Think about the News 4

The general election candidates who stand no chance ofwinning makes a few important points. It notes that high-flyers nowadays are parachuted to safe or marginal seats without even proving themselves first; they are marked as high-flyers through other methods, typically SPADing for a senior figure or being friends with them. This makes local party branches even less relevant; they are merely unpaid lobbyists, being taken advantage of by better-connected outsiders. As the article notes, ‘no-one in his right mind would stand in a safe seat unless he saw it as a stepping stone’. Of course, famous politicians have taken the opportunity to tell their stories, to appear humorous, humble and forgiving and make it seem like it was hard work that got them there. That doesn’t mean it’s how things work now, or even how they mostly worked back then.

It also notes at the end that it would look a bit odd if no-one stood against safe candidates. That’s the problem. By concealing the oddness of our electoral system, these losing candidates are supporting the major political parties in general, because it is the major parties that benefit from the obscenely undemocratic system we have. One such candidate said ‘it’s about making sure that there’s a voice for people with a different point of view’. Yet that’s precisely what does not happen. One person gets elected, and that’s it. If one candidate stood, representing all other possibilities, people would think it strange, but that would be the ideal solution to the FPTP system. That one candidate should stand, and then resign on victory, triggering a vote for candidates from the constituent parties he represented.

So not only do these losing candidates get no chance of winning, their hopes of stepping on to something else are smaller than they think, and they’ll get no support from party HQ. But despite needing sympathy, they are still doing democracy a disservice. This news story helpfully conceals that disservice, because it’s so hard to have sympathy for a person’s plight and also think that the person has made bad choices that shouldn’t be made. It is much easier to be sympathetic to the situation and the choices that got a person there.

Think about the news 3

An easy one this time.
'David Cameron has said he wants to complete the job of "turning the country around"'.
Obviously the right direction for him didn't include enough inequality and injustice.

More seriously, today the Conservatives are taking the heat:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32116129
 Someone has done my job already, pointing out that their figure is utter rubbish and very much sly propaganda. I guess Labour will be up next.

Thinking about the news 2

The biggest news story today is this. A plane has crashed in the French alps, killing all 150 people aboard.

I want to offer a bit of perspective, helpfully turned into a pretty picture by the Grauniad.
The figures for the whole of Europe will be even higher. 150 people on a plane is news, but should it be the top story? I bet that many people die every day in some hospitals.
Accidental hanging or strangulation is far more common than air accidents. And as for deliberate hanging or strangulation, or all forms of suicide... these are 100 times more common, but still only 1% of deaths.
Or go to Eurostat and find 8154 transport deaths in 2011, or 22 every day. Alternatively, an air accident of this size every day would be 55000 deaths a year in Europe. That's the same order of magnitude as 'ill-defined or unknown causes' 9i.e people who've slipped through the cracks), and still fewer than the 83,449 who died in 2011 from dementia, for example.

Think about the news 1

I intend to devote an occasional post to a headline story online. I usually go for the BBC to avoid some of the most obvious bias in reporting. But the BBC nonetheless reports what everyone else is talking about, and that in itself reflects some shocking assumptions or cunning PR.

Today the biggest story on the website is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32022484
'David Cameron has told the BBC he will not serve a third term as prime minister if the Conservatives remain in government after the general election.'

It seems a harmless story; a reasonable statement of political intent which he hopes will persuade voters that he's not a power-hungry tyrant, but a man with a specific ambition. He probably hopes that they'll believe the spin that the Conservatives' economic policies are working and that he merely needs one more term to complete his promises... which were that everything would be fixed in one term.

In its directness and openness, it's actually relatively praiseworthy. There doesn't seem to be any subtle motives, except for his curious mention of shredded wheat. Is he paid by Kelloggs, or is it just an odd attempt to be a man of the people? He might be starting the internal fighting himself, pointing out that he only wants one more term so that when Boris Johnson tries to depose him Boris seems even more greedy and ambitious.

But as it was a 'wide-ranging' interview, one of a series of 'behind-the-scenes' conversations with party leaders, it probably was said with some of those thoughts in the background, but mostly just an honest intention. Labour's response is just cheap point-scoring.

