Robin Hanson has wondered why folks seem concerned about inequality based on some stuff, like race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability, but not other stuff, like height, appearance, intelligence, sleep, conscientiousness, and perhaps most importantly, happiness.
My explanation: Race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability are fairly discrete ways of classifying people. Most people (though not all) can be categorized fairly neatly in to a single race, birth gender, desired gender, and sexual orientation. By contrast, looks, smarts, and happiness all vary in a continuous fashion. For some/all of these characteristics, there’s a bell curve—many people in the middle and fewer people at the extremes.
How would wealth or income inequality relate to this? Wealth and income are clearly not a discrete group, but a large number of people are very concerned about wealth and income inequality.
Wealth and income are clearly not a discrete group
People certainly act like they are. Folks who want to diffuse concerns about income equality often deny the existence of classes in America, while those who want to raise concerns recently divided the entire country into 2 discrete groups (the 1% and the 99%).
I’m not sure if this goes for or against the hypothesis though. If it’s that easy to draw arbitrary lines, then the continuous nature of traits like height shouldn’t be much of a barrier to being concerned about it.
I’m not sure if this goes for or against the hypothesis though.
I was thinking further on this topic after reading your post, and I noticed something about the main post that I wanted to consider.
There are complaints like “Those people don’t add any value, and they can still get money! I have to WORK for a living!” That richer people will throw at poorer people, (Because they are able to live on government subsidies.) and that poorer people throw at richer people (Because they are able to live on the wealth of their investments.)
It seems like a lot of the phrasing for acceptable wealth or income (in)equality arguments relies on being able to cast your opponents as being lazy. The rhetoric that I have heard doesn’t usually include complaints about the people who work 80 hour days, whether those people hold 3 minimum wage jobs, or whether they work long hours at a business making millions.
If you do think “Well, Bob works just as hard as I do at his middle class job, but Bob has a Mercedes. Fucking Bob. I want his Mercedes!” That seems to be portrayed much less acceptably.
This makes me wonder if I should try to say something about “Effort inequality.”(?) Except I’m not sure where to start or even if it really relates to the other inequalities.
Perhaps a perception that other people got their money through factional conflict makes one more likely to solve the problem using a factional conflict. People are more likely to use violence if they feel the violence was used against them.
Examples:
Some people don’t work and yet get money, because some philanthropist gives them? Not my problem.
Some people don’t work and yet get money, because they organized against me successfully and made government take my money and give it to them as welfare? Fuck them! I want a government that stops this!
Some people have billions, because they have put a lot of time and hard work to their projects, or they have an extraordinary talent? Not my problem.
Some people have billions, because they organized against me successfully and made government take my money and give it to them as subsidies and bailouts? Fuck them! I want a government that stops this!
Perhaps this is just my thinking, but I feel a desire to go to conflicts in cases of self-defense. In case someone is already attacking me and winning, not fighting back does not seem like a winning option. The dichotomy is not “lazy” versus “diligent”, but “attacking me” versus “not attacking me”. But maybe that’s just my personal reaction.
As a thought experiment, imagine a lazy person living entirely from voluntary donations, no welfare. I can envy them, but I don’t feel threatened by them. So it is not a problem for me. As another experiment, imagine a person spending 16 hours a day lobbying and bribing politicians to take our tax money and give it to that person. This is a problem; and knowing that the person works hard does not make it any better.
EDIT: And it seems to me that even a person who wants to attack a diligent non-stealing non-lobbying talented millionaire typically starts by convincing themselves and the people around them that the given millionaire is somehow responsible for their misery. They try to convince themselves that it is some kind of self-defense, and with a motivated thinking they usually find some excuse.
I’m not sure if this works for or against the theory, but it’s not terribly uncommon for activists to take parameters generally thought of as discrete and reconceptualize them as continuous: for example, by pointing out the existence of intersexed individuals or bringing up the Kinsey scale. Doesn’t seem to happen quite as much for race, but I’ve seen it occasionally: the paper bag test sometimes seems to refer to one version, for example.
