposed on rich individuals,” then something reasonably close to this. Mankiw simply hasn’t read them.

2) Anyway, Mankiw’s point here is flawed on its own terms, since there are significant differences between intranational and international redistribution. In the former case, for one thing, it’s easier to ensure that the redistributed money ends up in the hands of those whom it is intended to benefit. So there might very well be good reasons for approaching the two sorts of redistribution a bit differently. Thus, considered admittedly out of context, this quoted passage is rather silly. It’s probably equally silly even when read in context of the whole paper.

Usergoogol,

I think they’re blind. They don’t see it as a transfer. They see it at a voluntary transaction, with two winners, typically. Conservatives and right-libertarians tend to have this rose-colored, pie in the sky, incredibly romanticized, almost edenic vision of commerce. Everyone agrees to all of it willingly. There is no coercion. There is no unequal power involved that could make a mockery out of the idea of voluntarism or lack of force. Everyone apparently freely chooses to forge a contract and it’s always mutually beneficial.

Nonsense.

In reality, the laborer in a capitalist system has the choice only in the sense that they can starve is they choose not to accept the terms of employment. Or, in the sense that they can move from one exploiter to another.

It’s kind of like smoke-filled bars. You want to go to a bar, but you hate cigarette smoke. So your right-libertarian friend says you’re “free” to go to another bar. But they’re all smoke-filled!

That’s their idea of “freedom.”

Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy is a better treatment of the 1%. I know economists will be derisive. Hayes is more empirical than Mankiw, which is not hard, since Mankiw provides basically no data whatsoever.

So Adam, how does Nozick deal with the fact that sales folk almost exclusively work on commission, that is either a percentage of the purchase price or a fixed amount per sale?

I remember that Julian Sanchez essay after the Slate article on Nozick and the Chamberlain example (which it argued was relying on his race to generate sympathy or something). Was Mankiw unaware of that? I doubt it. He was probably hoping people too young to remember Nozick or Chamberlain would have some positive associations with Steve Jobs. Mankiw really adds nothing to Nozick’s example, and being an amateur philosopher makes it worse.

rootless_e, no Mankiw says the government provides public goods which enable people to build wealth, and brings up the idea that taxes should be proportional to benefit. That’s why in his conclusion he claims to favor progressive taxation. But he also has intuitions about desert which prohibit very high levels of taxation. The exact boundaries of what his intuition permits are not made explicit.

Bryan Caplan did a better job of arguing taxation=slavery than the kidney example in “Distributive Justice in a Pure Service Economy”:
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/service

Plume@72: I suppose it depends on what sort of coercion you’re talking about. Nozickians do not consider the fact that people who do not work for capitalists will starve to death to be coercion, since the capitalists aren’t actively causing people to starve, they’re just passively allowing them to starve. I think this is stupid primarily because I think the doing/allowing distinction is bullshit, but I don’t think someone can legitimately embrace the distinction without being blind. On the other hand, there are instances where capitalists do actively cause people to starve by taking away their alternatives. (Privatizing commons people depend on, for instance.) This would be a situation where Nozickians are just plain being blind.

reason @75
Since he [Mankiw] worked for Bush he has become a pariah amongst Democrat supporting economists, in a way he clearly wasn’t before.

I don’t think working for Bush, in itself, would have made him a pariah. Also, why should he care? He has a tenured professorship and he has a textbook which — even if he is the only person who assigns it, will still make him money (and I’m sure he isn’t the only person who assigns it). He’s laughing all the way to the bank. I’m sure at this point he doesn’t much care how the profession views him — not that I know what that view in fact is.

A glance at this paper suffices to suggest that it is risible rubbish — see the ridiculous

@3 Ingrid Robeyns

I haven’t read all of the comments on this thread, let alone with a kind of scrutiny they may possibly demand, except for noting an overriding criticism of the author and his piece. And I wonder why.

