Suppose the state threatens people to do the following six things for their citizens:
* Teach the young * Cure the sick * Maintain law and order * Feed, clothe and house people with work injuries * Feed, clothe and house the elderly * Feed, clothe and house people with FUBAR agency
(Requesting roughly equally many resources to be put into each of them.)
People vary in how they react to the threats, having basically three actions:
1. Assist with what is asked 2. Develop personal agency for essentially-selfish reasons, beyond what is useful on the margin to handle the six tasks above 3. Using the tokens the government provides to certify the completion of the threatened tasks, put citizens in charge of executing similar tasks for foreigners
The largest scale of assisting with what is asked could be to find areas with powerful economies of scale, for instance optimizing the efficiency with which food and clothing is distributed to citizens. However, economies of scale require homogenous tasks, which means that the highest extremes of action 1 trades negatively against extremes of action 2, as one develops narrower specialization while neglecting the general end-to-end agency.
One cannot do much of action 3 without also doing a lot of action 1, so wealth inequality correlates to a focus on economies of scale.
I’m not sure which of “oppression” and “production” this scenario corresponds to under your model.
Similar to the “production” scenario, the production under this model seems to be “real”, for instance people are getting clothed and the people who are handsomely rewarded for this are contributing a lot of marginal value. However, unlike the “production” scenario, the wealth doesn’t straightforwardly applying knowing better than others. One might know better with respect to one’s specialty, but the flipside is that one has neglected the development of skills outside of that specialty (potentially due to starting out with less innate ability to develop them, e.g. a physical disability or lack of connectedness to tutors).
Meanwhile, the scenario I described here doesn’t resemble “oppression” at all, except for the original part where the state threatens people to perform the various government services instead of improving their own agency. I get the impression that your oppression hypothesis is more concerned that people provide a simulacrum of these products to the state than that people are forced to provide a genuine version of these products in the most efficient possible way. I do see a strong case for the simulacrum model, but my comment here seems like a relevant alternative to consider, unless I am missing something.
Consider this model.
Suppose the state threatens people to do the following six things for their citizens:
* Teach the young
* Cure the sick
* Maintain law and order
* Feed, clothe and house people with work injuries
* Feed, clothe and house the elderly
* Feed, clothe and house people with FUBAR agency
(Requesting roughly equally many resources to be put into each of them.)
People vary in how they react to the threats, having basically three actions:
1. Assist with what is asked
2. Develop personal agency for essentially-selfish reasons, beyond what is useful on the margin to handle the six tasks above
3. Using the tokens the government provides to certify the completion of the threatened tasks, put citizens in charge of executing similar tasks for foreigners
The largest scale of assisting with what is asked could be to find areas with powerful economies of scale, for instance optimizing the efficiency with which food and clothing is distributed to citizens. However, economies of scale require homogenous tasks, which means that the highest extremes of action 1 trades negatively against extremes of action 2, as one develops narrower specialization while neglecting the general end-to-end agency.
One cannot do much of action 3 without also doing a lot of action 1, so wealth inequality correlates to a focus on economies of scale.
I’m not sure which of “oppression” and “production” this scenario corresponds to under your model.
Similar to the “production” scenario, the production under this model seems to be “real”, for instance people are getting clothed and the people who are handsomely rewarded for this are contributing a lot of marginal value. However, unlike the “production” scenario, the wealth doesn’t straightforwardly applying knowing better than others. One might know better with respect to one’s specialty, but the flipside is that one has neglected the development of skills outside of that specialty (potentially due to starting out with less innate ability to develop them, e.g. a physical disability or lack of connectedness to tutors).
Meanwhile, the scenario I described here doesn’t resemble “oppression” at all, except for the original part where the state threatens people to perform the various government services instead of improving their own agency. I get the impression that your oppression hypothesis is more concerned that people provide a simulacrum of these products to the state than that people are forced to provide a genuine version of these products in the most efficient possible way. I do see a strong case for the simulacrum model, but my comment here seems like a relevant alternative to consider, unless I am missing something.