John Rawls, liberalism and what it means to live a good life
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Someone else put it a little more concisely: Work to create the world you would want to be born into if you didn't know in advance who you were going to be.
Isn't this like table stakes for being a thoughtful person who isn't a sociopath? The most influential thought experiment in contemporary philosophy is to not act like a toddler?
There's a strong argument that the knowledge someone has from being disadvantaged contributes to their views on justice. The original position also incentivizes ignoring the rights of small groups of people since you likely aren't going to be a part of one.
One also gets into issues like reparations for past injustices. Those benefit a small group of people at the cost of the many (hard to justify with the original position), but can still be a form of justice since we want to balance past wrongs.
I think the veil of ignorance is a great thought experiment everyone should think about, but there shouldn't be any prescribed way how to think about it.
Stated another way, while that argument is probably a valid way to "win" a competitive debate, it doesn't strike me as particularly useful for exploring the concept that Rawls is presenting.
Abstractly, Rawls says society shouldn't be racially/ethnically/socioeconomically/etc prejudiced. The vast majority of people agree with this obviously.
Concretely, he says this can be achieved by ignoring your racial/ethnic/socioeconomic/etc status.
The claim is that the more you ignore your own lived experiences, the less you can use the knowledge that it gives you.
Rawls also argued that people would maximize the minimum utility behind the veil of ignorance, as they wouldn't want to risk being a persecuted minority.
This didn't come up during the debate, although it should've since it's why "whatever rules society operates under need to work regardless of what your starting point in society is".
It is easy to agree with it if you are talking about some racial minority.
Treating murderers or child rapists with the compassion you would want in their shoes is beyond most people.
It also has a number of very easy criticisms that can be set against it
You always have to consider all sides of every decision as well as higher order effects.
I think the numbers argument is a pretty different one than the original thought experiment.
Furthermore the argument that it is a bad idea isn't even strong. The veil of ignorance is powerful and interesting but voting is about different cultures negotiating to make decisions. That all but guarantees there will be different conceptions about what is fair that are not the veil of ignorance and those need to be respected. They aren't sociopaths, they just don't agree with you.
Not all thoughtful people come to the same conclusions, and it's nice to try to axiomatise these things anyway, so you have something to point at when trying to formulate new rules.
For instance, non-toddlers understand the Golden Rule, which seems good enough on its surface, but on deeper reflection can let bad behaviour through.
Hypothetically, I like bribes: I can pay others to change the rules in my favour. I also like receiving money for changing rules. So this passes the Golden Rule, but fails Kant's Categorical Imperative.
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
i.e., act according to a principle that makes sense for everyone else also to follow. If you jump the subway turnstile to avoid payment, what happens if everyone does likewise?
(P. C. Hodgell) "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."
Kant was a moral philosopher. There is a difference. And there's a reason why Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant never came up with Rawl's "veil of ignorance": because it is itself ignorant.
How is Rawls’ view ignorant?
Kant is addressing the need for a moral philosophy to be coherent, in that you have to play out the consequences of what it would lead to. However, you are not asked to put yourself in anyone else's shoes; if you were a rich and powerful person, you might want to act in deference to rich and powerful people, and think it would be great for everyone to act that way universally.
Rawls is asking you to create a rule book the you would be willing to follow no matter who you were in society. If you are rich, you are supposed to imagine if you would still support the rules if you were poor. So from our previous example, would you want everyone to defer to rich and powerful people if you were poor?
The important aspect of The Original Position is that you are supposed to come up with a system where you wouldn't be against it no matter who you were in society.
It's often said that Rawls is a restatement of Kant for modern liberals, though there's plenty of dissent over that claim. Besides, Rawls restricted himself to political philosophy whereas Kant is talking about knowledge and morality (and also politics).
For one thing, Kant's formulation has a problem that Rawls' doesn't: at what level of detail should you make your categorical imperatives?
Is there always a moral obligation to obey the law, or to be truthful? Clearly not, there are obvious counterexamples to both. You could try to refine your rules-based morality system, but you're never going to account for all possible edge-cases.
It's not the same thing as saying hold yourself to the moral standard that you wish were applied to everyone.
Successful leaders would probably refine it and create subcategorical categories that can be handled in ways that are a better fit for their special local case of imperativeness, which means you might still be on the right track after all
You're right, yes, I should have gathered that from both the name and the use of that maxim, which is clearly singular.
> it has nothing to do with moral, law or truth
That's not right, it's talking about morality.
