So maybe it’s only 99.99% rather than 99.9999%. I don’t think this really affects Viliam’s point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value), and Paul Graham writes and acts as if it’s almost all cause 1, then maybe Paul Graham is doing the same thing he complains about other people doing and ignoring inconvenient bits of reality.
Note that PG could well be doing that even if when working on cause 1 he takes some measures to reduce the impact of cause 2 on it. It’s not like PG completely denies that some people get rich by exploiting or robbing others; Viliam’s suggesting only that he may be closing his eyes to how much of the world’s economic inequality arises that way.
If you have a world full of evil then don’t you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
Viliam’s point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value)
That may have been implied, but wasn’t stated. Is it actually Viliam’s point? I am not sure how true it is—consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low. Or consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from—did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
This is a tricky subject because Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value and so pretty much all wealth resulting from investment is “stolen”. If we start to discuss this seriously, we’ll need to begin with the basics—who has the original rights to created value and how are they established?
Is it actually Viliam’s point? [that a larger fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from taking by force or fraud than from creating value]
I believe this, at least in long turn; i.e. that even if once in a while some genius creates a lot of wealth and succeeds to capture a significant amount of it, sooner or later most of that money will pass into hands of people who are experts on taking value from others.
No Marxism here, merely an assumption that people who specialize at X will become good at X, especially when X can be simply measured. Here X is “taking value from others”.
consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low.
Nope, that was merely the official propaganda. In fact, high-level Communists were rich. Not only they had much more money, but perhaps more importantly, they were allowed to use “common property” that the average muggle wasn’t allowed to touch. For example, there would be a large villa that nominally belonged to the state, but in fact someone specific lived there. Or there would be a service provided nominally to anyone (chosen by an unspecified algorithm), but in fact only high-level Communists had that service available and average muggles didn’t. High-level Communists were also in much better positions to steal things or blackmail people.
consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from—did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
How is this wealth distributed among the specific Chinese? It can be both true that “China” created the wealth, and that the specific “Chinese” who own it, mostly stole it (from the other Chinese).
Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value
My argument is completely unrelated to this. For me the worrying part about rich people is that they can use their wealth to (1) do crime more safely, and even (2) change laws so that the things they wanted to do are no longer crimes, but the things that other people wanted to do suddenly become crimes.
I disagree. As I mentioned, they did live better (more comfortably, higher consumption) than the peons, but not to the degree that I would call “rich”. I don’t believe that critics of communist regimes, both internal and external, called the party bosses “rich” either. For comparison, consider, say, corrupt South/Central American dictatorships.
Things have changed, of course. Putin is very rich.
the worrying part about rich people is that they can use their wealth to (1) do crime more safely, and even (2) change laws
You are worried about power, not wealth.
It’s true that wealth can be converted to power—sometimes, to some degree, at some conversion rate. But if you actually want power, the straightforward way is attempt to acquire more power directly.
There is also the inverse worry: if no individuals have power, who does? Is it good for individuals to have no power, to be cogs/slaves/sheep?
I’ll let Viliam answer that one (while remarking that the bit you quoted certainly isn’t what I claimed V’s point to be, since you chopped it off after the antecedent).
A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low
That’s not a counterexample; what you want is a case where economic inequality was high without a lot of value being taken by force.
the massive growth of wealth in China
Mostly a matter of real growth through technological and commercial advancement, I’ve always assumed. (Much of it through trade with richer countries—that comes into category 1 in so far as the trade was genuinely beneficial to both sides.) But I’m far from an expert on China.
If we start to discuss this seriously, we’ll need to begin with the basics
It seems like one could say that about a very wide variety of issues, and that it’s more likely to prevent discussion than to raise its quality in general. As for the actual question with which you close: I am not convinced that moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
I am not so much asking for moral analysis as for precise definitions for “using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon”. That seems like a very malleable part which can be bent into any shape desired.
To get a bit more concrete I’m talking about the Soviet Russia of the pre-perestroika era, basically Brezhnev times.
Do you have something specific in mind? Of course party bosses lived better than village peons, but I don’t think that the economic inequality was high. Money wasn’t the preferred currency in the USSR—it was power (and access).
If a single person solves 0.01% of the worlds injustice that’s a huge success. You only need 10000 people like that to solve all injustice.
If you have a world full of evil then don’t you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by distrupting industries. If Paul success in keeping the YC companies nice and successful he shifts the global balance towards the good.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting. As YC grows it might pick a few fights. You could call supporting DemocracyOS a fight against the established political system but it’s also simply building systems that work better than the established political system.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
If a single person solves 0.01% of the world’s injustice that’s a huge success.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world’s injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by disrupting industries.
You don’t get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality—the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process—and may be neglecting another part.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there’s a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don’t see that you can just deflect the question by saying “effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms”.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
You’re just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909
and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement.
In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
It’s not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It’s about building effective communities with good norms.
