Kiwiblog

Food News reports:

A school lunch lady in Falun, Sweden has been told by education authorities to get in step and stop serving better quality meals than lunch ladies at other schools.

Horrific. That means there is no food equality. It is not fair kids at one school get better meals than kids at another school.

She has been told to stop baking her own bread in favour of the store-bought version and to reduce the range of vegetables she offers in her now famous vegie buffets.

In spite of working within her budget, and meeting all health and nutrition standards, Annika Erikson has been told her super lunches are unfair on students at other schools, and she must stop such anti-social behaviour immediately.

Yes, initiative and excellence are anti-social behaviour.

Katarina Lindberg, head of the authority which overseas school meals in the region, told local news media, “A menu has been developed. …It is about making a collective effort on quality, to improve school meals overall and to try and ensure everyone does the same.”

Oh yes the collective effort, This is the same collective effort that argues against performance pay for excellent teachers because it is all about the collective effort.

Another article on this has a great quote:

The “same,” even if everyone is worse off. Or as Winston Churchill put it, “socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

Equality, comrades!

Martin Robinson writes in the NZ Herald:

New Zealand rugby players come in all ages, shapes and sizes, and both sexes. Players vary greatly as regards their skill levels, commitment and training schedules. Rewards for players are extraordinarily unequal, as most actually pay to play while a very few are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is this fair or unfair? Should the Labour Party, the Greens or the Occupy Auckland movement campaign for more-equal payment of rugby players? Should the “greedy” All Blacks be forced to hand over some of their colossal income to the more impoverished fellow players? Should the Government intervene to reduce this glaring disparity in rewards?

Reducing the pay of All Blacks and spreading it among the less well rewarded rugby players, even if it is a good idea in theory, poses immense practical problems. Would the All Blacks agree to a significant pay cut? If they did, the team would become a 2nd or 3rd XV of players who were willing to play for the reduced reward.

We would never beat the Aussies, and maybe the All Blacks team would disappear. So the equality campaign would have succeeded in narrowing pay differentials, but at the cost of destroying the world’s greatest rugby team.

But the players would finally all be equal.

Inequality and the poor will always be with us. People vary greatly in their talents, work ethic and attitudes. Some people are lucky, others are unlucky. Whatever any government does, the lucky and hard-working will tend to be wealthier than the unlucky and lazy.

Every family is unequal. Both my brothers are much richer than I am, but I don’t envy them or think there is anything unfair about it. I don’t regard them as greedier than I am.

I am the poor relation. If I had worked harder, invested more wisely and spent less time on holiday, I would have more money in the bank, but they are the choices I made. I don’t regret anything so I’m content with our financial inequality. When I met my brother on holiday on the Gold Coast, I stayed in a motel-cum-backpackers while he stayed in the Sheraton.

He should have complained to the Government that his brother had been too successful.

New Zealand is an unequal society, just like every human society, just like every family. An equal society is impossible, an unworkable nightmare involving zero incentives and gross unfairness. Why should a cleaner be paid the same as a surgeon? It’s a ridiculous idea. I’ve cleaned toilets at the minimum wage but I don’t think it was unfair that I was paid less than when I was a teacher.

The All Blacks and some chief executives earn mega-salaries but they also pay stacks of tax. New Zealand’s tax and benefit system transfers many billions of dollars from rich Kiwis to poor Kiwis year after year.

In fact if you have a couple of kids you don’t even pay net tax until you earn around $55,000 or more.

The way to reduce poverty in New Zealand is to increase exports, improve workers’ skills and productivity, create more wealth and jobs, and then raise the minimum wage.

If New Zealand is becoming more unequal, the answer is for us poorer ones to work and save harder and smarter in order to even things up.

How outraegous. He has overlooked that it is all society’s fault.

Red Alert posted this great video.

When you watch the video, recall how the Greens argue against economic growth, because they say its rob the world of resources. They argue for greater income equality, such as the world had 200 years ago.

The left tend to measure most things by talking about inequality, and how anything that increases inequality is bad. Inequality, being the gap between those on the lowest incomes and the highest incomes.

This of course means that most of the focus grows on how to divide up the cake, rather than grow the cake.

But even putting that to one side for a moment, I want to make the case for focusing on social mobility rather than merely inequality.

In many cases inequality is a normal and good thing. It is a good thing that a 50 year old with 30 years of experience gets paid more than a 16 year old with no experience.

It is also a good thing that someone who spends six years at medical school and four years of specialisation gets paid more than say a parliamentary researcher.

For the vast majority of New Zealanders, they start their working life earning a lot less then they finish it. And this is good – otherwise you extra skills and experience are not valued.

So I reject many measures of income equality as unsophisticated and even counter productive.

The measure that I would like more emphasis placed on is social mobility. I don’t have a problem with a 19 year old earning $10 an hour as a kitchen hand if when they are 30 they are earning say $25 an hour as a cook. However I will agree that someone who spends their life earning just $10/hour is going to have a relatively deprived life.

But for me the solution is not to raise the minimum wage to $25/hour, but to have a society and a labour market which will help people on $10/hour gain skills and experience so they move up the pay scale.

In the UK social mobility has historically been difficult with such a class ridden society. In New Zealand I think it is far less so. Few people really care about where you were born (unless it was Palmerston North) and what your parents did.

In a society with very low levels of social mobility, I can understand why reducing inequality is more important. But in a society which does have opportunities, I want the emphasis to go increasing social mobility, rather than merely the blunt instrument of inequality. If you take inequality to extreme measures, then you end up like the old USSR where cleaners and surgeons get paid much the same.

The data on social mobility in NZ is fairly sparse – partly because you have to measure it over extended periods of time. But that is where I would like more focus to go.