> it covers all edge cases but it won't work because they can't build that many Porsches
I'm not sure what you mean here.
I don't see a serious refutation of my main point. Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail, and trying to cover all edge-cases in a rules-based morality is a losing battle.
From a quick look at Wikipedia [0] it seems Kant's categorical imperative falls at the first hurdle - he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Decepti...
> That's not right, it's talking about morality.
Not quite right then - 2 out of 3 aint bad
>I'm not sure what you mean here.
it is something of a hunch that categorically noone is going to have a porsche or everyone. I will rephrase that maybe.
>Every moral decision is unique in at least some detail,
Which detail? how does it matter what kind of food you give a hungry person?
>rules-based morality is a losing battle
Now were talking - you want something that will work with real humans while I am admiring the concept.
>he asserted that lying, or deception of any kind, would be forbidden under any interpretation and in any circumstance. Absurd.
exactly - the absurd is the essential concept and the first truth
What do economists have to do with it, seeing as its a philosophical position, and not one that attempts to predict the economy (badly)?
Mathematically, we can deal with it by taking the pth power of whichever metric of utility per individual, then maximizing the expected value. When p->inf, then we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing the maximal utility. When p->0, we maximize E(utility^p) by maximizing minimal utility, ie rawls position.
I think one finds oneself very quickly having to come up with bizarre arbitrary (and unjust) rules to try and build such a statistical monstrosity.
Because the foundation of their happiness is predicated on taking someone else's. It's an end result of a political system built on utilitarian morality. Although La Guinn may disagree with the comparison, taxes are a close real-life parallel.
As soon as you realize that Omelia could not obtain if it involved humans, it becomes a lot less interesting.
Omelas is just the inherent hypocrisy of human morality and the banality of evil presented as reductio ad absurdum. If it's possible to accept the suffering of millions for ones' own benefit - as it clearly and demonstrably is - for the sake of our imperfect modern world, surely it would be even easier to accept the suffering of only one scapegoat, for the sake of utopia? The truth is, most people would simply learn to live with it.
In the first case, what you're looking at is unawareness, stiff competition for limited attention and care budgets, and a diversity of opinion with respect to the evaluation of tradeoffs for this specific, micro-topic. People who labor in sweatshops that provide goods for Amazon want those jobs because its better than the alternative. They don't want those conditions, but that's a problem that is not going to be fixed tomorrow, whereas they have to worry a lot about their tomorrow. People making decisions within that complex matrix of forces is not evidence that Amazon buyers don't care about other people. It's evidence that the world is complex and that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time. Even Ghengis Khan was talked out of genociding the Chinese by someone who admired Chinese society and suggested that he would be better off taxing the skilled artisans of China instead of genociding them, as he usually did to any society that defied him.
Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ? Or that morality was the sole possession of a tiny vanguard ? If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.
Yes it is. People don't care enough to not use Amazon - suffering is simply priced into the market and people are fine with that.
>At the other extreme, neither was colonialism.
It very much is. Colonialism was built on slavery and genocide, and the colonizers cared very little for the suffering of the colonized.
>Colonialism and or conquering and enslaving was how the world was run by all parties everywhere since the beginning of time.
"That's just how the world works and has always worked and it's absurd to take issue with it" is only one of many excuses people use to reconcile their morality with the amount of suffering they benefit from. No point even thinking about it if it's simply the law of nature.
>Are you saying that throughout all historical time , there were no moral people until the current crop of modern leftists ?
Now we're at the part of the comment where you purposely misconstrue my comment and make it into some weird anti-leftist rant.
No, I didn't say that, and when did I even mention anything about modern partisan politics? Of course diverting from the topic with strawman arguments means you don't have to take the topic seriously, which is another coping mechanism.
>If so, then you're swimming against a strong current and I wonder what it would take, and what you'd be willing to do, in order to perpetually force that current to flow in the other direction.
Ooh. "I wonder what you'd be willing to do?" That's a nice turnabout. The only true evil is pointing out evil. I bet you also like to say the only true racists are the black people who keep complaining about racism. Turning me into the enemy, nothing but a windmill to be tilted at, is yet another coping mechanism.
Thank you. I couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of my point. Not only would you not leave Omelas, you don't even think there's anything wrong with Omelas. Rather you'd be the one spreading FUD about anyone who does leave.
It’s not just you. The formulation of Rawls’ question is designed to get people to focus on statistically unlikely scenarios at the expense of probable ones. As an engineer and an Asian I find it incomprehensible that Rawls has so much purchase.