To fly in the face of conventional wisdom, I should think it rather refreshing for an economist, an economist by profession, to introduce and to be guided by philosophical considerations, however naive or misguided we may think them to be. It’s a rare thing indeed, and the author should be lauded for having done so rather than put down, minimized, and generally speaking, relegated to irrelevance. As a philosopher, I’m certain you appreciate that point even if others don’t. Nuff said!

And let’s face it. What is the main objection, the cardinal sin of the author, the theme that runs through and though most every comment critical of him? Is it simply because he hadn’t got it right, that his conclusions fail the litmus test of political correctness, more importantly perhaps, that they’re wrong?

What’s being lost in the shuffle, I’m afraid, is that the author had arrived at his conclusions honestly. The argument is not only clearheaded but also clearly presented. If there be fault with it, fault him for the assumptions. Interestingly, however, not many interlocutors on this thread had gone the full route, and this is precisely which I find most suspect about their treatment of the author: they share the very same assumption as he, those which come with vulgar utilitarianism. No wonder, therefore, that most everyone is up in arms against the author of the piece, for the simple reason that he’d come to a diametrically opposite conclusion than they would have, and mind you, from essentially the same set of premises.

Go figure! But that’s the liberal mind for you.

I don’t think it is correct to connect Mankiw’s argument with Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example. Mankiw argues for what he calls a “just deserts” principle of distribution, in which everyone’s income depends on his or her marginal productivity. (See p.21 ff of his paper) That theory is an example of what Nozick calls a patterned theory. In Mankiw’s account, the government would have to assess how closely actual income corresponded to marginal productivity and would if necessary intervene to correct for deviations from this pattern. Nozick used his Chamberlain example against all patterned theories, not just egalitarian ones.

Incidentally, it’s surprising that Mankiw does not cite John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth, as a predecessor of his proposal, along with Wicksell and Lindahl, whom he does cite.

David Gordon – you’re misunderstanding the stipulated connection. It’s not that Mankiw makes the same argument as Nozick, it’s that he uses the exact same thought experiment as part of his (indeed rather different and much less sophisticated) argument.

roger – I’d be curious about that and I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “utilitarian” in this context. Rawls, who most liberals at least nod to in their political philosophy, was very clearly and explicitly anti-utilitarian.

Many economists have told that John Bates Clark was mistaken about marginal productivity, and that economists have long since discarded that point a view. Mankiw cannot even get the economics correct.

O masterful Gregory Mankiw,
I cannot sufficiently thank you.
A fool in my vanity,
you schooled me in sanity.
Now would you permit me to wank you?

chris @ 28:

Jobs’s very early work may be more like Rowling than like Spielberg (in that he could have created the work itself in isolation and possibly even did)

As was briefly referred to in the recent Shirky Bleg, not so much. Or, to get more specific, Plume @ 40:

Jobs couldn’t have made his billions without

Steve Wozniak. FT, as the young people say, FY.

Layman @ 45, quoting Mankiw:

“… Many economists do support increased foreign aid, but as far as I know, no one has
proposed marginal tax rates on rich nations as high as the marginal tax rates imposed on rich individuals.”

In fact, forty years ago the eminent economist M. Python made the assertion, “I would tax all foreigners living abroad.” Mankiw really needs to review the primary literature.

Jim Henley @ 45:

“We are born with as many kidneys as we will ever have. Similarly, we are born with all the money we will ever earn.”

If Mr. Henley would provide wiring instructions, his awarded internet will be transmitted to him forthwith.

Substance McGravitas @ 65:

What a vicious and barbaric thing to write when you could simply have written of subsidy via invasive asset transfer. You know, euphemasia.

… Well, crud, and here I am, fresh out of internets. Perhaps we can appropriate a foreign nation’s internet through taxation.

