Isn’t every avoidable act (i.e. decision) that yields negative consequences (or less positive consequences) when compared to the alternatives immoral? If no, how do you define immoral?
Your tone indicates to me that you believe the OP’s argument to be unreasonable as it is exceedingly hard to follow. But does that preclude it from being (1) possible and (2) morally sound?
Depends on what you mean. Would I prefer if people ceased their selfish behavior to ruthlessly attack the world’s greatest problems? No. To a small degree perhaps. The way people demonstrate more concern for their morning beverage than for the millions of poor and starving people in the world is part of what makes them human. I wouldn’t want that to go away.
Nor given people’s selfishness would I want a social norm that people should sacrifice what they have for the sake of the poor. People would respond to this norm by not gathering many resources in the first place, and the aid would be carried out ineffectively, without much attention paid to quality.
However, if I could just snap my fingers and reduce the wealth of the average wealthy Westerner and transfer that wealth to where it could do a great deal of good alleviating poverty and hunger, I would.
Depends on what you mean. Would I prefer if people ceased their selfish behavior to ruthlessly attack the world’s greatest problems? No. To a small degree perhaps. The way people demonstrate more concern for their morning beverage than for the millions of poor and starving people in the world is part of what makes them human. I wouldn’t want that to go away.
Nor given people’s selfishness would I want a social norm that people should sacrifice what they have for the sake of the poor. People would respond to this norm by not gathering many resources in the first place, and the aid would be carried out ineffectively, without much attention paid to quality.
So, Ayn Rand is right? Except...
However, if I could just snap my fingers and reduce the wealth of the average wealthy Westerner and transfer that wealth to where it could do a great deal of good alleviating poverty and hunger, I would.
...this doesn’t fit. At all.
Wouldn’t a one-time transfer of wealth be doomed to fail quickly due to your view of humans’ innate selfishness and laziness? That is, resource inequality would restore itself quickly, no?
I think it is odd that you see some sort of moral value to “flip the big equality switch” via a snap of your fingers, yet you push back against the idea of more gradual steps toward a similar end.
No, Ayn Rand is as silly as any other highly influential and successful political philosophy. However, the truth is that people are remarkably selfish. Observe the many who are more concerned about their coffee-based beverages than wars and starvation. This makes them human. I don’t want them to stop being that way, not completely, not even to a great extent.
Resource inequality is not the concern here. Poverty is. Poverty can be reduced by giving people wealth.
If a person said to me, “I used to be selfish and spend a lot of money on Starbucks, but now I see the error of my ways and will devote my life to fighting poverty,” I would applaud his morality.
It’s not obvious this is true other than in the short term.
This sentence also exists in a large number of variations with the word “wealth” replaced by “power”, “technology”, “information”, “self-confidence”, “government assistance”, etc. etc.
No, Ayn Rand is as silly as any other highly influential and successful political philosophy. However, the truth is that people are remarkably selfish. Observe the many who are more concerned about their coffee-based beverages than wars and starvation. This makes them human. I don’t want them to stop being that way, not completely, not even to a great extent.
I don’t know that this is the place or format to come to a conclusion, but I would argue your views as expressed are in close correlation with Rand’s Objectivism. Broad strokes, limited sample. But correlation.
Is it possible that people must refrain from acting in remarkable selfish ways, at least in regard to physical resources, in order to bring about an improvement in net global conditions (poverty rate, etc.)? Is it possible that “greed (or selfsihness) is good” in terms of leading to financial growth, technological progress, etc...but it also leads to an eventual extreme inequality in wealth?
Resource inequality is not the concern here. Poverty is. Poverty can be reduced by giving people wealth.
Can poverty be defined as (one aspect of) an extreme inequality in resources? If no, why not?
If a person said to me, “I used to be selfish and spend a lot of money on Starbucks, but now I see the error of my ways and will devote my life to fighting poverty,” I would applaud his morality.
Didn’t you just say you didn’t want people to stop behaving selfishly?
Can poverty be defined as (one aspect of) an extreme inequality in resources? If no, why not?
No.
Let’s say there was a day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the wealthiest human alive owned nothing more than a sharp stick and a basket full of raw fish. That was still a condition of poverty, despite the lack of any more-successful rivals.
Poverty is not a comparative thing, for all that the formally recognized thresholds have been adjusted as conditions change. It is the condition of scarcity so severe as to perversely inhibit using any remaining resources at all efficiently. Poverty is jamming the round peg into the square hole because there’s ice-cold water coming through that hole, you need to block the flow somehow, at least a little bit, it’s up to your knees already. You don’t have a square peg. The last time you had a square peg, using it up was the only adequately expedient way to deal with some other goddamn ridiculous deathtrap mechanism.
Let’s say there was a day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the wealthiest human alive owned nothing more than a sharp stick and a basket full of raw fish. That was still a condition of poverty, despite the lack of any more-successful rivals.
Good point. So it is possible for 100% of the world to live in poverty.
However, the earth bears sufficient resource for this to not be the case. In fact, it bears sufficient resource so that no one need be impoverished.
Inequality in wealth at extreme levels is often the product of systemic issues—the rules allow for, and in some cases even encourage, oppression.
In this case, it might be worthwhile to conceive of the poverty/wealth spectrum as being a separate dimension from the oppression/power spectrum.
Wealth can be positive-sum, but social power isn’t. It might be interesting to see how they correlate—it seems that a large component of the debate between various political ideologies, for example, is over what effect a given level of social power disparity has on the amount that wealth is positive-sum vs. zero-sum. (Ugh, that’s an ugly sentence.)
Hm. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. Please elaborate, if you will?
Gladly. (EDITED: I originally used ‘wealth’ and ‘power’ instead of ‘wealth’ and ‘coercion’. It was rightly pointed out that ‘wealth’ is just a form of ‘power’. So rather than “separating wealth from power”, what I’m really talking about is “separating our ideas about wealth from our ideas about coercion”.)
On one axis, we have poverty/wealth, which is a measure of “how much stuff do I have?”—how much food, water, air, shelter, etc. - up to and including how much control I have over my physical environment. Near one end of the spectrum, we can imagine skeletal children waiting for vultures to eat them. Near the other end of the spectrum, we can imagine eloi living within utility fogs, waiting to condense anything they dream of out of thin air.
