8 ms·

The Formula for a Richer World? Equality, Liberty, Justice

50 points by known 10y ago

soufron 10y ago
Yeah sure... "Poverty is the problem, not inequality". That's just lobbying and self-delusion into believing that improving the riches always ends up improving the poors. John Rawls where are you? Equality does not mean having the same amount of money. That's naive and uninformed. Equality means sharing everything. It means that the nids of the riches and the poors will go to the same schools, that everybody goes to the same hospitals, etc. Of course it implies that these services must be good enough so that the riches wont look for something else. But then you can have both poors and equality.
- nickff 10y ago
  The only problem is that Rawls was wrong; there is ample evidence showing that we have differing views on what is right even when shielded by a 'veil of ignorance'. For instance, your view of equality is not the same as mine, as I favor a 'rule of law' paradigm of equality (, and I do not mean to imply that you are 'wrong'). The author here seems to value Pareto (absolute and widespread) improvements over relative measures, which you appear to prioritize; one could even make the case that you are encouraging avarice.
  - soufron 10y ago
    Poor Pareto would be sad to hear this. Even as hé described them, he viewed Pareto improvements as unjust and broken.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - physicalist 10y ago
    There can be no such evidence because there is no such thing as a "veil of ignorance". You are fully aware of your social status. It seems likely that this knowledge informs your values.
    - soufron 10y ago
      That's not what the veil of ignorance is about. It's not supposed to be a reality, but a thought experiment in order to do the relevant moral choices.
    - nickff 10y ago
      Your status does inform your values, but we differ in values even if we aggressively correct for social status (as well as upbringing, race, and every other factor). This is a 'nurture vs. nature' issue, where Rawls assumed nature was irrelevant, but was incorrect.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    It's natural that we think differently behind the veil because we cannot remove from ourselves our different knowledge of what lies beyond. I don't think this makes Rawls wrong; it makes some arguments from behind the veil ignorant in a different way, not an ignorance of where we end up, but an ignorance of what it's actually like across the spectrum of possibilities.
    - nickff 10y ago
      No, it is not about us not being able to use he veil effectively; we have different innate preferences and understandings without regard to our present circumstances.
      - bobwaycott 10y ago
        It is extremely amusing—and informative with regards to your argument—that you think your preferences and understandings are innate and separate from your material circumstances. You make it clear you do not understand Rawls or the veil of ignorance at all.
        nickff 10y ago
        They are related, but not completely determinitive of one another; it is a 'nature vs nurture' issue, as I describe in my comment on a lower post. Existing evidence shows that preferences and understandings are a result of nature and nurture; there are a number of interesting studies on the subject, which obtain differing results, but none agrees with Rawls' assumptions. You can find this evidence in a number of fields including psychology on moral reasoning, educational psychology, and studies on philosophy. Your dismissiveness illustrates your foolishness, and you clearly made no effort to understand my point; or perhaps you lack the mental capacity to read three posts down.
        bobwaycott 10y ago
        I'm not sure I'm the one being dismissive here, and insulting my "mental capacity" is rather dull. I've read your other comment, as well, but it, like this one, provides no concrete explanations or evidentiary support for your argument. > They are related, but not completely determinitive of one another; it is a 'nature vs nurture' issue, as I describe in my comment on a lower post. Existing evidence shows that preferences and understandings are a result of nature and nurture; there are a number of interesting studies on the subject, which obtain differing results, but none agrees with Rawls' assumptions. You can find this evidence in a number of fields including psychology on moral reasoning, educational psychology, and studies on philosophy. First off, it's a rather vacant argument to suggest one's preferences as they relate to one's material conditions and circumstances, are "nature v nurture". What preferences are you suggesting are natural, divorced from one's material conditions and circumstances? Which are you willing to agree to being informed, established, or perpetuated by one's material conditions and circumstances? What evidence are you specifically pointing to as differentiating natural preferences vs those which are learned within one's social space? Most importantly, what at all does this evidence have to do with the veil of ignorance or Rawls' arguments for justice, fairness, or equality—which isn't some Rawlsian invention, but has a long history in the works of Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other seminal political and social theorists? You seem to have a conception that Rawls' ideas are somehow reducible to a single binary format of true/false. This is what I mean by pointing out your comments show no actual understanding of Rawls, or any other thinkers who discuss the veil of ignorance or equality. You don't realize that what you think you're disputing with relation to Rawls isn't something Rawls has suggested to be any different. What assumptions do you think Rawls makes that you believe you—and all this alleged evidence—disagrees with and proves to be incorrect assumptions?
  - bobwaycott 10y ago
