If you want to get down to the essence of something, you strip away the unnecessary. Jamie Oliver successfully branded this notion to cooking, and became the Naked Chef. Dr. Charles Whelan applies the same formula, and calls himself the Naked Economist. While I applaud anyone who is interested in making the complex easier to understand, there is a point where you bypass the truth and simplify to the point of conjecture.
Whelan, in a recent article about income gap, shows exactly how far you can go in asking the right questions.
“The problem of the commons” is one of the philosophical hurdles of free-market thinkers: if everyone has a selfish motivation, then who preserves the parks, and the land, and the schools, and the roads..? Another one you hear about involves a concept known as “economic justice.” It is the scorecard you use to answer the question, “How rich can the rich be relative to the poor for society to be fair?”
Unfortunately, that sentence is already loaded with a number of words that defy a universal definition. Not even a consensus definition.
One thing I have discovered on my personal journal of education and mentoring is that the vast majority of conflicts come down to a difference in core values. Two people looking at the same set of facts will come to completely different resolutions. Those discussions rarely generate anything close to a conclusion, and usually end with someone questioning the other’s intelligence or motives. The opponent is either, by definition, “stupid” or “evil.” Only rarely do parties reach that moment of enlightenment where they recognize that the other person simply has a different set of internal priorities.
Which gets us back to the scholarly research into the notion of economic justice. The number used in those calculations is the Gini coefficient, which measures a country’s distribution of income. On a scale of zero to one, “0” means everything is meted out flat, “1” means a single person has the whole pie to himself. The overly-simplified analysis of such numbers tends to define nations on one end of the continuum as “evil” and those at the other end as “just.”
The next simplification involved the mapping of the Gini Index to crime rates, making an argument that we need to bring down the gap between rich and poor, or expect an increase in violent crime. Whelan himself warns against such over-simplification, as it tends to ignore other factors. His conclusion is that it’s more important to be asking the right questions. In this case, the question he wants to address is more about “perception of gap” than “reality of gap.”
That truly would be a worthwhile line of study, done correctly. Too often, the “lay economists” (think policymakers, politicians, journalists) tend to settle on a set of definitions that didn’t bias the results one way or another. Most commonly, it’s a bias of a core value that the pollster holds as beyond question.
Naked truth requires stripping away more than complexity. It only happens when one lays bare everything they are about.
