Many people think that we live in a meritocracy, where talent and hard work are rewarded by success and status, and opportunities are there for whoever is willing to work for them. But this is not true. Childhood circumstances have a huge impact on people’s life chances and outcomes, alongside talent, hard work and random luck during life. So we cannot say that those at the top and those at the bottom of society fully deserve their lot. Even if we could ‘level up the playing field’ on childhood circumstances, there are many other reasons to question how and why we reward people differently.
Correcting for market failures
Some people’s talents and labours are more valued by society (and thus better rewarded) than others, so the amount that people are rewarded often owes more to the vagaries of the labour market than to how hard they work. We don’t value or reward vital unpaid labour (often care work done by women) at all. We don’t value or reward key workers nearly enough. And we allow the market to bestow excessive and unearned rewards on people whose contribution to our shared prosperity – let alone to the social good – is sometimes in net negative territory.
Rewarding everyone’s contributions
We should reward hard work, but we should ensure that everyone’s contributions are not only valued but fairly rewarded, by narrowing the ‘reward gap’ from both directions. And we need to recognise that huge variations in income in one generation lead to unequal opportunities in the next, even if wealth inequality is both bigger and more important a driver of this than income inequality.
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