A Philosopher Redefining Equality
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I wonder if Anderson supports an open-borders immigration policy. By her argument, a free society should be equally obligated to someone unlucky enough to be born in Congo, and should afford her all the same freedoms to live, work and participate in a well functioning free society.
I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality. If she isn't calling for an immediate end to border enforcement, I wonder how she reconciles that with her espoused moral philosophy.
One could rationally want the best for their country/society, but not for everybody outside of it (e.g. if giving that free-pass-for-all access can decline the prospects of one's society more than the free-pass-for-those-already-in can help it, because of the population increase, different backgrounds that would need to overcome, different religious and political preferences that a mass of outsiders could impose, etc).
Her moral philosophy seems predicated on the idea that everyone is deserving of certain rights. If we're going to deny these rights to some people on the basis of birth-location, why not deny the same rights on the basis of other criteria such as race, gender, intelligence, physical health, etc
> e.g. if giving that free-pass-for-all access can decline the prospects of one's society more than the free-pass-for-those-already-in can help it
I agree completely with the above, but that's because the above is a utilitarian argument and I believe in utilitarianism. If you were to ask Anderson though, she would likely reject utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.
Was that something she actually said or just something you inferred?
It seems pretty clear that she thinks that each society has an obligation towards its members but I didn't her mention anything about obligations societies have towards non-members.
I very much doubt that she's against, say, the right of asylum, but there's nothing there that I can see that implies that she believes France has an equal responsibility to provide for Chinese citizens as it does towards its own.
It's perfectly rational to say:
a) I want the best for my country and fellow citizens
b) I think the best outcome for (a) comes if all citizens in my country are given X rigts etc.
There's no need to "mean everybody" for this to be a perfectly rational philosophy.
If anything, your extra requirement that she has to "mean everybody" seems to come from a moralistic or christian source, rather than rationality.
Like her, I think China should do something about its wealth inequality. Like her, I don't the Czech republic really needs to get involved.
It is, as you say, an "important distinction".
It implies that both China and the Czech Republic are obligated to level out arbitrarily enforced class divisions in their own societies.
She used the word "society" a lot, not "world".
So no, the requirement definitely is not there.
Everyone in a society. Does she feel that way about people not in a society?
Is denying rights and denying entry the same? I find that belief self-centered - is <your country> the only one able to confer rights?
We don't have to deny them to anybody. Just to ask that those other countries it give them to their citizens, not having us give them to them.
Not to mention, those in those other countries might even value other things.
Well clearly the girl in Congo is born into a country that is not able/willing to grant her all the freedoms that Anderson is championing. We can blame Congo for her predicament all we want, but that doesn't change the fact that she's being deprived of the freedoms that we have the ability to grant. So why should we not grant her those freedoms?
The whole point of foundational moral philosophies is that they should be applied universally. I'm very suspicious of moral philosophies that are applicable only to your in-group, and not your out-group. If the philosophy is so sound, why shouldn't it be applied towards everyone?
At which point you find yourself inventing a whole other moral philosophy, in order to explain why XYZ people should be in your in-group and ABC people should not. And yet another moral philosophy which determines what is right/wrong when interacting with those in your out-group. And then another moral philosophy which explains why you need 3 different disparate moral philosophies, instead of just applying one of them universally.
With that in mind, I do support an open border. Why wouldn't you? A closed border denies freedom of movement under arbitrary restrictions of "productivity" (or random lottery, which is just as arbitrary), aka you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish? Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?
I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse. And lets be clear, most western nations aren't shooting people trying to cross the border on sight, and usually have some sort of asylum process (that may take years and years, however). But the limitation of movement itself is also a human rights abuse, in my mind. German families were cut off from each other, unable to see relatives trapped on the other side of the wall. The Stasi secret police were able to apprehend and torture people unable to escape because of the wall -- a closed border makes authoritarian regimes more powerful. The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path? Don't we supposedly value freedom above all else? Didn't Franklin say "He who would sacrifice freedom for a little temporary safety deserves neither"? How is a closed border compatible with that sentiment?
Westerners didn't ask permission to invade the Congo, or India, or hundreds of other places in the global south, and we certainly didn't get visas before stripping those countries of natural resources and their cultural heritage (see: every item in the British Museum that they refuse to return), and then we turn around and say hey you can't come here without our permission? How hypocritical is that?