    You do not understand Rawls, and are suggesting as a point of opposition exactly what Rawls takes as a fundamental given in human society. Rawls makes no suggestion that everyone shares the same perspectives on either side of the veil of ignorance. In fact, he says the opposite, and it is because of this he suggests the veil of ignorance as a mediating force to minimize the vast difference of views, by way of the veil removing one's knowledge of their material place and circumstances in society on the other side of the veil. Rawls very strongly supports fidelity to and rule of law. The veil's purpose is to provide a more level playing field on which participants in a society can more fairly determine what the rules of law and order will be. Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean when you suggest a "'rule of law' paradigm of equality"? I have no doubt you mean something specific, but this combination of words suggests nothing about this paradigm of equality, nor about what role the "rule of law" plays in or has relationship to equality.
    - nickff 10y ago
      I resolved to your first paragraph in a response to a sub-comment here, and will not repeat the text. Rule of law provides a foundation for equality; having a system that treats everyone in a predictable, unbiased, and well-known fashion gives them something they can count on when they plan and engage in all the activities of life. The more your fate rests in the hands of officers acting capriciously, with the power of vague unpredictable rules that you were never aware of, the more difficult and terrifying your life becomes. When you don't have rule of law, who you are in relation to the powerful determines what you can do, and who you can be, thus depriving many (if not most) of opportunity, while subjecting them to the worst form of oppression, embodied by constant terror. It is unfortunate that no country, province, state, or city fully follows the principles of 'rule of law' but there is definitely a spectrum, and some are much better than others.
      - bobwaycott 10y ago
        > I resolved to your first paragraph in a response to a sub-comment here, and will not repeat the text. You really didn't, except to offer some hand-waving nature v nurture nonsense and insults that don't elucidate or engage Rawls' ideas at all. > Rule of law provides a foundation for equality; having a system that treats everyone in a predictable, unbiased, and well-known fashion gives them something they can count on when they plan and engage in all the activities of life. The more your fate rests in the hands of officers acting capriciously, with the power of vague unpredictable rules that you were never aware of, the more difficult and terrifying your life becomes. When you don't have rule of law, who you are in relation to the powerful determines what you can do, and who you can be, thus depriving many (if not most) of opportunity, while subjecting them to the worst form of oppression, embodied by constant terror. You appear to assume that "rule of law" as an idea provides any guarantees at all that the laws themselves by which one is ruled are at all just, fair, or equitable. It is, at best, foolish to make such an assumption. People living under a lawful regime of unjust laws will find themselves in no better shape than those who toil under a less lawful society. History is replete with such circumstances, including: - Jews under the rule of law of National Socialism - former slaves and their descendants under the rule of law of the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South - slaves under the rule of law in every Western colonial/imperial territory, and the pre-Civil War US - interracial couples under the rule of law before Loving v Virginia - women under the rule of law throughout Western nations before the advent of equal suffrage The rule of law provides no innate or guaranteed protection from inequality or injustice. Who you are in relation to the powerful always determines what you can be and do, especially within the context of legally proscribed behaviors. Those who hold power typically make the laws. When the laws are unjust, inequitable, and unfair, the rule of law does nothing to alleviate such a condition.
- bluetomcat 10y ago
  > Of course it implies that these services must be good enough so that the riches wont look for something else. Even if the services are good enough, there will always be segregation in the presence of huge income disparities between sizable portions of the population. Wealthy overambitious parents wouldn't want their kids to have any contact whatsoever with the "lower class".
  - soufron 10y ago
    Yeah? Have a look at EU social democracies... Everybody go to the same schools and the same hospitals, everybody gets the same internet, everybody go to the same sport clubs, etc. And wealthy overambitious parents tend to hide their money and live among their community.
    - bluetomcat 10y ago
      That tends to happen in EU countries with lower income disparity (mainly Germany and the Nordic countries), which doesn't disprove my point. With 10x disparity and more, it is not going to happen.
    - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
      I live in an apparent EU social democracy, certainly compared to US and there are different classes of sports clubs, different schools (all schools are paid for by the state and kids living within x miles get in. House prices within x miles determine who can get in) It's crazy, we do push for better for our kids and our selves within the bounds of whatever equality we have set.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > Of course it implies that these services must be good enough so that the riches wont look for something else. There can be only one best heart surgeon. How would you go about deciding who gets the best one, and who gets second best, on down to who gets the bottom of the class?
- woliveirajr 10y ago
  > But then you can have both poors and equality. Venezuela?
erkose 10y ago
While I'm not arguing with the article, I thought liberty is freedom bound by justice.
- nickff 10y ago
  That phrase is laden with subjective meanings: Liberty: positive or negative liberty? Freedom: freedom from or for what? Obligation, morality, ethics, work, or responsibility? Justice: is this rule of law, or some type of social justice?
lutusp 10y ago
The article fails to mention a key element in eliminating poverty -- free and affordable access to fertility control measures for women, as well as an absolute sovereign right for women to choose when and whether to have children.
- mamon 10y ago
