The Market Has Spoken!
If you find something amiss in the fact that Bristol Palin will earn multiples of the amount a Doctor earns in a year, you just don't understand the way the Free Market works to establish individual "value to society".
Color Me Guilty!
In a stunning article in NYT's Economix, Uwe E. Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton uses Bristol Palin as an example of how the theory of marginal productivity, taught every year to millions of college students around the world, is a crock. This is the theory that fosters the idea that the prevailing distribution of income and wealth in a market economy reflects the contribution to society that people in different income classes make, and is widely quoted to explain income disparity and why there's such variance in compensation amounts.
From Bristol Palin and How Society Establishes Value
It is a safe bet that Bristol Palin, not yet 21, will earn this year and next a multiple of the income earned by her son’s pediatrician. Anyone who finds this amiss just does not like the verdicts of the free market, which sets those incomes. Ms. Palin sells her services in a free market, and she purchases her son’s health care in a free market, paying directly or through private health insurance. That free market has spoken.
[...]
Would anyone be surprised if her income this year and next is three to five times as much as that of a typical pediatrician? Would an economist find anything amiss in such a multiple? Probably not. The free market, they will argue, appears to judge the value that Ms. Palin adds to American society greater than that added by the typical pediatrician.
Reinhardt quotes the 2009-10 The Associated Press reports of earnings, $332,500 by Candie’s Foundation, a nonprofit group, to appear in videos and print material to help raise awareness on the prevention of teenage pregnancies, “Dancing with the Stars” income, signed on for a new television reality show and is said to earn $15,000 to $30,000 for each appearance on the speaking circuit. She also just published a book.
Her income represents her "value to society" per accepted economic theory and her value is that she is a "single teenage mothers who happens to be the daughter of Sarah Palin, which ipso facto makes Bristol Palin a celebrity as well'.
He adds,
And I find it impossible to detect the working of the theory in the compensation of financial executives, whose incomes are so dependent on excessive risk-taking and the government for social reinsurance.
There's much to think about and little to explain why we as a society place so little value on those who really do contribute (even folks who put their own lives at risk for us) and fall for excuses to justify the incomes of those who add nothing but succeed by marketing themselves to the highest bidder.
Just another aspect to the Free Market myth?