What made me realize this was going to Africa and seeing lots of animals in the wild. All or nearly all the big mammals lived in groups and cooperated to survive. It was clear that our ancestors would in their day have been one of these groups, also cooperating to survive (as hunter-gatherers still do in a few places), and that their cooperative inclinations were probably genetically preprogrammed.
If so then people's problem with inequality is not a learned behavior. It simply feels wrong to humans.
That doesn't mean they're right. The Monte Carlo fallacy feels right to humans, but it isn't. But it does probably mean that people are happier, all other things being equal, when there is less inequality.
Of course you have to balance this against (a) other, equally deeply held traditions, like not stealing, and (b) the slower technological/economic growth you get when you ban being rich.
If we're genetically constructed to feel unhappy about something, and we build a society that makes that thing true, then it seems as though we are manufacturing suffering, and we should seek to reduce it.
From what perspective can it be 'right' to knowingly maintain a society where the majority of people are guaranteed to suffer?
Also - isn't there a giant difference between 'banning being rich', and making it possible for a reasonable number of people to share in prosperity. There's plenty of evidence suggesting that the US was more prosperous when there was less inequality, and yet there were always some very rich people.
It does seem as though political opinion is moving in the direction of reducing attempts to mitigate then problem at the low end.
Also unconsidered is the idea that one period of adaptation early in one's life is no longer enough, and that is a new consequence of technological change that wasn't true during the heyday of the large corporation.
If the 'poor' and 'middle classes' simply don't have the resources to devote to accomodating change and developing new skills, their position will be systematically enforced. Information may be more widely available than ever, but learning still takes a long time and requires practice, and tacit knowledge is ever more important.
Isn't it disingenuous to infer that this inclination should not imply anything about economic policy? I would arrive at the opposite conclusion. Economics are sentiment driven by a huge factor. Robert Shiller's work in behavioral economics and his book Irrational exuberance has established and popularized this idea. Krugman's discussion of the unsuitability of BitCoin as a currency rests largely on the peculiar nature of human sentiment and behavior. Large income gaps are perceived by most people as unfair irrespective of the contributions by the wealthy. No one thinks that Bill Gates/ Edison made a greater contribution to social progress than Einstein/Gandhi. I don't think the association of the net worth of an individual to the contribution that they have made to society is very strong. Economies rewards people largely on the basis of demand/supply with I believe is a weak proxy for social contributions.
Perhaps you want to draw an analogy to say gay marriage where the popular vote might end up denying gay rights, but I don't think a similar argument holds in the case of wealth distribution.
Um, I do.
But I think that this sentence is unfair for Einstein.
When Einstein published the General Theory only 2 other
people were able to understand it.
However, the General theory was a far greater achievement than the Special theory, because the idea of mass influencing the geometry of space-time was far less obvious and it may have been a decade before anyone else would have investigated that possibility. Nevertheless: someone else would have come up with it. Einstein was no greater than any of the other great physicists of the time, who each had brilliant idea. Einstein just happened to have one that became widely known.
But it is really off topic. Let's say Einstein and his contemporaries are more important than Bill, the guy who really made DOS, and the first few MS employees, but obviously the later group is a lot wealthier.
This is true, I stand corrected. However outside of Hilbert and Einstein no one was looking at Reimannian Geometry for answers.
> The physics community was already converging on the special theory of relativity
They had the Lorentz equations for decades but were not getting anywhere close to the final result apart from Poincare. And even Poincare inspite of getting almost all equations lined up, seemed to miss the fact that there is no absolute time and that time is only partially and not totally ordered. Einstein hit the nail on the head inspite of the fact that Lorentz/Poincare had been working on the problem for possibly decades. It still seems likely that Poincare could have arrived at the result.
This is the reason I cited GR. As far as I know, no one apart from Einstein/Hilbert seemed to ave been working on it.
In hindsight special relativity was "obvious", but Maxwell's equations had been around for decades and the Lorentz transforms emerged in 1887 and yet no one was able to make the mental leap required to re-interpret the nature of Time. SR could have ended up taking decades more to sort out. Einstein hit the ball out of the park in his 20s when the scientists working on the problem had spent decades on it. And GR could have only followed after SR.