So my opening post hasn't much to say?
On the contrary, I think there is a hidden message in this, but it's even more subtle than normal. The hidden message is that the party leader is important; that his intention to stay or not has political weight, and will sway people. My summary of this news story is:
David Cameron says that he supports personality politics
The evidence is all there; not only does he talk about himself and his intentions, but in his place he tries to give notoriety to other individuals. No matter what other rhetoric the Conservatives might spout (and the other parties are no doubt as bad, but this story is about the Prime Minister), it's clear that Cameron's usual attitude is that personalities matter; that talk of leadership is genuinely meaningful, and that people should care about personalities.
A charitable person (i.e a partisan Conservative) might say that Cameron is merely acknowledging the fact that personality matters. To which I can only respond that meekly acquiescing to a bad thing doesn't show much leadership or personality. But I doubt he's thought about it, actually. It's just an unquestioned assumption that hasn't even had enough attention to be deliberately accepted. He could as easily have talked about Conservative policy and about the strength of the party and its ideals; about how the team is greater than the whole or the ideas matter, not the person debating them. But he didn't.

So this news story, harmless as it is, does demonstrate a problem with politics; that the framing of the debate and the news matters. Every harmless story that seems at the very least not to be directly promoting injustice is nonetheless taking valuable news space from important issues.

I do understand that people want to look at cute animals. But Cameron is not a cute animal. This is a story about politics, but it's a waste of people's time. It ignores, and therefore implicitly supports, an assumption that deserves attention far more than Cameron's musings about the future.

Every story tells a story. This one is about the presidential politics in parliamentary democracy; about personality in place of policy; and about people instead of principles.

Update 2/4/15: The general election campaign has now begun, and it turns out that the Conservatives are targetting Ed Miliband and his personality, making direct comparisons between him and David Cameron. They have been criticised for these personal attacks, but clearly I picked up on something that Cameron already had in mind at the time.

I've been following the fuss in the USA over the Steubenville rape case a little. Although I've been spared the details of the crime itself, I saw the responses.
I agree with the people who are surprised and angry that the criminals got more sympathy in some coverage than the victims, but I was also annoyed at some of the points raised by the commentators.
Yes, we shouldn't tell young girls not to show cleavage as though rape is all their fault. Yes, we should teach men to behave themselves. But no, it's not all men. What I have to say isn't a nice easy solution; it cuts to the heart of how many people interact. I think that there's a tension between human desires that we cannot easily resolve, but I do think that we should recognise it rather than simply focus on the easy answers.
Every time a woman says 'I'm not sure' and means 'I want you try harder', she's creating a rapist. Every 'consummate lover' for one woman is a rapist for another.
 The statistics of reported rape show that the vast majority of rapes are done by people who know and are known by the victim. This isn't always an arbitrary attack by a complete stranger. It's a man a woman knows who then takes things far too far. That's not something easy, like teaching young men not prowl the streets at night and assault complete strangers. He managed to avoid raping her long enough for the victim, on average, to say that she knew him as a person. So what made him change?

It seems rather implausible to me to blame rape on either women wearing short tops and acting like sexually aware women, or on men having lapses from being seemingly normal people to utterly base animals. Rape arises from a complex interplay of emotions and incentives, not least of which are the ones I want to discuss here. However, I do not intend to claim that I'm giving an account of all necessary causes: just one aspect of the problem. The problem is that it looks very much as though people's intrinsic desires do not match those of being anti-rape. Allow me a few paragraphs of what might seem irrelevancy before I tie things back together.

How many women actually want a prince to come and save them? I guess that most quite like the idea of a handsome knight sweeping them off their feet, but in any situation that tends to be too much like that dream they find it unpleasant. I really don't know, since I can't read the minds of lots of women and do a good survey. But supporting an ideal and rejecting it when you find out what it's really like isn't good enough, especially if you continue supporting that ideal after realising how unpleasant it is.

http://ho-fun.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/gender-and-equality-disneys-wreck-it.html
This blog post has some interesting things to say about a recent Disney film, 'Wreck-It Ralph', and it is pleasing to see the princess dream being discarded, especially in favour of democracy, coincidentally a form of governance that requires and grants personal responsibility. If only we could run ourselves the way we aspire to run our countries: on principles and wisdom, rather than foolish fantasies that do not really work.

