Redefining Work
medium.com
medium.com
Is religion the answer to questions of inequality? Historically speaking, probably not on its own. However, it certainly informed most of the larger solutions we have today.
Arguing about the distinction between "purpose" and "function" of evolved features is a useless game of word semantics.
BTW, I am not religious per se, but I do meditate every day. I like my spirituality unorganized.
Also see this hilarious "secular sermon": https://vimeo.com/10601416
As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The divide between winners and losers grows constantly. Losers multiply as winning behaviors are replicated in the smaller winners’ circles and losing behaviors are replicated in the bigger losers’ circles. This is why, in the end, the winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the divide of inequality, the bigger the price that finally has to be paid. The winners end up having to take care of the losers. Before that two totally different cultures are formed in society, as is happening in many places today.
I believe the issue that needs to be tackled is not income inequality but access to resources inequality, resources being health, education and so on. As long as a part of society doesn’t have reasonable access to those resources they’ll never be able to contribute to a bigger wealth pie.
This is important because I do agree that some people prefer to take risks on their careers and that those should get a bigger reward. Not necessarily in terms of money, but IT IS OK if it is in terms of money. After all, entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to make an impact on society.
The next part of the article distills the idea that a good way to reduce inequality is to promote cooperation and relationships over individuals and companies racing for a single prize. It’s a nice concept but difficult to translate into a series of real steps that we can take now.
Again, I think a less ideological first step is ensuring everyone in a society has reasonable access to resources, allowing them to make conscious decisions of how to drive their professional careers and have a minimum understanding of how those with political and economical relevance use their influence.
Naturally, achieving such a thing isn’t easy as governments are corrupt and a big chunk of those with economical and political relevance now don’t way their “free” wealth pie to end (and those are not startup entrepreneurs). But to complement what Esko said, there is still a middle fragment of society (we here on HN for example) that has power to drive this change, especially with the advent of technology and means to easily talk about it.
The dream of stamping out inequality is built on the factually incorrect notion that we are all born with equal abilities. It's much easier to explain outcome differences as ability differences than to come up with increasingly unlikely forms of oppression.
As technology improves, low-IQ contributions become increasingly less valuable relative to machines, increasing inequality.
The challenge is to redistribute resources fairly once the concept of 'working' is no longer pertinent.
The rest depends on the definition of 'contribution'. A grandmother involved in raising grandkids is a significant contribution that is uncompensated at present. We could fix things like that. Definitely room for improvement in our antiquated economic system.
If there is an equality of access to resources (not only learning) the degree of income inequality will eventually be balanced. The problem, again, is that there is an increasing portion of society that is born intelligent but never able to develop it, put it in practice and finally contribute to the bigger wealth pie.
Income and wealth inequality will and should persist.
In this environment the best we can to is provide somewhat consistent access to resources to encourage the development human ability in all its varied forms.
Science tells us that IQ is a general mental cognitive factor; tasks can be more or less heavily g-weighted, but intelligence is strongly correlated to all sorts of things, like mortality (inversely), lifetime income, accomplishment, marriage stability, and so on.
Try again.
Please also edit the incivility out of your comments. There's no need for a nasty swipe like "Try again."
Which specific facts are inappropriate to mention on HN?
Okay, so zero-sum games and scarcity economics are based on the idea that resources/valuables are limited and I'm all in favor of agreeing that there is no end to resources, creativity, or human sympathy. And I would even be willing to take that a step further and say that, no matter what the problem, there will be people willing to devote their time to it.
But the crux is not available resource: the key is defining something as a problem. Are schools the problem, or poverty? Are broken windows the problem, or mandatory minimums? Take away the assumptions from this article, and you aren't left with much more than a half-reasoned book report. I would be much more inspired if the conclusion of this article was something like "nuanced solutions are the only option" rather than what was presented: "be excellent to each other".
This is, in practice, what we already have.
Two companies in the same space, A and B, compete. Initially, both grow into their space. Eventually, one does better than the other, and B fails. B dies. What happens? A goes and hires the best parts of B, or acquires them, or many variations on that theme. Most of the remainder go find a job somewhere else, perhaps in an entirely different economic sector. The employees of B are not cast into the outer darkness never to compete again, to starve and die.
Capitalism competes at the level of companies, and companies live in a highly Darwinian live-or-die environment. But the people making up those companies actually live on a different level.
Combine that with ensuring that your business environment makes it easy to start a new company, and the process continues. (Meaning that one of the key things to worry about is ensuring that we do not accidentally destroy that property.)
In fact that's the core brilliance of a limited liability company; all societies and cultures, whether they like it or not, are Darwinian, because we live in a rather harsh Darwinian universe of limited knowledge and resources. Many other social structures have been developed to directly cover it up or deny it, and in the process, fail miserably. It can not be covered up or denied. Since it isn't even caused by a human process, it doesn't care if you vilify it, and it is not amenable to politicking. You can't shame Darwinian competition into not existing any more.
But you can move it. You can move it into entities that are not human. You can move it into things that, when they die, mean a lot of people may feel really bad, but then they by and large go get another job or perhaps retire or worst case live on the largesse of the social safety net that a capitalistic society is wealthy enough to provide, but they don't actually die. You can get the Darwinian benefits of competition increasing fitness, while not actually killing the components of the system. Removing the Darwinian benefits from the system...
... well, actually, it's not like we need to hypothesize about what happens. Have we not already witnessed entities that are so large that they internally function without effective competition and, hypothetically, nothing but "cooperation" inside them, transcending the "system"? Old-school IBM. Many governments. We do not associate these systems with producing paradisaical cornucopias of happiness and resources. We associate them with massive resource wastage, favoritism, law-breaking, and extensive internal infighting. "Cooperation" unconstrained by competition has a concrete historical track record of ceasing to be "cooperation".
If you just "cooperate", you need a mechanism to remove those cooperatives that aren't working properly. People living under the shield of the current system and mistakenly diagnose what the system is actually shielding you from as being caused by the system will always find these methods distasteful. But they are necessary lest the whole system dissolve into useless, wasteful flab. As in biology, so in economic life.