And lets not kid ourselves that closed borders keeps "the bad people" out -- people who want to commit crimes generally don't care about following immigration laws. They'll dig tunnels under walls, pilot submarines full of cocaine past the Coast Guard (this really happens), and extort desperate people trying to escape violence and crushing poverty.
So yes, I do think a closed border is immoral. If it means more strain on welfare programs in the short run as people try to start new lives here, well, if we can afford trillions to bomb the middle east into the stone age, we can probably afford that.
For example, the Berlin wall divided a city that was otherwise ethnically, culturally, geographically, historically a single unit. This is not comparable to a national border in any sense. So why make the comparison?
Past injustices like colonialism, whether good, bad, or evil, justified or otherwise, have no bearing on present policies except perhaps as an illustration of the dangers of cultural disunity. In any case, if they make an policy argument, it is for more greatly closed borders. Much more. With machine guns.
Likewise, the effectiveness of a physical border is technical problem--not a moral or rhetorical point of any sort. You can't say, "ladders defeat walls, therefore walls are immoral." Silly argument.
I guess my point is--if you want open borders for X reason, just say 'X'. For instance, open borders might be economically advantageous to you or people of the group you identify with. That's rational.
Because the influx of people will be huge and will only stop if the incentive to move disappears, i.e. if the quality of life in your country is approximately equal to the quality of life in the worst country on the planet. Furthermore, it's not at all clear that this is a net positive if you take a consequentialist view, because your plan will probably vastly reduce scientific and technological progress by turning the countries with the highest output into failed states.
If you truly believe in equality you could give almost all of your income away. Taking a moral stance while collectivising the downside is easy, particularly when you know that it won't happen anyway. It's freeloading on the people who are willing to take a non-virtuous stance.
On top of that the US is already a poor place to live if you lack education, wealth, and connections. Our vast homeless population and minimal safty net shows just how difficult it would be to show up in the US with little more than the clothes on your back. Which is probably why on net ~1.5 million illegal immigrants left the US over the last decade.
PS: Counties don’t exist on a single universally agreed upon yardstick and a clear best one.
Maybe that's because of the current restrictive immigration policies?
Which is probably why on net ~1.5 million illegal immigrants left the US over the last decade
a wide range of sources
You will find that your "wide range of sources" is simply Pew and/or their underlying cherry-picked sources. You have to look at where the numbers come from and the differing criteria for counting outflow vs. inflow.
mind you, we may need to rethink how to best do that without being imposing, but that is something we can workout.
poverty levels have reduced worldwide according to statistics, so it is possible. it will just take some more effort to get there.
How certain are you that open borders won't result in tremendous downsides? Let's say it doesn't work out and society actually gets much worse as a result - how do you fix the problem? Virtually any bad policy can be "fixed" (either retroactively or going forward) via voting, updating laws, etc. You can't fix "150 million people moved to the US and ruined it", if that is what happens.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/153992/150-million-adults-world...
i find the idea that 150 million people would "ruin" the us to be laughable. when has immigration ever made the us worse? why do you think immigrants are worse citizens than people born here? if anything, people who want to move here are motivated people who truly believe in the promise of america -- the exact kind of people we do want.
Why is a transition period needed? If you believe that, then fundamentally we agree, we just differ on the rate at which immigrants should be let in. Why not just let literally anyone who wants to live here move here right now?
I don't necessarily think they will ruin the US, but I certainly don't know it with the degree of certainty required for such an irreversible decision.
how does our stance differ? i want tk borders to transition to completely open and you don't... i think it's obvious
If a large number of impoverished, unhealthy, or uneducated people moved to a country it could overwhelm the resources available to help them.
Increased population could overwhelm the availability of things like good jobs and housing.
Open borders may not be reciprocated.
Many people could move to the country for economic reasons but be uninterested in or unwilling to become part of the country's culture.
Many people could move to the country that do not value norms such as democracy, freedom, equality, etc.
There is a limit to how quickly society can adapt to cultural change. If too many people with a dramatically different culture moved to a country, it could cause unrest.