Professor Bertram @ 91:

Mankiw refuses to respond to critics and quotes from his fan-mail:

So, we could read Mr. Nowosielski’s comments in more than one venue?

roger – I don’t think many people here disagree with any of what you write. See e.g.
https://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/16/annals-of-anti-egalitarian-hyperbole/comment-page-2/#comment-470752
and
https://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/16/annals-of-anti-egalitarian-hyperbole/comment-page-2/#comment-471044
for two comments that cite the exact same passage you do.
There are few people here who aren’t aware of declining median real wages in the US since the 1970s – this isn’t some obscure fact unknown to many, but something that has been covered extensively in both opinion and non-opinion journalism and in mainstream outlets like the NY Times, Slate, TNR, or MSNBC.

The reason most people here don’t engage with the paper in a rigorous fashion but rather pick out passages to poke fun at or discuss the details of Nozick vs. Mankiw is – I’d assume – that it’s just so ridiculously and obviously bad. Even economists think it’s a laughingstock
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/346853962739240960
It just doesn’t call for serious debate, it calls for being ridiculed.

Mankiw wants “marginal” to do an awful lot of work.

Receiving one’s marginal product sort of defines his just desserts frame, and marginal taxes are bad, because those taxes will tend to reduce total output as part of the cost of redistributive taxation.

The classic retort, in economics, would be to analyze the role of economic rents, the portion of factor income, which doesn’t respond at the margin, and is morally “unearned”. Mankiw obliquely side-steps the problem of economic rents, by referring only to “rent-seeking”, which term he uses as a synonym for “predatory behavior”.

I’ve seen several commenters say they don’t think Mankiw believes anything like this claptrap. I think he might believe it, or something very much like it.

O masterful Gregory Mankiw,
I cannot sufficiently thank you.

Now I know how to pronounce Mankiw. I would never have guessed correctly.

I didn’t realize the top 1% of income earners weren’t taxed at all. That doesn’t seem fair. The highest earners should be taxed the most, like a 35% or 40% income tax rate or perhaps higher… this would establish the proper incentives to achieve and succeeed. The more you earn, the less you keep.

The bottom 50% of income earners shouldn’t be taxed at all. In fact, real wages are declining these days so the bottom 50% should probably receive public assistance of some sort. Again, this would provide the proper incentives for people to remain in the lower/middle class and not make trouble.

The article by Timothy Besley, which Adam Smith cites above, is certainly an example of a less ridiculous style than Mankiw’s, but, putting aside whether Besley takes moral philosophy seriously, I think Besley is still vulnerable to the criticism of not taking economics, or its egregious faults, seriously enough. There are conceptual problems with economics, which drive the ideologies of conservative libertarianism and neoliberalism and their deleterious effects on the political discourse and policy choice. Besley politely and diffidently acknowledges problems with the ideologies, without really tracing any responsibility back to the core doctrines. In fact, he appears to think the cure would be for economics to issue more generic poisons by extending the existing apparatus (market design!), possibly to be distributed under the same ideological brand names.

The other day, Mark Thoma had a column in Pete “let me steal your Social Security, please!” Peterson’s Fiscal Times, which was titled, Seven Important Examples of How Markets Can Fail. On his blog, he added as a preface to the title: Free, Unregulated Markets are Not Always the Answer: Thoma is no right-wing ideologue; he presents himself as having slightly left-of-center political sentiments and mainstream views on economics. The theme of his blog is to highlight the middle or consensus range of well-informed or authoritative mainstream views, as informed by academic economics thinking and teaching. And, his article presents a consensus view: that competitive markets are an emergent phenomenon, liable to a canonical list of “market failures” identified by theoretical analysis, which failures can be imperfectly remedied by government interventions, designed to move the failing markets “toward” the competitive ideal. I imagine Besley would mildly acknowledge that this is a common, and common textbook view, but might object that, surely, there are more advanced and sophisticated assessments — that’s how Besley avoids accepting more than the most minimal and grudging responsibility for the failings of economics as a profession or doctrine. And, so Thoma’s formulation remains the hand-waving, which, in other, somewhat more polemical contexts, becomes either Friedmanite libertarianism or neoliberalism.

rootless @ 15 identified the fundamental flaw with Mankiw: “The fundamental weakness of Mankiw is his unwillingness to admit the role of the state in markets.” And, we can trace that flaw to Thoma’s clichéd formulation of competitive markets as an ideal, with no state in sight, until one of those “failures” can be identified. It is utter nonsense: perfectly competitive markets never exist; they are a logical impossibility, useful, perhaps for clarifying concepts, but having no factual existence and can hardly form an “ideal” useful as a practical guide*. Markets cannot exist without the public goods structure provided by the state. Markets and the public-goods providing state are co-emergent; politics and economics together, neither logically antecedent to the other.

