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Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuabl
by saulrh 11y ago
Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you fix this unfairness without invasive changes to home life starting from the minute the family goes home from the hospital?
And, of course, this entire thing is a symptom of fixed-pie mentality. When inequality exists - when some people have bigger slices of pie than others - people seem to be reliably made happier by throwing chunks of the pie on the floor as long as they're someone else's chunks of pie. They're happier about throwing away chunks of pie than they are about getting an entire new pie to split up. It really bugs me when I see "fairness" valued over actual goodness.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoAh, the hypothetical "entire new pie". Just produce it, bro; then there will be no more arguments about inequality.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoYeah, there will. People will complain about who got "more than their fair share" of the new pie.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoThen how is it a solution? Also, the pie is fixed.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago> Then how is it a solution? I didn't claim that it was. Maybe you should ask saulrh that. > Also, the pie is fixed. Economic growth has exceeded population growth rather reliably for the last two hundred years or so. The pie is definitely not fixed.
- s73v3r 11y agoThe pie gets bigger, but most people's concrete amount of pie they get generally does not change, while a tiny amount of people end up with the benefits of the expanding pie.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoUnless you believe something like the Banach-Tarski paradox [0] is possible in our world, there is a relatively constant amount of matter within our reach. (In fact, there is a finite amount of matter that we will ever be able to reach.) This puts a hard cap on how much "stuff" can exist. Therefore, the pie is fixed. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoI think most of us don't define "pie" that way. In particular, I (and, I presume, saulrh) were talking about the economy, not about the total amount of matter within reach of the human race. Even using your definition, though, the pie is not fixed. We can't mine the moon today. Perhaps someday we can. If so, the amount of matter available to us is not fixed. Or perhaps we can mine the earth's core. More mundanely, there's fracking. That's dramatically added to the amount of matter (of a particular useful form) that is available to the human race.
- saulrh 11y agoI wasn't even defining it economically, although that's one very concrete way this mentality appears. It also appears in discussions of civil rights, in everyday social interactions, and even when people are offered sterilized game-theoretic experiments. It's a depressingly general pattern.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago>I (and, I presume, saulrh) were talking about the economy So am I. What is "the economy"? I submit that it is the tracking of material in space. There is a fixed amount of space on the planet as well. At some point, there will be no more space or material to place another Hearst Castle. I guess someone should provide an example of an "entire new pie". (Interestingly, this is what I demanded in my first post.) My theory even explains your observation that 'People will complain about who got "more than their fair share" of the new pie'. The reason they complain is because the pie is fixed and the new pie is a lie. If we could just create "entire new pies", then there would be no reason to complain about the newest pie, because we can just create yet another entire new pie.
- vox_mollis 11y agoParental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness Your statement is correct, but your assumed cause is not. It's 60-80% genes: https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/iq-heritability-age.png https://jaymans.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/iq-heritability-...
- saulrh 11y agoI guess I should have worded it to better indicate that what I gave is a simple, obvious, and uncontroversial example of things that go into causal coupling between parental and child intelligence, but not the only or even remotely the strongest element. There are many reasons why being born to unintelligent or poor parents is incredibly unfair. It is present, but relatively weakly compared to genetics: http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap
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- anonmeow 11y agoWhen the civilization is confined to one small planet while hitting the physical limits to growth, the fixed pie is a good analogy. There is fixed and diminishing amount of arable land to grow the wheat and apples. You can make only so many pies.
- nickff 11y agoArable land is a particularly bad example of a justification for a 'fixed pie'. Highly developed countries such as the USA have upwards of eight times the crop yield per acre compared with developing countries, and yield appears to be increasing everywhere. In fact, yields are improving so much that the amount of land dedicated to crop production worldwide has already or will soon begin decreasing.
- vinhboy 11y ago> people seem to be reliably made happier by throwing chunks of the pie on the floor That's a really bold statement to make. Where is your proof? Are you just making it up based on your own biases? If we're just going by anecdotes, then I can honestly say, I have never met anyone who wants to destroy other people's piece of the pie. If anything, I've met more people adamant about defending other people's pie pieces. Like you, for example.
- saulrh 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game When given the choice between fair-pie-on-the-floor and unfair-everybody-gets-more-pie, humans reliably choose fair-pie-on-the-floor.
- weeksie 11y agoLook into John Rawls' theory of justice. It'll answer a lot of your questions.
- nshepperd 11y agoI'll take Rawls' veil of ignorance and say yes, I'd rather be born into unequal world A than equal world B if everyone in world A has strictly more pie than in world B. Destroying parts of the pie clearly isn't Pareto optimal, either.
- weeksie 11y agoMost people would, depending on the amount of inequality and how bad off the least fortunate are. There's been pretty good research on that. Rawls' thought experiment is meant to reveal what people in a society would consider just, not to be prescriptive. Rawls had ideas as to what people would choose and but he was wrong about how much equality they would prefer.