You can argue that is not worth the expense (it costs X to produce Y outcome and redistributing X would lead to negative impact Z. Y + Z results in a net loss to society). But it seems hard to argue that inequality or hierarchy is inevitable so we should not even try to ameliorate the negative effects of that structure or imagine different ones.
To me, the “inequality inevitable” mindset seems like a frequent way those who benefited from the existing system rationalize not sacrificing anything to help less fortunate people. I am very sympathetic to arguments that redistribution is not effective, but the debate should be about what is or is not effective. “Inequality inevitable” sidesteps that and asks that we just give up before even trying or imagining different possibilities because we’ve failed in the past. It is hard to not see such arguments as a misguided effort to rationalize one’s self interest.
I don't agree with this. I tend to agree that inequality is inevitable, but where I think I disagree with you is on the definition of equality.
If we create an even playing field in the environment, then we've just shifted the goalposts from "How wealthy were your parents?" To "How good are your genetics?". Some people will be born smarter than others, and excel. Some people will be born with learning disabilities and relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Judging based on innate ability also means discriminating against people who innately lack that ability. If you were born dyslexic, you're going to have to work twice as hard to achieve as much. The dyslexia is as innate as IQ advantages.
I just don't see a way that hierarchies aren't inherently unequal. You're always judging who has more of a particular thing, so people with less of that thing are worse off. Right now, that's largely money. Is using the genetic lottery a more equal means of doing this? I don't really think so.
I would rather focus on reducing the difference in lifestyle between the haves and have nots. If we can't stop inequality, we can at least lessen the effects.
The phenotype is a confusing angle. We should do some honest objective conversation about it collectively. Do we want people to be their natural self or do we prefer it if one goes out of his way to become something? Do we genetically optimize for the biggest possible struggle or for the slacking? We seem to look at the flexibility as a positive quality but does it really make a healthy breeding stock?
As a human I have to constantly challenge myself mentally and physically or I decay pretty rapidly. I had a sick cat one time that slept on my sofa for 4 years only getting up to eat. Then one day another cat came into the house and she leaped 3 meters off the sofa and ran after it. If I sleep for 4 years I doubt there will be any walking, definitely no running, jumping is out of the question and getting into a fight is unimaginable. We might have really good brains and a good digestive system, the rest of the body could do with some updates.
Those bananas? Well you can thank children in Ecuador for those: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/04/24/ecuador-widespread-labor...
We have the best medical care, but results are uneven. If you are so poor that you are rationing your medicine to the point it doesn't work, what does it matter how good it is?
Was the food the king ate really worse? Today's poor eat sugar disguised as "food" that leads to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. You can say what you want about medieval diets but at least they didn't have an obesity epidemic. I'm not sure who is better off.
At any rate, even if what you say is 100% true, that doesn't really change the fact that homelessness, hunger, and poverty are solvable problems today. To say that things were worse before and therefore the moral failings of society today are tolerable is just baffling to me.
whereas the king was swimming in booty, and at the end of it all, that's what moves most of us mostly.
id argue few ppl really want a lambo for the engineering of it as a machine, they just want to be seen riding in it. 500 years ago a lambo was a fancy horse drawn carriage.
In the modern world, one standard deviation of physical attractiveness matters way more for attracting sexual/romantic partners than does one standard deviation of wealth, especially so for genuine attraction.
This sounds like a bit of a stretch. Let's try and make people a bit more equal first.
Elon Musk is the second richest person in the world and has raised tens of billions of dollars of outside money to fund his companies. You talk like he's footing the bill; he put less than $10 million into Tesla. It was a brilliant decision, but hardly "risky".
>The engineers did not.
So the engineers who went to work for a project that may not have panned out were taking no risk huh.
That is the root meaning of risk - if things didn't pan out, he would have been (financially) ruined. Engineers would go ahead and get another job from somewhere else. If you can't see the difference here, I can't help you further.
But let's look at risk further. What about the people strapping themselves to the top of Musk's rockets and propelling themselves into outer space? They are literally risking their lives. All Musk did was put in $100 million dollars. Has anyone ever died from investing $100 million dollars? On one side you have a guy would lose a lot of money and land comfortably on his feet. On the other you have someone strapping themselves to a column of rocket fuel and blasting off to outer space, something many people have died doing. Surely if risk determines reward, and Musk is worth $150 billion dollars, these astronauts must at least be billionaires. Right?
Obviously that's a litter hyperbolic, but it's to prove a point. If we're going by risk/reward, why is financial risk the only thing considered? What about scientific risk? Musk's enterprises are premised on mountains of scientific and engineering work that came before him, work that is mostly publicly funded and for which the original pioneers (taking risks) will never be compensated. Take Tesla's much hyped "autopilot". Did Musk come up with that himself? Did Tesla engineers even come up with it? No, that research came from the government, namely DARPA through their autonomous Grand Challenges robot competitions. In 2005 during the first Grand Challenge the robots were running off the road and crashing into each other. By 2007 they were reliably navigating urban environments. This was after millions of dollars and thousands of person-hours were poured into the research. Did Musk fund that research? Did Tesla? No, you and I did as taxpayers, and we put in much more than the $100 million Musk did. The people doing that research on the ground were risking their careers and forgoing paychecks to do that work. Many of the people doing the actual coding on those robots were being paid $20k per year as graduate students. Who is now benefitting from that research? Musk. Tesla. Private interests.
Or look at the Kennedy Space Center. I just watched a SpaceX launch a rocket from there. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Who built that? I mean physically, who put hammer to nail there and built that thing. It's huge. "It took 1,500 engineers to design the buildings and launch pads. The drawings alone produced by architects and designers weighed more than a hundred tons" [1]. Did Musk take the risk building that? No, the public did, and now it's there for him to use and benefit from. But the people who built that for him with public money won't be seeing a return on investment proportional to the benefit it today generates. Those benefits are privatized largely into Elon Musk's pocket.