On another axis, we have the social ladder / status games that humans play so well. Near one end of that spectrum, we can imagine abject slaves, whose right to live is up to the whim of others; near the other end of that spectrum, we can imagine despotic conquerors, whose whim controls the lives of millions.
The poverty/wealth spectrum is NOT zero-sum, because even if we collapse a society’s span on that spectrum down to a single point, WHERE that point falls matters—everyone being equally poor is materially different from everyone being equally rich.
On the other hand, the social coercion spectrum is fundamentally zero-sum—you can’t remove B’s inferiority to A, without removing A’s superiority to B.
The problem is, most people don’t seem to REALLY separate those two spectra—when we talk about “making people more equal”, we usually talk about wealth redistribution, not coercion redistribution. Paul Graham discusses this at length.
The thing is, coercion influences wealth, and vice-versa. But the fact that they influence each other doesn’t make them the same thing—it just means that the phase diagram covers a subset of the phase space, instead of the whole thing.
One thing you notice when you look at history, is how various technologies (which are physical objects, and therefore on the wealth spectrum) influence the course of society and governance (which are social objects, and therefore on the coercion spectrum). For example, look at how readily “freer” democratic governments break out when new military technology makes it easier to mount rebellions, and how readily authoritarian regimes break out when new military technology makes it easier to consolidate coercion. And look at how readily technological revolutions break out when a culture allows free exploration of possibilities, and how readily they die when a culture imposes direct control over what its entrepreneurs and researchers can study and make.
A testable claim that the Progressive movement might make, if these two continua are recognized as separate, is that minimizing the coercion disparity between individuals will tend to maximize their aggregate wealth, while maximizing the coercion disparity between individuals will tend to lower that aggregate wealth. The American version of Libertarianism seems to make the opposite claim, that allowing power disparities to naturally follow the individuals’ innate abilities to seize and hold power will allow those individuals who are better at multiplying wealth to do so, while redistributing their wealth to those with less innate ability to seize and hold power is inefficient.
Even better, though, separating out those two concepts allows certain testable claims to be made more clearly—things like “we can redistribute coercive power without redistributing wealth, and regulation is one way to do that”, and “all attempts to redistribute or nullify coercive power must use coercive power to do so, and will therefore favor those who currently have coercive power”.
EDIT: Upon further reflection, I think it’s not entirely true that people can’t distinguish between these two concepts—plenty of people can and do distinguish between them, but then when they come to making policy decisions, they conflate them again. This looks like a cognitive bias at work, but I’m not sure which one—something that causes people to default to zero-sum thinking even when they know a situation has positive-sum solutions?
I might be out of my intellectual league here...and perhaps oversimplifying...
But I don’t know that I accept the premise that wealth & power are separate (or even can be) in the way you describe.
I suppose it comes down to definitions. I’d say wealth is roughly “stuff you need and want”; power is roughly “the ability to get stuff you need and want”.
In this sense, individual wealth is a result of power. And wealth also ensures the continuation (and even further accumulation) of power, as well as perpetuating further increases in wealth.
So, power --> wealth --> more wealth & power
As this process continues, power and wealth become concentrated among a small group relative to the population. When that happens, you have 80% of the pie being eaten be 20% (or <10%) of the people. 20% of the pie (wealth) ain’t enough for 80% (or >90%) of the people. And they haven’t sufficient means (power) to do anything about it.
In the past, revolutions take place to correct for this. The “haves” become too wealthy and not-powerful-enough to maintain the equilibrium against the huge (and therefore powerful enough) number of (too poor) “have-nots”, so it shifts.
But, as you mentioned, we seem to living in an age with technology that can ensure power indefinitely on behalf of the “haves”. In the global economy, there are large groups of have-nothings for whom no technology sufficient to mount a rebellion can be realized, and they are therefore marginalized from a power standpoint, and utterly impoverished in terms of wealth.
In any case, I don’t see a meaningful distinction between wealth and power in regard to how to fix the world and end poverty.
I suppose it comes down to definitions. I’d say wealth is roughly “stuff you need and want”; power is roughly “the ability to get stuff you need and want”.
Nod I see your complaint, and I think it’s fundamentally about what “power” means. I’ll edit my previous post to clarify terms:
Where I said “power”, what I really meant was “coercion”. “Wealth” and “Coercion” are both different kinds of “power”, which can in fact be separated from each other.
Hm. I don’t see a difference between power and coercion in that case. Power seems to include the ability to coerce.
It just seems to me there are ends (wealth) and means (power). Pure handouts are not sustainable to combat poverty in the long-term. You’ve got to create a means, and I think that is tricky to do given the current state of things in the world.
I’m probably risking a tangent here, but an example comes to mind: My uncle sold his farm and went to Africa to try and help battle poverty by teaching people to farm. Their first crop was very successful and yielded a strong harvest. They stored the harvest in a silo of some sort. In order to protect the harvest from thieves, they had to hire a guard. The cost of hiring a guard they could trust exceeded the value of the crop. So technically, the viability of working hard to grow a crop is exceeded by becoming a thief or waiting for handouts or even doing nothing at all.
Anyway, this speaks to the point (I think) I was trying to make somewhere way up the thread: Perhaps the only (or at least the best) way to end poverty is some sort of voluntary redistribution of wealth and power from the wealthy and powerful to the impoverished and non-powerful. Attempts to do this through government mandate seem to often exacerbate the problem because of all the inefficiency and corruption involved. So it seems to me that a direct, private (non-government), streamlined, voluntary redistribution is best.
My uncle, a Christian, summed up the futility of the current situation by concluding “we just needed more people to act like Jesus.” I tend to agree, as long as he meant something like “we need people who arrive at a rational basis for being selfless and charitable in an efficient way, and then act on it instead of just talking about it”.
I think we both, my uncle & I mean something like this. Or this, if you are (a lot) more wealthy.
It just seems to me there are ends (wealth) and means (power).
I disagree—I think that for some people power is the terminal goal (e.g. consider how Soviet and Communist China elites worked).
Perhaps the only (or at least the best) way to end poverty is some sort of voluntary redistribution of wealth and power from the wealthy and powerful to the impoverished and non-powerful.
And then? You will have to forcibly suppress wealth differentiation or in a few years you’ll have your underclass back again.