  There's one huge downside to this: eliminating poverty by reducing population leads to aging society, which leads to shitty pensions for retired workers, higher taxation, higher public debt, etc, which in turn leads back to population reduce. Basically, birth control leads to a slow death of civilization. The most tragic thing about it is that you can't do anything about it, as denying women the choice would be violation of their human rights. Therefore, advanced societies are doomed to die out and be replaced by more primitive ones. Which happened few times in history (e.g. Roman Empire) and is already happening again in some part of the world (e.g. EU immigration crisis)
  - scalio 10y ago
    China disagrees. They're still growing, in spite of a bloody ruthless birth control system (though I seem to remember that they've loosened it a bit, not sure). Also, the Romans died out because they fell into decadence, which is exactly what the west is doing right now.
    - sevenless 10y ago
      > Also, the Romans died out because they fell into decadence No historian on earth believes this. That's a myth from Gibbon.
    - mantas 10y ago
      I doubt China disagrees. Demographics are about to hit the fan over there. They fucked up with the single-kid policy. It's now canceled, but China is set to have "aging population" in coming decades. Given that their current economy is built on cheap workforce, they're in deep shit.
  - 10y ago
Animats 10y ago
China officially disagrees. Anyway, the big improvements in the standard of living came from the industrial revolution, not the Reformation.
- MarcScott 10y ago
  The industrial revolution would most likely have never occurred in Britain without such reforms as intellectual property and land rights.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
scalio 10y ago
> Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet That smells strongly of the same kind of delusion that fuels capitalism, infinite growth. > What, then, caused this Great Enrichment? Not exploitation of the poor, Apparently, none of our clothes or electronics are being fabricated by (economic) slaves. While I do mostly agree with the article's conclusion, > But the modern world came from treating more and more people with respect. it all looks terribly cherry-picked to me in order to make a certain point: "The current system is fine, we can all feel good" or thereabouts.
- berntb 10y ago
  >> Apparently, none of our clothes or electronics are being fabricated by (economic) slaves. You know the full argument as well as I do, I'd think? For a country to get rich, it walks up a staircase. It starts with simple industry, investments in education and at the top after two-three generations are Japan or South Korea? What to do to walk the staircase is known today, there are examples. It mainly needs lack of conflicts, little corruption and good (capitalist) governance. If you have good counter arguments, other than that China has one generation left of stairclimbing, I'm interested? This was what changed my world view regarding this: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
  - scalio 10y ago
    Thank you for that link, and for changing my view on the subject. The thing about capitalism, though, is that it's an apparently reliable way of doing things in such situations. Apart from the odd crisis, it has worked fabulously for the west during the 20th century. With the internet, however, a lot has changed. I'm not old enough to quantify exactly how much or what, but what's certain is that it has created an entirely new ground to explore and 'colonize', and I don't think capitalism is at all well suited for stable humanist development in both the physical and the new virtual grounds.
brador 10y ago
The ultimate solution is a machine that solves every need I have before I have it. But then why live?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jondubois 10y ago
I think money isn't the issue here. Freedom is the issue. If you're a regular person: - You have no free time because you have to work non stop just to pay the bills (especially rent) - You have no free speech because if you say the wrong thing at work, you might get fired. Workplaces tend to severely limit individuals' ability to express themselves freely (because people have their livelihoods at stake). It's usually a very tense environment. - For a lot of whitecollar jobs, you don't even have freedom of thought. You can't do your work while thinking about other stuff; your mind has to be focused 100% on the work (and in a lot of industries, the work is increasingly mechanical and repetitive). The problem is not lack of money itself, it's lack of freedom. The only way to get freedom is through having a lot of money.
- soufron 10y ago
  You can lower the importance of money by having great public services that will be paid collectively.
  - jondubois 10y ago
    Good point, but the rich don't want to lower the importance of money, they want to increase it.
  - visarga 10y ago
    What would it take for a community to "break off" the grid and not need money? Land for agriculture, solar panels, 3d-printers for parts, water filtration, AI and robots for automation (maybe the robots can build more robots, as well). What a single person can't do, maybe a hundred or a thousand can. Some technologies are converging towards independence, there might be a way to escape the system as it is now. Maybe we get to see various lifestyle experiments popping up, as long as the communities can take care of themselves, and seek independence. I think independence research should compliment UBI as a strategy for the automation age. Give people the necessary means of production to provide for themselves absent wages.
    - prodmerc 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
Justice is the overlooked leg of this tripod. Societies where the law is unevenly enforced find it harder to develop.
jernfrost 10y ago
Way to brush over the severe problems with inequality. There were plenty of countries poorer than France during the French revolution. It was not poverty which caused it but inequality. In all societies high levels of inequality coincides with political instability. All that wealth and prosperity is easily lost if you end up with revolution and civil war. Look at America today. It has not been as unequal and politically polarized in decades. The author champions Adam Smith, but can not possibly have read him. He did in fact speak at length about the dangers of inequality. He specifically said that poverty was not an absolute phenomenon. It is not about how many calories you get per day and the size of your dwelling. He understood hundreds of years ago that poverty is a relative phenomenon. The author also mentioned Picketty but elegantly ignored his reasoning for why inequality is a big problem. One of the things Picketty pointed out is that with rising inequality, inherited wealth starts dominating the economy. This means the ability to get rich fast will most efficiently be accomplished with strategic marriages rather than starting your own businesses. This is what the world of Jane Austin was about. Everything came down to strategic marriage. That was the obsession of the day. A society of high inequality over a long time can not be a society of "the self made man". That ought to be recognized as a problem.