I'm not seeing it. Under the veil of ignorance, it is better to give everyone one utilon than to give "the 1%" 90 utilons while the rest get nothing (because the "protagonist" who is deciding how to distribute the utilons has only a 1% chance of being born into the 1%). I.e., statistical likelihood is baked into the scheme.
It is true that Rawls's scheme assigns no intrinsic worth to society as a whole, only to individuals, but that is quite different from the point you made.
Rawls was explicit about this: he thought society should focus on increasing the utility of the worst case outcomes instead of maximizing total utility: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarian_rule
This leads to dysfunctional societies where the majority can’t have nice things. E.g. the utility of public transit or public parks goes down for 90% of the population in order to avoid draconian enforcement against 1-2% of the population that’s homeless, mentally unwell, or drug users.
Contrast public spaces and public transit in San Francisco to the same things in objectively poorer East Asian countries.
It's possible to provide alternatives for the 1-2%, but proposals to do that will generally be met by outcries from various corners — NIMBYs, small-government types, etc.
Rawls's original position (a.k.a. veil of ignorance) is, in essence, "There, but for the grace of God, go I or my loved ones — so let's help others the way we'd hope to be helped if life had dealt us a similarly-bad hand." (That latter part should sound familiar ....)
Oh, wow, I had no idea. (Rawls's response is quite different from my response to the hypothetical of the veil of ignorance.) Sorry for adding noise to this thread. I agree with everything you wrote in this thread.
We saw a lot of folks carefully ignoring a related issue during the covid pandemic: They argued angrily that it made no sense to mandate masks, lock down society, and spend billions on vaccine development, when only a small percentage of people would die or have long-term adverse effects. (There was a lot of that kind of talk in Texas.) But those folks never seemed willing to admit that they were really saying, "I'm willing to roll the dice that I'll be all right; the rest of you, well, you're on your own."
Sadly, folks like that seldom take enough precautions on their own — and they're often the first to plead for "the gummint" to help them when they get in trouble. (Cf. the bail-outs of big, de-regulated banks during the financial crisis that kicked off the Great Recession, the demands for federal hurricane assistance by people who lived in flood zones, etc. Privatize the profits, socialize the risks.)
You’re going against what’s been widely publicized as the overwhelming scientific consensus, so it’d be useful if you’d cite some evidence, including your qualifications, to help the rest us feel comfortable accepting your judgment in this area. And you seem excessively sure of yourself (as do some of your other comments — yes, I looked you up), which tends to weigh against accepting your view.
It’s possible this sentiment is punitive—I just want to see terrorists punished—and such a response isn’t necessary to maintain the state’s monopoly on violence. But I would submit that extreme responses to e.g. Islamism is important to keep a real threat to order at bay. We’ll probably have a real A/B experiment with this in Bangladesh now that Hasina—who was doing a good job crushing the Islamists—has been overthrown. Will Bangladesh turn into Pakistan in the absence of that enforcement? We will see.
Can you reconcile this with the comment I just replied to?
If even half of what I read about Hasina is true she has completely gone around the bend and has no business running any country anymore.
Rawls does say we should optimize social and economic inequality for the worst-off. But he insists that equality of opportunity and equality under the law come first. Only when those liberal conditions are met are we to focus on helping the worst off.
So, in a society operating under Rawls' rules, you could see a lot of inequality...so long as that inequality is the result of everyone having the same rights. In my opinion that is usually the case, so I don't view Rawls as particularly radical.
That aside, I'm not convinced that Rawls addresses the kind of thought experiment you're talking about.
The Wikipedia page says that's a common criticism of Rawls, but it might be wrong.
Liberalism doesn't answer this nicely because of the belief that everyone is more or less fungible.
Consider by contrast how East asian countries approach public policy: the needs of the typical person are elevated above the needs of people with different or special circumstances. That’s why they can have nice things like public transportation and clean and safe cities.
Also, there's the obvious slippery slope into utilitarianism and things like killing one person to save 10 with their organs.
Just because some long dead philosophers, mostly affluent people who avoided real work and utilitarian choice, had time to sit and cobble together some syntax and semantics doesn’t mean it’s literally possible to live by their high minded babble
And to the moral point; today the majority rely on as little labor as possible paid as little as possible to make their food and clothes; consuming the few willing to work for little for the benefit of the many is daily life for richer countries. Pretending our society is beyond such because our historical philosophy says it is pretentious wank
Furthermore I think that this specific misunderstanding is a huge conflict point in politics, and contributes significantly to things like the left-right divide.