I disagree—I think that for some people power is the terminal goal (e.g. consider how Soviet and Communist China elites worked).
Good examples. It still seems power inherently involves owning means to sufficient wealth (i.e. enough to live comfortably for indefinite periods).
And then? You will have to forcibly suppress wealth differentiation or in a few years you’ll have your underclass back again.
You’ve pointed out the problem, I think. Though I’m not as concern about differences in wealth, per se. Instead, I’m concerned with eliminating poverty.
Perhaps the norms will need to change? Perhaps it will be seen as increasingly negative to be super rich on a globe where some are dying of starvation? It will become a faux pas?
I recommend capitalism :-) By XIX-century standards, the First World countries have eliminated poverty.
To the extent that this is true, I don’t think it makes much sense to attribute it to capitalism as such. After all, some of the most extreme poverty in American history took place around the beginning of the 20th century, when American capitalism was at its most laissez faire. Without the institution of some kind of societal safety net, capitalism does not seem to eliminate poverty very effectively.
After all, some of the most extreme poverty in American history took place around the beginning of the 20th century, when American capitalism was at its most laissez faire.
I’m prepared to be convinced of this, but that link doesn’t demonstrate this, or much at all really. It argues that history textbooks overemphasize the tilted income distribution relative to the economic growth that took place, but the only arguments it offers against the magnitude of the distribution skew being as great as the textbooks claim are strictly theoretical.
The notion that people simply would not immigrate if conditions were so poor, unless conditions were even worse where they already lived, is a supposition unworthy of the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter; people don’t act as if they were rational agents operating on complete information now, and information availability was much lower then. Plus, once you’re stuck in a system of wage slavery, it’s extremely difficult to get out, unlike the work that people were emigrating from in the first place.
It’s easy to avoid paying workers near the marginal productivity they generate if there’s enough competition willing to take lowball compensation so that they can be the ones to get the job (and plenty of competition willing to do so when many families need to mobilize all their possible working force to stay above water.) Unionization can result in many negative side effects, and often produces ludicrously perverse incentives, but at the same time do not forget, with the dramatic improvements in compensation and working conditions they generated at the time for huge numbers of workers, how many industries stayed in business.
The whole thing barely even tries to refute the notion that conditions were that bad, it just complains about history textbooks focusing more on those conditions than the productivity gains generated by industrialization. The closest thing it offers to an empirical argument throughout is when the author claims that he finds one figure hard to believe, and that one historian offered him one he found more reasonable. What research did he do to determine which figure was more likely to be correct?
I am entirely willing to adjust my estimate of how bad conditions were at that time based on well researched empirical data. As for the notion that history textbooks emphasize the ills too much relative to the gains, well, my own discussed both at length, and I think it’s appropriate that they should do such, because the historical record demonstrates both that industrialization has significant benefits, and that the conditions caused by its unregulated state can be substantially improved upon with certain effective regulations. Both points are important, and often discarded for ideological or theoretical reasons without empirical basis.
Well, the initial claim that “some of the most extreme poverty in American history took place around the beginning of the 20th century” sounds strange to me on its face. Do you think there was more extreme poverty at the beginning of the XX century or at the beginning of the XIX century, for example?
The notion that people simply would not immigrate if conditions were so poor
Is more plausible than you give it credit for. People used to immigrate by extended families, whole clans, and the way it worked was that some family members would move over, get a foothold, and then bring over the rest. There certainly was communication (post worked pretty well) and people already on the ground had first-hand knowledge of the conditions they would bring their entire family into. They mostly did bring their families.
The whole thing barely even tries to refute the notion that conditions were that bad
No one so far defined what do “bad conditions” mean, what are the relevant metrics, and what can you compare them to to establish the context.
Well, the initial claim that “some of the most extreme poverty in American history took place around the beginning of the 20th century” sounds strange to me on its face. Do you think there was more extreme poverty at the beginning of the XX century or at the beginning of the XIX century, for example?
Depends what metrics you use, but I am willing to bet that more people (and a greater proportion of people) at the beginning of the 20th century were living in conditions where they had less space, less access to food, more exposure to toxic and unsafe conditions, and less opportunity to move to a different environment.
Is more plausible than you give it credit for. People used to immigrate by extended families, whole clans, and the way it worked was that some family members would move over, get a foothold, and then bring over the rest. There certainly was communication (post worked pretty well) and people already on the ground had first-hand knowledge of the conditions they would bring their entire family into. They mostly did bring their families.
Many did, but then, many did not.
If a worker finds success, they’re a lot more likely to encourage family or village members to come over than if they do not. If we suppose that one in five initial immigrants has a positive experience, and immigrants who have positive experiences on average encourage eight more people to come over, then we will have a scenario where most immigrants are encouraged to come over by someone who had positive experiences, but most do not have positive experiences (am I claiming that these are the correct figures or something close to them? No, but they illustrate why I don’t think the argument proves much.)
No one so far defined what do “bad conditions” mean, what are the relevant metrics, and what can you compare them to to establish the context.
In the context of the comment, I am referring to the conditions being as bad as the textbooks Caplan is complaining about said they were, along whatever metrics they used. From his critique it’s hard to know what they even asserted since he’s arguing against them on ideological rather than empirical grounds.
Certainly so. Your metrics, for example, look biased towards hunter-gatherer tribes :-)
Many did, but then, many did not.
This looks like an empirical question. I bet there are studies with data. I am also too lazy to go, google them up, read them, and figure out the answer :-D
I recommend capitalism :-) By XIX-century standards, the First World countries have eliminated poverty.
Agreed. Though I think there are lots of variables here. I have no issue with capitalism. It works and leads to lots of growth. If left wholly unregulated, poverty will happen. But, add some social welfare programs and other wealth redistribution mechanisms, and if they are sufficient, you’ll get a poverty free system (depending on how you define poverty).
The issue I’d raise in regard to a more open system (i.e. a global economy) is that you have some countries functioning just fine...in part becaused they used unregulated capitalistic means (i.e. Imperialism) to move wealth to their own coffers and leave whole continents in the dark ages.
And what will make them change?
Culture and morality will evolve. I’m proposing this as a way in which relatively unregulated capitalism can work without any mandated redistributions of wealth or “forcible suppression” of power.
