13 ms·

The math that says egalitarianism is possible

diordiderot 5y ago
It's clear that the problem is that politicians can get to close to the money. That the people's will has no influence on policy. Could we cap net worth of 'public servants'? Would things be better in America if there was a max population per representative? I.e. 1 rep per 50k. Why can we not randomly select 500~1000 at random each year pay them 150k to serve as a proper house of commons.
- ohthehugemanate 5y ago
  while i love this line of thought, random sampling is probably not a great way to run any country. As George Carlin put it, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
tgv 5y ago
> Humans happen to be super cooperative, and that puts us more squarely in that space more often. Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile. The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Egalitarianism and democracy are, strangely enough, not natural partners. The article doesn't even mention it. Unfortunately, there's no link to the paper, so there's no way to tell what the assumptions are. In fact, I can't even find the journal.
- mrow84 5y ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01059-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01059-y For reference, I simply typed “Nature Human Behavior” into google.
  - tgv 5y ago
    I use DDG, and it wouldn't come up with the journal. I think the problem is I quoted it, and the name is in British English, Human Behaviour. Even then it's not the top hit, but the side bar result (which I tend to ignore). Thanks for straightening that out.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile. I'm curious, what makes you say that?
  - plutonorm 5y ago
    Living in America?
    - weare138 5y ago
      There's a difference between ideals and practice. The ultra rich and multi-billion dollar corporations are allowed to directly financially influence our politicians through lobbying which is just a legal form of bribery. We're not the best example of a pure democracy.
    - atoav 5y ago
      America is a nation mostly shaped by the idea that human nature is competitive and hostile (and capitalism would be the way to channel these emotions for productive outcomes). I rather live in a place that underlines a different trait of human nature. There will always be aggression and competitiveness, but places that make the base assumption of cooperation turn out to be much nicer, more liveable and generally more efficient. Also: if the US had the same voting system as most modern democracies where one vote has the same voting power, independent from which province or state you are voting, policy and live in the US would look a lot different.
      - mionhe 5y ago
        What places did you have in mind that exemplify that cooperation?
        plutonorm 5y ago
        Nordic countries. Probably, as the article suggests, the lack of defensible high concentrations of resources. Up until the most recent centuries of course. But genetics and culture are slower to change.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Basically all developed societies are "super cooperative", irrespective of stuff like wealth inequality. You want to see a society where the "competitive" spirit OP talks about is still flourishing, look no further than Afghanistan. A remarkably "equal" society, since few people there have any wealth at all - but still not a place you would want to be in.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  We've had one abandonment of social democracy cycle so far, I wouldn't draw timeless conclusions based on that. In particular, if uneven industrialization and colonization hadn't created such large scale inequality for norms arbitrage, it might have kept going. If I had to draw any conclusion from this n=1 it would be about the "thermodynamics" of post-colonialism, not the staying power of social democracy.
- lmm 5y ago
  > The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Is that really true? I don't see e.g. Scandinavia rushing to abandon all their social programs. The US took a big turn away from cooperation, but that seems to be much more about a breakdown of social trust relating to some specifics of US history (race relations, "stranger danger", ...) than some general principle about high general wealth societies.
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    I would go even further and say that the US is the only Western democracy that has abandoned some of the most important social-democratic principles. E.g. it's the only Western democracy with no universal healthcare, an industrial prison complex, weak labour rights etc.
    - lmm 5y ago
      That's not true; the UK has gradually weakened healthcare (introducing prescription charges, privatising eyecare and dental), significantly weakened labour rights (legalising arbitrary firing in the first two years), and I think privatised part of the prison system as well. No doubt those from other countries will have their own stories.
      - cameronh90 5y ago
        The UK has privately managed prisons, which is quite a lot different to privately owned prisons in terms of incentives. I think it's a bad idea too, but I don't think it's quite the same as the prison industrial complex in the US.
    - tgv 5y ago
      IMO, there have been two waves of social-democratically inspired politics: at the end of the 19th century, and after WW2. Once some complacency was reached, the policies were slowly being undone. While West and North Europe have done so slower than the USA, there's been an undeniable tendency towards free market policies, favoring companies and capital and eroding worker's rights. The voters seem to agree: parties left of center have been in steady decline over the last decades. This is not purely driven by individual wealth, of course. Issues such as immigration and (more recently) climate change also play a role.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  >>The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Social spending by government has rapidly increased as societies have gotten wealthier: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... But that money just ends up as pension benefits for unionized public sector workers, a significant fraction of whom are now in the top 10% of income earners. A NYS public school teacher now receives approximately $88,000 a year for their pension if they retire after 35 years, and it's practically impossible to fire them: https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried-to-fire-154-teachers-for-incompetence-or-misconduct-75-were/ https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried... New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why-new-york-is-in-trouble--290304-public-employees-with-100000-paychecks-cost-taxpayers-38-billion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