In an ideal world, people should not be discriminated against because of their birth-location. The fact that we do, is indeed a great injustice.
However, as a utilitarian, I'm opposed to open borders for utilitarian reasons. Having unchecked immigration would destroy the culture and institutions of the successful societies. They would lose the very culture and institutions that made them successful and attractive to immigrants in the first place.
I think that successful countries have a moral obligation to absorb as many immigrants as they can assimilate - no more and no less.
Are you counting Native Americans as a "faction"? That seems like an odd definition of the word "faction".
Are you referring to the Civil War? That seems like an odd definition of the word "genocide".
Are you referring to the current state of politics? Also not a genocide and, please God, it will continue to remain not a genocide.
What exactly did you have in mind in your statement?
I just wanted gowld to clarify what, exactly, his/her point was, because it seemed to be rather incoherent. Was gowld talking about Native Americans? I honestly can't tell.
I think it's pretty obvious that they were talking about the "manifest destiny" genocide of native people, considering that "freeing up" that land was considered pivotal to "completing america's destiny". though i guess they could have been talking about the genocide of african enslaved people through forced labor. or the genocide of people in the Philippines during the Spanish American war, which birthed the American empire. lots of genocide to choose from, actually, so i guess your confusion is understandable.
i have no opinion in this argument, i am just trying to understand yours
Is the Europe reference to Germany? I could kind of see that (genocide, yes, and also a "faction"), but tarring all of Europe with it is rather a stretch. The claim seems to be that European nations achieved ethnic unity via genocide, which seems to me to be rather a stretch historically.
gowld seems to be taking behavior that has occurred at times, to the shame of both the US and Europe, and making it the defining element of their history. But I'm trying not to accuse gowld of selectively reading history before I'm sure that's what he/she is trying to say. I'm trying to find out what that opaque little paragraph actually was supposed to say, so that I then can accurately criticize it, if it needs criticism.
native americans were certainly a different group of people than european settlers. i think that is clear enough.
but i am not a native english speaker, so maybe my understanding of faction is different from yours, and you define faction in a way that is incompatible with its application here.
however for the sake of discussion i'd like to ask if that is important? isn't the definition that should be applied into the context of this discussion rather clear?
i mean, go back to the original statement and replace faction with something else:
Successful society is usually predicated on genocide to remove dissent between groups.
it doesn't seem to me that that would change anything in that statement. we still don't know exactly which groups are actually referred to.
faction, group, party, nation, ethnicity, opponents, whatever it seems you got hung up on that word when you really want to know more specifically which examples are being referred to.
And, to me, the Native Americans were not part of US society. US society was a European society carved out of land that had previously belonged to Native Americans.
In the same way, when the US fought the Germans in World War II, you wouldn't say that the Germans were a faction. They were a foreign entity.
You might also note that the US negotiated treaties with the Native Americans. You do treaties with foreign entities, not with factions within your own society.
I have to steelman this position with something now:
If you have a country which accepts broad civil rights for sexual minorities, and you have a large influx of people coming into your country who prefer few or no civil rights for sexual minorities, what happens when you have enough immigrants to force a vote on rights for sexual minorities? Don't tell me that can't happen; ultimately, there's always a threshold beyond which the government loses legitimacy if it refuses to put certain things to a ballot, and by "government" I mean "ruling party or coalition" if you're lucky.
If I were a sexual minority, I'd see border restrictions as being an existential issue.
People who come to the US almost universally accept American values after a generation. And considering large proportions of the US believe LGBT people don't deserve to get married or adopt children, and several trans women were savagely beaten last month in my city by some white-bread born in america nazis, that many people born in this country think doctors should be able to deny care to LGBT people based on their religious beliefs -- meanwhile everyone I know who's immigrated from a different country has been nothing but wonderful to me -- I would argue that believing immigrants will somehow reverse progress on civil rights is ridiculous and not justified by the facts.
You aren't making your own case very well.
I don't really have a strong opinion on the topic of immigration in general, but I don't think it's very fair to look at a country or culture that has spent centuries fighting for its survival and say, "Well, your historical connection to this place and country is now meaningless in the face of global capitalism."