I mentioned The Giving Pledge (somewhere on this thread). This is a great example of what I’m talking about. There is no rational reason for anyone to give up the majority of their wealth. But many billionaires are becoming convinced it is the right thing to do nonetheless.
There is no rational reason for anyone to give up the majority of their wealth.
Sure there is. The remainder of your wealth is enough to satisfy all your material needs and giving away wealth puts you ahead in the Status Game which you value very much.
There is no rational reason for anyone to give up the majority of their wealth.
What are you, a straw Vulcan? If you value what another person can do with it more than whatever else you could do with it, it is rational to give it to them.
Rational was a bad word for me to use here. Taboo it.
Also, saying there is “no rational reason” was overstating it.
I’ll say this instead: Pre-humanity, nature had no behavior like this. During some large portion of human history, it has been considered strange to give away a majority of one’s wealth. The Giving Pledge, for example, flies in the face of millions of years of precedent.
In the context of the discussion I was having (and in many such discussions I’ve had) I’ve learned that this...
If you value what another person can do with it more than whatever else you could do with it, it is rational to give it to them.
...does not compute for many people.
At the risk of being too political (And speaking way too generally), this is one of the main differences I observe between American conservatives and liberals: The rational basis for giving doesn’t compute for conservatives.
They seem to want to win by accumulating wealth, and then keep wining, and winning, and winning by accumulating more wealth. Suggesting to them that “If you value what another person can do with it more than whatever else you could do with it, it is rational to give it to them.” tends to make them look at you sideways.
The basis by which conservatives tend to reject “radical charity” is pretty sound, I think. From what I can gather, it is something like, “(1) It was nature’s way (or God’s providence) and my hard work that caused my wealth, (2) I have a right to use it to further my ends and provide for as many future generations of my family as possible & (3) unnatural (non-capitalistic) economic moves never work anyway...therefore, giving away my money is bad and not rational.”
During some large portion of human history, it has been considered strange to give away a majority of one’s wealth.
Customs relating to this vary quite a bit. In cultures with a strong potlatch tradition, for example, gift-giving is the primary way of displaying status and it’s not at all unusual to give away most of one’s wealth.
I’m not ready to make sweeping declarations about what has been normal for most of human history, or at least for the portion of it where talking about wealth would have made any sense.
I’ve no doubt there are exceptions, but, when posed with the following question, how do you think the majority of humans who have ever walked the Earth would reply?:
Which word best describes your feelings about the act of giving away >50% of your possessions to benefit absolute strangers?
A. Normal
B. Abnormal
Further, “wealth” has always had some meaning, even before humans. If we define wealth as “stuff we need or want”, then the animal kingdom is full of this sort of wealth, and they tend to defend their wealth as a means to provide for themselves and their young with vigor.
It is perfectly natural to hoard wealth for yourself and your kin. It was point that movements like The Giving Pledge, or say, very large, anonymous charitable gifts seem to be anti-natural in this way.
I’m aware that what appears to be pure altruism may only be signalling, or some other mechanism for personal gain… But I do believe there is (possibly) something like rational altruism taking place where people are realizing that (1) every dollar past X million/billion is essentially worthless ’cuz you’re gonna die and you can’t use it all, (2) immense amounts of inherited wealth aren’t as 100% positive as you might think so leaving gobs of money to family is not optimal & (3) other people’s lives suck because they have no money or food and no way to get money or food.
There is also a group of people for whom this seems to make no sense. They see every red cent as having utility since they can find ways to pass it on (in some form) to their family.
when posed with the following question, how do you think the majority of humans who have ever walked the Earth would reply?:
As I just said, I’m not willing to make that generalization; we don’t have enough good data about prehistoric culture, or for that matter many historical cultures, to talk about it this specifically. A cladistic analysis of gift-giving behavior might be more tractable, but I don’t have the data for that either.
(Granted, given the shape of the population curve, it might be—though I don’t remember, and haven’t looked it up—that the majority of humans ever to walk the earth lived in historical times. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re getting at.)
Further, “wealth” has always had some meaning, even before humans. If we define wealth as “stuff we need or want”, then the animal kingdom is full of this sort of wealth, and they tend to defend their wealth as a means to provide for themselves and their young with vigor.
I’m using “wealth” to indicate the kind of goods that can be usefully hoarded, which IIRC are primarily discussed as a post-Neolithic phenomenon. I’m not anthopologist enough to speak authoritatively on how things might have worked in the Paleolithic, but it should be clear that there are physical limits on how much you can hoard if you’re leading a nomadic forager lifestyle, particularly without pack animals. I’d also expect people’s cultural reasoning about generosity to differ under this sort of regime.
I’m no anthropologist, but giving away the majority of one’s wealth isn’t the norm. If not self-evident, I’m not sure what else about human behavior is. You need resources to live, and the desire to live is a pretty hard wired drive inside any species that made it this far.
Customs relating to this vary quite a bit. In cultures with a strong potlatch tradition, for example, gift-giving is the primary way of displaying status and it’s not at all unusual to give away most of one’s wealth.
Incidentally, I’ve heard a reasonable argument that the so-called “gift-giving” cultures are largely an artifact caused by (mis)translating their languages words for different types of economic exchanges as “gift”. This mistranslation was started by early settlers who didn’t want to admit they were paying tribute to the natives. Later it was continued by anthropologists who believed or at least alieved the whole “noble savage” myth.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it an economic exchange in the same sense that we’d use for the phrase, but a prestige system denominated in (essentially randomly allocated) gifts doesn’t seem all that much more or less noble to me than one denominated in dollars.
this is one of the main differences I observe between American conservatives and liberals: The rational basis for giving doesn’t compute for conservatives.
I vaguely remember that empirical studies show that conservatives give to charity noticeably more than liberals in the US.
In any case, one main factor that bolsters conservative charitable giving is religion. In many of these instances, I think the term “charitable” is being stretched quite a bit, since many churches do little with that donated money apart from teaching their members their particular brand of religious beliefs. (Also, if beside the point, many Christians I know give with the expectation they will re-acquire those funds in the form of special pleasures and blessings once the reach heaven. So, win-win. Nothing wrong with that...)
The other factor would be that liberals philsophically view the government as a means of redistrbuting resources to the places it is needed. They vote for policies that mandate “charitable” giving, and then trust the system to do what it is inteneded to do. They support higher taxes (generally) and then pay them.
