Procedural Fairness in Team and Individual Settings.

This was a very insightful piece that analyzed the wealth distribution using behavioral psychology as an example to explain a specific phenomenon. I personally believe that this article touches on important topics such as “procedural fairness” which I found to be incredibly interesting. The psychological aspect of examining how someone receives wealth affects the distribution of this wealth was in particular something that did not occur to me before. I have personally experienced this phenomenon of procedural fairness when it comes to working with in a group environment. The concept of team vs. individual production as we discussed in class can be applied in the same experiment.

One example that shows this is when working in a group environment compared to an individual environment in a school setting. When working in a group, all the members of the group must contribute their effort in order for a final grade to be determined for the entire group. For these reasons, group members will often insist that every group member contribute an equal amount of work. If someone if slacking it would not be fair for that person to get a higher grade because the other people in the group were able to contribute on his behalf. On the other hand, individual work in a school setting corresponds with the effort that the person puts into the assignment or studying for a test irrelevant of other people. The procedural setting of working in a group or studying for a test by yourself corresponds with the distribution of wealth or in this case grades.

Furthermore, this article strikes an interesting point when the author states that “The compression went into reverse in the 1980s, and since then, inequality has risen to levels approaching those of 1929.” This fact alone shows the resulting implications of our current societal approach towards wealth distribution. It is simply not working. The author proceeds to further insist that democrats focus more on more ways to achieve a more balanced wealth distribution by focusing on the procedural fairness as discussed above. Some ideas that crossed my head when reading this article was just about ways in which this can be accomplished. The people is trying to achieve this wealth distribution by offering incentives for people to take on this approach without opposition for giving out handouts.

I personally believe that one way to solve the problem of unequal wealth distribution is to promote economic equality by putting more emphasis on the work culture. If we value the workers on the edge then there would be less opposition for fairer distributions of income. The notion that managers and CEOs should make millions of dollars based off of commissions or performance should be less idealized. If there is more cooperation and involvement from both the higher ups and the workers that constitute the majority of the production and other operations, then people could see how to divide income more evenly. This type of attitude is very prevalent in Japan, in which managers do not make substantially more than the workers at a company.