- soufron 10y ago
  same thing... the whole article seems so naïve...
- WalterBright 10y ago
  As a counterpoint, there has never been an era where more people have risen to great wealth so quickly as today. Also, 85% of American millionaires are self-made (not inherited). See the book "The Millionaire Next Door".
  - jondubois 10y ago
    I'm not worried about the past 20 years at all (those were good times). I'm worried about the next 20 years. Before, when people thought about 'monopolies' they thought about Microsoft (there wasn't that many)... Now practically every company is a monopoly. And taken together, they form a sort of oligopoly. Companies today are more cooperative than they are competitive (and this helps them maintain their positions).
hal9000xp 10y ago
I feel smell of leftism from keywords "equality" and "justice". You don't need machine learning to automatically spot social democrats (they have almost the same rhetoric as socialists), a simple python script is more than enough. By the way, what this article is doing on HN?
- jnbiche 10y ago
  Your heuristic failed here. The writer here opposes raising taxes and even uses the favored fiscal-conservative term "expropriation" (her words: "expropriation is a one-time trick"). She exalts Adam Smith and the free market. She's no social democrat.
  - hal9000xp 10y ago
    You are probably right, may be I was wrong on this article. In particular, I agree on this: "Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class." Till recently, I spent time and actually read articles on NYT (or similar) even if they had some keywords in title. And almost always, I found that author is supporter of labour party or Bernie Sanders or something like this. This time, I was probably mistaken.
esolyt 10y ago
> taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. It is not explained why it helps only a little or why it has to be a one-time trick. And why is the author talking about "expropriation" instead of "taxing"?
- x0137294744532 10y ago
  > And why is the author talking about "expropriation" instead of "taxing"? The process of expropriation usually occurs suddenly and forcefully in the name of the public interest and are focused on one specific group. Taxes on the other hand, are taken regularly and are applied to everyone (although at a different rate).
apatters 10y ago
The NYT again reveals its inability to look at anything outside of its comfortable Western bubble. The global trend of the past 10 years has been a wave of efforts by entrenched rulers to suppress free elections, free press, and a rise in corruption. There is a rough consensus among most watchdog organizations that track this sort of stuff on a global level that measures of freedom are getting worse or in the best case holding steady. The majority of the world's population does not live in democracies with honest elections and justice systems that are free of corruption. Sure you can argue that maybe on some 50+ year long trend things are getting better but to write a column like this in 2016 is just tone deaf. This is why no one wants to pay for the news.
- berntb 10y ago
  Interesting, do you have some serious references? I've seen the argument that as the general economy increases for an industrialized society, democracy becomes a necessity? (What seems scary is that with increasing 1984 Big Brother technological capabilities, it seems more possible for e.g. China to combine economic freedom and harsh political oppression.) So, it is not like that?
  - apatters 10y ago
    Freedom House is probably the most relevant watchdog/measuring organization I can think of for the general case of "equality, liberty and justice" that this article's author was handwaving about. They try to assess the state of several different types of freedom in every country around the world and produce a complete index. Their view is that the world has been getting less free for about ten years now. Many other organizations monitor and rank countries by their degrees of various kinds of freedom - for instance Reporters Without Borders ranks countries based on press freedom and the Heritage Foundation ranks them based on economic freedom - the general character of the assessments of these organizations is that the world is getting less free, not more.
tumbas 10y ago
sounds like communism and free masonry to me. free masons should be kiled to make some justice and people will be liberated. they should be punished for their sins just like others and that's equality
woodandsteel 10y ago
There are a lot of problems with free market capitalism. One important one is that, while living standards have skyrocketed in the developing world, in recent decades they have stagnated or declined in the developed world. Another is that the rich have a highly disproportionate influence on the political system. A third is crashes caused by the finance industry, as in our recent Great Recession. That said, I think the overall message has a lot of truth. The reason this is so is that industrialization produces vast, orders-of-magnitude increases in the total wealth of a society, and free market regimes, over the long term, are better than any other at both producing the technological innovation involved, and also putting it into efficient use. That is why the Soviet Union and Mao's China both stalled out in economic growth. It is also why crony capitalism economies, where the road to wealth is based on governmental connections, as in Putin's Russia and the whole Arab Middle East, don't have successful economies. That in turn ties to democracy. If you have an authoritarian regime, then probably it is going to try to enrich its members and control the economy for its own benefit, rather than that of its citizens. With a democracy it is much more likely the market will be free enough to have real, sustained growth.