 There are people who like the fantasy of having the relationship made for them; of sitting back and lapping up the devotion. At the extreme end is a woman I once knew who expected a boy who wanted her affection to travel on a 2-hour train ride with her just to keep her company, even though he then had to go back on the reverse journey by himself. I have no doubt that everyone enjoys making little effort and getting something for nothing, and I have to applaud some women who manage to be feminists and yet still believe that this aspect of life should keep its gender roles.
I have even read a serious work of non-fiction (which seemed rather like a PhD thesis) written by Catherine Hakim, which argued that it must always be this way, because men need more sex than women (an undoubted fact if you look at the research on the topic, it seems), and so men will always be competing for the relatively lesser interest from women.
Looking at other animals seems to confirm this point of view. It is the males who grow the enormous horns, display the brightly decorated tails and so on; it is almost always males who bear the burden of sexual selection, because they create greater demand and all the females have more ability to choose.
From an economics perspective, a market certainly needs some people to be active, trying to sell and create competition, because otherwise it seizes up, there's no liquidity, and no-one gets anything.

But when it becomes a part of our culture it has more insidious effects than the main one of allowing people who can't think for themselves to fall into predetermined roles. If a person has a lot of choice, why not make suitors demonstrate how much they're willing to invest in her?
If she values material wealth that much, she needs to know that he has it. It makes a complete mockery of the notion that women are the romantic ones who value their partners as individuals, but if a woman really does value wealth, a display might seem to make sense, as well as being pleasing both as a visceral demonstration of how attractive she is and how much power she has over him and other men, and in the immediate benefit of whatever is being bought (stereotypically a dinner).
However, if women begin to require material investment, we reach the nasty world of transactions. If material wealth is important in a partner, more than character, a woman is effectively admitting that she's selling her affections to the highest bidder. When people make investments they usually make down-payments in order to get certainty. The only time when down-payments don't bring certainty is when someone is being scammed: the wonderful e-mails from businessmen who need just a few hundred pounds in order to be able to share millions, and then just a few hundred more....
Of course, if the cost of the meal is truly negligible, then maybe it won't be regarded as a transaction. But then we're getting into princess territory, since the vast majority of the population can not regard a nice meal at a restaurant as a negligible cost. Not that I think even super-rich people are immune to the transaction mode of thinking. It's not as if many super-rich people buy a pack of chewing gum (or anything cheap) but pay hundreds of pounds for it. You pay the price expected in an exchange. Rich people who throw their money around probably won't stay rich for long, unless they're some sort of social parasite with a line to easy money. I know that sort of person can be attractive (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSFMsyBqZlY), but it's sad that that's the case.
If competition is created for something that men have a particular need for, they won't only spend negligible amounts of money on it. They will spend unwisely, and although every man should realise, utterly and absolutely, that paying for another being's dinner buys nothing, and certainly no right to sex, I do wonder if any man would actually buy that dinner if this vital truth were widely acknowledged. Implicit in the whole set-up is the romantic aspect of such a date (if these dates ever are romantic; I wouldn't know, since as you can guess I don't have many). For men, romance includes sex. It is not all that men think about, but it is a vital ingredient.
Any woman who accepts a meal has to ask herself why. If she is not selling something, why does she need paying for it? If she is selling something, but no-one has been clear about whether that's an evening's company, sex, or long-term interest, is it any surprise that confusion can result? As the great Jack Sparrow has it, "We've established the point in principle and now we're only haggling over price." If a woman can be bought, she's not the romantic partner most men want for long-term relationships. If she goes so far as to compare restaurants and meals with friends or with the men themselves, she's making it very clear whether she's after a relationship or a transaction.

Of course, it's not all about buying dinners and converting social capital into material capital. I've gone into that in some depth now, and if I haven't at least made the reader think a bit more about it, I won't with any more writing.

