>nepotism is a natural mammalian instinct, it propels us to take care of our children
Plenty of primates and human groups have shared child rearing in a non-familial way. Tribes were not aligned exclusively on family lines, and "it takes a village" was a literal statement.
Humans have an instinct to take care of babies, not just our own progeny. Our pets literally evolved to take advantage of that. A cat is not at all your genetic family member, and yet will still trigger child rearing instincts in tons of people.
This idea that we are only programmed to take care of direct genetic relatives is incorrect and a societal choice, not a scientific one.
Yes! Thank you so much for pointing this out! Our ideas about the nuclear family probably derive from the invention of agriculture, not from the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been in this earth.
It's individualism vs collectivism (if I got my terms right), with one side being "got mine, fuck you", whereas the other says that we're better together.
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.
There were different kinds of kings though - before a certain point in the history of most countries kings had to actively fight and wage war to achieve and maintain their positions. Over time this became more of a position where the king would deserve their positions simply by having ancestors who were "stupendous badasses" but otherwise actually had to do very little.
Early medieval kings - like those of the Franks, the Visigoths or the Nordic people - were more often than not elected for life.
Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
In practice, even later English kings were effectively elected and could have their terms ended early. Taking a few Plantagenet examples, the nobles imprisoned Edward II as retaliation for the plots of Hugh Despenser, and then the king died mysteriously (adverb used ironically). Edward III was far more popular with the nobles due to his many victories in Scotland and France. His successor, Richard II, tried to make a lasting peace with France, but that was much less popular with the most powerful burghers and nobles. So Richard II was deposed, imprisoned, and died mysteriously. No doubt if they had security cameras in those days, they would have mysteriously ceased functioning at some critical moment. So ended the Plantagenets and began the line of Lancastrian kings.
I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
It probably didn't help Edward II that he had Robert the Bruce in Scotland to fight who was most certainly an actual stupendous badass but even he was employed on condition that:
"if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us as our King"
The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
Politics is tricky because non wealthy very much support the wealthy politically. Agree or disagree it’s just reality in modern politics.
As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
You brought up politics in relation to different economic class.
My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence.
Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution.
> wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich
Replace a few words and:
> height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall
PS: To be clear the political interests of a group exist even if the group doesn’t map to a specified political party or ideology. Groups have specific interests independent of which other stances they take. We don’t think of short people in political terms, but there would be a real outrage if gas stations put their credit card readers 7 feet off the ground.
HN users can write anything they want, but that doesn’t automatically imply what they wrote is credible or must be assumed to be true for all subsequent replies…
Hence why I wrote ‘side’ in quotation marks, because I didn’t fully agree with the original parent comment’s characterization.
e.g. HN user 1 can say X part of the population is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of blue cheese and Y part is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of cheddar cheese. But future replies by HN user 2 and user 3 are free to treat that as all meaningless gibberish.
I read this comment a few minutes after it was posted and checked just now and you completely changed this comment to something else… I’m not going to engage with someone who does that without even putting an Edit: tag.
The site encourages people to delete unproductive comments that haven’t been responding to as it improves the reading experiences for 3rd parties. Which is one of the reasons there’s a big old delete button and you can edit posts for a full hour.
Adding “Edit:” is important for clarity when a post has been responded to, without that it’s just clutter.
To me, nepotism is a classic principal-agent problem.
Imagine you own a business, but you hire me to manage it.
If I negotiate a great salary and use it to get my kids the best education, help them get a house, fund them through unpaid internships? Not nepotism.
If you, the owner, say you want your dumb kid paid six figures for a do-nothing job? Eh, it's your money.
But if I want my dumb kid paid six figures of your money? So I decide we need a senior executive social media manager to look after our twitter account, or something? Probably you're not going to like me ripping you off.
Yes, plus sometimes the "owner" is a group of people. Then it gets more difficult for them to coordinate against the agent.
If you take six figures out of my money, I have a strong incentive to find out. If you take six figures from a treasure chest that belongs to million people, most of them will decide it is not worth their time to investigate.
It also creates conflict of interest problems among the owners. How do you ensure that only your share of the business profit is getting siphoned off to support your kid? Does each owner get one fail-son slot?
Nepotism is mostly a scaling problem. If you have a decent family and aren't an idiot about it - then for smaller stakes, and over shorter time-spans, nepotism usually works extremely well. And there is precious little damage to society, if Chuck hires his son Sam to drive one of his Chilly Chuck's Ice Cream Trucks for the summer.
But scale up enough, and nepotism looks both idiotic and evil. The "overhead" of finding, vetting, and orienting new talent - not meaningfully related to you - is relatively fixed. Vs. the chance that Albert Einstein's son is also a Nobel-level physicist is pretty damn low.
[Added] The top end of the nepotism disaster scale, of course, is having hereditary government leadership. So when "noble blood" yet again proves itself piss-poor, the go-to ways to replace the ruler are often murder, mayhem, and/or war.
So what? I don't make decisions, and I don't think society should make decisions, based on "mammalian instinct". My standards are a little higher than that.
It's a common, but bizarre way to try to argue something is inevitable. You don't have to act like a cow, or even a chimpanzee - if someone says you do, it's not a compliment.
> it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts
It reduces outcomes and fairness because productive work is shifted to unproductive people who lack merit.
but it has a negative implicit meaning because institutional power should somehow transcend lowly animal instincts (or something like that)