The Socialist Grading Scheme and Poverty

Many of you have probably seen the following story and commentary about a college professor who started a "socialist" grading scheme in class.  I decided to write a response.

First you will find the story and commentary then the response I have written.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer. 

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class".. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A.... (substituting grades for dollars - something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy.  When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. 

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that. (Please pass this on) These are possibly the 5 best sentences you'll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

Can you think of a reason for not sharing this?
Neither could we.

Here's my response:

Yes, I can think of a number of reasons not to share it.

1. The analogy between grading and the economy is inappropriate in a variety of ways:

• ·      In a college classroom, everyone starts with am equal opportunity to succeed.  Not so in the economy.
• ·      In a college classroom, the intellectually and academically weakest have already been weeded out.  The economy includes everyone.
• ·      If you get an F in a college classroom you don’t die. If you don’t have access to food, shelter, and health care, in the real world, you die.
• ·      The Bible, which for me as a Christian shapes my worldview and moral perspective, never says anything about how to grade people in a class, but does say this and many other things like it:  “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.

2. No one is proposing either to “legislate the poor into prosperity” or to “legislate the wealthy out of prosperity.”

• ·      But it is a constant battle, especially during a recession and in a time of dramatic changes in the structures of our economy brought on by globalization, to protect the social safety net upon which those at the bottom depend for survival (not prosperity!).
• ·      There is every indication that the wealthy are doing incredibly well in our society!  And every reason to believe they can stand to bear a heavier share of the burden without undermining either their wealth or their incentives to produce.  (Which is being really generous because so much wealth is generated by producing nothing, but through financial speculation.)

3. The second and fifth points here are based on a wildly mistaken belief: that there are huge percentages of people in our society who do not work and have the idea that they don’t have to work.

• ·      Surely, there always have been and always will be lazy people.  And, there always have been and always will be people who take advantage of government programs, (though I think that’s probably no more of a problem among those at the bottom than it is those in the middle and the top and those in the middle and the top “cost” the public coffers much more).
• ·      From what I’ve read, the much more accurate way to envision our situation requires us to recognize that we have growing poverty in our country because manufacturing jobs have fled the country, labor unions are weaker than in the past, wages at the bottom of the economic scale have stagnated, and the minimum wage has not kept up with the cost of living.
• ·      All this means that if the people at the bottom are losing their incentive to work, it isn’t because there are significant numbers of people who think they don’t have to work, but because the experience of so many is that you can work like a dog at lower end jobs (that pay very little and aren’t required to offer benefits by keeping people part-time) and never have any prospect of upward mobility (which a recent study I read about a couple of weeks ago suggested is almost non-existent in the United States).