Most public places used to have bathrooms which anyone could walk into but no one could easily roll into on a wheelchair. That was equal opportunity.
Nowadays many places have been mandated to have bathrooms such that anyone who uses the space can access a bathroom without difficulty. That is an enforced equal outcome.
Which is the correct approach?
No, it's an extremely relevant debate because a certain political faction has been trying to redefine "equality" from its original definition of "equal opportunity" to a completely different one of "equal outcomes".
> Which is the correct approach?
This is a false dichotomy. You can want equal opportunity in most places, and equal outcome in a select few (just like you can want freedom of speech for everything but a select few edge cases).
This is the correct way to do it, actually - enforced equal outcome is inextricably linked with tyranny and oppression, and invariably results in massive loss of human life when it has been ((ostensibly) attempted to be) implemented in the real world.
If you have to pick one, tell me, which is better - for tens of thousands of handicapped people to not be able to access some public bathrooms, or for tens of millions to die in another Cultural Revolution?
Imagine if half of all gold on earth was already mined in the first 4 years (and over 99% in the first 27 years) of gold mining millenia ago.
Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.
If I have to believe the below articles, miners own less than 10% of supply, so the gold comparison is misplaced:
What I mean by equal opportunity is that Bitcoin treats every wallet owner the same and does not favor any elite or closed group in any way. There's not been a "hidden" period where insiders could jump in, whilst others could not.
That's much different from almost any other crypto, where the development team pre-mines supply and rewards them to themselves before opening sales of their tokens.
Likewise, owning lots of Bitcoin does not reward additional Bitcoin. This rich get richer effect is simply not there. Although rich people do tend to get richer in other ways, but that's not Bitcoin's fault.
This too is different from PoS crypto, where owning lots of crypto rewards you even more of the token.
Sure, and that's fine for equity but really bad for currency.
> Whilst anybody is forgiven for not knowing about the very start of BTC at some obscure mailing list, since then there has been a decade of mainstream media exposure, a huge amount of time to acquire BTC. Failing to make use of this enormous time window is on the individual.
Again, totally fine for equity, shameful for currency.
Fairness and equality are different. Imagine 2 people of different heights who can't see over a wall - equality is giving them both a ladder of exactly the same height even if that means just the tallest person can now see over the wall, while fairness is giving them each potentially different height ladders so they can both see over the wall.
The PoW equivalent (not factoring in premine) would be to give the first person the tallest ladder, and each successive person vanishingly small ladders, which doesn't really come under fair or equal. PoW with premine puts you in front of the wall so you don't need a ladder, plus it gives you a pile of ladders which you can sell to the people behind the wall, and maybe even some bricks so you can arbitrarily make the wall higher if you want.
The above poster was right — it's fair if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
I've seen this whole ladder analogy commonly used in radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts, used to reframe discrimination in a positive light.
That doesn't imply simplistically equal treatment. If the definition was "equal treatment" that's what it would say instead of "impartial and just".
Impartial and just and no favoritism or discrimination isn't meant to literally complain "hey, you're discriminating in favor of car crash survivors getting physical therapy, that's not fair, everyone should get the same physical therapy".
The definition probably would be better to use the term "prejudice" instead of "discrimination". There's no reality in which people see fairness in absolute lack of discrimination. It's fair to discriminate based on something like medical diagnosis or any other sort of fair judgment of situations.
The false dichotomy of opportunity vs outcomes is stupid. We can't make true equality of either, and we can care about both. And just saying that you see extremists use an analogy is not a reason to reject an analogy. Extremists also wear pants or sleep at night. Anyway, an absolutist no-discrimination view is about as extreme as we can find.
I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.
FWIW in the "Oxford Dictionary of English" that's built into iOS, if I look up "fairness" I get
> 1. impartial and just treatment or behaviour without favouritism or discrimination.
> [...]