The fundamental difference being that one can realise that, statistically, they have a significant risk of being in a "losing group", whilst still thinking that designing a society with such "losing groups" results in a better system overall.
The stripped back "spherical cow" form of it would be as follows: imagine a society in which you can be born as one of two people. A person requires 80 potatoes in order to survive.
One of those people is capable of farming a hundred potatoes per week, which is enough to feed one person but not two (if shared, both will die). The other of those people is capable of farming only fifty potatoes per week, which is enough to feed no-one, and if shared is still not sufficient as a total of 160 potatoes is required in order to feed both.
The optimal way to design that society then is to allow the second person to starve and the first person to live alone, even though in this thought experiment there is perhaps a 50% likelihood that you "spawn" as the person who will be put to death, because the alternative is that you die regardless.
Extrapolating from there you can have other examples - say that 99% of people are green, and 1% blue, but green people are deathly afraid of blue people to the extent that they will develop anxiety and depression if the blue people are around. The best society is clearly then one where the two groups are segregated and do not interact, even if that might suck if you're born as a blue person "cut off from the world", because otherwise it sucks regardless.
Succinctly - it basically begs the question - it assumes that equality and fairness is somehow obvious and a priori but it's really not at all.
>If you, like me, are unchurched and don’t draw your values from a religion, then where do you get them from? From what broad tradition do you acquire your sense of what is good, normal and worthwhile in life, and – if I can put it this way – your general vibe too?
>When I’ve asked my non-religious friends, colleagues and students this question, they’re almost always stumped. Their impulse is to say one of three things: ‘from my experience’, ‘from friends and family’ or ‘from human nature’.
I'm non-religious and I'd say none of these three things. I derive my value system from empathy and (from what I strive to be) logical consistency.
> ‘What society-or-civilisation-sized thing can you point to as the source of your values? I’m talking about the kind of thing that, were you Christian, you’d just say: “Ah, the Bible,” or “Oh, my Church.’’’
None, but why should a society-or-civilisation-sized thing be any more valid as a source for your values than anything else? There is no intrinsic wisdom in society-and-civilisation-sized things (quite the opposite could be argued). Ultimately the author's conclusion is basically that you need a religion in order to have a value system, and that liberalism is a sort of quasi-religion that can offer that. In fact, it is entirely possible to have a coherent value system that is not based on a religion, quasi-religion or mass-movement of any kind.
A kind of cultural Christianity where the values have formed the sub structure of our western lives, institutions and thinking, so much that we can get rid of the actual religion but the values and impact it has had remains. Richard Dawkins recognises this today and calls himself a cultural Christian.
We need to look at history, other religions and cultures to see what other value systems there are, and to see what a value system really means. Anthropology really helps with this. One example would be to look at how people treat outsiders or foreigners.
I imagine a modern atheist seeking to change the world would have to recognise what cultural constructivism means, recognise that value systems are constructed and negotiated, understand that the meaning and value of things are a process of narrative and probably end up creating something like Christianity as a result!
So you might see a society that says that certain races, cultures, or "sinners" do not deserve empathy or deserve less empathy.
Another example are highly free market oriented political philosophies which argue that businesses should be governed by maximizing profit rather than empathy.
So for a favourite HN topical example it might be considered to be more empathetic to let homeless people sleep on the streets of San Francisco. In the past it might have been considered to be more empathetic to the people in the city to remove homeless people and put them in special nice shelters instead. "What gives people more dignity?" There are other, many and much important issues at play with this example but I think this could be an example about a change in how we think about empathy.
For the general trend of reduce of empathy, I think that goes in hand with individualism - thinking about oneself at the expense of thinking of others. Possibly it might not really be a reduction of the potential for empathy but perhaps just a reduction of the applications of it, like how a muscle reduces in size when its not being used. Alternatively we may express empathy in certain spheres of life from before. Different muscles being used but same energy being expended.
Since I believe values to follow are arbitrary, it doesn't matter that much where they are derived from. Religion? Sure. Bodily pleasure? All right. Following the vibes? No problem. Civilization-sized or not, meh. No explanation needed.
It's only when I descend towards the practical life, and have to put on my hat of a good citizen, the choice and origin of values starts becoming relevant. There, I may say: I derive my values from my intuitions on co-operation.
But are my intuitions drawn from liberalism, or did they merely end up similar to liberalism? Having been part of a somewhat liberal society since birth, I can't give an answer one way or the ohther.