My point (sincerely) wasn’t to disparage conservatives, per se. I’ve just noticed in discussions with my friends, who are politically inclined as such, that they seem to have a very different utility function than my liberal friends in regard to charitable giving, and fiscal policy writ large. They both want good policies that work, but they disagree on what “good” and “work” mean.
Not really differently. This piece picks a favorable definition of “conservative” to avoid the result they don’t like. And even then conservatives and liberals come out even—hardly support for your hypothesis that conservatives just don’t grok giving.
In many of these instances, I think the term “charitable” is being stretched quite a bit
That’s irrelevant because what’s under discussion is propensity of people to give away their wealth. In this context it doesn’t matter whether the money is used effectively.
they seem to have a very different utility function than my liberal friends
Well, any reason to be surprised? Political disagreements are real and correlate with a whole bunch of other preferences.
That’s irrelevant because what’s under discussion is propensity of people to give away their wealth. In this context it doesn’t matter whether the money is used effectively.
Hm. I’m not necessarily talking about if the money is being used “effectively”. Rather, the money given to the church is used for the good of the church and those who attend the church (i.e. the giver included). It is quite effective to that end.
I suppose all charities are like this in some way—they benefit humanity, a group to which we all belong. But in the church, a very small amount of total revenue does anything for people outside the church. If it is a charity (which I’m not sure it is), then it is one that quite directly benefits the giver.
If this money is all counted as “charity”, it’s very easy to see how conservatives might out-give liberals. In fact, it’s what I’d expect to see in a country that is so religious.
Well, any reason to be surprised? Political disagreements are real and correlate with a whole bunch of other preferences.
Not surprised, no. But it’s a more helpful way of viewing things than simply concluding liberals are generous with money and conservatives are selfish with it. There is more to it than that, as you point out.
Isn’t every avoidable act (i.e. decision) that yields negative consequences (or less positive consequences) when compared to the alternatives immoral? If no, how do you define immoral?
Your tone indicates to me that you believe the OP’s argument to be unreasonable as it is exceedingly hard to follow. But does that preclude it from being (1) possible and (2) morally sound?
Depends on what you mean. Would I prefer if people ceased their selfish behavior to ruthlessly attack the world’s greatest problems? No. To a small degree perhaps. The way people demonstrate more concern for their morning beverage than for the millions of poor and starving people in the world is part of what makes them human. I wouldn’t want that to go away.
Nor given people’s selfishness would I want a social norm that people should sacrifice what they have for the sake of the poor. People would respond to this norm by not gathering many resources in the first place, and the aid would be carried out ineffectively, without much attention paid to quality.
However, if I could just snap my fingers and reduce the wealth of the average wealthy Westerner and transfer that wealth to where it could do a great deal of good alleviating poverty and hunger, I would.
So, Ayn Rand is right? Except...
...this doesn’t fit. At all.
Wouldn’t a one-time transfer of wealth be doomed to fail quickly due to your view of humans’ innate selfishness and laziness? That is, resource inequality would restore itself quickly, no?
I think it is odd that you see some sort of moral value to “flip the big equality switch” via a snap of your fingers, yet you push back against the idea of more gradual steps toward a similar end.
No, Ayn Rand is as silly as any other highly influential and successful political philosophy. However, the truth is that people are remarkably selfish. Observe the many who are more concerned about their coffee-based beverages than wars and starvation. This makes them human. I don’t want them to stop being that way, not completely, not even to a great extent.
Resource inequality is not the concern here. Poverty is. Poverty can be reduced by giving people wealth.
If a person said to me, “I used to be selfish and spend a lot of money on Starbucks, but now I see the error of my ways and will devote my life to fighting poverty,” I would applaud his morality.
It’s not obvious this is true other than in the short term.
This sentence also exists in a large number of variations with the word “wealth” replaced by “power”, “technology”, “information”, “self-confidence”, “government assistance”, etc. etc.
I don’t know that this is the place or format to come to a conclusion, but I would argue your views as expressed are in close correlation with Rand’s Objectivism. Broad strokes, limited sample. But correlation.
Is it possible that people must refrain from acting in remarkable selfish ways, at least in regard to physical resources, in order to bring about an improvement in net global conditions (poverty rate, etc.)? Is it possible that “greed (or selfsihness) is good” in terms of leading to financial growth, technological progress, etc...but it also leads to an eventual extreme inequality in wealth?
Can poverty be defined as (one aspect of) an extreme inequality in resources? If no, why not?
Didn’t you just say you didn’t want people to stop behaving selfishly?
No.
Let’s say there was a day, tens of thousands of years ago, when the wealthiest human alive owned nothing more than a sharp stick and a basket full of raw fish. That was still a condition of poverty, despite the lack of any more-successful rivals.
Poverty is not a comparative thing, for all that the formally recognized thresholds have been adjusted as conditions change. It is the condition of scarcity so severe as to perversely inhibit using any remaining resources at all efficiently. Poverty is jamming the round peg into the square hole because there’s ice-cold water coming through that hole, you need to block the flow somehow, at least a little bit, it’s up to your knees already. You don’t have a square peg. The last time you had a square peg, using it up was the only adequately expedient way to deal with some other goddamn ridiculous deathtrap mechanism.
Good point. So it is possible for 100% of the world to live in poverty.
However, the earth bears sufficient resource for this to not be the case. In fact, it bears sufficient resource so that no one need be impoverished.
Inequality in wealth at extreme levels is often the product of systemic issues—the rules allow for, and in some cases even encourage, oppression.
In this case, it might be worthwhile to conceive of the poverty/wealth spectrum as being a separate dimension from the oppression/power spectrum.
Wealth can be positive-sum, but social power isn’t. It might be interesting to see how they correlate—it seems that a large component of the debate between various political ideologies, for example, is over what effect a given level of social power disparity has on the amount that wealth is positive-sum vs. zero-sum. (Ugh, that’s an ugly sentence.)
Hm. I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around this. Please elaborate, if you will?
Gladly. (EDITED: I originally used ‘wealth’ and ‘power’ instead of ‘wealth’ and ‘coercion’. It was rightly pointed out that ‘wealth’ is just a form of ‘power’. So rather than “separating wealth from power”, what I’m really talking about is “separating our ideas about wealth from our ideas about coercion”.)