Men do many things that betray our culture's insidious effect on their attitudes to women, and women can ask them to stop them all. So what else do men often do in the 'dating game'?
I could make a long list, but the common factor that makes things worrying to me is when something involves competing for a prize, especially if it involves material wealth. I know that it must feel good to be competed over, and it can't feel wise, but it has a pernicious effect on people's minds if women are thought of as a prize to be won.
We hear often enough from feminists who claim that pornography is vile stuff because it objectifies women; it has a bad effect on men's attitudes. How much worse must it be when the effect is in reality, not in a fantasy world on a screen?
Every time the competition is between men the woman is sidelined; she becomes less human, just a thing to be gained. Women become arm candy and accessories: things to have, not people to know.
The woman who chooses for herself can find herself reviled by men and women.  

Of course, the people who are truly nasty are the men who would never respect such a woman, and the women who disapprove of her. The women who need social pressure are the ones who do confuse transactions and relationships in society. These are not the prostitutes or call girls, who openly and honestly sell access to their bodies without any relationship, but the ones who find themselves drawn to wealth or status; who objectify men as accessories (or rather, covet the accessories that men mostly nowadays can bring, which include wealth and, for a certain class of person, therefore social status).

Interviews with call girls (who are mostly, contrary to popular belief, perfectly decent young women who find that they need the extra money and are satisfied with their work, and are not drug-addled slaves) show that most requests they get are for the 'girlfriend experience'. So maybe prostitutes are selling a fake relationship, but it shows that men are actually the true romantics. While women chase wealth and status, men have to resort to deliberate fakery in order to have a relationship in which they are valued as a person.

It's also a bit odd to make men front up the investment when they do not even know if the relationship will work well. If you tell an investor that if he'll give you some money he might have a chance to buy something but neither of you knows if he really wants it he'll have to be very desperate or foolish to take your offer. 

Men are encouraged to ask for all the dates, plan the dates, whether that's a sports game (renowned as a bad option, but actually very sensible) or 'just' the cinema (also regarded as boring, but at least provides something to talk about afterwards).
The harder you make a man work for something, the more he expects a reward when he's done it all. It's a neat line to say that 'time with me is reward enough', as one might see on a chick flick or television show, but it's just a cheap line. The truth is that until you've got to know someone and perhaps love that person then time with anyone isn't reward enough for one-sided relationships.
Dating is all the wrong way round. A man who puts enough effort in for some women will necessarily be a bit obsessive. If women don't want men to think that they've won/bought/earned sex, they could try a bit harder not to force men to win/buy/earn it, as well as on telling men off for the final moment of confusion.
If some women were honest about how much sex they wanted, they might not get as much interest. But honesty is best, and deceit leads down a dark road. I'm not trying to excuse rape, but like any action or problem in society, there is a network of contributing factors that might help us deal with it, and the approach many women take to dating is certainly one.

Most insidious of all, of course, is the 'try harder' line when used before sex. This I've discussed in a later post (much later, but this one stayed in draft form for a while).

I was spurred to think about my infamous ex-girlfriend recently. Infamous, I say, amongst those who know me, because she serves as a convenient reference point for proving that anyone else is a wonderful person. But I did learn a few things from the experience, and it might be worth sharing them here.  I won't be exaggerating, nor angling for sympathy... just reciting what I've learned.

K wanted me to be bent around her little finger, and would have large tantrums (day-long tantrums were common; I once timed 5 hours solid of crying, closely followed by 3 more) if she didn't get her way. I was not to talk to other women, or my friends, but be devoted to her, to the exclusion of all other cares. I wasn't to have hobbies that made demands on my time, nor worry about my degree.

I saw a recent news story by a woman who had escaped an abusive relationship. She described how the man had fallen in love with her, been very charming, but had gradually become abusive. She described how the man induced an emotional dependence on him, so that when he quit his job and wanted to move away from her friends and social network, she did because she was naive and would do anything for true love. Another life ruined by the 'true love' myth, unlike all those lives utterly unruined by pornography or action films, men's equivalent enjoyment.
She was isolated, and gradually his behaviour became worse. He hit her, and was enormously contrite afterwards. She forgave him because she was sorry for him and his emotional issues. And it happened again and again, and she accepted it because she was kind and loving and wanted to help him. The abusive relationship was not based on physical fear, but excessive generosity and a desire to cure him of his own demons.