97% of scientists agree that society has to switch to Socialism within the next 12 years, or we will all be killed by Capitalism. The models prove it. Seriously: consider that when you read "scientists say this or that", that "scientists" also includes people like the guy from this article.
- ggm 5y ago
  Is this code for "I don't agree" ?
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    No, just a summary of the message of the article. Obviously I also "don't agree". I find it a fascinating lesson how "scientists" can facilitate their "research" to prove exactly what they want to be proven.
handmodel 5y ago
The fact that the professor highlights Mongolia and Siberia as examples of countries with superior systems is very emblematic of this type of thinking. No Americans would be happier if the USA lifestyles started resembling the lifestyles of those countries. The GINI coefficient is better in those places - but much less so than his anecdotes would have you believe.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  > "the professor", "this type of thinking", "superior systems", "happier" Your comment makes me believe you see "the professor" as somebody from another tribe/group and you now want to show that "they" are wrong. Why this urge to defend superiority or who is the happiest? The research doesn't ask these questions - it's game theoretical models applied to societal cooperation. The whole Bezos incident is just a narrative hook to draw you in.
  - handmodel 5y ago
    It seems odd to suggest that someone is allowed to use an anecdote to prove a point but someone who disagrees with it should not critique the anecdotes. My whole critique is based on the fact that Mongolia has better wealth inequality on paper (and so his model would capture that) but that metric does not have a 1:1 ratio to what we actually care about. His paper doesn't address why maximizing on inequality alone could lead to bad outcomes - which is what I'm saying.
    - Pyramus 5y ago
      I don't understand - where does the judgement of what is better (or what "we" care about) come from? This is simply a piece of theoretical research whether cooperation strategies that we have historically observed in some parts of the world can evolve in a game theoretical model. Where do you see a comment on whether living in Mongolia today is better (or worse) than living somewhere else?
- ksaxena 5y ago
  There are many systems where if you measure inequality by metrics like wealth or income, you may overestimate the equality in a society. Socialist India before 1991 was such a system - most people appeared equal if you measured wealth or income but in reality there was extreme inequality. Those who had influence over the state (bureaucrats and politicians), regularly decided who got admitted in a hospital and who didn't, who got a telephone connection and who didn't, hell, a common person often couldn't even get a train ticket if he did not know a bureaucrat or a politician. This was so common that the system had a name - "sifarish". So, if anyone could measure an individual's "power" and include it along with wealth and income to measure the society's inequality, you would get an incredibly "inequal" Indian society before 1991 that has since become a lot more equal as socialism has started to wane a little bit here.
roenxi 5y ago
> We know how harmful inequality can be, and we know it’s been steadily on the rise, maybe since the ’50s. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ The US stopped burning wealth to maintain its spending, and turned to using inflation instead.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- axelroze 5y ago
  That jump in number of years needed to save for a house. Bit straight into heart. It's a good website with many plots. I also liked how many hours one needs to work to buy into S&P 500. To provide some more context to 1971. It is the year of the Nixon shock. The US dollar became a fiat currency not backed by gold any more. Since then the banks have been inventing money out of thin air by issuing debts as they wished. The whole ruse was covered with a lot of bullshit like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and other very bad newly developed financial instruments.
icare_1er 5y ago
Professor has just rediscovered that by becoming settlers, with fields, and villages, and wheat, and stocks of grains to protect, rather than nomads not belonging to a land and following hereds, communities had to start creating structured societies, "stratified", as he said. Great.
ekianjo 5y ago
If you don't understand that human nature lies in competition and not egalitarianism, you got your incentives wrong. Concentration of power is a natural course of human behavior, not an anomaly.
- anemoiac 5y ago
  Concentration of power wasn’t really possible when human nature, rather than technology (I.e. culture, civilization, the steam engine, etc.), was the primary determinant of human behavior. Anecdotally, most people’s perspectives on “human nature” appear to be little more than an exercise in confirmation bias, vis a vis their social/economic/political inclinations, which limits the utility of these discussions.
erikerikson 5y ago
No actual math presented. References to a genetic algorithm being run over an undescribed societal model sans description of the genome or mutagenic operators.
xyzzy21 5y ago
If you say "the math says", it's very likely your model of reality isn't complex enough to make it remotely real or possible. This is a common mistake. Abstraction Fallacy or Model Fallacy.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
There seems to be a conflation between non-cooperative behavior like aggression, and inequality. These two are not the same thing. Inequality can exist and increase in cooperative settings. It's just that the inequality will not be zero sum in such settings, meaning the poor will see improvements in standard of living even as the rich see even greater improvements. That's the Pareto efficiency that experiments in game theory show that a free market produces.