There's an even easier rebuttal: how does the believer choose which texts to obey and which to discard? Even if he blindly pledges himself to one particular translation of one particular text, how does he decide whether to eat bacon, kill homosexuals, or stone disobedient children?
Every complex adaptive system has needs for coming into existence, maintaining that existence, and adapting with the environment.
When two complex adaptive systems interact, a third one with new capabilities emerges with the two as components. This emergent system has needs for its existence, maintenance, and adaptability.
Most/all of life is complex adaptive systems interacting.
So there exists needs we all have on the specific level of each body, as well as collective needs emerging from our interactions.
One of those needs, for the sake of maintenance, is the moderation of meeting our needs.
In order to learn to moderate our needs, we need to oversatisfy and undersatisfy them so we can learn what it feels like to do so and when.
So our needs are nondual, in the sense that we need to fast/feast on each.
And then there's the needs related to maintaining our external environments.
If we choose to live and serve life, we need to learn to moderate the needs of the environments we live in.
The essay goes into much more detail on liberal ideas, but what's more interesting to me is how many different political models liberalism can actually fit into.
The author goes into some detail on liberal socialism. On the other end you can also have liberal anarchism though.
I've heard the term "voluntarism" being used to describe an anarchist approach where people choose to help their communities, though the rebranding mainly seems to be because "anarchy" is viewed with a lot of stigma today.
What do you mean by "on the other end"? AFAIK anarchism is a type of socialism.
Anarchism has no government. There may be overlaps in people's motivations and how communities of people interact, but the difference in scale, or existence of, the government is a pretty big difference to me.
I've not read any socialist literature in a long time but a quick glance at wikipedia confirms what I remember; Government isn't a requirement for socialism. That doesn't mean that there isn't "state socialism", there is, but there is also stateless e.g. anarchism.
Socialist anarchism still revolves around some kind of communal ownership. I've never been quite sure how that could be run without some kind of governmental structure, whether it calls itself that or not.
In practice, the only implementations of socialism that I'm aware of all included large governments and were/are more like communism than not.
The classic counter example of the other end of the spectrum would be anachocapitalism, which is about as far from socialism as you can get, but also embraces anarchism
After reading "on the other end" I was expecting to be met with anarcho-capitalism.
I disagree with you on AC embracing anarchism. Only the word is embraced and nothing else. Anarchism is against masters/hierarchies and that is why they are against both state and capitalism. AC is against state, for different reasons, no other relations to anarchism.
The point of the experiment is to show only that by rejecting the the possibility that such a thing could occur, you're exposing your implicit belief that you know the causal connections between equity, economics, technological advancement and human happiness, just like Rawls believed he did. But you don't know that system.
Rawls's thought experiment's real success is to smuggle into the conversation an exceedingly vast set of knowledge claims about how complex systems in the real world must behave.
It's a thought-terminating thought experiment.
Simple: Our constitution, our legal framework that (mostly) protects us from corruptive forces, our ability to trust that sellers can't sell us poison and lie to us about it, our ability to enter into transactions with total strangers without worry, our free elections, our freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom to be who we are.
People are stumped because they're not looking at it for what it is. There's no mysticism wrapped around our secular societies like there are around religions, so people tend to not notice it. But if you look at it - REALLY look at it - it's nothing short of miraculous what we've achieved. Life before we had these things was VERY, VERY different from the peace and prosperity we've enjoyed for almost a hundred years.
And it's unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic that they've lost sight of it to the point where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...
Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone.
This issue isn't just about individual interactions or the inherent honesty of our society; it's about systemic structures that prioritize profit over people. The reality is that our economic model often allows, and sometimes encourages, practices that are detrimental to consumer interests but beneficial to corporate bottom lines.
Thank you for proving my point.
There is no such thing as a perfect system, and there never will be. Human society is simply too complex to be modeled perfectly - and without a perfect model, a perfect system is an impossibility. That doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to improve it, but it ALSO doesn't at all detract from the marvelous, unlikely miracle we witness every day and are so blasé about that we'd even contemplate supporting those who intend to burn it to the ground.
Every time I bring this subject up, the curmudgeons always come out to tell us how bad we have it today. And they can do it too, because everyone who experienced the before times is now dead and can't speak up (I'm only old enough to speak up about the air pollution). Only a careful study of history can give a (partial) picture of just how shitty life was for 99% of people compared to today.
If you look at the food in the US for example one of the most distorted elements is the abundance of high fructose corn syrup - because the government subsidises it.
