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Haves And Have-Nots

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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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Haves And Have-Nots

Robin Hanson
Mar 21, 2012
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Haves And Have-Nots

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I often ask my students to predict the social effects of particular new products or technologies. And a common error is that they expect every new thing to increase inequality. Their argument is that any new thing costs money, which rich people can better afford. So the rich must more gain advantage from each new product. A similar argument is given for a new kind of job – those better suited to that kind of job will do that job, and gain an advantage over people with other jobs, increasing the job induced inequality.

An obvious flaw in this argument is that it works way too well – it applies to pretty much anything new. Yet the net effect of all the new things that we’ve ever seen has been at most a modest increase in inequality. Thus the average inequality produced by each new thing must be pretty small. Also, there have been eras when inequality has decreased – but how could that happen if each new innovation increases inequality?

Students are often tempted to imagine an extreme division of society into haves and have-nots, like the Eloi and Morlocks of H.G.Well’s novel The Time Machine. The imagined groups are entirely distinct and separate, with little variation within each group. And of course these groups are in a moral struggle, to the death. This seems an obvious consequences of thinking about the future in a far mental mode – which leans one toward fewer categories with more uniform members, more moralizing, and less moral compromise.

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Haves And Have-Nots

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Haves And Have-Nots

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

Does not the very division dichotomous division into "haves" & "have nots" beg oversimplification? Have what? (or how much, or how much of what?)

I feel another poorly reasoned plea for endless relativism coming on, here...which I will resist with might & main. Still, the post & the aggregate comments following suggest to me that either/or thinking works really well in hypothesis testing, but perhaps less well when we're talking about how most of us frame the world. Juuussst a thought...

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AaronArmitage
May 15

"the rich have sort received the short end of the stick"

Anytime you find yourself having that thought, please punch yourself as hard as you can right in the nads.

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