On one axis, we have poverty/wealth, which is a measure of “how much stuff do I have?”—how much food, water, air, shelter, etc. - up to and including how much control I have over my physical environment. Near one end of the spectrum, we can imagine skeletal children waiting for vultures to eat them. Near the other end of the spectrum, we can imagine eloi living within utility fogs, waiting to condense anything they dream of out of thin air.
On another axis, we have the social ladder / status games that humans play so well. Near one end of that spectrum, we can imagine abject slaves, whose right to live is up to the whim of others; near the other end of that spectrum, we can imagine despotic conquerors, whose whim controls the lives of millions.
The poverty/wealth spectrum is NOT zero-sum, because even if we collapse a society’s span on that spectrum down to a single point, WHERE that point falls matters—everyone being equally poor is materially different from everyone being equally rich.
On the other hand, the social coercion spectrum is fundamentally zero-sum—you can’t remove B’s inferiority to A, without removing A’s superiority to B.
The problem is, most people don’t seem to REALLY separate those two spectra—when we talk about “making people more equal”, we usually talk about wealth redistribution, not coercion redistribution. Paul Graham discusses this at length.
The thing is, coercion influences wealth, and vice-versa. But the fact that they influence each other doesn’t make them the same thing—it just means that the phase diagram covers a subset of the phase space, instead of the whole thing.
One thing you notice when you look at history, is how various technologies (which are physical objects, and therefore on the wealth spectrum) influence the course of society and governance (which are social objects, and therefore on the coercion spectrum). For example, look at how readily “freer” democratic governments break out when new military technology makes it easier to mount rebellions, and how readily authoritarian regimes break out when new military technology makes it easier to consolidate coercion. And look at how readily technological revolutions break out when a culture allows free exploration of possibilities, and how readily they die when a culture imposes direct control over what its entrepreneurs and researchers can study and make.
A testable claim that the Progressive movement might make, if these two continua are recognized as separate, is that minimizing the coercion disparity between individuals will tend to maximize their aggregate wealth, while maximizing the coercion disparity between individuals will tend to lower that aggregate wealth. The American version of Libertarianism seems to make the opposite claim, that allowing power disparities to naturally follow the individuals’ innate abilities to seize and hold power will allow those individuals who are better at multiplying wealth to do so, while redistributing their wealth to those with less innate ability to seize and hold power is inefficient.
Even better, though, separating out those two concepts allows certain testable claims to be made more clearly—things like “we can redistribute coercive power without redistributing wealth, and regulation is one way to do that”, and “all attempts to redistribute or nullify coercive power must use coercive power to do so, and will therefore favor those who currently have coercive power”.
EDIT: Upon further reflection, I think it’s not entirely true that people can’t distinguish between these two concepts—plenty of people can and do distinguish between them, but then when they come to making policy decisions, they conflate them again. This looks like a cognitive bias at work, but I’m not sure which one—something that causes people to default to zero-sum thinking even when they know a situation has positive-sum solutions?
I might be out of my intellectual league here...and perhaps oversimplifying...
But I don’t know that I accept the premise that wealth & power are separate (or even can be) in the way you describe.
I suppose it comes down to definitions. I’d say wealth is roughly “stuff you need and want”; power is roughly “the ability to get stuff you need and want”.
In this sense, individual wealth is a result of power. And wealth also ensures the continuation (and even further accumulation) of power, as well as perpetuating further increases in wealth.
So, power --> wealth --> more wealth & power
As this process continues, power and wealth become concentrated among a small group relative to the population. When that happens, you have 80% of the pie being eaten be 20% (or <10%) of the people. 20% of the pie (wealth) ain’t enough for 80% (or >90%) of the people. And they haven’t sufficient means (power) to do anything about it.
In the past, revolutions take place to correct for this. The “haves” become too wealthy and not-powerful-enough to maintain the equilibrium against the huge (and therefore powerful enough) number of (too poor) “have-nots”, so it shifts.
But, as you mentioned, we seem to living in an age with technology that can ensure power indefinitely on behalf of the “haves”. In the global economy, there are large groups of have-nothings for whom no technology sufficient to mount a rebellion can be realized, and they are therefore marginalized from a power standpoint, and utterly impoverished in terms of wealth.
In any case, I don’t see a meaningful distinction between wealth and power in regard to how to fix the world and end poverty.
Nod I see your complaint, and I think it’s fundamentally about what “power” means. I’ll edit my previous post to clarify terms:
Where I said “power”, what I really meant was “coercion”. “Wealth” and “Coercion” are both different kinds of “power”, which can in fact be separated from each other.
Is that clearer?
Perhaps. Can you give me your definition of coercion?
I’ve always liked “power to affect another agent’s payoff matrix”, but I’m afraid that might be over-general.
Hm. I don’t see a difference between power and coercion in that case. Power seems to include the ability to coerce.
It just seems to me there are ends (wealth) and means (power). Pure handouts are not sustainable to combat poverty in the long-term. You’ve got to create a means, and I think that is tricky to do given the current state of things in the world.
I’m probably risking a tangent here, but an example comes to mind: My uncle sold his farm and went to Africa to try and help battle poverty by teaching people to farm. Their first crop was very successful and yielded a strong harvest. They stored the harvest in a silo of some sort. In order to protect the harvest from thieves, they had to hire a guard. The cost of hiring a guard they could trust exceeded the value of the crop. So technically, the viability of working hard to grow a crop is exceeded by becoming a thief or waiting for handouts or even doing nothing at all.
Anyway, this speaks to the point (I think) I was trying to make somewhere way up the thread: Perhaps the only (or at least the best) way to end poverty is some sort of voluntary redistribution of wealth and power from the wealthy and powerful to the impoverished and non-powerful. Attempts to do this through government mandate seem to often exacerbate the problem because of all the inefficiency and corruption involved. So it seems to me that a direct, private (non-government), streamlined, voluntary redistribution is best.
My uncle, a Christian, summed up the futility of the current situation by concluding “we just needed more people to act like Jesus.” I tend to agree, as long as he meant something like “we need people who arrive at a rational basis for being selfless and charitable in an efficient way, and then act on it instead of just talking about it”.
