After reading Jonathan Haidt’s How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles,
it is clear that gift exchange and team production are very closely linked.
However, this does not come as a surprise to me. When two people put in the
same inputs to achieve a common goal, I completely expect both parties to
receive the same compensation. However, if you were not to do the same work to
achieve the goal, or the payment was a gift, I do not expect for the payments
to be even.
An interesting point I believe
the article makes without knowing it is the how ok people are if they start out
“rich” or “poor.” When they talk about the babies who do no work but start out
with more marbles, the babies rarely ever shared them. This can be compared to
where people with rich or poor parents start their kids off. Although the
children themselves have done nothing to deserve the extra income, they still
receive a huge boost and a starting point that is not equal to that of the
other child. More importantly, the child believes he is right by not sharing
the marble, something egalitarians may find a problem with.
Although I have not had any
group projects in college, in high school they were much more common. One in
particular comes to mind, from my Latin American history class. During the
project, most of the group contributed their fair share to the completion of
the project, however one student in particular did not. In fact, rather than
participating, she was studying for the final in that same class. At the end of
the project, we received forms as to judge how the remainder of our group
contributed to our success from 1-20 (20% of our grade on the project) and in
the end; the student who did not participate received a significantly worse grade
than those who did. In addition, he offered all the kids who received 20/20 on
the group judgments, he would give us an extra credit point to motivate us to
do our fair share. This type of exchange I do not feel bad about, as the girl
who did not participate did not deserve the same grade as the rest of us. In
this situation, everyone had an equal chance to participate, so an egalitarian
should not be bothered by this outcome.
When looking back on the
project, I am still happy that the shirker received a lower grade because the
remaining four group remembers not only did our fair share but also had to ban
together and make up for the work she was not doing. If we apply this situation
to gift exchange, the grade would be pay and while the effort put in stays the
same, while the grader would be the employer and the students would be the
employees. Here, the slacking student would not receive the extra 20% pay
because she provided less than the minimum amount of work to do so. In our
case, and especially those who got the perfect 20/20 scores and earned the
extra point, received a gift from the grader and the grader received the gift
of an excellently made project, in the case of a business, an excellently made
product.
Something the paper touched on
that I couldn’t relate to is the collusion between big business, big finance,
and big government. I wish they had done an experiment where they somehow
communicated to one child that they were going to receive more and then measure
how often they gave up their marbles. I would say the conclusions in this piece
do jive with the conclusions that came form this piece. Everyone is always
looking to the fair share, however, if someone is not doing his or her fair
share, that person should not be entitled to the same payment as someone who
put in more work.
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