Em Redistribution

I’m in the last few weeks of finishing my book The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule The Earth, about social outcomes in a world dominated by brain emulations. As a teaser, let me share some hopefully non-obvious results about redistribution in the em world.

There are many kinds of inequality. Inequality exists between different species, between generations born at different times, and between nations of the world at a time. Within a nation at a time, there is inequality both between families and within families. There is also inequality across the moments of the life of each person. In all of these cases, there is not only financial inequality, but also inequality in status, prestige, pleasure, lifespan, happiness, and more. There is also inequality between the size of families, firms, cities, or nations, even when individuals within those groupings are equal.

Today, we have relatively little intentional redistribution between generations or between nations. Redistribution within the moments of a person’s life happens, but that is mostly left to that person to choose and to fund. Similarly, redistribution between siblings is mostly achieved via differential treatment by parents. Instead, most concern today about inequality, and most debate about redistribution to address inequality, focuses on one very particular “standard” kind of inequality.

This standard inequality looks at differences in average individual financial incomes between the families of a nation, all at a given time. This type of inequality is actually one of the smallest. For example, in the U.S. today financial inequality between families is only one third the size of that inequality between siblings within families, and even that is much less than the inequality between individuals from different nations. We may focus our redistribution feelings on this standard inequality because it seems to us the most analogous to the inequality that forager sharing norms addressed. Alternatively, perhaps it is the most profitable type of redistribution for opportunistic rent-seekers.

This history suggests that the em world will have little redistribution between em generations or city states, and also that each clan is mostly in charge of deciding how to address inequality within that clan. After all, em clan members are more similar and closer to each other than are human siblings, even if they may sometimes be more distant from each other than are typical human life moments. Also, clan members have rather complex relations with each other, making it hard pick a natural sub-clan unit to be the standard basis for counting inequality. So that leaves ems with comparing inequality between clans.

A set of em clans can be unequal in two different ways. One way focuses on individual incomes, or perhaps individual happiness or respect, and says that a clan is better off if its individuals are on average better off. The other way focuses on the overall size and success of a clan. Here a clan is better off if it has more members, resources, or respect. Historically, most redistribution efforts have focused on average individual outcomes. For example, we have seen very little efforts to redistribute between human family clans based on family size. That is, we almost never take from families with many descendants in order to give to families that have few descendants. Nor do we take much from big nations, cities, or firms to give to smaller ones.

Because most em wages are near subsistence levels, unregulated wages have less inequality than do wages today. So em clans naturally have less inequality of the standard sort that is the focus of today’s redistribution. In contrast, em clans have enormous inequality in clan size, resources, and respect. However, history gives little reason to expect much redistribution to address this inequality. It is not very analogous to forager sharing, nor does it lend itself to profitable rent-seeking.

Thus the main kind of redistribution that we have reason to expect in the em era is between the clans of a city, based on differences of average within-clan individual income. But we expect less inequality of this sort in the em world, and so expect less redistribution on this basis.

Income taxes are today one of our main mechanisms for reducing the standard inequality that compares individual incomes between families within a nation. Over the last two centuries, big increases in the top marginal tax rates have mostly followed wars where over two percent of the population served in the military. For example, in the U.S. the top marginal tax rate jumped from 15% to 67% in 1917, during World War I. Controlling for this effect, top tax increases have not been correlated with wealth, democracy, or the political ideology of the party running the government. This weakly suggests that the local degree of individual income redistribution between the clans of an em city may depend on the local frequency of large expensive em wars.

If ordinary humans are included straightforwardly in the redistribution systems of the em world, then the simple result to expect is transfers, not only away from richer humans, but also from humans to ems overall. After all, in purely financial terms typical ems are poorer than the poorest humans. Redistribution systems may perhaps correct for the fact that em subsistence levels are much lower than are human subsistence levels. But if so such systems may also encourage or even require recipients of aid to switch from being a human to being an em, in order to lower costs.

During the em era, humans typically have industrial era incomes, which are much higher than subsistence level incomes. While many and perhaps most humans may pay to create a few ems, they tend to endow them with much higher than subsistence incomes. In contrast, a small number of successful humans manage to give rise to large em clans, and within these clans most members have near subsistence incomes. Thus transfers based on individual income inequality take from the descendants of less successful humans and give to descendants of more successful humans.