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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> We are living in a sad state where everyone is benefiting from technical progress but people think only the rich is benefiting.

We live in a sad state where people expect everyone to be happier if absolute material condition is improving despite the gap between haves and have nots widening, because everyone either ignores or prefers not to believe the piles of evidence that, outside of the most desperate circumstances, relative deprivation is the main driver of experienced disutility, not absolute condition, so the people with power (including the relatively empowered portion of the electorate) keep pushing full throttle on policies which make human experience worse while looking at poorly chosen metrics that let them say things are getting better.

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Assuming for the sake of argument that a non-zero % of experienced disutility is caused by increasing inequality (despite things improving in absolute terms across the board), I'm not clear on what the (moral) argument is for acting to mitigate it on that basis.

The most common practical argument that I've heard is that not doing so will cause those experiencing that disutility to take matters into their own hands, which is:

1) risible, to the extent that it is untrue, as slander generally is, and

2) unconvincing, to the extent that it is true, because it's a trivial case of extortion, and the correct game-theoretic answer to extortion is "no", and is also immoral for the same game-theoretic reasons.

I'm curious if you have a more convincing argument, along any dimension. n.b. My prior is that such redistributive efforts are long-run harmful in expectation to material conditions at all levels of the economic ladder, possibly with the exception of revenue-neutral taxation of land value & externalities (which may or may not end up being redistributive in the progressive sense). If you disagree with that, there's obviously an argument that could be made on that basis.

> despite things improving in absolute terms across the board

Things increasing in absolute terms isn’t improvement in and of itself; improvement consists in, and only in, enhancements to someone’s experienced utility.

> I'm not clear on what the (moral) argument is for acting to mitigate it on that basis.

The moral argument depends on the moral principals you subscribe to. With utilitarianism or Rawlsian liberalism, the argument is fairly trivial. In the moral framework of, say, Objectivism or Austrian economics there probably isn’t an argument, but the very idea of measuring aggregate outcomes to assess progress in those systems has no direct moral relevance, its just a way of redirecting complaints from people with different moral frameworks. The whole theory of appeal to broad aggregate measures is as an assumed proxy for broad experienced utility.

I'm some flavor of utilitarian, but I don't think that makes the argument trivial. I also believe that most people's experience of disutility in response to inequality isn't an unconditional facet of their personality, but is heavily mediated by their environment, including factors like "how salient do we make existing levels of inequality in day-to-day life" and "how much do we tell people that they should expect to experience disutility from their own positional inequality".

Also, people's experienced utility is not solely a function of positional concerns, so the claim that things increasing in absolute terms isn't an improvement (in terms of experienced utility) seems trivially wrong. To the extent that it's a useful claim you could say the same thing about reducing inequality; there's nothing inherently good about that, except to the extent that it improves experienced utility. So that circles back to the questions of "which factor(s) have a stronger effect on people's experienced utility on the margin", "what 2nd order effects (including feedback loops) might occur due to our proposed mitigation", etc, which ultimately boils down to an empirical question about whether people will gain more (long-term) from absolute improvements on the margin or from positional improvements on the margin. Economic growth compounds, so sacrificing it as a temporary band-aid (that might make the underlying issue worse!) before we've even reached "fully automated luxury space communism" levels of wealth seems like a sucker's bet.

Your claim is undermined by migration from more-equal-but-poorer countries to less-equal-but-richer ones.

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