Also it should be noted that Satyagraha and Gandhi's civil resistance predates the March 1st movement.
And it's very much a matter of timing. If IBM had been able to delay the broad commercial success of PCs by 15 years, which is not inconceivable, it would have been too late for me to choose a career in this field.
I think the great commercializers like Bill Gates or Edison have made tremendous contributions to society. You need business model disruption in order to make new technologies broadly accessible.
However, I do understand what you're saying. If the discoveries of Einstein or Gandhi had simply never been made, that would be a tragedy for the world, not just a delay affecting my own life.
Gates is a tremendous example of modern capitalism - ie leveraging regulatory capture. Microsoft, as an unneeded but forcibly installed middleman, has been a drain on the economy. Broken windows for everyone.
Windows is a better corporate OS than any of the alternatives and Office is an awesome piece of software by any standard.
While I have cited Bill Gates as a weaker contributor than Einstein/Gandhi, I think you are being far too critical here and missing a few key things. The fundamental insight that Bill Gates had was that software is king and the hardware is the add on. Even Steve Jobs credited Bill for the insight at D5. All other competing OSes at the time were a hardware and software bundle. Bill realized that what was of essence was the software and the hardware wasn't as important. He licensed the software and commoditized the hardware industry into a fierce race to the bottom that saw PC prices dropping every month. If Apple/Amiga had won that round we would be spending a couple of grand on a PC even to this day and poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.
Hardware is king - try executing your code manually if you disagree. Try wiring the world with a particularly clever algorithm or executing that massively parallel algorithm on a single-core CPU.
When he says software is king he means that it's profitable to dominate because its incremental costs are minimal. And with the DMCA preventing reverse engineering, software patents preventing use of trivial algorithms, etc, they're assuring the monarchy will last forever.
> If Apple/Amiga had won that round we [...]
... could still have a free market where competitors weren't locked out before they started.
Microsoft delivered crippled products to its customers specifically to preserve its marketshare. If I did that as a consultant it'd be criminal.
> poorer economies wouldn't have been able to afford computers as freely as they do now.
Hardware is ultimately fungible so the same boom would have occurred regardless. The boom was happening before MS and the PC, and before Apple too.
Just as an example, it'd be as reasonable to credit RMS for the hardware commoditization as Gates. Stallman was largely personally responsible for reinventing proprietary lisp-machine functionality. By killing off one of the most potentially profitable specialized hardware companies Stallman started the commodity hardware trend.
If anyone really influenced it though it was one of the computing pioneers like Turing simply by proving computational equivalence. After that it's a given.
There's a world of difference between "ban being rich" and "resist oligarchy with progressive taxation, investment in public services, infrastructure, research, and consumer-friendly laws and protections."
Makers versus takers...
However, there's another aspect of inequality: when a significantly large number of people are living in poverty, while others are "filthy rich". In this context, the issue is real and important, and people are right in being concerned about it.
Even though the word inequality means merely "not equal" and could very well refer to the fact that some people are rich while some other aren't, I think that what most people really mean by "inequality" is the second case: where some people are extremely poor while some others are extremely rich.
You may have read a very famous book by Jared Diamond called "Guns, Germs and Steel" which won the '98 Pulitzer in nonfiction. A lot of these conversations about wealth and equality (and why they are not equal among different sets of society, or among countries) are addressed in the book. This is definitely a life-changing read worth looking into.
Because you might be really (really) busy, I also recommend a short article that sumarizes a lot of the themes in an interesting way: http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/SocJusticeRes.pdf Cheers - Jamison
Equality/inequality is, I think, a cultural factor. Culture is also subject to some sort of evolution process, which means that some inventions got lost, but some remain and evolve. So, more equal society is indeed more stable and healthy. You might not see so intense struggling or competition which means less innovation and so-called progress, but innovations or progress aren't among ultimate goals of the process of human evolution.
I would assume the same practice were true for most hunter-gatherer societies. But one aspect that led to this "wealth" sharing is the fact that in primitive societies people living in the same community were closely genetically related.