50 points by known 10y ago

Yeah sure... "Poverty is the problem, not inequality". That's just lobbying and self-delusion into believing that improving the riches always ends up improving the poors. John Rawls where are you? Equality does not mean having the same amount of money. That's naive and uninformed. Equality means sharing everything. It means that the nids of the riches and the poors will go to the same schools, that everybody goes to the same hospitals, etc. Of course it implies that these services must be good enough so that the riches wont look for something else. But then you can have both poors and equality.

nickff 10y ago
The only problem is that Rawls was wrong; there is ample evidence showing that we have differing views on what is right even when shielded by a 'veil of ignorance'. For instance, your view of equality is not the same as mine, as I favor a 'rule of law' paradigm of equality (, and I do not mean to imply that you are 'wrong'). The author here seems to value Pareto (absolute and widespread) improvements over relative measures, which you appear to prioritize; one could even make the case that you are encouraging avarice.
- soufron 10y ago
  Poor Pareto would be sad to hear this. Even as hé described them, he viewed Pareto improvements as unjust and broken.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- physicalist 10y ago
  There can be no such evidence because there is no such thing as a "veil of ignorance". You are fully aware of your social status. It seems likely that this knowledge informs your values.
  - soufron 10y ago
    That's not what the veil of ignorance is about. It's not supposed to be a reality, but a thought experiment in order to do the relevant moral choices.
  - nickff 10y ago
    Your status does inform your values, but we differ in values even if we aggressively correct for social status (as well as upbringing, race, and every other factor). This is a 'nurture vs. nature' issue, where Rawls assumed nature was irrelevant, but was incorrect.
- barrkel 10y ago
  It's natural that we think differently behind the veil because we cannot remove from ourselves our different knowledge of what lies beyond. I don't think this makes Rawls wrong; it makes some arguments from behind the veil ignorant in a different way, not an ignorance of where we end up, but an ignorance of what it's actually like across the spectrum of possibilities.
  - nickff 10y ago
    No, it is not about us not being able to use he veil effectively; we have different innate preferences and understandings without regard to our present circumstances.
    - bobwaycott 10y ago
      It is extremely amusing—and informative with regards to your argument—that you think your preferences and understandings are innate and separate from your material circumstances. You make it clear you do not understand Rawls or the veil of ignorance at all.
      - nickff 10y ago
        They are related, but not completely determinitive of one another; it is a 'nature vs nurture' issue, as I describe in my comment on a lower post. Existing evidence shows that preferences and understandings are a result of nature and nurture; there are a number of interesting studies on the subject, which obtain differing results, but none agrees with Rawls' assumptions. You can find this evidence in a number of fields including psychology on moral reasoning, educational psychology, and studies on philosophy. Your dismissiveness illustrates your foolishness, and you clearly made no effort to understand my point; or perhaps you lack the mental capacity to read three posts down.
        bobwaycott 10y ago
        I'm not sure I'm the one being dismissive here, and insulting my "mental capacity" is rather dull. I've read your other comment, as well, but it, like this one, provides no concrete explanations or evidentiary support for your argument. > They are related, but not completely determinitive of one another; it is a 'nature vs nurture' issue, as I describe in my comment on a lower post. Existing evidence shows that preferences and understandings are a result of nature and nurture; there are a number of interesting studies on the subject, which obtain differing results, but none agrees with Rawls' assumptions. You can find this evidence in a number of fields including psychology on moral reasoning, educational psychology, and studies on philosophy. First off, it's a rather vacant argument to suggest one's preferences as they relate to one's material conditions and circumstances, are "nature v nurture". What preferences are you suggesting are natural, divorced from one's material conditions and circumstances? Which are you willing to agree to being informed, established, or perpetuated by one's material conditions and circumstances? What evidence are you specifically pointing to as differentiating natural preferences vs those which are learned within one's social space? Most importantly, what at all does this evidence have to do with the veil of ignorance or Rawls' arguments for justice, fairness, or equality—which isn't some Rawlsian invention, but has a long history in the works of Kant, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and other seminal political and social theorists? You seem to have a conception that Rawls' ideas are somehow reducible to a single binary format of true/false. This is what I mean by pointing out your comments show no actual understanding of Rawls, or any other thinkers who discuss the veil of ignorance or equality. You don't realize that what you think you're disputing with relation to Rawls isn't something Rawls has suggested to be any different. What assumptions do you think Rawls makes that you believe you—and all this alleged evidence—disagrees with and proves to be incorrect assumptions?
- bobwaycott 10y ago