I sympathised. K, my evil ex-girlfriend, was similar. She liked to try to manipulate me by being hurtful. This might take the form of insults (she's the only girlfriend I've had who openly thought I was ugly), or the ever-so-subtle hints that she was desirable and could find attention elsewhere. The idea, presumably was to draw attention to how lucky I was and to my devotion to her, and spur me into whatever action she required. I doubt that I'd be gullible enough to be spurred into action even if I did love someone doing that; I have a stubborn streak that will outlast granite. But here we meet lesson number 1:
Every single time you tell your partner something hurtful, whether it's deliberately trying to invoke jealousy, being directly insulting, threatening to leave or simply asking directly 'don't you love me [enough to do that]?' you are actually telling your partner 'caring for me will cause you pain'. By setting up conflicts between your partner's love (if any) and desire for you, and your partner's character or other wants, you are stunting the growth of any love.
By teaching your partner this lesson, you ensure that you will get only stupid, masochistic or uncaring partners.

K also had an impressive ability to ask questions such as "are we ok?" I find this a very strange question to ask. Presumably she knew if she was alright or not and only lacked my opinion out of the two of us, but she didn't ask "Are you ok [with things]?" She said "we", which is the clue we need to work out what she really cared about. It wasn't me, and my feelings, but Us: the Relationship.
I rapidly took to capitalising it in a not-so-subtle display of displeasure. I had a strange idea that I would be valued as an individual in a relationship, not as merely a means to create the ideal state of being, which is The Relationship.
I have over the years had other girlfriends, and I have had arguments with them from time to time about previous girlfriends. With the notable exception of the evil K I am very fond of my ex-girlfriends, and pretty much all my 'flings'. If they come up in conversation I speak of them warmly. This has pained the odd woman, who would prefer me to dislike them. The unreservedly insane K went from being utterly in love to trying to tear out my hair and then sending me hate-mail.
I have been told and read that the desire for me to be on bad terms with them is so that they'll be less of a 'threat'. Clearly someone I've been out with I have some modicum of attraction to, and my current woman's status as my one-and-only is threatened. But if I hate all the ex-girlfriends, there's no threat. This only makes sense as part of rather warped attitude to relationships.
If you truly love someone, that love is not conditional. You want the best for that person: you wish them joy and happiness, and there's probably some degree of selfishness mixed in there, so that you want that joy and happiness to happen with you. Two millenia ago when Christianity was being invented people knew that unconditional love was the greatest and most precious. God loves us unconditionally; this is so central to the religion that it was the name of the campaign the Christian Union had to convert people when I was an undergraduate.
If you love someone, you won't impose the condition that that person loves you back, or spends time only with you, and you won't impose the condition that the person has to be in a relationship with you for you to love them. If, when a relationship ends, you find yourself hating your ex-partner then you didn't love that person properly in the first place.
There are plenty of people out there whose selfishness is always greater than their love. They need to stifle the object of their love: to hoard it and obsess about it. They care about themselves, or else The Relationship, a sort of Trojan Horse for this invidious attitude. By making everything about The Relationship they conceal the obvious selfishness, because both people should be doing things for The Relationship. There is no other person called Relationship. There are only people, who deserve not to be lied to.
With the contemptible K, I never told her I loved her. In fact, I specifically denied it on many occasions when she pressed me on the subject. I am, apparently, a cold-hearted ba**#@/] who is incapable of loving someone. I did admit to caring about her, although I never confessed the thought running through my mind that I care about humanity as a whole, and that one can care that another's welfare is bad. I couldn't be bothered with a week-long tantrum. She of course swore her undying love for me, a love that evaporated like dry ice in a volcano when we broke up.
I am tempted now to break up with any girlfriend just to check that she's a decent person who cares about me to some extent.
Lesson 2: there is no Relationship, a thing to be perfected beyond the two of you. There is you, and your partner.
It's normal to want to share the good times with your loved ones, but if you can't imagine liking your partner after hearing, upfront and with no cheating, that your partner is falling out of love with you (and in love with someone else), then you need to think about why you're with that person, and wasting the person's time.
I am annoyed that the common opinion is that people who do not fall in love easily are derided as malfunctioning dead-ends who cheat and waste your time, but the people who do not even understand love, and act on jealousy and selfishness before turning into raging animals, are simply naive innocents, hurt once again by the cruel world.