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
people are largely too impatient
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those “crime-field hell-holes” would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you’re comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you’re talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs.
Most mainstream news sources
… are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By “inner cities” I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources.
So maybe it’s only 99.99% rather than 99.9999%. I don’t think this really affects Viliam’s point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world’s economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value), and Paul Graham writes and acts as if it’s almost all cause 1, then maybe Paul Graham is doing the same thing he complains about other people doing and ignoring inconvenient bits of reality.
Note that PG could well be doing that even if when working on cause 1 he takes some measures to reduce the impact of cause 2 on it. It’s not like PG completely denies that some people get rich by exploiting or robbing others; Viliam’s suggesting only that he may be closing his eyes to how much of the world’s economic inequality arises that way.
If you have a world full of evil then don’t you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
That may have been implied, but wasn’t stated. Is it actually Viliam’s point? I am not sure how true it is—consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low. Or consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from—did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
This is a tricky subject because Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value and so pretty much all wealth resulting from investment is “stolen”. If we start to discuss this seriously, we’ll need to begin with the basics—who has the original rights to created value and how are they established?
I believe this, at least in long turn; i.e. that even if once in a while some genius creates a lot of wealth and succeeds to capture a significant amount of it, sooner or later most of that money will pass into hands of people who are experts on taking value from others.
No Marxism here, merely an assumption that people who specialize at X will become good at X, especially when X can be simply measured. Here X is “taking value from others”.
Nope, that was merely the official propaganda. In fact, high-level Communists were rich. Not only they had much more money, but perhaps more importantly, they were allowed to use “common property” that the average muggle wasn’t allowed to touch. For example, there would be a large villa that nominally belonged to the state, but in fact someone specific lived there. Or there would be a service provided nominally to anyone (chosen by an unspecified algorithm), but in fact only high-level Communists had that service available and average muggles didn’t. High-level Communists were also in much better positions to steal things or blackmail people.
How is this wealth distributed among the specific Chinese? It can be both true that “China” created the wealth, and that the specific “Chinese” who own it, mostly stole it (from the other Chinese).
My argument is completely unrelated to this. For me the worrying part about rich people is that they can use their wealth to (1) do crime more safely, and even (2) change laws so that the things they wanted to do are no longer crimes, but the things that other people wanted to do suddenly become crimes.
I disagree. As I mentioned, they did live better (more comfortably, higher consumption) than the peons, but not to the degree that I would call “rich”. I don’t believe that critics of communist regimes, both internal and external, called the party bosses “rich” either. For comparison, consider, say, corrupt South/Central American dictatorships.
Things have changed, of course. Putin is very rich.
You are worried about power, not wealth.
It’s true that wealth can be converted to power—sometimes, to some degree, at some conversion rate. But if you actually want power, the straightforward way is attempt to acquire more power directly.
There is also the inverse worry: if no individuals have power, who does? Is it good for individuals to have no power, to be cogs/slaves/sheep?
I’ll let Viliam answer that one (while remarking that the bit you quoted certainly isn’t what I claimed V’s point to be, since you chopped it off after the antecedent).
That’s not a counterexample; what you want is a case where economic inequality was high without a lot of value being taken by force.
Mostly a matter of real growth through technological and commercial advancement, I’ve always assumed. (Much of it through trade with richer countries—that comes into category 1 in so far as the trade was genuinely beneficial to both sides.) But I’m far from an expert on China.
It seems like one could say that about a very wide variety of issues, and that it’s more likely to prevent discussion than to raise its quality in general. As for the actual question with which you close: I am not convinced that moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
I am not so much asking for moral analysis as for precise definitions for “using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon”. That seems like a very malleable part which can be bent into any shape desired.
Well, that would be for Viliam to clarify rather than for me, should he so choose. It doesn’t seem excessively malleable to me, for what it’s worth.
I am contesting this.
The first part, or the second, or both?
Second.
To get a bit more concrete I’m talking about the Soviet Russia of the pre-perestroika era, basically Brezhnev times.
Do you have something specific in mind? Of course party bosses lived better than village peons, but I don’t think that the economic inequality was high. Money wasn’t the preferred currency in the USSR—it was power (and access).
If a single person solves 0.01% of the worlds injustice that’s a huge success. You only need 10000 people like that to solve all injustice.
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by distrupting industries. If Paul success in keeping the YC companies nice and successful he shifts the global balance towards the good.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting. As YC grows it might pick a few fights. You could call supporting DemocracyOS a fight against the established political system but it’s also simply building systems that work better than the established political system.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world’s injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
You don’t get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality—the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process—and may be neglecting another part.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there’s a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don’t see that you can just deflect the question by saying “effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms”.
You’re just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement. In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those “crime-field hell-holes” would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you’re comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you’re talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs.
… are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By “inner cities” I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources.
[EDITED for slightly more precise wording.]