  You do not understand Rawls, and are suggesting as a point of opposition exactly what Rawls takes as a fundamental given in human society. Rawls makes no suggestion that everyone shares the same perspectives on either side of the veil of ignorance. In fact, he says the opposite, and it is because of this he suggests the veil of ignorance as a mediating force to minimize the vast difference of views, by way of the veil removing one's knowledge of their material place and circumstances in society on the other side of the veil. Rawls very strongly supports fidelity to and rule of law. The veil's purpose is to provide a more level playing field on which participants in a society can more fairly determine what the rules of law and order will be. Out of curiosity, what exactly do you mean when you suggest a "'rule of law' paradigm of equality"? I have no doubt you mean something specific, but this combination of words suggests nothing about this paradigm of equality, nor about what role the "rule of law" plays in or has relationship to equality.
  - nickff 10y ago
    I resolved to your first paragraph in a response to a sub-comment here, and will not repeat the text. Rule of law provides a foundation for equality; having a system that treats everyone in a predictable, unbiased, and well-known fashion gives them something they can count on when they plan and engage in all the activities of life. The more your fate rests in the hands of officers acting capriciously, with the power of vague unpredictable rules that you were never aware of, the more difficult and terrifying your life becomes. When you don't have rule of law, who you are in relation to the powerful determines what you can do, and who you can be, thus depriving many (if not most) of opportunity, while subjecting them to the worst form of oppression, embodied by constant terror. It is unfortunate that no country, province, state, or city fully follows the principles of 'rule of law' but there is definitely a spectrum, and some are much better than others.
    - bobwaycott 10y ago
      > I resolved to your first paragraph in a response to a sub-comment here, and will not repeat the text. You really didn't, except to offer some hand-waving nature v nurture nonsense and insults that don't elucidate or engage Rawls' ideas at all. > Rule of law provides a foundation for equality; having a system that treats everyone in a predictable, unbiased, and well-known fashion gives them something they can count on when they plan and engage in all the activities of life. The more your fate rests in the hands of officers acting capriciously, with the power of vague unpredictable rules that you were never aware of, the more difficult and terrifying your life becomes. When you don't have rule of law, who you are in relation to the powerful determines what you can do, and who you can be, thus depriving many (if not most) of opportunity, while subjecting them to the worst form of oppression, embodied by constant terror. You appear to assume that "rule of law" as an idea provides any guarantees at all that the laws themselves by which one is ruled are at all just, fair, or equitable. It is, at best, foolish to make such an assumption. People living under a lawful regime of unjust laws will find themselves in no better shape than those who toil under a less lawful society. History is replete with such circumstances, including: - Jews under the rule of law of National Socialism - former slaves and their descendants under the rule of law of the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow South - slaves under the rule of law in every Western colonial/imperial territory, and the pre-Civil War US - interracial couples under the rule of law before Loving v Virginia - women under the rule of law throughout Western nations before the advent of equal suffrage The rule of law provides no innate or guaranteed protection from inequality or injustice. Who you are in relation to the powerful always determines what you can be and do, especially within the context of legally proscribed behaviors. Those who hold power typically make the laws. When the laws are unjust, inequitable, and unfair, the rule of law does nothing to alleviate such a condition.
bluetomcat 10y ago
> Of course it implies that these services must be good enough so that the riches wont look for something else. Even if the services are good enough, there will always be segregation in the presence of huge income disparities between sizable portions of the population. Wealthy overambitious parents wouldn't want their kids to have any contact whatsoever with the "lower class".
- soufron 10y ago
  Yeah? Have a look at EU social democracies... Everybody go to the same schools and the same hospitals, everybody gets the same internet, everybody go to the same sport clubs, etc. And wealthy overambitious parents tend to hide their money and live among their community.
  - bluetomcat 10y ago
    That tends to happen in EU countries with lower income disparity (mainly Germany and the Nordic countries), which doesn't disprove my point. With 10x disparity and more, it is not going to happen.
  - lifeisstillgood 10y ago
    I live in an apparent EU social democracy, certainly compared to US and there are different classes of sports clubs, different schools (all schools are paid for by the state and kids living within x miles get in. House prices within x miles determine who can get in) It's crazy, we do push for better for our kids and our selves within the bounds of whatever equality we have set.
WalterBright 10y ago
> Of course it implies that these services must be good enough so that the riches wont look for something else. There can be only one best heart surgeon. How would you go about deciding who gets the best one, and who gets second best, on down to who gets the bottom of the class?
woliveirajr 10y ago
> But then you can have both poors and equality. Venezuela?

