Spreading the Wealth: Knowledge as Social Inheritance

Warren Buffett, ranked by Forbes in 2008 as the world's wealthiest man, is no moral philosopher. Yet he is capable of raising a tricky philosophical quandary. Reflecting on his tremendous riches, he has attributed his fortune largely to chance. "It just so happens that I was in the right place at the right time," Buffett has said. "I really wouldn't have made a difference if I were born in Bangladesh. Or if I was born here in 1700.... I just got lucky as hell.... Stick me [someplace else] and I could say I know how to allocate capital and value business. But they'd say, so what?"

In crediting luck, Buffett not only points to the birth lottery, in which some people are born into more privileged circumstances than others, but also recognizes that to a great extent he owes the accomplishments of his professional life to the manifold contributions of other people, known and unknown, past and present. They have collectively done Buffett enormous favors, affording him security and education, providing modern infrastructure, science and communications systems and creating a sophisticated market in which he could do business. Because of this, Buffett claims, "society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned."

"But if this is true," ask Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly in Unjust Deserts, "doesn't society deserve a very significant share of what [Buffett] has received?" This question clearly indicates how thoroughly Alperovitz and Daly want their new book to upend commonplace notions about the relationships between economic growth, productivity and wealth. The duo cite "extraordinary developments" in the study of knowledge and economic growth as the foundation of their contentions. But they are actually returning the economic discussion to where it started, with Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Marx--to moral philosophy and debates about the values that should inform public policy. Their foremost ethical question is, given that we owe most of our productivity to a common social inheritance, to what extent can we say that we have "earned" our personal wealth? If we see far, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants, the argument goes. Therefore, a large portion of what we claim as payment for our productivity should actually go to the Goliaths who are doing the heavy work of holding us up. Even if your eyesight is much better than average, your individual claim is limited.

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