[1] https://www.wesh.com/article/looking-back-at-the-constructio...
The second part does follow some sense - but then, how many engineers did it take to build the US road system? Why aren’t you screaming at car companies, logistics companies, taxi drivers or all other appropriate parties for taking advantage of infra built with public money?
Frankly, its fairly obvious you have a massive distaste for Musk, which is fine - I or nobody else should dictate your opinion on him. What I’m extremely tired of is this new ”social democratism movement” which is some very thinly veiled weird combination of utopian socialism and at times vitriolic hatred against the entrepreneurial populace.
Yes, there are bad actors in the current system. But what is it exactly you are advocating as the alternate system?
Do adult humans honestly believe that going to Mars is a reasonable way to "save our species"?
And to answer your question, yes. Successful, accomplished, professional, adult scientists - like myself and my friends - do honestly believe that.
You could start with investing heavily in this planet, which is significantly more habitable than mars. Electric vehicles were a great start, but there's a lot more than EVs and reselling battery and solar equipment from China that can be done.
>Do you not see any value in developing the technology necessary to get to Mars - in order to travel elsewhere?
I see some value, and if Mr. Musk wants to pursue it, great. But let's not pretend he's saving humanity here; the God complex of SV is already bad enough.
> Why is a powerful bureaucrat with no money more desirable to you than a rich entrepreneur that had to prove his value before attaining reward?
Because the "value" they have proven is so often criminal and fraudulent in nature - best case scenario it's down to luck. The world is not even close to the meritocracy you think it is.
Yes, as you've told us in a few comments.
Because the bureaucrat had to prove their merit among the whole population while the rich entrepreneur just had to prove their merit among other kids that were privileged enough. Just think of Bill Gates that went to probably the only school that had a computer in the world.
In ancient China they even went so far to castrate bureaucrats to prevent cross-generational cronyism.
> Why limit Elon Musk
Because he is using cool goals like travelling to mars to motivate his workers to work themselves to exhaustion while ignoring safety measures? He acts exactly like capitalists of the industrial age. The difference is that his workers do not lack money for sustenance, but a purpose in life.
then lets say this child turns this education and inheritance into 1 billion dollars worth of wealth. does this have no merit??
ive seen many people squander privileged upbringings, i think if you 10x what was given to you, you have some merit regardless of where you stared from.
That seems more luck than hard work to me. Just read the paper.
Even if that was possible. Do you want in a world where people with merit call the shots or a world in which people that cheated their way to wealth or simply inherited wealth call the shots?
Money can be transferred, gained through stealing and luck which all does not require merit. It is not a good proxy for merit.
The real outrage here is the millions and millions of people squandering their talents in some shite job due to lack of opportunity, not the handful of billionaires that started from nothing and whose children might now be taxed somewhat.
Now that Im a father myself, Im of course trying to give my child the best opportunities, but also trying to raise him to be grateful and disciplined.
So I'm not talking about the billionaires. Im talking about regular people who can now grant their children not private jets, but just a good private school.
What would be fair in this scenario? How can we make things equal/just in this case?
Also I dont think its rare or hypothetical at all, that rich kids never learn to work hard and squander their good fortune.
-- EDIT, i completely agree its absurd and completely wrong that 1% of people have 50% of the wealth, that should not be that way.
Someone with a better understanding is a normal authority, it might 'dominate' others in the sense that they have to follow his lead and maybe not feel it's right but in the end it's the best path.
On the other hand there are so much bad authorities that percolate through luck, appearances, bullying, networking.. and it will be 1) very clear their ways are detrimental .. sometimes almost absurdly, 2) very difficult for people below to change this.
Hierarchy? In so far as it currently exists, who cares?
I’m not sure whether this applies to you (I’m not implying that it does), but I continually find it interesting to hear Americans expressing the fear that acting to reduce inequality will somehow limit social mobility, as if they don’t realize that much of the developed world has greater social mobility than their country (or that many countries also rate higher in measures of social welfare, despite having greater social mobility and lower inequality).
> You keep harping on the US, but it is one of - if not the most - upwardly mobile societies in history.
The data doesn't support your conclusions. The US has lower social mobility than many of its (more redistributive) peers in the developed world. [1]
1 - https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...
Please enumerate these instances and support the claim that in each of them mobility is reduced due to redistribution.
Without that, this sounds like subjective impression shaped by ideological preference being presented as if it were evidence for the ideological preference that produced it.
Much of Western-Europe show you otherwise, I'm not sure how you could have missed that?
> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility - as well as introduces a middleman (the redistributors that steal/war/lie/oppress), corruption, politics, and extreme inefficiencies.
Care to explain? Or are you just being childishly contrarian which your last sentence seem to suggest?
As long as there is a hierarchy, you cannot really have equality, sorry. You make humans more economically equal and you create an even worse situation where human hierarchy is based on family name, connections, genetics or just plain violence and social mobility would be even worse than it is now, where it is dictated by income and wealth.
Also your definition of meritocracy is contentious. For example you are saying, it is not meritocratic that a boy does not achieve his maximum potential because his parents could not afford to give him the best opportunities. But what if instead of comparing just one generation, we compare two or three? What if we compare their grandparents and their parents? Maybe the grandparents of the poor boy were better off but for whatever reason the wealth did not tickle down in sufficient quantities. Whereas maybe a boy who is richer today had poorer grandparents who worked really hard to make sure their grandchildren had the best opportunities. That looks like meritocracy to me.