erkose 10y ago

While I'm not arguing with the article, I thought liberty is freedom bound by justice.

nickff 10y ago
That phrase is laden with subjective meanings: Liberty: positive or negative liberty? Freedom: freedom from or for what? Obligation, morality, ethics, work, or responsibility? Justice: is this rule of law, or some type of social justice?

lutusp 10y ago

The article fails to mention a key element in eliminating poverty -- free and affordable access to fertility control measures for women, as well as an absolute sovereign right for women to choose when and whether to have children.

mamon 10y ago
There's one huge downside to this: eliminating poverty by reducing population leads to aging society, which leads to shitty pensions for retired workers, higher taxation, higher public debt, etc, which in turn leads back to population reduce. Basically, birth control leads to a slow death of civilization. The most tragic thing about it is that you can't do anything about it, as denying women the choice would be violation of their human rights. Therefore, advanced societies are doomed to die out and be replaced by more primitive ones. Which happened few times in history (e.g. Roman Empire) and is already happening again in some part of the world (e.g. EU immigration crisis)
- scalio 10y ago
  China disagrees. They're still growing, in spite of a bloody ruthless birth control system (though I seem to remember that they've loosened it a bit, not sure). Also, the Romans died out because they fell into decadence, which is exactly what the west is doing right now.
  - sevenless 10y ago
    > Also, the Romans died out because they fell into decadence No historian on earth believes this. That's a myth from Gibbon.
  - mantas 10y ago
    I doubt China disagrees. Demographics are about to hit the fan over there. They fucked up with the single-kid policy. It's now canceled, but China is set to have "aging population" in coming decades. Given that their current economy is built on cheap workforce, they're in deep shit.
- 10y ago

Animats 10y ago

China officially disagrees. Anyway, the big improvements in the standard of living came from the industrial revolution, not the Reformation.

MarcScott 10y ago
The industrial revolution would most likely have never occurred in Britain without such reforms as intellectual property and land rights.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

scalio 10y ago

> Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet That smells strongly of the same kind of delusion that fuels capitalism, infinite growth. > What, then, caused this Great Enrichment? Not exploitation of the poor, Apparently, none of our clothes or electronics are being fabricated by (economic) slaves. While I do mostly agree with the article's conclusion, > But the modern world came from treating more and more people with respect. it all looks terribly cherry-picked to me in order to make a certain point: "The current system is fine, we can all feel good" or thereabouts.

berntb 10y ago
>> Apparently, none of our clothes or electronics are being fabricated by (economic) slaves. You know the full argument as well as I do, I'd think? For a country to get rich, it walks up a staircase. It starts with simple industry, investments in education and at the top after two-three generations are Japan or South Korea? What to do to walk the staircase is known today, there are examples. It mainly needs lack of conflicts, little corruption and good (capitalist) governance. If you have good counter arguments, other than that China has one generation left of stairclimbing, I'm interested? This was what changed my world view regarding this: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
- scalio 10y ago
  Thank you for that link, and for changing my view on the subject. The thing about capitalism, though, is that it's an apparently reliable way of doing things in such situations. Apart from the odd crisis, it has worked fabulously for the west during the 20th century. With the internet, however, a lot has changed. I'm not old enough to quantify exactly how much or what, but what's certain is that it has created an entirely new ground to explore and 'colonize', and I don't think capitalism is at all well suited for stable humanist development in both the physical and the new virtual grounds.

brador 10y ago

The ultimate solution is a machine that solves every need I have before I have it. But then why live?

deleted 10y ago

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jondubois 10y ago

I think money isn't the issue here. Freedom is the issue. If you're a regular person: - You have no free time because you have to work non stop just to pay the bills (especially rent) - You have no free speech because if you say the wrong thing at work, you might get fired. Workplaces tend to severely limit individuals' ability to express themselves freely (because people have their livelihoods at stake). It's usually a very tense environment. - For a lot of whitecollar jobs, you don't even have freedom of thought. You can't do your work while thinking about other stuff; your mind has to be focused 100% on the work (and in a lot of industries, the work is increasingly mechanical and repetitive). The problem is not lack of money itself, it's lack of freedom. The only way to get freedom is through having a lot of money.

soufron 10y ago
You can lower the importance of money by having great public services that will be paid collectively.
- jondubois 10y ago
  Good point, but the rich don't want to lower the importance of money, they want to increase it.
- visarga 10y ago
  What would it take for a community to "break off" the grid and not need money? Land for agriculture, solar panels, 3d-printers for parts, water filtration, AI and robots for automation (maybe the robots can build more robots, as well). What a single person can't do, maybe a hundred or a thousand can. Some technologies are converging towards independence, there might be a way to escape the system as it is now. Maybe we get to see various lifestyle experiments popping up, as long as the communities can take care of themselves, and seek independence. I think independence research should compliment UBI as a strategy for the automation age. Give people the necessary means of production to provide for themselves absent wages.
  - prodmerc 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

Justice is the overlooked leg of this tripod. Societies where the law is unevenly enforced find it harder to develop.

jernfrost 10y ago

Way to brush over the severe problems with inequality. There were plenty of countries poorer than France during the French revolution. It was not poverty which caused it but inequality. In all societies high levels of inequality coincides with political instability. All that wealth and prosperity is easily lost if you end up with revolution and civil war. Look at America today. It has not been as unequal and politically polarized in decades. The author champions Adam Smith, but can not possibly have read him. He did in fact speak at length about the dangers of inequality. He specifically said that poverty was not an absolute phenomenon. It is not about how many calories you get per day and the size of your dwelling. He understood hundreds of years ago that poverty is a relative phenomenon. The author also mentioned Picketty but elegantly ignored his reasoning for why inequality is a big problem. One of the things Picketty pointed out is that with rising inequality, inherited wealth starts dominating the economy. This means the ability to get rich fast will most efficiently be accomplished with strategic marriages rather than starting your own businesses. This is what the world of Jane Austin was about. Everything came down to strategic marriage. That was the obsession of the day. A society of high inequality over a long time can not be a society of "the self made man". That ought to be recognized as a problem.

