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Not the GP, but it's an easily defended view along several avenues. First, I could point out that the marginal utility of money must decline at least logarithm
by jbay808 5y ago
Not the GP, but it's an easily defended view along several avenues.
First, I could point out that the marginal utility of money must decline at least logarithmically with quantity*, which means that egalitarian resource distributions tend to have a higher net utility.
Second, I could point out that the Pareto principle only guarantees an outcome for which, locally, no individual actor can do marginally better without another doing marginally worse, not an outcome in which the total utility of all actors even approaches a local maximum, let alone a global one. We can easily end up in a scenario where a beggar can starve to death while a baron gorges on food whose loss would go unnoticed to him.
I could go on but I think the above is already enough of a basis to support the claim.
* The proof of this is not short enough to type on my phone.
- andriesm 5y agoI agree with your argument that a Baron could be gorging himself while a begger starves to death... this is a definite disadvantage of capitalism, but does this disadvantage outweigh the advantages? And how do the alternatives compare... I would say it's still a far leap to say tue system is terrible or worse than most proposed alternatives. I like the saying - Democracy is the worst possible system, except for all other alternatives... which is to say democracy is a way for 51 percent to force their will down the throats of the other 49 percent... but autocracy is still worse in general because it does not have a corrective mechanism like democracy has. The same I believe applies to capitalism. We can improve pure democracy by going for constitutional democracy... some may argue a mostly free market with some taxation is an improvement over pure anarcho-capitalism.
- jbay808 5y agoWell, I'm not making a claim in favour of any particular system, merely answering this question: > Wait, HOW does inequality render assumptions about free markers maximising social utility invalid? by showing that there is no particularly strong reason to think that free markets maximize social utility. When it comes to other systems, all I can really say is that the space of alternatives is not very well explored.