

A Cultural Thought Experiment - russell
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html#more

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JoshTriplett
Every time I see a reference to the meme that the top M% of the population has
N% of the total wealth for some N > M, I always want to point out "Inequality
in Equalland" ([http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-
equ...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-10-inequality-in-
equalland.html)), a thought experiment which shows that even in a society
equal to the point of parody, 20% of the population would hold at least 64% of
the wealth just by saving for retirement over the course of their careers.

It makes slightly more sense to talk about income inequality, and much of the
article looks at what a top-tier _income_ looks like, but it makes little to
no sense to gripe about wealth inequality.

~~~
Symmetry
Even beyond income, I think that what we really ought to concentrate on is
inequality of consumption. If some person is immensely rich but lives modestly
and either gives most of their income to charity or reinvests it I don't
really see how they're meaningfully contributing to inequality. And if they
just pile the money under their mattress we might as well just print money
instead of taxing theirs, the net effect on everyone else is the same but the
miser gets whatever emotional gratification they're seeking.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I agree with the first half of what you said; getting bothered about income
seems like sour grapes, but I don't see anything wrong with finding
wastefulness tacky. (With the caveat that "wastefulness" remains subjective.)

However, I disagree with your claim of "just print money"; doing so devalues
currency for everyone, including people genuinely saving money for the future.

~~~
Symmetry
If we wanted to maximize the value of our money, we could straightforwardly
start reducing the number of dollars and introduce widespread deflation. What
we do instead is try keep inflation predictable, so that interest rates on
savings and debts can easily factor in inflation and neither savers nor
borrowers are treated unfairly.

Getting back to the case in question, the link between printing money and
inflation isn't magical, the mechanism that turns more money into inflation is
people using that money to bid up the prices of goods and services. But the
money that was in the mattress wasn't being spent on anything. So both taxing
that money away and printing new money result in exactly the same amount of
new money chasing goods and services.

You don't have to take my word for it. During '09 the supply of dollars
increased by a pretty sizable amount, but we actually managed to have negative
inflation because the Fed's interest on reserves policies managed to keep all
that new money in the vaults of large banks rather than in circulation.

------
russell
Charlie asks a variant of one of my favorite thought experiments: what is
society like when everyone lives like the 1% of today, affordable housing,
universal health care, robotic servants, cures for nearly all of today's
diseases, cheap customize mass production, a society where only the 5% make a
meaningful contribution to society (designers, artists, entertainers, writers,
scientists, etc).

One theme he doesnt mention is what is the road there like. What happens when
all the fry cooks are unemployed because of fast food robots, maybe 30% of the
middle class is suddenly unemployed?

~~~
bluekeybox
I don't know what it would be like for others, but if the society was 100%
equal and egalitarian, I would be bored to death.

It's the same old question as: what do people do when they get to Heaven?
Right now I have something to strive for and somewhere to get to. If I got the
same share of food/amenities/service as everyone else regardless of how hard I
work and how smart I am, I would kill myself. Either that or I would be
transformed into a pathetic measly creature which has near zero impact on the
entropy of the Universe.

~~~
zerostar07
Are you sure that's not the result of social conditioning? Surely, humans,
esp. males have an innate aggressive/competitive behavior but it hasn't always
been the case that people want to be compensated for their work with material
goods to be satisfied. Michelangelo was rich yet he barely ate, Einstein
wasn't rich but i doubt he was unhappy. Someone from a former communist
country could chime in about the differences of an egalitarian society.

~~~
bluekeybox
> Someone from a former communist country could chime in

I am from a former communist country. If you ask my opinion, communism was the
most repulsive and despicable experiment in the history of mankind. Nazism was
communism under a different name. The way people bonded with each other was
through vile and resentful hate of the westernized upper class (communism) or
the Jews and the British (nazism). Schoolteachers brainwashed children from
the early age to become haters as well. Both were populist movements enabled
by "liminal" conditions of post-WWI period and spearheaded by ruthless
Machiavellian manipulators of public opinion who harnessed the newly emergent
mass-media to appeal to the disgruntled poorly educated populace lacking a
better leader. See any Dostoyevsky's novel where he portrays the character
known as the "Underground Man" for a better background, as well as the
following links:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leaders...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality#Imitation.2C_leadership.2C_and_the_role_of_the_trickster),
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0458375/>.

You introduce a dichotomy between wealth (aka Bill Gates) and fame (aka
Michelangelo, Einstein). It's a false dichotomy. As PG wrote, money is not
wealth. The way money works is that it makes you important in the eyes of a
number of people. The way fame works is it makes you important in the eyes of
a number of people as well, perhaps a different _kind_ of people, but the
underlying logic is the same. It's not one against the other, and whoever
ardently defends that idea carries an agenda. Ultimately both money and fame
are tokens for power. If you were infinitely powerful, you would need neither.

------
pnathan
To put another way:

Supposing everyone is 'rich' (ie, can sustain heavy-duty research into space
colonization supply chains without beggaring nations), what incentive do
people have to go on the highly risky business of space colonization? You've
got to have that itch to hit the frontier and keep going.

Personally, I have no great desire (today) to go wandering around the stars
and be involved in sifting data points regarding exoplanets for years while
stuck in a small enclosed space. Leaving aside the pay and risk , I'd go
flippin' nuts in such an environment. Other people can sustain that life -
today's submariners and Antarctic researchers.

What I'd leap at would be the chance to homestead another Terra-like planet as
a farmer/rancher/etc. That's its own form of high-risk grunt work, but the
thought of exploring and walking about on an unexplored planet with clean air
sounds like a great life. Better than cube work, at least. :D

~~~
cstross
Alas, even given a reasonable form of interstellar travel for human
physiological constraints, the chances of finding a target planet with an
oxygen atmosphere but no pre-existing biosphere is very low. And the question
of human food chain compatibility with alien biospheres is ... well, there's a
very good chance that _they_ would find _us_ crunchy to snack upon, rather
than vice versa. (I'm thinking at a microbiological level. H. G. Wells hit the
hammer on the nail with "War of the Worlds" in more ways than one.)

~~~
Cushman
The idea of finding a ready-made habitable planet somewhere out there isn't
science fiction, it's pure fantasy.

You don't colonize the new world by paddling across the Atlantic in a dugout
canoe with a few of your friends, expecting to rent an apartment in midtown
Manhattan. We have a _lot_ of work left to do on this planet first.

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JWLong
I understand that this is just a thought experiment, but what's the point if
we're going to start with the assumption that if we found $100 lying on the
ground, our actions are merely determined by our current socio-economic
status?

Not all homeless men would do the same thing... some of them would spend it
trying to create a better tomorrow, but many would spend it (for a myriad of
reasons) on "right now". I believe that this fact would continue to influence
us even if we all "lived like the 1%".

------
gbog
This guy failed to see that the bright shiny depicted future is not WEIRD, but
AEIRD (Asian).