Status can easily be taken away. You can not put status in a an index fund a watch it grow without doing anything. You can't give your status, without anyone knowing, for a favor.... The idea that switching "capital" for "status" will still get you the same thing is just dumb.
He draws a parallel with Sorin Kierkegaard’s idea of “Christendom” and a new kind of “liberal-dom”. Where our personal values system is born out of the sea of liberal institutions that we love in, like constitutions.
Philosopher's Zone: https://podcasts.apple.com/jp/podcast/philosophers-zone/id13...
But as this forum is full of techies who are among the only ones still benefiting from this current system then of course that pro-liberalism nonsense like the stuff espoused by Rawls will have lots of adherents.
And yet in nation after nation hundreds of millions are voting strongmen to lead them. If one is serious about understanding the reasons a good place to start is to stop blaming them ("entitled", "myopic", "curmudgeons"...) and make a genuine effort to understand their world view.
These are not fringe elements but hundreds of millions dissatisfied with status quo and want something to change, and are willing to give strongmen a chance. They don't care how the life was 50 or 100 years ago or that life today is 99% better. Their lived reality has lead them to believe they are leading a shitty life. Telling them they are myopic or entitled will only lead to further disconnect.
That's one of the reasons why it's important to make sure that everyone in society is provided for; because if their needs aren't met under the current society then they have an incentive to destroy it in favor of a different society.
That sounds like a rather authoritarian approach to this problem.
Perhaps it isn't so much that we're sufficiently far way from WWII now that people have just forgotten the dangers, more that we haven't been explicit enough about the red flags and lessons offered by people like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin (and then Mao, Pol Pot etc).
It's no surprise that strong men usually go for educators first.
One problem is that most people just don't really examine what's going on, either because they don't have the time, skew gullable, are generally trusting or don't have the relevant critical faculties.
Education can help with some of those. I was very heartened by this recent news piece
https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/aug/10/uk...
The claim to not having mysticism is part of the mysticism. The current economic system funnels economic value from the poor to the ultra rich. You're telling me that having two different groups of people with the same physiological needs being given vastly different quantities of resources is some kind of natural state? That "mysticism" isn't required there?
> And it's unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic that they've lost sight of it to the point where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...
If you're waxing on about how great the status quo is, you're most likely the entitled one
The economic system creates values (and you can compare it with alternatives such as Soviet Union to realize just by how much). It does this in an unequal way, by chance, historical context and self-selection preferences. But the creation of value still trumps any inequality it might have. With TV, air conditioning and phones, an entry mid-class person in US is having it ten times better than the kings of middle ages.
Not really because there are too many other variables
> But the creation of value still trumps any inequality it might have.
Why is inequality even necessary here in the first place? How do you know that creation of value can't exist in the presence of equality? The Nordics do a better job at it
> With TV, air conditioning and phones,
This is the mysticism I was referring to. Look at all of this cool stuff, no don't look at the rich people poisoning the water supply
> is having it ten times better than the kings of middle ages.
yeah and it's 1000x better than cavemen banging on rocks in the stone age, so the peasantry should be 1000x as grateful
You can average out countries that equalize property rights to the state vs. average of countries where property variance is respected, and check which ones are doing better vs worse.
> How do you know that creation of value can't exist in the presence of equality?
Equality of output would imply equality of inputs? People will no longer have the right to decide for themselves if they want to be busy creating wealth or busy doing more social/pleasurable things?
> yeah and it's 1000x better than cavemen banging on rocks in the stone age
Why do you take that improvement for granted? (in the context of today's nuclear treats, it's not a given that we'll able to propel this rate moving forward in the next 100 years, there's a non-zero probability that we wipe ourselves back to the stone age).
Or more generically, if you had to chose between two economic policies, one with 1'000x improvement where people can take risks and see variation in rewards according to their choices (and an element of luck/historical background), and another one where everyone is forced to the same output, irrespective of their actions, which leads some to pursue more pleasure activities to a larger fraction of their existence and the improvement is just 50x, which one would you choose for the society?
Is equality worthy as a goal in itself? And if so, enough in order to stop people in self-selecting doing what they want and letting them keep some percentage as a reward for assuming the risk? Even if it leads us as a society to slower growth?
I think it's likely that a lower class person might prefer an alternative system that produced somewhat less value but distributed it more equally.
As evidenced by the vast amount of poor Americans emigrating to Cuba, or poor Brazilians crossing the border to Venezuela. They really desire all that sweet equality.