Honesty.
Whom do you find more creepy: the person who admits on the first date that he's into whips and chains, or the person who goes out on a load of dates with someone and begins to dream of marriage and children?
Again, the immediate cultural connotations are that someone kinky is the nasty person.
But I struggle to understand why honesty is so unpleasant. Not everyone's interested in marriage, and children are definitely a huge and life-changing goal. It's grossly unfair to get far into a serious relationship without sharing these life goals.
With the reprehensible K, I was always careful to be honest. Often that would be a tangled web of subtly avoiding answering the question in order to avoid missing dinner, sleep and breakfast, but frequently I admitted outright that I did not love her (and I rapidly came to despise her, and eventually I gave up on even affording her the general care that I believed I owed to all humanity. She was quite inhuman).
Every time she heard the truth about our relationship, she'd have an angry weepy fit. I learned a great many tricks for avoiding conversations and distracting her (and some not so subtle ways of ignoring dodgy subjects).
But even when I managed to avoid the hissy-fits, I didn't enjoy the suspense of never knowing if conflict was going to arise. I did quite like the puzzle of phrasing things carefully, but there are more fun puzzles to attempt.
Lesson 3: By punishing me for being myself, K did not change reality. She simply ensured that I didn't want to share it with her. If you are ever tempted to become angry with someone when they tell you the truth, think hard about how much you value both the truth and sharing your life with that person.

Cowardice
When our relationship was ending, and in many other relationships besides, people have called it cowardly to stay with someone rather than outright tell them that they're not wanted.
Cowardly to stay with someone? Or just damage limitation and kindness? She needed to take some responsibility for herself. If you get upset at truth, don't expect it.
On a similar note, we're always told that it's cowardly to break up with someone from a distance, in an impersonal way. Text messaging is worst, e-mail poor, and face-to-face best. Impersonal is bad, and it's cowardly to do otherwise. But by invoking the word 'cowardly', these people already tell us what's really behind this. There is something to fear, and it's the outsized response.
For every cowardly man who breaks up with a woman from a distance, there's a spiteful, vengeful monster who wants to be able to punish him for being honest. If a man doesn't trust a woman to behave like an adult, it's best that the relationship ends, and the woman should think carefully about her own behaviour before deriding his. This is an important one, but it's just a sub-set of Lesson 3.

Should a banker earn more than a nurse

I was delighted to see something that looked interesting on the radio, and listened to Michael Sandel host a debate about this subject with increasing dejection. I like Sandel; I appreciate what he says. I suppose it's partly because I already think what he teaches in his lectures than it always disappoints me to hear him: I wonder why I can't be a highly-respected philosophy professor.

But then, he writes academic articles as well as his more public teaching, which are probably a step apart.
Nonetheless, this debate annoyed me because I wasn't there to answer any of the points made. So here I will make my own case.

