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Some PG thoughts on distribution of wealth: http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html

klenwell 15y ago
PG asks: Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money? I'd offer this passage from Robert Wright's The Moral Animal as one answer. This assumes the distribution of wealth serves as a proxy (inexact, even inaccurate, perhaps, but functional) for the distribution of access to sexual resources among males: Men have long competed for access to the scarcer sexual resource, women. And the costs of losing the contest are so high (genetic oblivion) that natural selection has inclined them to compete with special ferocity. http://books.google.com/books?id=MuI_DVZ1Xo8C&lpg=PP1&dq=moral%20animal%20wright&pg=PA100#v=onepage&q=%22inequality%20amoung%20males%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=MuI_DVZ1Xo8C&lpg=PP1&#3... So the argument goes something like this: Material resources (wealth) provide access to sexual resources and reproductive success (any organism's raison d'etre). An organism hard-wired to persist its genes will probably also be hardwired to recognize the existential threat presented by unequal access to the resources required to persist its genes and take radical action to avoid it. Since among most animals (including humans), females make a greater biological investment, they enjoy the privilege of selecting among males, preferring those with resources to best provide for their offspring, which puts males in the position of scrabbling to accumulate the resources necessary to win the affections of a mate. That probably leaves out a few necessary premises, but if you're not familiar with the argument, hopefully you at least get the picture. Wright makes the point that a society in which there is such radical inequality of wealth that a significant number of men have not the resources to attract a mate, settle down, and marry, also tend to be the most violent and unstable. If you had a society in which there was radical inequality of wealth, but not radical inequality of access among young males to mates, you would expect less instability. But allowing for the shortcuts in reasoning that evolution might encourage, you'd still expect some. And as various behaviorial economic experiments have demonstrated, humans seem to have a tendency to reason about fairness in relative rather than absolute terms. So in such a society, you'd probably still have a greater threat of instability than one where there was a more equitable distribution of wealth -- and, especially, the perception of it.
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  okay, tax male babies and subsidize female ones. not joking.
- rphlx 15y ago
  This is a Beta male view of female sexual selection: "if I can just get rich enough, girls will like me". The truth is that for the middle class and above, social intelligence, wit, charm, "Game", and other characteristics matter as much, or more, than raw financial net worth. Of course, these are often correlated, but there are plenty of broke bikers, musicians, and womanizers doing quite well too, in comparison to Aspie SW millionaires.
david927 15y ago
I like Paul but this essay is especially simplistic and poorly reasoned.

PG asks: Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money? I'd offer this passage from Robert Wright's The Moral Animal as one answer. This assumes the distribution of wealth serves as a proxy (inexact, even inaccurate, perhaps, but functional) for the distribution of access to sexual resources among males: Men have long competed for access to the scarcer sexual resource, women. And the costs of losing the contest are so high (genetic oblivion) that natural selection has inclined them to compete with special ferocity. http://books.google.com/books?id=MuI_DVZ1Xo8C&lpg=PP1&dq=moral%20animal%20wright&pg=PA100#v=onepage&q=%22inequality%20amoung%20males%22&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=MuI_DVZ1Xo8C&lpg=PP1&#3... So the argument goes something like this: Material resources (wealth) provide access to sexual resources and reproductive success (any organism's raison d'etre). An organism hard-wired to persist its genes will probably also be hardwired to recognize the existential threat presented by unequal access to the resources required to persist its genes and take radical action to avoid it. Since among most animals (including humans), females make a greater biological investment, they enjoy the privilege of selecting among males, preferring those with resources to best provide for their offspring, which puts males in the position of scrabbling to accumulate the resources necessary to win the affections of a mate. That probably leaves out a few necessary premises, but if you're not familiar with the argument, hopefully you at least get the picture. Wright makes the point that a society in which there is such radical inequality of wealth that a significant number of men have not the resources to attract a mate, settle down, and marry, also tend to be the most violent and unstable. If you had a society in which there was radical inequality of wealth, but not radical inequality of access among young males to mates, you would expect less instability. But allowing for the shortcuts in reasoning that evolution might encourage, you'd still expect some. And as various behaviorial economic experiments have demonstrated, humans seem to have a tendency to reason about fairness in relative rather than absolute terms. So in such a society, you'd probably still have a greater threat of instability than one where there was a more equitable distribution of wealth -- and, especially, the perception of it.

nazgulnarsil 15y ago
okay, tax male babies and subsidize female ones. not joking.
rphlx 15y ago
This is a Beta male view of female sexual selection: "if I can just get rich enough, girls will like me". The truth is that for the middle class and above, social intelligence, wit, charm, "Game", and other characteristics matter as much, or more, than raw financial net worth. Of course, these are often correlated, but there are plenty of broke bikers, musicians, and womanizers doing quite well too, in comparison to Aspie SW millionaires.

david927 15y ago

I like Paul but this essay is especially simplistic and poorly reasoned.