Re:It’s better to be born rich than gifted
by bobthechef on Saturday October 13, 2018 @08:33PM
(#18210730)
I don't see what fairness and equality have to do with one another. Consider a poor person and a rich person. The poor person gives $100 to charity and the rich person gives nothing. They're not economic equals, but which would be more fair? A tax deduction for the poor guy or the rich guy? Extrapolate.
Human instincts and morals are really well calibrated to small-village life. I take things like the Dunbar number [1] to indicate that we are optimised for a small circle of close relationships.
"Fairness" has a sister in "equality" that is very powerful force on the local scale and scales horribly, to the point where equality being scaled up is usually a warning sign of an incoming economic breakdown where everyone starves. Unfortunately, people keep trying to scale equality up because they want it in their local relationships.
Talking about "permanent power disparities" touches on the same vein of thinking - we know that permanent power disparities are an inevitable feature of society. The attempts to set up societies where there are no permanent power disparities have resulted in permanent power disparities forming, and frequently going to very nasty despots. Modern western civilisation has done _extremely_ well compared to the competition by dangling systemic advantage as the reward for massively improving the industrial base and consumer access to resources. This has worked a lot better than attempts to suppress inequality under, eg, the communist systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number