A test that I would likely pass in February but not in September. (Also, what part of your skin do they compare with the bag? The back of my hand is darker than the palm...
How would wealth or income inequality relate to this? Wealth and income are clearly not a discrete group, but a large number of people are very concerned about wealth and income inequality.
People certainly act like they are. Folks who want to diffuse concerns about income equality often deny the existence of classes in America, while those who want to raise concerns recently divided the entire country into 2 discrete groups (the 1% and the 99%).
I’m not sure if this goes for or against the hypothesis though. If it’s that easy to draw arbitrary lines, then the continuous nature of traits like height shouldn’t be much of a barrier to being concerned about it.
Indeed. Parts of the internet divide people (at least men) by height with words like “manlet”, and specific numbers for the cutoff.
I was thinking further on this topic after reading your post, and I noticed something about the main post that I wanted to consider.
There are complaints like “Those people don’t add any value, and they can still get money! I have to WORK for a living!” That richer people will throw at poorer people, (Because they are able to live on government subsidies.) and that poorer people throw at richer people (Because they are able to live on the wealth of their investments.)
It seems like a lot of the phrasing for acceptable wealth or income (in)equality arguments relies on being able to cast your opponents as being lazy. The rhetoric that I have heard doesn’t usually include complaints about the people who work 80 hour days, whether those people hold 3 minimum wage jobs, or whether they work long hours at a business making millions.
If you do think “Well, Bob works just as hard as I do at his middle class job, but Bob has a Mercedes. Fucking Bob. I want his Mercedes!” That seems to be portrayed much less acceptably.
This makes me wonder if I should try to say something about “Effort inequality.”(?) Except I’m not sure where to start or even if it really relates to the other inequalities.
Perhaps a perception that other people got their money through factional conflict makes one more likely to solve the problem using a factional conflict. People are more likely to use violence if they feel the violence was used against them.
Examples:
Some people don’t work and yet get money, because some philanthropist gives them? Not my problem.
Some people don’t work and yet get money, because they organized against me successfully and made government take my money and give it to them as welfare? Fuck them! I want a government that stops this!
Some people have billions, because they have put a lot of time and hard work to their projects, or they have an extraordinary talent? Not my problem.
Some people have billions, because they organized against me successfully and made government take my money and give it to them as subsidies and bailouts? Fuck them! I want a government that stops this!
Perhaps this is just my thinking, but I feel a desire to go to conflicts in cases of self-defense. In case someone is already attacking me and winning, not fighting back does not seem like a winning option. The dichotomy is not “lazy” versus “diligent”, but “attacking me” versus “not attacking me”. But maybe that’s just my personal reaction.
As a thought experiment, imagine a lazy person living entirely from voluntary donations, no welfare. I can envy them, but I don’t feel threatened by them. So it is not a problem for me. As another experiment, imagine a person spending 16 hours a day lobbying and bribing politicians to take our tax money and give it to that person. This is a problem; and knowing that the person works hard does not make it any better.
EDIT: And it seems to me that even a person who wants to attack a diligent non-stealing non-lobbying talented millionaire typically starts by convincing themselves and the people around them that the given millionaire is somehow responsible for their misery. They try to convince themselves that it is some kind of self-defense, and with a motivated thinking they usually find some excuse.
This is a good counter example to the effort inequality concept I was ruminating on, thank you for mentioning it.
I’m not sure if this works for or against the theory, but it’s not terribly uncommon for activists to take parameters generally thought of as discrete and reconceptualize them as continuous: for example, by pointing out the existence of intersexed individuals or bringing up the Kinsey scale. Doesn’t seem to happen quite as much for race, but I’ve seen it occasionally: the paper bag test sometimes seems to refer to one version, for example.
A test that I would likely pass in February but not in September. (Also, what part of your skin do they compare with the bag? The back of my hand is darker than the palm...