It's clear that the problem is that politicians can get to close to the money. That the people's will has no influence on policy. Could we cap net worth of 'public servants'? Would things be better in America if there was a max population per representative? I.e. 1 rep per 50k. Why can we not randomly select 500~1000 at random each year pay them 150k to serve as a proper house of commons.

ohthehugemanate 5y ago
while i love this line of thought, random sampling is probably not a great way to run any country. As George Carlin put it, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

tgv 5y ago

> Humans happen to be super cooperative, and that puts us more squarely in that space more often. Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile. The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Egalitarianism and democracy are, strangely enough, not natural partners. The article doesn't even mention it. Unfortunately, there's no link to the paper, so there's no way to tell what the assumptions are. In fact, I can't even find the journal.

mrow84 5y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01059-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01059-y For reference, I simply typed “Nature Human Behavior” into google.
- tgv 5y ago
  I use DDG, and it wouldn't come up with the journal. I think the problem is I quoted it, and the name is in British English, Human Behaviour. Even then it's not the top hit, but the side bar result (which I tend to ignore). Thanks for straightening that out.
beckman466 5y ago
> Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile. I'm curious, what makes you say that?
- plutonorm 5y ago
  Living in America?
  - weare138 5y ago
    There's a difference between ideals and practice. The ultra rich and multi-billion dollar corporations are allowed to directly financially influence our politicians through lobbying which is just a legal form of bribery. We're not the best example of a pure democracy.
  - atoav 5y ago
    America is a nation mostly shaped by the idea that human nature is competitive and hostile (and capitalism would be the way to channel these emotions for productive outcomes). I rather live in a place that underlines a different trait of human nature. There will always be aggression and competitiveness, but places that make the base assumption of cooperation turn out to be much nicer, more liveable and generally more efficient. Also: if the US had the same voting system as most modern democracies where one vote has the same voting power, independent from which province or state you are voting, policy and live in the US would look a lot different.
    - mionhe 5y ago
      What places did you have in mind that exemplify that cooperation?
      - plutonorm 5y ago
        Nordic countries. Probably, as the article suggests, the lack of defensible high concentrations of resources. Up until the most recent centuries of course. But genetics and culture are slower to change.
zozbot234 5y ago
Basically all developed societies are "super cooperative", irrespective of stuff like wealth inequality. You want to see a society where the "competitive" spirit OP talks about is still flourishing, look no further than Afghanistan. A remarkably "equal" society, since few people there have any wealth at all - but still not a place you would want to be in.
Ericson2314 5y ago
We've had one abandonment of social democracy cycle so far, I wouldn't draw timeless conclusions based on that. In particular, if uneven industrialization and colonization hadn't created such large scale inequality for norms arbitrage, it might have kept going. If I had to draw any conclusion from this n=1 it would be about the "thermodynamics" of post-colonialism, not the staying power of social democracy.
lmm 5y ago
> The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Is that really true? I don't see e.g. Scandinavia rushing to abandon all their social programs. The US took a big turn away from cooperation, but that seems to be much more about a breakdown of social trust relating to some specifics of US history (race relations, "stranger danger", ...) than some general principle about high general wealth societies.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  I would go even further and say that the US is the only Western democracy that has abandoned some of the most important social-democratic principles. E.g. it's the only Western democracy with no universal healthcare, an industrial prison complex, weak labour rights etc.
  - lmm 5y ago
    That's not true; the UK has gradually weakened healthcare (introducing prescription charges, privatising eyecare and dental), significantly weakened labour rights (legalising arbitrary firing in the first two years), and I think privatised part of the prison system as well. No doubt those from other countries will have their own stories.
    - cameronh90 5y ago
      The UK has privately managed prisons, which is quite a lot different to privately owned prisons in terms of incentives. I think it's a bad idea too, but I don't think it's quite the same as the prison industrial complex in the US.
  - tgv 5y ago
    IMO, there have been two waves of social-democratically inspired politics: at the end of the 19th century, and after WW2. Once some complacency was reached, the policies were slowly being undone. While West and North Europe have done so slower than the USA, there's been an undeniable tendency towards free market policies, favoring companies and capital and eroding worker's rights. The voters seem to agree: parties left of center have been in steady decline over the last decades. This is not purely driven by individual wealth, of course. Issues such as immigration and (more recently) climate change also play a role.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
>>The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Social spending by government has rapidly increased as societies have gotten wealthier: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... But that money just ends up as pension benefits for unionized public sector workers, a significant fraction of whom are now in the top 10% of income earners. A NYS public school teacher now receives approximately $88,000 a year for their pension if they retire after 35 years, and it's practically impossible to fire them: https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried-to-fire-154-teachers-for-incompetence-or-misconduct-75-were/ https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried... New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why-new-york-is-in-trouble--290304-public-employees-with-100000-paychecks-cost-taxpayers-38-billion/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...