As soon as one admits that “private” markets require “public” goods to exist or function, then you are confronted with the problems of paying for the public goods as well as the implications of an economic structure of markets and hierarchies. Structured markets means that there are never markets in everything; there are always numerous structural constraints, and not just the deus-ex-machina constraints of Technology, but the political structuring of hierarchical organization, in which private selfishness lives alongside the public spiritedness and enlightened self-interest in a peaceful, safe and cooperative society. Wilt Chamberlain’s income consists in the largest part, of an economic rent, which is unearned, and which creates a cushion which dampens to non-existence the effect of marginal taxes on his income — even a 70% tax on Chamberlain’s income isn’t going to have him forego basketball and the life of fame, luxury and sexual debauchery, which it affords him, for some other occupation, where his marginal productivity isn’t amplified by the technologies of arenas and television broadcasting. (Television broadcasting, we might note in passing, distributes a “natural” public good through the commonwealth of frequency spectrum, in a way that generates vast “private” business incomes, because of a complex and elaborate political infrastructure.)

None of what I wrote in the paragraph above is any kind of radical or original departure from the core of “orthodox” economic thinking. It is colored a bit by my personal values, but the logic and acknowledgement of reality is not some bit of heterodox esoterica; this is, or should be, orthodoxy, and acknowledged by economists across a spectrum of personal values. Besley, Thoma and Mankiw simply do not see any reason to be bound by sound economic thinking — they may think they take it seriously, but they don’t. No idea is ever really wrong, no identification of necessary and sufficient factors forms a boundary, which cannot be breached by willful speculation or a comfortable truce among colleagues in the cafeteria. Mankiw is more ridiculous, more frequently than most polemicists with a Chair at Harvard, but the abuse of privilege is commonplace in the economics profession, and just as evident in Besley’s or Thoma’s mild-mannered weakmindedness, as in Mankiw’s ridiculous incompetence.

*There’s a well-known doctrine of the second-best in economics that would seem to tell against this prescription to move toward an unobtainable “ideal” like perfectly competitive markets, but Thoma, characteristically, does not feel constrained by his awareness, and even acceptance in other contexts, of the doctrine of the second-best.

Why do we say that Wilt Chamberlain created the value of the millions of dollars he received? It does not take a PhD in economics to observe that there were no millionaire sports stars before the invention of broadcast; whereas afterwards, there have been thousands of them. It seems to take a PhD in economics to ignore it.

The value-creation is attributed to Chamberlain, and not Marconi, because Chamberlain made the money, and Marconi did not. If society were so structured as to allow Marconi (and his descendants) to capture all of the profits from broadcast advertising, Nozick would not have become an activist demanding redistribution of money from Marconi’s estate to Chamberlain. He would have just used Marconi in his example instead of Chamberlain.

At the bottom of this circular logic the literal complete absence of any rational-technical criteria of value-added.

This is absolutely necessary, since the application of any remotely plausible criteria other than income would quickly lead us to the realization that our entire society — that is, every person currently alive — has added a tiny portion of the total value of what exists (and therefore of what can be owned). We ourselves, the living, as an entire society, can take credit at most for the advance in standard of living between 2013 and (approximately) 1900. From our dead ancestors, we inherit the advance in standard of living between humans living in 1900, and wild chimpanzees.

Technology and knowledge accumulate. No one adds more than a lifetime of labor to the millions of lifetimes of labor inherited. But some inherit much more than others.