I think we both, my uncle & I mean something like this. Or this, if you are (a lot) more wealthy.
I disagree—I think that for some people power is the terminal goal (e.g. consider how Soviet and Communist China elites worked).
And then? You will have to forcibly suppress wealth differentiation or in a few years you’ll have your underclass back again.
Good examples. It still seems power inherently involves owning means to sufficient wealth (i.e. enough to live comfortably for indefinite periods).
You’ve pointed out the problem, I think. Though I’m not as concern about differences in wealth, per se. Instead, I’m concerned with eliminating poverty.
Perhaps the norms will need to change? Perhaps it will be seen as increasingly negative to be super rich on a globe where some are dying of starvation? It will become a faux pas?
I recommend capitalism :-) By XIX-century standards, the First World countries have eliminated poverty.
And what will make them change?
To the extent that this is true, I don’t think it makes much sense to attribute it to capitalism as such. After all, some of the most extreme poverty in American history took place around the beginning of the 20th century, when American capitalism was at its most laissez faire. Without the institution of some kind of societal safety net, capitalism does not seem to eliminate poverty very effectively.
This is actually a common misconception.
I’m prepared to be convinced of this, but that link doesn’t demonstrate this, or much at all really. It argues that history textbooks overemphasize the tilted income distribution relative to the economic growth that took place, but the only arguments it offers against the magnitude of the distribution skew being as great as the textbooks claim are strictly theoretical.
The notion that people simply would not immigrate if conditions were so poor, unless conditions were even worse where they already lived, is a supposition unworthy of the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter; people don’t act as if they were rational agents operating on complete information now, and information availability was much lower then. Plus, once you’re stuck in a system of wage slavery, it’s extremely difficult to get out, unlike the work that people were emigrating from in the first place.
It’s easy to avoid paying workers near the marginal productivity they generate if there’s enough competition willing to take lowball compensation so that they can be the ones to get the job (and plenty of competition willing to do so when many families need to mobilize all their possible working force to stay above water.) Unionization can result in many negative side effects, and often produces ludicrously perverse incentives, but at the same time do not forget, with the dramatic improvements in compensation and working conditions they generated at the time for huge numbers of workers, how many industries stayed in business.
The whole thing barely even tries to refute the notion that conditions were that bad, it just complains about history textbooks focusing more on those conditions than the productivity gains generated by industrialization. The closest thing it offers to an empirical argument throughout is when the author claims that he finds one figure hard to believe, and that one historian offered him one he found more reasonable. What research did he do to determine which figure was more likely to be correct?
I am entirely willing to adjust my estimate of how bad conditions were at that time based on well researched empirical data. As for the notion that history textbooks emphasize the ills too much relative to the gains, well, my own discussed both at length, and I think it’s appropriate that they should do such, because the historical record demonstrates both that industrialization has significant benefits, and that the conditions caused by its unregulated state can be substantially improved upon with certain effective regulations. Both points are important, and often discarded for ideological or theoretical reasons without empirical basis.
Well, the initial claim that “some of the most extreme poverty in American history took place around the beginning of the 20th century” sounds strange to me on its face. Do you think there was more extreme poverty at the beginning of the XX century or at the beginning of the XIX century, for example?
Is more plausible than you give it credit for. People used to immigrate by extended families, whole clans, and the way it worked was that some family members would move over, get a foothold, and then bring over the rest. There certainly was communication (post worked pretty well) and people already on the ground had first-hand knowledge of the conditions they would bring their entire family into. They mostly did bring their families.
No one so far defined what do “bad conditions” mean, what are the relevant metrics, and what can you compare them to to establish the context.
Depends what metrics you use, but I am willing to bet that more people (and a greater proportion of people) at the beginning of the 20th century were living in conditions where they had less space, less access to food, more exposure to toxic and unsafe conditions, and less opportunity to move to a different environment.
Many did, but then, many did not.
If a worker finds success, they’re a lot more likely to encourage family or village members to come over than if they do not. If we suppose that one in five initial immigrants has a positive experience, and immigrants who have positive experiences on average encourage eight more people to come over, then we will have a scenario where most immigrants are encouraged to come over by someone who had positive experiences, but most do not have positive experiences (am I claiming that these are the correct figures or something close to them? No, but they illustrate why I don’t think the argument proves much.)
In the context of the comment, I am referring to the conditions being as bad as the textbooks Caplan is complaining about said they were, along whatever metrics they used. From his critique it’s hard to know what they even asserted since he’s arguing against them on ideological rather than empirical grounds.
Certainly so. Your metrics, for example, look biased towards hunter-gatherer tribes :-)
This looks like an empirical question. I bet there are studies with data. I am also too lazy to go, google them up, read them, and figure out the answer :-D
Agreed. Though I think there are lots of variables here. I have no issue with capitalism. It works and leads to lots of growth. If left wholly unregulated, poverty will happen. But, add some social welfare programs and other wealth redistribution mechanisms, and if they are sufficient, you’ll get a poverty free system (depending on how you define poverty).
The issue I’d raise in regard to a more open system (i.e. a global economy) is that you have some countries functioning just fine...in part becaused they used unregulated capitalistic means (i.e. Imperialism) to move wealth to their own coffers and leave whole continents in the dark ages.
Culture and morality will evolve. I’m proposing this as a way in which relatively unregulated capitalism can work without any mandated redistributions of wealth or “forcible suppression” of power.
I mentioned The Giving Pledge (somewhere on this thread). This is a great example of what I’m talking about. There is no rational reason for anyone to give up the majority of their wealth. But many billionaires are becoming convinced it is the right thing to do nonetheless.
Sure there is. The remainder of your wealth is enough to satisfy all your material needs and giving away wealth puts you ahead in the Status Game which you value very much.
Noted. And I agree. Though there are people who do so in secret.
What are you, a straw Vulcan? If you value what another person can do with it more than whatever else you could do with it, it is rational to give it to them.
What do you think of the EA movement?
Rational was a bad word for me to use here. Taboo it.
Also, saying there is “no rational reason” was overstating it.
I’ll say this instead: Pre-humanity, nature had no behavior like this. During some large portion of human history, it has been considered strange to give away a majority of one’s wealth. The Giving Pledge, for example, flies in the face of millions of years of precedent.