notanzaiiswear 5y ago

97% of scientists agree that society has to switch to Socialism within the next 12 years, or we will all be killed by Capitalism. The models prove it. Seriously: consider that when you read "scientists say this or that", that "scientists" also includes people like the guy from this article.

ggm 5y ago
Is this code for "I don't agree" ?
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  No, just a summary of the message of the article. Obviously I also "don't agree". I find it a fascinating lesson how "scientists" can facilitate their "research" to prove exactly what they want to be proven.

handmodel 5y ago

The fact that the professor highlights Mongolia and Siberia as examples of countries with superior systems is very emblematic of this type of thinking. No Americans would be happier if the USA lifestyles started resembling the lifestyles of those countries. The GINI coefficient is better in those places - but much less so than his anecdotes would have you believe.

Pyramus 5y ago
> "the professor", "this type of thinking", "superior systems", "happier" Your comment makes me believe you see "the professor" as somebody from another tribe/group and you now want to show that "they" are wrong. Why this urge to defend superiority or who is the happiest? The research doesn't ask these questions - it's game theoretical models applied to societal cooperation. The whole Bezos incident is just a narrative hook to draw you in.
- handmodel 5y ago
  It seems odd to suggest that someone is allowed to use an anecdote to prove a point but someone who disagrees with it should not critique the anecdotes. My whole critique is based on the fact that Mongolia has better wealth inequality on paper (and so his model would capture that) but that metric does not have a 1:1 ratio to what we actually care about. His paper doesn't address why maximizing on inequality alone could lead to bad outcomes - which is what I'm saying.
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    I don't understand - where does the judgement of what is better (or what "we" care about) come from? This is simply a piece of theoretical research whether cooperation strategies that we have historically observed in some parts of the world can evolve in a game theoretical model. Where do you see a comment on whether living in Mongolia today is better (or worse) than living somewhere else?
ksaxena 5y ago
There are many systems where if you measure inequality by metrics like wealth or income, you may overestimate the equality in a society. Socialist India before 1991 was such a system - most people appeared equal if you measured wealth or income but in reality there was extreme inequality. Those who had influence over the state (bureaucrats and politicians), regularly decided who got admitted in a hospital and who didn't, who got a telephone connection and who didn't, hell, a common person often couldn't even get a train ticket if he did not know a bureaucrat or a politician. This was so common that the system had a name - "sifarish". So, if anyone could measure an individual's "power" and include it along with wealth and income to measure the society's inequality, you would get an incredibly "inequal" Indian society before 1991 that has since become a lot more equal as socialism has started to wane a little bit here.

roenxi 5y ago

> We know how harmful inequality can be, and we know it’s been steadily on the rise, maybe since the ’50s. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ The US stopped burning wealth to maintain its spending, and turned to using inflation instead.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
axelroze 5y ago
That jump in number of years needed to save for a house. Bit straight into heart. It's a good website with many plots. I also liked how many hours one needs to work to buy into S&P 500. To provide some more context to 1971. It is the year of the Nixon shock. The US dollar became a fiat currency not backed by gold any more. Since then the banks have been inventing money out of thin air by issuing debts as they wished. The whole ruse was covered with a lot of bullshit like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and other very bad newly developed financial instruments.

icare_1er 5y ago

Professor has just rediscovered that by becoming settlers, with fields, and villages, and wheat, and stocks of grains to protect, rather than nomads not belonging to a land and following hereds, communities had to start creating structured societies, "stratified", as he said. Great.

ekianjo 5y ago

If you don't understand that human nature lies in competition and not egalitarianism, you got your incentives wrong. Concentration of power is a natural course of human behavior, not an anomaly.

anemoiac 5y ago
Concentration of power wasn’t really possible when human nature, rather than technology (I.e. culture, civilization, the steam engine, etc.), was the primary determinant of human behavior. Anecdotally, most people’s perspectives on “human nature” appear to be little more than an exercise in confirmation bias, vis a vis their social/economic/political inclinations, which limits the utility of these discussions.

erikerikson 5y ago

No actual math presented. References to a genetic algorithm being run over an undescribed societal model sans description of the genome or mutagenic operators.

xyzzy21 5y ago

If you say "the math says", it's very likely your model of reality isn't complex enough to make it remotely real or possible. This is a common mistake. Abstraction Fallacy or Model Fallacy.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

There seems to be a conflation between non-cooperative behavior like aggression, and inequality. These two are not the same thing. Inequality can exist and increase in cooperative settings. It's just that the inequality will not be zero sum in such settings, meaning the poor will see improvements in standard of living even as the rich see even greater improvements. That's the Pareto efficiency that experiments in game theory show that a free market produces.