Post 7 Team work

After reading “how to get the rich to share the marbles” article, I think the result of this experiment could not convince me. At least, it could not rely on those restricted circumstances to reflect the whole population’s “sharing idea”. Even though the experiment chose three-year- old children, who seem to make the decision base on their instinct, as objects of study, actually there is an important factor would significantly affect the way they make decision – family education. Recently, there are several popular Parent-child TV shows in China. For every season, five popular singers, actors and athletics father will bring their kids to complete all different type of tasks. Those kids are normally from 2-8 years old average about 4 years old. They are required to complete the challenging tasks either independently or cooperating with other kids. Of course, there are many rewards wait for the first winner who complete the tasks faster than the others. The interesting thing is that most time those winners would share the gifts with other kids right after they got the gifts. They feel satisfied by sharing. Not only gifts, they would love to share any delicious food or drinks with other kids. Why? Obviously, family education plays a significant role here. Even they are still a little kid, their parents have already started to teach them the idea of sharing. Parents also told them older kids need to take care of younger kids. Those moral value has already implanted into kid’s minds. Another important reason for those kids loving shares is that they all come from rich families, which could afford most things they like, which actually make them less selfish. To illustrate, a tasty cake might be very precious to the very poor or rural area’s kids but just a normal appetite to those rich kids. They really don't care to share it or even just give it away. Hence, I really think “how to get the rich to share” is not a core problem that need to be addressed.

In addition, I think “fair” is a relative definition, not an absolute definition. Same distribution may sound fair to you but not to everyone else. The claim announced by President Obama that “we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules” may sound fair at first appearance and seems very humanity. However, if you take further consideration, this claim actually is not fair at all. Why? From my perspective, if everyone gets exactly equal amount wealth in an economy, the citizens guided by this type of ideal policy would lose the incentive to work hard because no matter how much efforts you made, the amount of effort you get is always fixed. Especially when the government tries to solve the wealth inequality by taxing rich people to subsidize poor people, this policy already failed to achieve fairness. If the fairness is defined as people deserve to get the amount of efforts they made, then it is unfair to tax on high-income family who might contribute more to this society or works very hard to earn all that wealth. Just take a second to think about the welfare system in Europe, initially government was trying to improve the poor families or unemployment by giving them relief funds that collected by a high tax. Later on, some people found that even they work hard regularly, probably their after-tax weekly salaries is less than those who did not work at all by getting the social welfare. Naturally, they would have a lot of complaints and quit the job and rely on social benefit as well. For high-income family, they might lose an incentive to earn more money since once they passed certain tax threshold, the tax rate would be very high, which actually damage their benefit.

For team work, it is always hard to divide work equally. The most common situation is that someone would contribute more than the others. Normally, a more competent student would finish the challenging part which requires more time or more research on it, and leave the rest to other team members, but everyone gets some grade in the end. Is it fair? It depends on. If the more competent student thinks he could complete the challenging part more outstanding or effectively which save the whole group work time and improve team work performance, everyone gets a better grade as a whole, he thinks it is fair, then this situation would be fair. If he thinks everyone should get exactly the same amount of work, regardless the hardness of the work, in the end results probably won’t be as satisfied as the previous situation, he thinks this type of situation is fair, then it could be fair as well. No matter what kinds of decisions we made, everyone agrees on it and accept the possible results, then it would be fair.

To restatement my point, fairness is a relative moral value, no one should force everyone else to accept his or her own perspective as the sole answer. The moral value would change as the time pass by. Something people deeply believed fair in the past, it would probably be unacceptable to the contemporary people or future generation. A good policy is not achieving goals by sacrificing a group of people to benefiting the other group. It should create incentive value to the society as a whole to work on it.