  But granting basic moral significance to the set of holdings that would have obtained had all received what they contributed to production is less plausible than it may initially appear.[10] First, the intuition that people should receive in income something close to what they contribute to production seems crucially to depend on the overall background fairness of the social system in which production takes place. If, for example, a society allowed educational opportunities for technical training only to members of certain ethnic groups, or if poorly designed education system puts these opportunities out of reach for the vast majority of people, then the fact that those who received such training might then be able to contribute more to production would not seem to entitle them to proportionally higher incomes. Second, the contribution of some person to total output will depend not only on the value of their labor, but also on the value of the resources that they own. And the claim that owners of resources should receive the marginal contribution of their resources to production is especially problematic: The existing distribution of such resources is tainted by its historical evolution. And the purported moral right to full control over what one owns is rather more tenuous than the moral right fully to control one’s natural endowments. As Sen (1982, p. 4) has put it, “The moral appeal of giving more — in (P.T.) Bauer’s words — to ‘those who are more productive and contribute more to output’ does not readily translate into giving more to ‘those who own more productive resources which contribute more to output’.”