"If Bill Gates could actually cure malaria just by touching people, that would be orders of magnitude more amazing than any particular talent he actually possesses in reality."
This rankles. I'm not sure this is true at all. It would take him thousands of hours to physically touch even a small fraction of malaria sufferers and lead to risks (etc.) even if those visiting him were streamlined into a sort of production line.
Compare his ability to turn lots of mental effort into a gigantic pile of resources with which he can, with a reasonable probability, cure tens of millions with malaria. Having the superpower of "designing popular and useful computer OSes" seems much better and more impressive than the superpower of "curing malaria by touch".
"People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context."
I'm reminded of Daniel Kahneman's success equation that goes something like "success = talent + luck"; "great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck". I think it was Taleb who suggested that the difference between mild success and wild success is luck.
If there's a relevant super-power, it's being lucky. If that's the case, it raises a whole set of other questions and issues that aren't addressed in this post.
There are 83 billionaires in China's parliament (the 3000 highest ranking members of the party excluding the 25 member politburo). There are 122 billionaires in China (according to Forbes), so at least 68% of China's billionaires are high ranking party members.
As to multimillionaires, well it seems only senior party members and their family members (the entire party, including the lowest ranking members comprises only 5% of China's population) become multimillionairs in China: http://www.sunday-guardian....
> inequality talk is usually a covert way of coordinating who to grab stuff from.
you mean "inequality talk is the result of human tendencies (which developed in the ancestral environment) to try and grab stuff even if, in the present case, this talk isn't an effective means to those ends"? Because, per Caplan and the Myth of the Rational Voter, any individual has negligible chance of influencing national policy (through either talk or voting) in a way that gets them stuff.
If this is what you mean, then your observation may be interesting but it probably wouldn't sway the moral argument too much. *All* of our moral intuitions are likely the result of such ancestral adaptations, and we don't typically use those origins as a reason to ignore them.
So really, this is an argument to be more consistent in our morality, right? Other things being equal, we might (in light of your observation) choose to enforce all forms of inequality to the same degree. But this is *not* an argument against redistribution per se.
While I believe that self-made billionaires have special abilities, I don't think the grabbers share this belief. They think billionaires' wealth was somehow gained illegitimately. Or maybe more accurately, they are jealous and covetous but don't want to admit to this, so they put on a superhero cape and convince themselves that they are heroic by re-distributing the ill gotten into good works.
if by "Markets aren't designed, they are emergent" you mean "The rich and elite change the market design so that they disproportionately benefit at the expense of the majority" you are correct and repeating what I said. Look at the last two nobel prize winner Tirole and Roth, both won for a lifetime on research in market design and looking into how large corporations manipulate and abuse markets that are poorly designed. Markets are "emergent" anymore than software code is emergent. Someone set the market up and consequences follow from those rules. There is no naturally existing market. Pretending that markets exist and naturally provide efficiency and that they are born as egalitarian systems just like the wildebeest and lion on the Serengeti one of those fantasies that doesn't hold up to even a modest acknowledgement of reality. Is the US bank/insurance/drug/big oil not a consequence of market design. The state
Markets aren't designed, they are emergent. Elitists can use the state to coercively limit markets, and to regulate the following inevitable market "failures" that pop up when the market spontaneously reacts to the situation.
while people usually justify their inequality concerns by noting that inequality can make lower folks feel bad, that justification can apply equally to a great many sorts of inequality
I may have read your post when it was originally published (and subsequently forgotten about it), but a couple days ago I wrote something similar in "The inequality that matters II: Why does dating in Seattle get left out?" Someone on that post left a comment pointing back to this one.
In the last year I've seen a lot of writing about financial inequality and almost none about non-racial, non-financial forms of inequality.
You can't grab something that already belongs to you. All capital that physically exists in the US is ultimately owned by the citizens of the US, collectively.
It's just that we use individual - transient! - property rights as a legal vehicle to create market incentives. This is merely a function of democratic will. We want billionaires to have some property rights. That's why they have property rights. Every investor knows that elected officials can raise taxes as they see fit. They know this before they start investing.
But you didn't think so six years ago. In "Sex versus food charity" ( http://www.overcomingbias.c... ) you say it's "obvious" that food charity concerns equality.
