I’ll give it a shot. Note that I’m going to discuss wealth inequality, not income inequality. (Because the discussion is almost always really about wealth, and not income.)
The con side: Wealth inequality lead to resentment and multi-tiered systems; the rich get better healthcare, for example, and therefore live longer. It is supposed that it leads to hardening class lines, as well; if only the rich can go to Harvard, and only Harvard graduates get rich (a gross simplification, but you see the basic idea), then class mobility goes to zero, which leads to declining meritocracy in society, which leads to suboptimal economic organization.
The pro side: Wealth inequality is meritocracy in action; it represents the tendency of those who are good at managing money to acquire more money (to be managed), which represents optimized (although not necessarily optimal) economic organization. It is, by dint of lost ability, a greater societal tragedy when an expert in managing wealth dies than an average given individual; therefore it’s not necessarily a bad thing that wealthy people get better healthcare, given that healthcare is a finite resource. It is supposed that ability in managing wealth is necessary merely to maintain it, and therefore class mobility is not as rigid as opponents of wealth inequality would argue.
Which leads to a second con side, ability in managing wealth as the sole social-value determinant is suboptimal; Richard Feynman contributes more to society than your average hedge fund manager, the argument might go, and his investment of wealth, while not generating more wealth for him personally to invest, would generate more wealth overall.
Which of course leads to the second pro side, that ability in managing wealth is the only inherent property identifiable in our current system. That the system isn’t perfectly optimized is a nature of imperfect information; we wouldn’t necessarily recognize a new Richard Feynman, and even if a new Richard Feynman could use the wealth more wisely, the number of non-Richard Feynmans incorrectly identified as a new Richard Feynman would result in negative utility compared to the current system.
The argument can go on for ages. This is without discussing the influence of wealth in politics, which has a tendency to get heavily mired in color politics, as both sides think the other is unduly influenced by wealth.
It is supposed that ability in managing wealth is necessary merely to maintain it, and therefore class mobility is not as rigid as opponents of wealth inequality would argue.
How many people born to very rich parents end up very poor because they are bad at managing wealth?
Seriously, when I look at wealthy people, I mostly see people born from the right vagina. Or in some case people with good genes but mediocre memes (think about sportspeople or models).
The plural of anecdote isn’t data; are you basing this statement on an objective analysis of wealthy people, or a subjective case-by-case analysis subject to confirmation bias and selectivity biases? How do you “look” at wealthy people, for example? What do you even define as wealthy?
Was a wealthy person who grew up in an abusive home and was driven to succeed through neurosis merely born from the right vagina? What if it was simply a middle-class home with strong ethics?
Research on American mobility published in 2006 and based on collecting data on the economic mobility of families across generations looked at the probability of reaching a particular income-distribution with regard to where their parents were ranked. The study found that 42 percent of those whose parents were in the bottom quintile ended up in the bottom quintile themselves, 23 percent of them ended in the second quintile, 19 percent in the middle quintile, 11 percent in the fourth quintile and 6 percent in the top quintile.
(Now, it’s possible that “ability in managing wealth” is heritable to some extent, but it seems unlikely that that alone would cause such an effect, without your parents being wealthy ‘directly’ causing you to be wealthy. And note that that study was across one country—if they took quintiles worldwide I’d expect the results to be even more dramatic.)
Heritability in ability to manage wealth would explain this, actually. Assuming it’s as likely to go down as it is to go up in any given generation, and assuming a lower bound on this ability, and assuming some percentage of people are already at that lower bound and their descendants can only improve, you’d expect something like this distribution.
Not to say it -does- explain this. I don’t disagree that wealth is a factor. Where I disagree is in naming it as the most important factor.
If you run a hotel you will seldom have all of your beds rented out. If you run a hospital you usually have all of your beds filled with patients.
Why? The doctors in the hospital advice the patients in a way to seek treatments to fill all the hospital beds.
A hotel manager has no way to archive a similar effect.
When it comes to big pharma drugs, there a huge cost to find a new drug but a much smaller cost to produce the actual drugs.
When you use a drug on 10,000 people instead of on 100 it even becomes better because doctors learn more about the side effects of the drug.
A lot of illnesses are contagious. Even obesity might be. Treating everyone will increase the health of the elite that you are worried about.
Healthcare is a lot more complicated than simply being a “finite resource”.
There are two positions on whether or not something is finite: It’s finite, or it’s infinite. “It’s complicated” doesn’t exist on the spectrum.
You’re arguing that a wider availability of healthcare has potential feedback effects. I don’t disagree. What you fail to establish, however, is that healthcare is, in fact, an infinite resource. You make a strong argument that demand for healthcare is considerably more elastic than we might suppose; I don’t disagree. You make a strong argument that wider availability of a drug results in more utility; I don’t disagree. You make a strong argument that for many problems in the healthcare domain, wider availability of a cure is better even for those who would have it available anyways; again, I don’t disagree.
What you fail to establish is that the resources to provide healthcare are, in fact, infinite, or simply non-finite. You discuss demand; you don’t discuss supply. You discuss the utility of a bigger supply; you don’t discuss the mechanics of actually increasing that supply.