Matt Ridley touches tangentially on this topic in his book "The Origins of Virtue".
I'm not sure living in groups and cooperating implies a genetic predisposition to equality. Even though a group might have, say, twenty to fifty members, some members tend to rule and others tend to hang on the outskirts. I'd pick Venkat Rao's division into Sociopaths, Clueless, and Losers (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...) as the best way to divide up types of people in such a group. He writes about their role in businesses, but it's the same in a small societal group. The Sociopaths are the jocks who absolutely must have the power, eat the most food, and have the most offspring. The Losers are the ones who live at the edge of the group, eat the least food, and be eaten first by predators. The Clueless are the majority who follow the Sociopaths' rules and rise slowly through the group hierarchy to their natural level of competence.
Perhaps society is best modeled as a cell, where the Sociopaths are the nucleus and the Losers are the membrane. It does seem to be a male-oriented model, where females act more like glue, facilitating relationships. The male Sociopaths would have two or more females each, eat the food, feed the women, and produce the most offspring. The male Clueless would only have one female and follow whatever other rules the Sociopaths impose, and get food based on their rank in society. Perhaps the females overall are most similar to male Clueless in this model.
The male Losers would be the first to miss out on the food, not get any girls, and die young, being the first to be sacrificed to predators. And maybe there's the reason why Sociopaths naturally shun any interaction with Losers, going through the Clueless intermediaries, as in "the jocks hate the nerds". When there's any threat to their survival or status, the Sociopaths in the nucleus can't afford to have any emotional attachment to the Losers in the outer membrane. They need to be able to sacrifice Losers without hesitating if that's required for their own survival.
I guess I'm saying not only are mammals built out of biological cells internally, but also make up societal cells externally. When there's plenty of food and the group grows too big, the Sociopaths start electioneering among the Clueless for loyalty. The group will eventually split in half, just like cells do, some Sociopaths taking some of the Clueless with them and the others taking the other Clueless. When there's just enough food for the Sociopaths to multiply but not enough Clueless for a successful cell split, the Sociopaths will turn on one another, a coup takes place, and the losing Sociopaths killed or thrown outside the membrane.
This model describes how a genetic predisposition to inequality and hierarchy can also explain group living and apparent cooperation.
I think you're confusing this personality with someone who's classed as an alpha-type.
You do not need to be unable to relate to people on a human level to be able to rule.
It does seem to be a male-oriented model, where females act more like glue, facilitating relationships [..]
Why?
You should remember that women and men can equally be equally be classified as antisocial. If this classification is the main indicator of leadership potential, then women would have been just as likely to lead.
--
If your model is correct, and people who can be classified as antisocial really did rule the pre-historic world - why aren't we all 'sociopathic' now?
1) What You'll Wish You'd Known
2) What You Can't Say
3) Disconnecting Distraction
4) The Age of the Essay
5) Why Nerds are Unpopular
6) Writing, Briefly
7) Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
8) Good and Bad Procrastination
9) How to Do What You Love
10) See Randomness
11) The Power of the Marginal
12) How Art Can Be Good
13) Taste for Makers
14) Two Kinds of Judgement
15) Stuff
There's obviously some overlap with this list and Hackers & Painters. But I think this grouping would be much more useful for the general population; most freshmen aren't as keen on programming language discussions.
I often use the first three essays listed above in the freshman comp classes I teach, and they often yield interesting reactions from students. Sometimes we venture into "The Age of the Essay" and "Stuff." Students who are especially interested in why high school is structured the way it is often get pointers to "Why Nerds Are Unpopular."
If you know anyone at O'Reilly, you can tell them they'd get about 50 copies a semester ordered. That's probably pretty small time, but I suppose something is better than nothing.
I could imagine the process being relatively easy if you have a pre-existing relationship with a publisher like O'Reilly: send me the contract, here are the essay URLs (which have already been proofread), do the typesetting, and send the book out into the world.
In actuality I suppose it's not that simple.
[1] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/09/mobile-first-web-second.html