Consider the case of Poland. The country has a pretty brutal recent history: dozens of wars, uprisings, border changes, and other chaos over the last 250-300 years. Many, if not most, of the people fighting against the oppression were doing so with the expectation that they’d be building a future free country for themselves and their family. More broadly, for their culture.
If suddenly Poland were composed of X group of people that had zero relationship with the country and zero interest in learning the language or promoting the culture, would all this struggle then not be in vain? More importantly, would Poles have instigated numerous revolutions, uprisings and protests if they weren’t trying to preserve their culture? Would the Soviet Union even have been overthrown?
I think one can make a very strong argument that a culture with no future has no present, either. Inherited wealth between individuals and families may be a problem, for sure, but inherited “cultural capital” seems absolutely necessary if you want your civilization to continue existing.
First of all, where does this "freedom of movement" come from? Freedoms are things that human societies carve out of harsh reality by legal convention and physical enforcement. "Freedom of speech", for example, is really better thought of as saying "within this area wherein this government has a monopoly on force and physical enforcement of policy, it is permitted to say anything, and legal consequences will be brought upon those who try to prevent others from exercising this permission". It's not some fundamental, pre-existing condition that you have by some god-given set of rights (encoded where? defended how?)
Freedom of movement is not some guaranteed thing, nor is it a state of normalcy. Throughout human history, we have defended our territories from outsiders who would exploit us for their own gain; it's a very sound evolutionary strategy, and virtually every group that has survived the last ten thousand years has this as their default state, modulo legal immigration and trade and visas and such.
In other words, "freedom of movement" is not denied - it's simply not granted by default. When a society matures to a certain level in cooperation with other nearby mature societies, e.g. the situation in continental Europe, it's possible to relax some of the restrictions; but it's important to keep in mind that this only comes from the expectation of shared enforcement of similar or identical laws that just push the border out from the immediate ones surrounding one nation, to a group of nations. The need to enforce who is and who is not permitted in society remains under the purview of government, for reasons that really ought to be obvious.
> you only earn the freedom to move if you've been deemed productive -- so people with physical disabilities preventing them from working, or severe mental illness should be denied the right to move where they wish?
This "freedom to move" should be replaced with "right to immigrate into some other country" - very few places try to prevent you from leaving! - and you need to look at things realistically from the perspective of the new country. You're asking them to take on a new citizen you yourself say is not productive - if they have a healthcare system, this translates directly to a new financial burden. Why should they do this? In what sense do they owe you care simply because of your desire to live on their collective property?
> Or that person from the Congo shouldn't be allowed to come here simply as a circumstance of their birth?
It's not just the "circumstance of their birth". We're not blank slates, and even if we were, we certainly aren't by the age of voluntary personal emigration. Some number of people from the Congo do emigrate, of course; but it remains completely the right of their new host nation to be as selective as they like about determining which individuals to accept and deny. Surely it makes sense to do this on some objective merit basis, and not randomly or just all-permissively?
> I'm sure almost everyone on HN would decry the Berlin Wall as a authoritarian human rights abuse.
I'm pretty sure the Berlin Wall was built by the USSR to keep East Germans in, not West Germans out. Who would want to go behind the iron curtain to wait in a bread line?
> The US is far from East Germany, but why even begin down that path?
It's not even remotely a reasonable comparison. The border wall between the US and Mexico is intended to keep illegal immigrants out - legal immigrants from south of the border will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands per year. The idea is that these will be people selected peacefully and legally for being able to contribute to society in a positive way, rather than the selection process of "whoever can pay people-smugglers and survive a trip through the border and then manage to hang on in their new country illegally without getting caught".
> Westerners didn't ask permission to invade the Congo, or India, or hundreds of other places in the global south, and we certainly didn't get visas before stripping those countries of natural resources and their cultural heritage
Well, of course not. I don't really see how this is exactly germane to the conversation about open borders. I will say that the Congo and India probably would have enjoyed having stronger borders to prevent this incursion, in retrospect; I'll also say that I and increasingly many other people do not buy into any kind of collective guilt based on the ethical indiscretions of our ancestors / predecessors / people very distantly related to us.
> How hypocritical is that?