I can confidently say that the world would be much better off if, all other things being equal, there were substantially more healthcare resources. In this, you and I don’t disagree.
Where we may disagree is whether increasing those resources in a world in which all other things -won’t be- equal is the best course of action.
Finite, considered as a nonabstract referential, because blue describes a finite length of the electromagnetic spectrum. Of course, we could consider it in the abstract, in which case it’s not something.
If you proceed to argue that it can’t be nothing, then we’ve been embroiled in a semantic argument from the beginning, about what constitutes something as opposed to nothing. Inwhichcase you’ve defined away healthcare as a meaningful referential to anything in the real world, and inwhichcase nothing you’ve written has any bearing on what I wrote, which considered the real problem of the real limitations of real resources.
If I halve the wavelength of blue I don’t get something that’s half blue. I don’t consider blue something unreal. I just don’t consider it a resource in the same sense as money is a resource.
Things can be real without being resources for which can be finitive in the same sense of the word ‘finitive’ that applies to money.
To me healthcare is something like “more men-years of good health”.
I wouldn’t measure healthcare in amount of hospital beds taken up by patients or by the number of operations that are performed.
Putting people into hospital beds can increase or reduce men-years of good health. The same is true for performing operations.
Hospital beds or operations are resources that are finite resources.
Men years of good health aren’t resources that you can allocate in the same way as you can allocate hospital beds. They behave differently. It doesn’t make sense to treat them the same way.
It is, by dint of lost ability, a greater societal tragedy when an expert in managing wealth dies than an average given individual; therefore it’s not necessarily a bad thing that wealthy people get better healthcare, given that healthcare is a finite resource.
If you don’t think that health care is about health your initial argument makes no sense.
You defined health care as societies ability to prevent people from dying. Especially those people that are valuable to society.
Being “about” health doesn’t make it health. If I have a magical machine that produces an infinite number of bleggs, I can describe the state of bleggs as being infinite, but I still can’t describe blegg machines as being in infinite number.
It matters. You’re arguing that healthcare isn’t a finite resource because allocation of healthcare could conceivably produce a non-finite amount of health. But it doesn’t follow from that that healthcare is a non-finite resource. If we only have one Perfect Health Machine, a theoretical machine which enables clinical immortality, we -still- have to decide who gets to use it. If we decide to build another, that consumes finite resources. We can only have a finite number of Perfect Health Machines which can each only process a finite number of people in any finite amount of time. The potential for “infinite health”, however one defines that, doesn’t imply a potential for infinite healthcare.
You argument rests on the claim that you can prevent valuable people from dying by allocating healthcare resources to them.
If that’s not something you believe I think I win the substance of argument and our further disagreement is about insignificant semantics.
I’ll give it a shot. Note that I’m going to discuss wealth inequality, not income inequality. (Because the discussion is almost always really about wealth, and not income.)
The con side: Wealth inequality lead to resentment and multi-tiered systems; the rich get better healthcare, for example, and therefore live longer. It is supposed that it leads to hardening class lines, as well; if only the rich can go to Harvard, and only Harvard graduates get rich (a gross simplification, but you see the basic idea), then class mobility goes to zero, which leads to declining meritocracy in society, which leads to suboptimal economic organization.
The pro side: Wealth inequality is meritocracy in action; it represents the tendency of those who are good at managing money to acquire more money (to be managed), which represents optimized (although not necessarily optimal) economic organization. It is, by dint of lost ability, a greater societal tragedy when an expert in managing wealth dies than an average given individual; therefore it’s not necessarily a bad thing that wealthy people get better healthcare, given that healthcare is a finite resource. It is supposed that ability in managing wealth is necessary merely to maintain it, and therefore class mobility is not as rigid as opponents of wealth inequality would argue.
Which leads to a second con side, ability in managing wealth as the sole social-value determinant is suboptimal; Richard Feynman contributes more to society than your average hedge fund manager, the argument might go, and his investment of wealth, while not generating more wealth for him personally to invest, would generate more wealth overall.
Which of course leads to the second pro side, that ability in managing wealth is the only inherent property identifiable in our current system. That the system isn’t perfectly optimized is a nature of imperfect information; we wouldn’t necessarily recognize a new Richard Feynman, and even if a new Richard Feynman could use the wealth more wisely, the number of non-Richard Feynmans incorrectly identified as a new Richard Feynman would result in negative utility compared to the current system.
The argument can go on for ages. This is without discussing the influence of wealth in politics, which has a tendency to get heavily mired in color politics, as both sides think the other is unduly influenced by wealth.
How many people born to very rich parents end up very poor because they are bad at managing wealth?
Seriously, when I look at wealthy people, I mostly see people born from the right vagina. Or in some case people with good genes but mediocre memes (think about sportspeople or models).
The plural of anecdote isn’t data; are you basing this statement on an objective analysis of wealthy people, or a subjective case-by-case analysis subject to confirmation bias and selectivity biases? How do you “look” at wealthy people, for example? What do you even define as wealthy?