In the context of the discussion I was having (and in many such discussions I’ve had) I’ve learned that this...
...does not compute for many people.
At the risk of being too political (And speaking way too generally), this is one of the main differences I observe between American conservatives and liberals: The rational basis for giving doesn’t compute for conservatives.
They seem to want to win by accumulating wealth, and then keep wining, and winning, and winning by accumulating more wealth. Suggesting to them that “If you value what another person can do with it more than whatever else you could do with it, it is rational to give it to them.” tends to make them look at you sideways.
The basis by which conservatives tend to reject “radical charity” is pretty sound, I think. From what I can gather, it is something like, “(1) It was nature’s way (or God’s providence) and my hard work that caused my wealth, (2) I have a right to use it to further my ends and provide for as many future generations of my family as possible & (3) unnatural (non-capitalistic) economic moves never work anyway...therefore, giving away my money is bad and not rational.”
Huge fan.
Customs relating to this vary quite a bit. In cultures with a strong potlatch tradition, for example, gift-giving is the primary way of displaying status and it’s not at all unusual to give away most of one’s wealth.
I’m not ready to make sweeping declarations about what has been normal for most of human history, or at least for the portion of it where talking about wealth would have made any sense.
I’ve no doubt there are exceptions, but, when posed with the following question, how do you think the majority of humans who have ever walked the Earth would reply?:
Which word best describes your feelings about the act of giving away >50% of your possessions to benefit absolute strangers?
A. Normal B. Abnormal
Further, “wealth” has always had some meaning, even before humans. If we define wealth as “stuff we need or want”, then the animal kingdom is full of this sort of wealth, and they tend to defend their wealth as a means to provide for themselves and their young with vigor.
It is perfectly natural to hoard wealth for yourself and your kin. It was point that movements like The Giving Pledge, or say, very large, anonymous charitable gifts seem to be anti-natural in this way.
I’m aware that what appears to be pure altruism may only be signalling, or some other mechanism for personal gain… But I do believe there is (possibly) something like rational altruism taking place where people are realizing that (1) every dollar past X million/billion is essentially worthless ’cuz you’re gonna die and you can’t use it all, (2) immense amounts of inherited wealth aren’t as 100% positive as you might think so leaving gobs of money to family is not optimal & (3) other people’s lives suck because they have no money or food and no way to get money or food.
There is also a group of people for whom this seems to make no sense. They see every red cent as having utility since they can find ways to pass it on (in some form) to their family.
As I just said, I’m not willing to make that generalization; we don’t have enough good data about prehistoric culture, or for that matter many historical cultures, to talk about it this specifically. A cladistic analysis of gift-giving behavior might be more tractable, but I don’t have the data for that either.
(Granted, given the shape of the population curve, it might be—though I don’t remember, and haven’t looked it up—that the majority of humans ever to walk the earth lived in historical times. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re getting at.)
I’m using “wealth” to indicate the kind of goods that can be usefully hoarded, which IIRC are primarily discussed as a post-Neolithic phenomenon. I’m not anthopologist enough to speak authoritatively on how things might have worked in the Paleolithic, but it should be clear that there are physical limits on how much you can hoard if you’re leading a nomadic forager lifestyle, particularly without pack animals. I’d also expect people’s cultural reasoning about generosity to differ under this sort of regime.
I think you are over-thinking it.
I’m no anthropologist, but giving away the majority of one’s wealth isn’t the norm. If not self-evident, I’m not sure what else about human behavior is. You need resources to live, and the desire to live is a pretty hard wired drive inside any species that made it this far.
Incidentally, I’ve heard a reasonable argument that the so-called “gift-giving” cultures are largely an artifact caused by (mis)translating their languages words for different types of economic exchanges as “gift”. This mistranslation was started by early settlers who didn’t want to admit they were paying tribute to the natives. Later it was continued by anthropologists who believed or at least alieved the whole “noble savage” myth.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it an economic exchange in the same sense that we’d use for the phrase, but a prestige system denominated in (essentially randomly allocated) gifts doesn’t seem all that much more or less noble to me than one denominated in dollars.
I vaguely remember that empirical studies show that conservatives give to charity noticeably more than liberals in the US.
I’ve read differently.
In any case, one main factor that bolsters conservative charitable giving is religion. In many of these instances, I think the term “charitable” is being stretched quite a bit, since many churches do little with that donated money apart from teaching their members their particular brand of religious beliefs. (Also, if beside the point, many Christians I know give with the expectation they will re-acquire those funds in the form of special pleasures and blessings once the reach heaven. So, win-win. Nothing wrong with that...)
The other factor would be that liberals philsophically view the government as a means of redistrbuting resources to the places it is needed. They vote for policies that mandate “charitable” giving, and then trust the system to do what it is inteneded to do. They support higher taxes (generally) and then pay them.
My point (sincerely) wasn’t to disparage conservatives, per se. I’ve just noticed in discussions with my friends, who are politically inclined as such, that they seem to have a very different utility function than my liberal friends in regard to charitable giving, and fiscal policy writ large. They both want good policies that work, but they disagree on what “good” and “work” mean.
Not really differently. This piece picks a favorable definition of “conservative” to avoid the result they don’t like. And even then conservatives and liberals come out even—hardly support for your hypothesis that conservatives just don’t grok giving.
That’s irrelevant because what’s under discussion is propensity of people to give away their wealth. In this context it doesn’t matter whether the money is used effectively.
Well, any reason to be surprised? Political disagreements are real and correlate with a whole bunch of other preferences.
Hm. I’m not necessarily talking about if the money is being used “effectively”. Rather, the money given to the church is used for the good of the church and those who attend the church (i.e. the giver included). It is quite effective to that end.
I suppose all charities are like this in some way—they benefit humanity, a group to which we all belong. But in the church, a very small amount of total revenue does anything for people outside the church. If it is a charity (which I’m not sure it is), then it is one that quite directly benefits the giver.
If this money is all counted as “charity”, it’s very easy to see how conservatives might out-give liberals. In fact, it’s what I’d expect to see in a country that is so religious.
Not surprised, no. But it’s a more helpful way of viewing things than simply concluding liberals are generous with money and conservatives are selfish with it. There is more to it than that, as you point out.
Or rather they support higher taxes (on everyone) and then try to evade them.