soufron 10y ago
same thing... the whole article seems so naïve...
WalterBright 10y ago
As a counterpoint, there has never been an era where more people have risen to great wealth so quickly as today. Also, 85% of American millionaires are self-made (not inherited). See the book "The Millionaire Next Door".
- jondubois 10y ago
  I'm not worried about the past 20 years at all (those were good times). I'm worried about the next 20 years. Before, when people thought about 'monopolies' they thought about Microsoft (there wasn't that many)... Now practically every company is a monopoly. And taken together, they form a sort of oligopoly. Companies today are more cooperative than they are competitive (and this helps them maintain their positions).

hal9000xp 10y ago

I feel smell of leftism from keywords "equality" and "justice". You don't need machine learning to automatically spot social democrats (they have almost the same rhetoric as socialists), a simple python script is more than enough. By the way, what this article is doing on HN?

jnbiche 10y ago
Your heuristic failed here. The writer here opposes raising taxes and even uses the favored fiscal-conservative term "expropriation" (her words: "expropriation is a one-time trick"). She exalts Adam Smith and the free market. She's no social democrat.
- hal9000xp 10y ago
  You are probably right, may be I was wrong on this article. In particular, I agree on this: "Raising low productivity by enabling human creativity is what has mainly worked. By contrast, taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. Enrichment from market-tested betterment will go on and on and, over the next century or so, will bring comfort in essentials to virtually everyone on the planet, and more to an expanding middle class." Till recently, I spent time and actually read articles on NYT (or similar) even if they had some keywords in title. And almost always, I found that author is supporter of labour party or Bernie Sanders or something like this. This time, I was probably mistaken.

esolyt 10y ago

> taking from the rich and giving to the poor helps only a little — and anyway expropriation is a one-time trick. It is not explained why it helps only a little or why it has to be a one-time trick. And why is the author talking about "expropriation" instead of "taxing"?

x0137294744532 10y ago
> And why is the author talking about "expropriation" instead of "taxing"? The process of expropriation usually occurs suddenly and forcefully in the name of the public interest and are focused on one specific group. Taxes on the other hand, are taken regularly and are applied to everyone (although at a different rate).

apatters 10y ago

The NYT again reveals its inability to look at anything outside of its comfortable Western bubble. The global trend of the past 10 years has been a wave of efforts by entrenched rulers to suppress free elections, free press, and a rise in corruption. There is a rough consensus among most watchdog organizations that track this sort of stuff on a global level that measures of freedom are getting worse or in the best case holding steady. The majority of the world's population does not live in democracies with honest elections and justice systems that are free of corruption. Sure you can argue that maybe on some 50+ year long trend things are getting better but to write a column like this in 2016 is just tone deaf. This is why no one wants to pay for the news.

berntb 10y ago
Interesting, do you have some serious references? I've seen the argument that as the general economy increases for an industrialized society, democracy becomes a necessity? (What seems scary is that with increasing 1984 Big Brother technological capabilities, it seems more possible for e.g. China to combine economic freedom and harsh political oppression.) So, it is not like that?
- apatters 10y ago
  Freedom House is probably the most relevant watchdog/measuring organization I can think of for the general case of "equality, liberty and justice" that this article's author was handwaving about. They try to assess the state of several different types of freedom in every country around the world and produce a complete index. Their view is that the world has been getting less free for about ten years now. Many other organizations monitor and rank countries by their degrees of various kinds of freedom - for instance Reporters Without Borders ranks countries based on press freedom and the Heritage Foundation ranks them based on economic freedom - the general character of the assessments of these organizations is that the world is getting less free, not more.

tumbas 10y ago

sounds like communism and free masonry to me. free masons should be kiled to make some justice and people will be liberated. they should be punished for their sins just like others and that's equality

woodandsteel 10y ago

There are a lot of problems with free market capitalism. One important one is that, while living standards have skyrocketed in the developing world, in recent decades they have stagnated or declined in the developed world. Another is that the rich have a highly disproportionate influence on the political system. A third is crashes caused by the finance industry, as in our recent Great Recession. That said, I think the overall message has a lot of truth. The reason this is so is that industrialization produces vast, orders-of-magnitude increases in the total wealth of a society, and free market regimes, over the long term, are better than any other at both producing the technological innovation involved, and also putting it into efficient use. That is why the Soviet Union and Mao's China both stalled out in economic growth. It is also why crony capitalism economies, where the road to wealth is based on governmental connections, as in Putin's Russia and the whole Arab Middle East, don't have successful economies. That in turn ties to democracy. If you have an authoritarian regime, then probably it is going to try to enrich its members and control the economy for its own benefit, rather than that of its citizens. With a democracy it is much more likely the market will be free enough to have real, sustained growth.