A banker should not be paid hugely more than a nurse. Even a perfectly operating market only tells us what is in demand and in short supply. It does not give us a moral outcome unless we explicitly state that we absolve ourselves of all responsibility for making general decisions and subjugate ourselves to the market. There are people who think that because a perfect market distributes resources efficiently we can deduce that they are necessarily moral.
I disagree. I am a fan of efficiency, as evidenced in daily life, writing and speech. But although I do seek efficiency in achieving my goals, and disapprove of inefficiency in others' achievements, I do not make it my only goal: it is always a necessary part of the means, but never an end. It can't be a goal in itself; we need to achieve something else efficiently. Distributing resources efficiently according to the balance of human decisions (and ability to pay) is not intrinsically moral. If everyone gets a vote in what is right then we can have the tyranny of the majority: the persecution of minorities and so on. We guard against this with constitutions and bills of rights precisely because this is not moral. This is the easy argument of principle even before we get onto rich people raising prices for goods that others get more from. Markets judge the usefulness of a good from what a purchaser pays for it. That means that those with less money get less say in what is useful, and in what is moral, if we assume that market distribution is moral. That seems to me like disenfranchisement and slavery. Markets are the means by which people acquire what they choose, once we have decided on moral entitlements.
Of course, this is the case even if we have perfect markets. We don't. This is an impossibility, and economists like to pretend that markets approximate efficiency despite their known imperfections (unknown ones are assumed not to exist). But when it comes to justice, is approximate good enough? Is it enough that someone from the right house is convicted of murder? Yes, I know that's a bit of a spurious comparison, but if a few people do inordinately well out of a system that works mostly well, it's a very poor argument to say that we should not make things fairer because the system we have approximates quite well to fairness and therefore should be taken as a proxy for it.
We use markets as a tool, not an end. Just like GDP, they are a marker for sensible distribution because the two are correlated for much of human experience. But as with GDP, the link is neither perfect nor does it necessarily extrapolate either into the future or further into even freer (anarchic) markets.
Should we decree that everything is chance, including talent and the timing of birth that makes the talent useful? I don't like this one either. It is true that it is only by chance that my parents' son has the talents I have, but anyone else with different abilities would not be me. I deserve the products of my talent and effort precisely because they are inseparable from being me. They define who I am. Timing seems irrelevant. Why should we deny everyone ipods because it is only through an accident of birth that they even have the opportunity to use one (rather than being born centuries ago)? The implicit assumption is that there is a soul sitting in a timeless zone that is sucked into the world with an equal chance of being any one baby, and that we should be judging souls, not people. I think that a person is inseparable from the skills and attributes with which he is born: they make the person.
If we decide that even the effort you put into work is not your own, because it is determined by parental encouragement and social background, we are effectively denying the notion of individual responsibility for one's actions. It's a common thing to do, but it has awfully wide implications. Crime, punishment, morality and justice are definitely nonsensical if we do this. We don't want to do this.
Splitting talent and effort is not easy. The two feed into each other. But even if we could, I don't think we should for questions of how much pay one earns.
Are bankers more talented? They possibly are more able than nurses, and could do a nurse's job given training. Do they work harder? Definitely not. They might put in the hours, but that doesn't compare to a 12-hour night shift turning oldies, getting shouted at and delivering medicine.

Bankers' talent could be said to earn them more than nurses' effort. That might be what we want as a society: to reward talent heavily. But we're not. University professors are intelligent people, capable of being rich bankers if they choose. Doctors are usually intelligent people, easily rivals for bankers in the league of talents, but not paid as much. This is because we have market distortions.

Doctors' work is provided almost entirely by the state, at set levels of pay. Bankers' work isn't state-controlled, but they are in the special position of controlling the markets which set their pay. They share this position with company directors, who control selections onto remuneration boards. Most importantly, bankers, directors and others with economic power can afford the political donations, meals and lobbying (or campaigning, for those who get fully into politics) to suborn government into ensuring that their work is needed, allowed and well-rewarded.

Government doesn't directly set pay levels, but it does decree what is legal and what amounts to conning others, it sets and (supposedly) enforces tax rates and it (fails to) regulate companies that distort markets by becoming too large or engaging in unsound practices.

That our current system amplifies the differences in talent is obvious from the differences in pay. The top-earning bankers and executives are paid millions of pounds: each million is the pay of 20 well-qualified, talented people.

It is not believable to suggest that these people have more talent than 20 senior staff members, all of whom are good at their jobs, especially when evidence suggests that hedge-fund managers and directors are more products of chance (combined with enough sense not to be a disaster) than exceptional ability (I'm thinking of studies that show that you'd expect half of hedge-fund managers to do well if each time a decision crops up half of them choose each side, and that the numbers achieving notoriety and then failing are consistent with the random bobble of chance).

We have a system that rewards luck and enables those lucky enough to be catapulted into wealth to engineer things so that they do not lose it. That is very different from rewarding talent and effort.