What Wilt Chamberlain's 100 Point Game Tells Us About Income Inequality
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By Daniel Shuchman
Today marks the 50th anniversary of basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain’s epochal 100-point game. Many sports commentators have reflected on the competitive and cultural significance of this still-unsurpassed record, achieved when Chamberlain played for the Philadelphia Warriors in a game against the New York Knicks.
Less well known about Mr. Chamberlain’s legacy is his role as an unwitting player in the debate over the morality and economics of income inequality. With President Obama making income distribution a central tenet of his presidency, while being America’s basketball fan-in-chief, it is an apt moment to reflect on what lessons we can learn from Wilt Chamberlain, the political philosopher.
In 1974, Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick wrote the highly influential work Anarchy, State & Utopia. In it, Professor Nozick argued that only a government with very limited powers and responsibilities, a “minimal state,” as he called it, was consistent with human liberty.
One of the many fundamental questions addressed by Nozick was whether it was appropriate for government to take actions against income inequality. Nozick sought to show how any idea of justice that is premised on outcomes (such as the still oft-heard “no person should be allowed to earn more than x times more than the lowest paid worker”) will undermine personal freedom in innumerable and unacceptable ways. In order to illustrate this point, Professor Nozick called the 7-foot -1 Chamberlain off the bench.
“Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams,” Nozick suggested. In fact, he is such a big gate attraction, that he is able to sign the following sort of contract with a team: “In each home game, twenty-five cents [!] from the price of each ticket” will get placed in a special box with Wilt’s name on it. Chamberlain’s talent and popularity are so great that over I million fans attend his games the following season, each enthusiastically pays the twenty-five cent surcharge, and “Chamberlain winds up with $250,000.” (Yes, this was 38 years ago, but clearly Professor Nozick was destined to be a philosopher, not a sports agent. Though notwithstanding Nozick’s lack of inflationary imagination, Mr. Chamberlain would at least still be deemed “rich” by President Obama.) Nozick’s question: Is Chamberlain entitled to this windfall, or is it unjust for him to have earned so much relative to other basketball players or workers at large?
Nozick concludes that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this outcome. After all, each of the fans who attended Chamberlain’s games did so voluntarily and each “chose to give twenty-five cents of their money” to him. Moreover, “they could have spent it on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or of Monthly Review.” (The reading habits of NBA fans on the Harvard faculty apparently being somewhat different than those from other places.)
Nozick’s serious point is that voluntary exchanges between free people will almost always result in a distribution of income that is unpredictable and unequal. No arbitrary, preconceived notion of a ‘Just” distribution of income can be achieved in society, according to Nozick, without “continuous interference in people’s lives.”
The Wilt Chamberlain example is a simple dramatization of the infinite variety of personal and commercial relationships that government would have to forcibly restrict in order to pursue what Nozick calls a preconceived “end-state” principle of justice. “Liberty upsets patterns,” he wrote, and the only alternative is for government to “forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.” Looked at in this way, it is much easier to see why socialistic societies have so regularly descended into dictatorships.
The campaign against income inequality has thus far focused on industries and professions other than sports. But ultimately a consumer’s right to buy what he desires at a price he deems appropriate will always lead to a distribution of income much different than that which may be desired by those who value equality of outcome above all else. So the next time you buy a basketball ticket, remember Wilt Chamberlain’s other legacy; your right to pay, and the athlete’s right to play.
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