Not normally a fan of Brad deLong, but I can appreciate his brutal attack on our comfortable myths…
“Now I think it is an open question whether it is harder to do the job via predistribution, or to do the job via changing human perceptions to get everybody to understand that:
*no, none of us is worth what we are paid.
*we are all living, to various extents, off of the dividends from our societal capital
*those of us who are doing especially well are those of us who have managed to luck into situations in which we have market power–in which the resources we control are (a) scarce, (b) hard to replicate quickly, and (c) help produce things that rich people have a serious jones for right now.”
I highly recommend his piece and the Noah Smith one he includes. Provoking some new ideas?