In my personal and professional life, I see lots of people deliberately foregoing opportunities to earn more money. I wish that the “income inequality” alarmists would take this seriously and admit that this is a widespread phenomenon. Almost everyone could make various decisions that would increase their income. When someone spurns such an opportunity, I take that as an admission that they are comfortable with their level of income and don’t want to earn anymore. I’m thinking of a few examples.

One is from college. Someone (who I barely knew but had a few classes with) told me he’d had an “epiphany” over winter break. He decided to change his math major to a physical education major. I hope he’s doing well, but this decision to change majors severely limited his options.

I know a lot of actuaries who stop after passing a few exams (there are 9 or 10 total, depending on how you count them). I understand. The exams are a pain in the butt, and this is partly by design. It’s a powerful sorting mechanism. If someone passes all the exams, you can be pretty sure they are serious. If someone passes a couple exams and then stops, you know they have some good analytical chops by maybe they lack the combination of ambition, conscientiousness, willpower, and intelligence that makes a really good actuary. The rewards for passing just one more exam are pretty big. Usually when another adult makes a choice like that I try not to second-guess them, but honestly I think some of these people are being short-sighted. Many of them would be more fulfilled in the long run if they just passed another exam or two (or all of them).

One person I know described his educational trajectory to me: “I finished my poly sci degree with the intention of going to law school. But, man, the slopes of Colorado were calling me. I decided to do some skiing instead.” I assume he knew his own long-term self-interest, but there’s no question such a person is deliberately deciding to earn less than he could.

I sometimes suggest career options to people and get not-very-satisfying excuses for not taking the advice. From a single guy with no kids: “I’d love to take more actuarial exams, but I’m just too busy.” He offered “mowing the law” and “preparing meals” and other mundane household chores as examples of things that made him “too busy,” and he even suggested that people like me with a family had more time because other family members could help with that stuff. (?!) This was really an example of someone not prioritizing the thing that would have allowed him to earn more, and choosing a relatively easy-going home life over long, boring hours of study. I can’t blame anyone for taking that route. But it’s funny how people invent implausible excuses for not doing obvious things that would plainly advance their careers. (This person’s notion that having a family means having more time to do grueling hours of study is exactly backwards, but at that point I was just politely smiling and nodding. He’d already decided on “No” and then back-fit a lame excuse to his answer.) It’s funny. I actually started hiring a guy to mow my lawn because it bought me a couple extra hours of study time each week, and I’d pack my lunch so would have a few extra minutes over my lunch break to study (I didn’t have to walk to a nearby sub shop, which took precious time). For dinner, I’d fix whatever was fastest (throw burgers on the griddle and let them sizzle, or throw chicken nuggets in the oven and let them cook while I studied, pausing briefly to eat when they were done). If you are prepared to hunker down and study, you can make time for it. It might require shaking yourself out of your routine and making some sacrifices and uncomfortable changes, but it’s not hard.

I hear other weird excuses, too. “I don’t want to do any more school.” Really? Even a few online courses to teach you specific skills relevant to a specific profession? Bullshit. Categorically writing off the possibility of continuing your education is a bad move, not to mention completely arbitrary.

Here is one I have heard from several under-employed people: “I want a job as long as it’s not [long list of careers for people with quantitative skills and with an extremely low barrier to entry]. Anything else would be fine.” I think you can afford to be this picky after you’ve had some initial career success and want to do something more creative and rewarding.  But if someone is setting down these rules at the dawn of their working career, they are setting themselves up for failure. I don’t parse this as “I physically cannot do more schooling” or “I _physically can’t_work an unpleasant job.” I parse it as:  “I **could**do something unpleasant that would earn me more money, but I choose not to.”

I think even the inequality alarmists understand this point. If you could keep the conversation out of a political context and talk to them about under-performing family members or friends, they would tell you something like what I said above. Everyone has a sibling with unfulfilled potential, or a brilliant friend who is under-employed and content to stay that way. They will tell you, with sighing, face-palming frustration, that their friend or family member is spurning a perfectly good opportunity for no good goddamn reason. Implicitly, they will admit that those folks on the lower end of the distribution could choose to be on the higher end if they only made a few unpleasant choices.

This is where the inequality mongers need fixate less on metrics and more on philosophy. If people are essentially choosing their position on the income distribution, then income inequality is not a great moral problem. We shouldn’t pretend that people are assigned an income by the casting of some cosmic dice or some fickle god’s roulette wheel. Sheer introspection and experience with actual people suggests otherwise. At least to this observer.

[Note to people who know me personally: If any of this looks familiar, I am not talking specifically about you. These “examples” are really composites of several people with details changed or made vague enough to not identify their real-life inspirations. My younger self is more represented in the above examples than any other single person I know.]