Question Fox "news," busily enjoining viewers to mock the idea of wealth redistribution, has posted a story entitled "College Students in Favor of Wealth Distribution Are Asked to Pass Their Grade Points to Other Students" http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/17/college-students-in-favor-wealth-distribution-are-asked-to-support-grade/ Their ludicrous point is "if wealth is going to be redistributed, we should do the same with grades." Is this a "fallacy by false analogy?" If not, what would be the most succinct explanation to explain what's wrong with this comparison? Thanks, Tom K.

Accepted:
September 1, 2011

Comments

Thanks for a few moments of idle amusement!

Perhaps the best response is "Oy!" But to earn the huge salary in Merely Possible Dollars that the site pays me, a bit more is called for.

So yes: it's a case of false analogy, and the analogy goes bad in indefinitely many ways. But one of them has at least some intrinsic logical interest.

Suppose that as a matter of social policy, we set up a system that left everyone with a paycheck of the same size at the end of every month. What does that amount to? It amounts to saying that each person can acquire the same quantity of goods as each other person. Maybe that would be a bad idea; maybe the result would be that people would get lazy and less wealth would end up getting produced overall. But that's not built into to very logic of the idea. It's an empirical claim, even if a highly plausible one. There's nothing logical incoherent, as it were, about a system intended to produce completely uniform distribution of wealth, whatever the practical upshot might be.

Suppose, on the other hand, that we set up a system that smooths GPAs out completely, so that every student gets the same GPA - say, 3.2. Then what we've done amounts to getting rid of GPAs. It gets rid of them because what a GPA does, at least roughly, is tell us how well people did on certain sorts of tasks. For that to be possible, the system for awarding GPAs must allow (though needn't require) that different people can end up with different GPAs.

We've looked at the extreme cases of completely uniform distribution. In practice, the reply might be, no one has anything that extreme in mind. But the point of looking at the extremes was to draw attention to a difference between the very logic of the two cases. Redistributing income doesn't as a matter of logic affect the purchasing power of a dollar, even though redistribution schemes raise lots of perfectly good policy and empirical questions. But unless the "redistribution" of grades is a mere matter of relabeling, redistributing GPAs destroys the information that GPAs are intended to convey. It's logically a bit like what we'd have (to borrow Kant's example) if it was understood by everyone that when we say "I promise" there's no real expectation that we'll do what we "promised." That would be a case where promising in any meaningful sense would be impossible.

Real life redistribution schemes would no doubt be less total. But the underlying logical point doesn't go away. GPA redistribution schemes would amount to fuzzing out the information at the core of what a GPA is. Near as I can tell, there's no similar logical problem for wealth redistribution. And so the analogy really is an apples and oranges affair.