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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

Nozick has a very interesting thought experiment about this. It poses a completely egalitarian world in which everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who's really good at dunking basketballs, and starts charging 5c to watch him dunk. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everybody does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody else. Nozick asks the question: is this something that a good society would try to stop?

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I think the answer to your question depends on what you mean by a “completely egalitarian world”. Depending on the answer, I would ask: why does the kid desire to charge people to earn money in a society like that in the first place?

But yes, I think a lot of people would say there should be a cap on how much more wealth someone has compared to the median, for many reasons, such as the amount of political power it would yield him. The thought experiment uses a harmless activity for earning the wealth, but criticism of wealth inequality is often based on what happens _after_ the wealth is earned too. If in this example you will claim the world remains perfectly (socially) egalitarian and the kid will be benevolent, then maybe we can let him keep his wealth in the thought experiment. But that’s not the world we live in, and possibly never will be.

> but criticism of wealth inequality is often based on what happens _after_ the wealth is earned too.

IIRC, that's precisely what Nozick is nominally interested in exploring (although he really doesn't).

There at least 2 distinctions going on:

1. whether wealth is acquired with or without exploitation; Nozick uses consent as a proxy for exploitation, which is dubious but predictable given that he's a libertarian

2. whether there are ill-effects to (excessive) wealth regardless of how it was acquired

and you answer is...? There is an interesting article about inequality and intentions behind it: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/inequality-is-about-grabbin... ... what do you think about it?

Now switch the paying 5c to buying endorsed sweatshop Nikes and owning hundreds of minimum wage paying franchises. Because that seems to be what the successful sports folks do.

I have an interesting thought experiment too. First everyone has the same wealth and earns the same income. But there's a kid who strings razor wire across a road and starts charging 5c to unhook it while you pass by. Nobody is required to pay the kid, everyone does so entirely of their own free will. Things progress, and the kid now has 100x the wealth of anybody else. I ask the question: is this something that a good society would try to stop?

Which one is the better allegory of modern capitalism?

It's somewhere in the middle usually. Kid gets a bunch of people to pool their money to build a new road that is more convenient and lobby the road authority to not build competing roads. Then puts up razor wire and tries to extract the maximum that the market will tolerate.

Nozick's thought experiment isn't about modern capitalism, which can be and should be trivially condemned without the work of gedankenexperimenten.

It's about how a utopian society could and/or should respond to changes in resource distribution, and how entirely consensual behavior and exchanges between people can still lead to situations that are problematic.

I think Nick's utopian egalitarian society would arrange for the amazing basketball player to have the job of playing amazing basketball, but the same income as everyone else. In exchange for playing basketball really well, he doesn't have to, say, clean toilets.

Making everyone have the same income means there is already a big infrastructure to manage how resources are allocated in this society - it already can't have been a free-trade system with currency that can be arbitrarily sent and received.

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