I believe in a world where it is possible to get rich, and not necessarily through hard work or being a better person. One person owning the world with the rest of us would be bad. Everybody having identical shares of everything would be bad (even ignoring practicalities). I don’t know exactly where the optimal level is, but is it closer to the first situation than the second, even if assigned by lottery.
I’m treating this as basically another contrarian views thread without the voting rules. And full disclosure I’m too biased for anybody to take my word for it, but I’d enjoy reading counterarguments.
My intuition would be that inequality per se is not a problem, it only becomes a problem when it allows abuse. But that’s not necessarily a function of inequality itself; it also depends on society. I can imagine a society which would allow a lot of inequality and yet would prevent abuse (for example if some Friendly AI would regulate how you are allowed to spend your money).
In the US I would say more-ish. I support a guaranteed basic income, and any benefit to one person or group (benefitting the bottom without costing the top would decrease inequality but would still be good), but think there should be a smaller middle class.
I don’t know enough about global issues to comment on them.
If we’re stipulating that the allocation is by lottery, I think equality is optimal due to simple diminishing returns. And also our instinctive feelings of fairness. This tends to be intuitively obvious in a small group; if you have 12 cupcakes and 4 people, no-one would even think about assigning them at random; 3 each is the obviously correct thing to do. It’s only when dealing with groups larger than our Dunbar number that we start to get confused.
Assuming that cupcakes are tradable, that seems intuitively false to me. Is it just your intuition, or is there also reason? Not denying intuitions’ values, they are just not as easy to explain to one who does not share them.
If cupcakes are tradeable for brownies then I’d distribute both evenly to start and allow people to trade at prices that seemed fair to them, but I assume that’s not what you’re talking about. And yeah, it’s primarily an intuition, and one that I’m genuinely quite surprised to find isn’t universal, but I’d probably try to justify it in terms of diminishing returns, that two people with 3 cupcakes each have a higher overall happiness than one person with 2 and one with 4.
Inequality is a good thing, to a point.
I believe in a world where it is possible to get rich, and not necessarily through hard work or being a better person. One person owning the world with the rest of us would be bad. Everybody having identical shares of everything would be bad (even ignoring practicalities). I don’t know exactly where the optimal level is, but is it closer to the first situation than the second, even if assigned by lottery.
I’m treating this as basically another contrarian views thread without the voting rules. And full disclosure I’m too biased for anybody to take my word for it, but I’d enjoy reading counterarguments.
My intuition would be that inequality per se is not a problem, it only becomes a problem when it allows abuse. But that’s not necessarily a function of inequality itself; it also depends on society. I can imagine a society which would allow a lot of inequality and yet would prevent abuse (for example if some Friendly AI would regulate how you are allowed to spend your money).
Do you think we currently need more inequality, or less?
In the US I would say more-ish. I support a guaranteed basic income, and any benefit to one person or group (benefitting the bottom without costing the top would decrease inequality but would still be good), but think there should be a smaller middle class.
I don’t know enough about global issues to comment on them.
If we’re stipulating that the allocation is by lottery, I think equality is optimal due to simple diminishing returns. And also our instinctive feelings of fairness. This tends to be intuitively obvious in a small group; if you have 12 cupcakes and 4 people, no-one would even think about assigning them at random; 3 each is the obviously correct thing to do. It’s only when dealing with groups larger than our Dunbar number that we start to get confused.
Assuming that cupcakes are tradable, that seems intuitively false to me. Is it just your intuition, or is there also reason? Not denying intuitions’ values, they are just not as easy to explain to one who does not share them.
If cupcakes are tradeable for brownies then I’d distribute both evenly to start and allow people to trade at prices that seemed fair to them, but I assume that’s not what you’re talking about. And yeah, it’s primarily an intuition, and one that I’m genuinely quite surprised to find isn’t universal, but I’d probably try to justify it in terms of diminishing returns, that two people with 3 cupcakes each have a higher overall happiness than one person with 2 and one with 4.