Was a wealthy person who grew up in an abusive home and was driven to succeed through neurosis merely born from the right vagina? What if it was simply a middle-class home with strong ethics?
Do you think mediocre memes win?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility:
(Now, it’s possible that “ability in managing wealth” is heritable to some extent, but it seems unlikely that that alone would cause such an effect, without your parents being wealthy ‘directly’ causing you to be wealthy. And note that that study was across one country—if they took quintiles worldwide I’d expect the results to be even more dramatic.)
Heritability in ability to manage wealth would explain this, actually. Assuming it’s as likely to go down as it is to go up in any given generation, and assuming a lower bound on this ability, and assuming some percentage of people are already at that lower bound and their descendants can only improve, you’d expect something like this distribution.
Not to say it -does- explain this. I don’t disagree that wealth is a factor. Where I disagree is in naming it as the most important factor.
This explanation is clear. Thank you.
Very often health care isn’t a finite resource.
If you run a hotel you will seldom have all of your beds rented out. If you run a hospital you usually have all of your beds filled with patients. Why? The doctors in the hospital advice the patients in a way to seek treatments to fill all the hospital beds. A hotel manager has no way to archive a similar effect.
When it comes to big pharma drugs, there a huge cost to find a new drug but a much smaller cost to produce the actual drugs. When you use a drug on 10,000 people instead of on 100 it even becomes better because doctors learn more about the side effects of the drug.
A lot of illnesses are contagious. Even obesity might be. Treating everyone will increase the health of the elite that you are worried about.
Healthcare is a lot more complicated than simply being a “finite resource”.
There are two positions on whether or not something is finite: It’s finite, or it’s infinite. “It’s complicated” doesn’t exist on the spectrum.
You’re arguing that a wider availability of healthcare has potential feedback effects. I don’t disagree. What you fail to establish, however, is that healthcare is, in fact, an infinite resource. You make a strong argument that demand for healthcare is considerably more elastic than we might suppose; I don’t disagree. You make a strong argument that wider availability of a drug results in more utility; I don’t disagree. You make a strong argument that for many problems in the healthcare domain, wider availability of a cure is better even for those who would have it available anyways; again, I don’t disagree.
What you fail to establish is that the resources to provide healthcare are, in fact, infinite, or simply non-finite. You discuss demand; you don’t discuss supply. You discuss the utility of a bigger supply; you don’t discuss the mechanics of actually increasing that supply.
I can confidently say that the world would be much better off if, all other things being equal, there were substantially more healthcare resources. In this, you and I don’t disagree.
Where we may disagree is whether increasing those resources in a world in which all other things -won’t be- equal is the best course of action.
Is blue “finite” or “infinite”?
If everything is either “finite” or “infinite” you should be able to answer the question.
Finite, considered as a nonabstract referential, because blue describes a finite length of the electromagnetic spectrum. Of course, we could consider it in the abstract, in which case it’s not something.
If you proceed to argue that it can’t be nothing, then we’ve been embroiled in a semantic argument from the beginning, about what constitutes something as opposed to nothing. Inwhichcase you’ve defined away healthcare as a meaningful referential to anything in the real world, and inwhichcase nothing you’ve written has any bearing on what I wrote, which considered the real problem of the real limitations of real resources.
If I halve the wavelength of blue I don’t get something that’s half blue. I don’t consider blue something unreal. I just don’t consider it a resource in the same sense as money is a resource. Things can be real without being resources for which can be finitive in the same sense of the word ‘finitive’ that applies to money.
To me healthcare is something like “more men-years of good health”.
I wouldn’t measure healthcare in amount of hospital beds taken up by patients or by the number of operations that are performed.
Putting people into hospital beds can increase or reduce men-years of good health. The same is true for performing operations. Hospital beds or operations are resources that are finite resources.
Men years of good health aren’t resources that you can allocate in the same way as you can allocate hospital beds. They behave differently. It doesn’t make sense to treat them the same way.
I think you’ve just described health, not health care.
If you don’t think that health care is about health your initial argument makes no sense.
You defined health care as societies ability to prevent people from dying. Especially those people that are valuable to society.
Being “about” health doesn’t make it health. If I have a magical machine that produces an infinite number of bleggs, I can describe the state of bleggs as being infinite, but I still can’t describe blegg machines as being in infinite number.
It matters. You’re arguing that healthcare isn’t a finite resource because allocation of healthcare could conceivably produce a non-finite amount of health. But it doesn’t follow from that that healthcare is a non-finite resource. If we only have one Perfect Health Machine, a theoretical machine which enables clinical immortality, we -still- have to decide who gets to use it. If we decide to build another, that consumes finite resources. We can only have a finite number of Perfect Health Machines which can each only process a finite number of people in any finite amount of time. The potential for “infinite health”, however one defines that, doesn’t imply a potential for infinite healthcare.
You argument rests on the claim that you can prevent valuable people from dying by allocating healthcare resources to them. If that’s not something you believe I think I win the substance of argument and our further disagreement is about insignificant semantics.