How does it make sense to take an irrational-yet-principled, self-destructive stance? Is the goal to earn some kind of moral absolution? Who would deliver that, and in what sense would it really be absolute, lasting forgiveness? What level of impact / destruction / restitution / reparation is required? How many generations need to bow to this historical guilt - a concept that was literally antithetical to the Western canon of the son not being punished for the sins of the father for the past two thousand years?
Is there some point at which the due is paid?
> And lets not kid ourselves that closed borders keeps "the bad people" out -- people who want to commit crimes generally don't care about following immigration laws. They'll dig tunnels under walls...
I think a decent number could be stopped. It's not like this would be the only effort - consistently applying enforcement and rewriting laws to more fairly and effectively keep the citizenry safe is the ongoing job of any government interested in "law and order". Deportation, fighting organized crime, making it more difficult to be undocumented, and reducing financial incentives to be in the country illegally are all a part of this effort. Of course, this effort cannot stand alone in its attempt to make the country safer and better - there are plenty of legal Americans who are problematic and similarly need to be dealt with. No reason to believe only one strategy should be executed at once.
> If it means more strain on welfare programs in the short run as people try to start new lives here
It probably means their collapse, eventually, when taxpayers become tired of funding an effort that is directly to their own personal detriment and causes the slow decay and destruction of their beautiful cities. What comes next is terrible; so I think trying to stave that off and form something workable while we still have societal cohesion is the better course of action. That means capping things off and committing to a slow reduction in these services (and a corresponding uptick in services to wean people off, e.g. re-education, employment placement, renewed industrial development to help form career paths for blue-collar workers rather than being stuck in entry-level work for their entire lives, etc.)
Immigrants are a) not a financial burden long term, people might need assistance at first but will generally get established and then pay into social programs and b) the US is incredibly wealthy. We can spend trillions on the military, we can afford welfare.
The point about east germnay was that it inhibited freedom of movement. I see no practical difference between preventing someone from leaving and preventing someone from entering. Both deny the person their freedom to live where they choose.
The point about colonialism is that colonialism is the reason much of the global south is in cycles of war and poverty (eg, european powers dividing up africa ignoring tribal boundaries). so it's pretty rich to extract wealth from a place to build your indsutrial economy, and then tell people trying to escape that war and poverty that they aren't allowed the fruits of that wealth extraction. and why are you pretending this is ancient history? the french were comitting war crimes in algeria against the independence movement in the 60's!!
automation is coming. expanded welfare will be necessary regardless -- we cannot have a world of 10 billion programmers and service workers. the top strata owns the vast majority of the world's wealth. if we returned to 50s era tax rates these people could still live extremely opulently and we would have morw than enough resources for all americans and immigrants.
Where did she say that society should treat its obligations towards non-members as equal to the ones it has towards members? I can't find it.
>I personally don't support an open borders policy, but that's because I don't subscribe to her philosophy of morality.
I don't see how her philosophy of morality does either. This seems somewhat strawmannish.
The beliefs are written down as the law but they aren’t set in stone - a candidate who ran for office on a manifesto of an open border and won sufficient votes could rewrite the law. I’m not sure if there is an electorate anywhere in the world that would go for it.
It's ironic that the this line is in the article, considering that the notion of "equality = an unquestionably beneficial thing" was quite rigorously attacked nearly 200 years ago by Nietzsche and company. Somehow contemporary philosophers seem to have jumped straight from the late 18th century straight to today, ignoring the entire corpus of criticism that's been written since.
This while simultaneously ignoring the fact that foundational thinkers of Western thought like Plato were extremely critical of democratic values.
The scholarship is just bad. The whole argument is full of mis-statements of critiqued positions.
Anyone interested in the article is better served to start reading Plato, Locke, Hume, Smith . . . .
The pompous middlebrow dismissal strikes again. In this moment I am euphoric.
A lot of her stuff is online - I just read one paper ("Ethical Assumptions in Economic Theory: Some Lessons from the History of Credit and Bankruptcy" - 2004) and was happy to find it easy to read and jargon-free. A couple of quotes:
"Most critics of the normative framework of economic theory fault it for failing to recognize the vices of capitalism – for example, its inability to evaluate the inequality that capitalism generates. My thesis turns this critique on its head: the assumptions of economic theory fail to represent some of the virtues of capitalism. They fail to grasp some ways in which capitalism advanced freedom and equality."
