Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Graham leaves out one crucial thing:

A more equal society is a better society. Always. This was borne out in the work of Wilkinson and Pickett for their book The Spirit Level.

You may have less technology. You may have less innovation. Tough. Creating more of what Earl Dunovant called "cute and useful monkey tricks with energy and matter" at the expense of your fellow man and the planet does not put you ahead, and societies should not seek to optimize for monkey tricks over the betterment of their fellow man.

Inequality (along with the environment) may be the defining issue of the twenty-first century, and once recognition of inequality and its consequences goes mainstream, laissez-faire capitalism will join royalism in the dustbin of discredited political philosophies.

View on HN

> A more equal society is a better society. Always.

If you can read Russian and aren't familiar with the concept of уравниловка, I suggest looking it up. My search on the English transliteration (uravnilovka) doesn't turn up good descriptions offhand.

If you can't read Russian, I'll summarize. It's basically the argument you're making: that everyone should be equal, and that the most expedient way to accomplish this is to drag down the people who stick up. Which is true: that _is_ the most expedient way to accomplish equality. Historically it also leads to everyone living in communal apartments and a stagnating economy that eventually causes your country to have a revolution because people get so fed up with it. It just takes several decades for the pernicious effects of stifling economic growth and innovation to show up.

Now maybe you didn't really mean "always" when you said "always", of course. Maybe you meant "keeping all sorts of things equal, more equality is preferable". I may be able to buy that, but then you need to convincingly argue that those things can be kept equal.

(We could also have an argument about the data cherrypicking and other shenanigans in the book you mention, but I don't think it's really all that germane here, since you're making a blanket argument which has simple historical counterexamples.)

No he doesn't leave this out because as he says, he is just explaining things, not giving an opinion.

Oh great lets get back into the trees. Then we will be very advanced society.

This is not what OP is saying.

This is exactly what he was saying. I just put it this way to show how absurd his idea is if we follow through with it till the end.

Nonsense, please quit that strawmanning. Reducing the pace of consumer technological progress to the benefit of more equality would very likely beneficial for humanity; and it does not imply returning to underdeveloped times (assuming it would reduce it significantly in the first place).

Oh of course you self labeled savior of humanity and self taught economist would know how much to reduce "consumer technological progress" and can decide for others what they need and want? Do we need internet? Cars? Washing machines? TVs? Drugs? No? Where to stop? If we don't stop we don't need anything and can go back to the trees and that's how this bullshit leftist nonsense works out logically if we follow through with it. You just hypocritically wrote that we don't need to consume and don't need to advance technologically with your computer. Ironic.

> Reducing the pace of consumer technological progress to the benefit of more equality

Was tried, more or less successfully, in the Soviet Union. People were not happy with the results in terms of access to consumer goods and living conditions. Been there, done that, don't want to do it again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com