The math that says egalitarianism is possible
nautil.us
nautil.us
The GINI coefficient is better in those places - but much less so than his anecdotes would have you believe.
Your comment makes me believe you see "the professor" as somebody from another tribe/group and you now want to show that "they" are wrong. Why this urge to defend superiority or who is the happiest?
The research doesn't ask these questions - it's game theoretical models applied to societal cooperation. The whole Bezos incident is just a narrative hook to draw you in.
My whole critique is based on the fact that Mongolia has better wealth inequality on paper (and so his model would capture that) but that metric does not have a 1:1 ratio to what we actually care about. His paper doesn't address why maximizing on inequality alone could lead to bad outcomes - which is what I'm saying.
This is simply a piece of theoretical research whether cooperation strategies that we have historically observed in some parts of the world can evolve in a game theoretical model.
Where do you see a comment on whether living in Mongolia today is better (or worse) than living somewhere else?
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: 'If you don't work you die.'"
--Rudyard Kipling
Humans also happen to be super competitive, and downright hostile. The "leveling" the article speaks about has been tried: it's strong government on social-democratic principles. It works. And it gets abandoned as soon as general wealth has risen enough. Egalitarianism and democracy are, strangely enough, not natural partners. The article doesn't even mention it. Unfortunately, there's no link to the paper, so there's no way to tell what the assumptions are. In fact, I can't even find the journal.
I'm curious, what makes you say that?
I rather live in a place that underlines a different trait of human nature. There will always be aggression and competitiveness, but places that make the base assumption of cooperation turn out to be much nicer, more liveable and generally more efficient.
Also: if the US had the same voting system as most modern democracies where one vote has the same voting power, independent from which province or state you are voting, policy and live in the US would look a lot different.
Then, for those where a prime minister rules, the prime minister is chosen by the elected representatives.
In presidential democracies, the president is usually directly elected by voters, on a nationwide basis, independently of voting districts.
So having a majority of the votes gets you elected.
In a presidential democracy, yes. In the others, maybe. Win 51% of the districts with 51% of the vote, and lose the other 49% without getting any votes. You've won the election, but haven't gotten the majority of votes.
Yes, it's usually less extreme than in the US, but it still has the same issues with different district sizes.
To help with it, many countries regularly redraw their districts based on population size (census data).
How is it in the US? (honestly have no idea)
These numbers are not atypical. So generally in the US, 40% of voters are not represented.
A parliamentary democracy with proportional representation would, assuming say 10 seats for a 'state', split those 10 seats according to the vote. So you'd get 40 X'ers and 60 Y'ers.
However, the parliamentary allows smaller parties to emerge, and as the support of a smaller party is necessary to get a majority of overall votes, the smaller parties have real power.
For reference, I simply typed “Nature Human Behavior” into google.
In particular, if uneven industrialization and colonization hadn't created such large scale inequality for norms arbitrage, it might have kept going. If I had to draw any conclusion from this n=1 it would be about the "thermodynamics" of post-colonialism, not the staying power of social democracy.
Is that really true? I don't see e.g. Scandinavia rushing to abandon all their social programs. The US took a big turn away from cooperation, but that seems to be much more about a breakdown of social trust relating to some specifics of US history (race relations, "stranger danger", ...) than some general principle about high general wealth societies.
I think it's a bad idea too, but I don't think it's quite the same as the prison industrial complex in the US.
While West and North Europe have done so slower than the USA, there's been an undeniable tendency towards free market policies, favoring companies and capital and eroding worker's rights. The voters seem to agree: parties left of center have been in steady decline over the last decades. This is not purely driven by individual wealth, of course. Issues such as immigration and (more recently) climate change also play a role.
Social spending by government has rapidly increased as societies have gotten wealthier:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
But that money just ends up as pension benefits for unionized public sector workers, a significant fraction of whom are now in the top 10% of income earners. A NYS public school teacher now receives approximately $88,000 a year for their pension if they retire after 35 years, and it's practically impossible to fire them:
https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
Could we cap net worth of 'public servants'?
Would things be better in America if there was a max population per representative? I.e. 1 rep per 50k.
Why can we not randomly select 500~1000 at random each year pay them 150k to serve as a proper house of commons.
As George Carlin put it, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
This is a common mistake. Abstraction Fallacy or Model Fallacy.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
The US stopped burning wealth to maintain its spending, and turned to using inflation instead.
To provide some more context to 1971. It is the year of the Nixon shock. The US dollar became a fiat currency not backed by gold any more. Since then the banks have been inventing money out of thin air by issuing debts as they wished. The whole ruse was covered with a lot of bullshit like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and other very bad newly developed financial instruments.
It's just that the inequality will not be zero sum in such settings, meaning the poor will see improvements in standard of living even as the rich see even greater improvements. That's the Pareto efficiency that experiments in game theory show that a free market produces.
Anecdotally, most people’s perspectives on “human nature” appear to be little more than an exercise in confirmation bias, vis a vis their social/economic/political inclinations, which limits the utility of these discussions.