LOURY: Maybe there's a possibility for a real War on Poverty. Okay. How about taking on the idea that hedge fund managers, and Wall Street bankers, make a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times what the ordinary person on the street is making, and really bringing that into the center of our politics. Now I don't much expect that to happen, but that's the kind of thing that I would get excited about.
And here's Loury in a more recent Bloggingheads, discussing executive compensation and the $500,000 "limit" for firms taking bailout money:
LOURY: But this $500,000 thing... I'm thinking, suppose I lived in Manhattan. Suppose I needed to send my kids to the equivalent of Sidwell Friends in Manhattan, if I could get them in there. Suppose I had a loft over in Battery Park, or over in Brooklyn somewhere, or whatever, I don't know what the real estate market is like... They're telling me it's like $1500 a square foot for anywhere decent in Manhattan, so if you got 2000 square feet, that's $3 million dollars... And I'm pretty good at what I do. Okay. Derek Jeter is pretty good at playing shortstop and hitting a baseball. Some people are pretty good at assessing business deals or deciding whether or not to invest money... Five hundred thousand dollars ain't diddly. This is the statement that I want to make. I'm sorry, I'm not running for office, I can actually tell you the truth--it's not a lot of money. For such a person. It is a lot of money for Joe Sixpack, proverbial... But for millions of Americans--a surgeon, anywhere in this country, who's halfway decent at what they do, a heart surgeon, neurosurgeon, orthopedic surgeon--they're gonna make way more than five hundred thousand dollars.
Loury seems to relish in employing a bit of demagoguery in the first quote--the same demagoguery, ironically, that he decries in the second quote. So what's the deal? Shorter early Loury is: Wow, some people make a lot more money than others, we need to address this. Shorter later Loury (which I happen to think is the logical take) is: WTF, $500K ain't squat for someone living a good life in New York City.
Loury seems to acknowledge that some jobs are going to fetch more on the market than others. Ergo, some people are always going to be a lot richer than others. That's just the way it works in a semi-capitalist system like ours. There's nothing wrong with this--in fact, there's everything right with this. And Loury seems to agree. So why does he feel the need to employ pointless populism in seeking to address the War on Poverty? Of course "poverty" is always relative--but the frame of reference should not be Wall Street bankers. That just doesn't make any sense and only serves to cloud the issue.