"The normative framework of the classical economists Smith and Condorcet, is superior to that of neoclassical economics and libertarians. The classical economists had superior conceptions of freedom and equality, which are better able to grasp the specific virtues of capitalism. ... Contemporary economic theory cannot represent these virtues because it is too abstract."
The New Yorker article is was interesting, but journalistic summaries of peoples' ideas should help you decide whether you want to check out the original works. New Yorker articles aren't a substitute for the real thing. For instance, it's easy to think you're disagreeing with Elizabeth Anderson when you may actually be disagreeing with the guy who wrote the New Yorker article. So go read some of her work, and then disagree if you must.
I do, however, think that if you want a peaceful and stable and safe society that at least establishing the pretense that people are equal before the law and in relations between each other is important— and I think that distributing the rewards of society broadly is important if you want the society to remain intact and not endlessly under threat by a rampaging mob of have-nots.
It's actually not a font or typeface: it's spelling consistent with their style guide.
The society seems quite well multivalued as of today anyway, with people on top of their hierarchies commanding high wealth.
First, the framing of equality and redistribution, and the suggested emphasis on focusing our efforts on raising the floor rather than lowering the ceiling:
In Anderson’s view, the way forward was to shift from distributive equality to what she called relational, or democratic, equality: meeting as equals, regardless of where you were coming from or going to. This was, at heart, an exercise of freedom. The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.
To be truly free, in Anderson’s assessment, members of a society had to be able to function as human beings (requiring food, shelter, medical care), to participate in production (education, fair-value pay, entrepreneurial opportunity), to execute their role as citizens (freedom to speak and to vote), and to move through civil society (parks, restaurants, workplaces, markets, and all the rest). Egalitarians should focus policy attention on areas where that order had broken down. Being homeless was an unfree condition by all counts; thus, it was incumbent on a free society to remedy that problem. A quadriplegic adult was blocked from civil society if buildings weren’t required to have ramps. Anderson’s democratic model shifted the remit of egalitarianism from the idea of equalizing wealth to the idea that people should be equally free, regardless of their differences. A society in which everyone had the same material benefits could still be unequal, in this crucial sense; democratic equality, being predicated on equal respect, wasn’t something you could simply tax into existence. “People, not nature, are responsible for turning the natural diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies,” Anderson wrote.
There's also an interesting bit that I haven't considered or heard of before: the original arguments for the free market were to escape a tyrannical hierarchy, topping out with the king - a free market was much better than that. But as we have built out free-market economy, we've gotten to the point where the decisions your employer makes are just as arbitrary (and probably have a greater effect on your daily life).
Images of free market society that made sense prior to the Industrial Revolution continue to circulate today as ideals, blind to the gross mismatch between the background social assumptions reigning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and today’s institutional realities. We are told that our choice is between free markets and state control, when most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.
Many years ago, what started my shift from a capitalist to what I am today, was the following question: "If people had to earn and pay for breathable air (a basic) the same way they had to earn and pay for food, education and medical care (also basics), would the world be a better place or a worse place?"
The world I imagined was one of such desperation that hardly anyone had time to think about anything but themselves, a world that barely advanced because hardly anyone had the luxury of time to think of greater things.
I am now completely sold on the idea of taking the basics out of the competitive equation (nutrition, education and health). Desperation is the enemy of civilization.
Food requires land, plants, and animals. It requires labor. It requires you to either produce it yourself or interact with someone who does. Air does not.
One should have every right to pursue such goals, but defining these as unalienable rights is incompatible with egalitarianism.
Of course, in practice, private government goes hand-in-hand with growth in the usual sort of government - this is what today's "institutional reality" looks like. A truly free institutional reality would have people constantly voting with their feet, shopping around for the best "private government" service. It's only because of pervasive interference that this is not allowed to happen today.
The fundamental error is the erroneous belief that markets will magically find equilibrium states, and optimal ones with that. Both premises are false: market tend to equilibrium only in undesirable situations such as oligopoly, monopoly or monopsony; else they're simply chaotic and fail to converge to anything stable and go anarchically from boom to bust.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We unbanned you recently because almost all of your comments lately have been just fine for HN.)