(the other definitions refer to pale skin or beauty)
It sounds like your definition is more of a list of synonyms — I was using the current Oxford dictionary available on iOS and Google.
> I'm not an expert on "radical socialist, communist, CRT-type Instagram accounts", but I'd have thought they would be more into equality rather than fairness, e.g. everyone gets the same pay irrespective of how much effort they put in or the quality of results.
Yes, exactly that, and that's what your comment above was doing, no? You reframed fairness as meaning equality of outcome, and framed equality as meaning equality of opportunity. (Equality of outcome = same end-height, equality of opportunity = same ladder height)
We have had repeated instances throughout history of groups of people practicing common ownership, and they do seem to work reasonably well. (I completely grant they aren't super-popular, but, again, I'm not advocating change, I'm trying to understand why you think this qualifies as "impossible")
What do you think prevents this on a planet-level scale?
If everybody has the exact same amount of wealth, it means you've decoupled wealth from anything that is variable, most importantly human individual qualities like risk taking, hard work, talent, brilliance, persistence.
In a world where you can't better yourself economically, most incentives to innovate or produce would cease to exist. To still get a functioning society, a deeply oppressive regime is the only likely answer. After all, why would anybody work?
I suppose you're right that it's not impossible in the short term, just not sustainable in the long term. If nothing matters at all and is pointless, societies' output will degrade over time until the point it is unbearable.
That said, this is current thinking. It's possible to imagine a different equal wealth world that is futuristic. If we get so advanced as to achieve technical abundance, any citizen on the planet would have a high living standard, say upper middle class. Which satisfies almost everybody. And the standard is guaranteed over time, there's no insecurity to it. And those wanting even more things, have everything at their finger tips. Usage based, not owning things.
In such a world, money becomes meaningless. It's no longer a way to reflect scarcity, a way to secure your personal future, or a differentiator of status. Everybody is materially equal at a high and lasting standard. Differentiation might then be found intellectually or in social status. But probably the robots have taken over by then.
We also have repeated instances throughout history of groups claiming to try to implement common ownership, and instead killing millions and installing tyrannical governments (see: most communist revolutions), of consistently larger scale (orders of magnitude) than the successes.
Historically, it's far more probable that such a common ownership experiment will result in death and tyranny (and not actual common ownership!) than a success - and, given the relative difference in scale between the successes and failures, there's a strong argument to be made that as the scale goes up, the probability of tyranny goes up.
This is one of the justifications for it being impossible in a practical sense (yeah, it's annoying that there's more than one definition for "impossible"). It's a fact that power attracts corruption, and it's also a fact that planet-level-scale common ownership would require more power to implement than any government has achieved so far. So, while not "impossible" in the hard-science sense, it's improbable (with a correspondingly large chance of a catastrophically bad alternative) to the point that it's not reasonable to attempt.
That said, your comment is a measured and thoughtful answer to a potentially-inflammatory topic, and I hope that my response is equally thoughtful.
I do hear the "scale" concern, and it's interesting to think about it. I.e. for me, it immediately pops the question "why is scale a problem for common ownership, but not for individual ownership". I suspect - without having any proof - that scale is the thing that makes the transition impossible, not that it's an inherent problem for community property itself. Practically, the outcome is indeed the same - if you can't safely transition, the end state is impossible, even if it itself would be a stable state.
This also raises the question of democracy & unequal ownership as a possible stable state - Plato was certainly concerned enough about it, and history has done nothing to discourage that belief since then. There are plenty of rather deadly examples of failed non-communist states.
If nothing else, your comment (and the subthread in general) has lead me to a rather interesting paper: "Social instability and redistribution of income", by Josef Falkinger. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762... (Yeah, as usual, paywalled. Elsevier)
It's a deliberate attempt at modelling outcomes based on income distribution - which I think attempts to get to the heart of the "impossible" issue. It only tackles income, not wealth, but there's a rich set of references :)
It's "fair" if you're referring to equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.