"No, you don't understand Chinese politics. The parliament is NOT part of the party; the party rules."
I know this, yet the rich who sit in parliament for the communist party don't do it for charity (it's probably a reward ofr service and a great place to network) and the very rich are severely overrepresented in bodies with real power. I don't know why you assume people involved in state enterprises are not rich: many of China's ultra rich became rich through shady real estate deals via state owned enterprises (this is usually the domain of the completely rotten local governments which do not hold the supreme power but can easily, through party members, block extreme proposals, such as a 100% tax on multimillionairs and billionaires, from the national government).
"The author of the article you cite heads a far-rightwing think tank. The author refers to some survey of Chinese where the people complain that wealth comes from politics in China to "prove" that it does."
I don't know who the author is but the survey was Chinese, by the Chinese and even the publically known millionaire party members represent 35% of the millionaires in China (while the party contains only 5% of China's population). Also, not officially inviting billionaire and multimillionaire party members to meetings, but not expelling these members from the party isn't any different than American politicians complaining about the banks but taking huge campaign funding checks from those banks behind the scenes.
Simply put, if the Chinese communist party were to eliminate billionaires and multimillionairs they'd be eliminating their own a lot.
No, you don't understand Chinese politics. The parliament is NOT part of the party; the party rules. The article I cited spoke of the Party Congress, which is important; the "parliament" is unimportant. The very rich have greatly increased their numbers in the parliament while proportionately greatly declining in the party's leading bodies. Only the second trend has political significance. The "parliament" definitely is not constituted of high ranking party members. (It seems the "input" of the rich can be obtained through their participation in parliament without giving them real power.)
The author of the article you cite heads a far-rightwing think tank. The author refers to some survey of Chinese where the people complain that wealth comes from politics in China to "prove" that it does.
The majority of China's billionaires are high ranking communist party members (they elevate the term "champagne socialist" to a whole new level). Many other high ranking members are multimillionairs and the party leadership has been communist (or even socialist) in name only for a long time now.
I think that's a popular misconception. In fact, government bureaucrats remain dominant in the party. The number of rich have been curtailed.
"The CCP, more than a decade after former President Jiang Zemin tried to open it up to private businesspeople, remains dominated by Party and government bureaucrats, military officers and executives of state-owned corporations."
"The data from Hurun, publisher of a luxury-goods magazine that tracks China’s affluent, show the number of billionaire delegates at the Party Congress will rise by at most one since 2007, when it last convened."
State-run enterprises remain economically dominant in China. The country is Communist--but in a kind of ultra-Bukharinist way.
"If Bill Gates could actually cure malaria just by touching people, that would be orders of magnitude more amazing than any particular talent he actually possesses in reality."
This rankles. I'm not sure this is true at all. It would take him thousands of hours to physically touch even a small fraction of malaria sufferers and lead to risks (etc.) even if those visiting him were streamlined into a sort of production line.
Compare his ability to turn lots of mental effort into a gigantic pile of resources with which he can, with a reasonable probability, cure tens of millions with malaria. Having the superpower of "designing popular and useful computer OSes" seems much better and more impressive than the superpower of "curing malaria by touch".
"People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context."
I'm reminded of Daniel Kahneman's success equation that goes something like "success = talent + luck"; "great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck". I think it was Taleb who suggested that the difference between mild success and wild success is luck.
If there's a relevant super-power, it's being lucky. If that's the case, it raises a whole set of other questions and issues that aren't addressed in this post.
There are 83 billionaires in China's parliament (the 3000 highest ranking members of the party excluding the 25 member politburo). There are 122 billionaires in China (according to Forbes), so at least 68% of China's billionaires are high ranking party members.
As to multimillionaires, well it seems only senior party members and their family members (the entire party, including the lowest ranking members comprises only 5% of China's population) become multimillionairs in China: http://www.sunday-guardian....
To clarify: is it true that when you say
> inequality talk is usually a covert way of coordinating who to grab stuff from.
you mean "inequality talk is the result of human tendencies (which developed in the ancestral environment) to try and grab stuff even if, in the present case, this talk isn't an effective means to those ends"? Because, per Caplan and the Myth of the Rational Voter, any individual has negligible chance of influencing national policy (through either talk or voting) in a way that gets them stuff.
If this is what you mean, then your observation may be interesting but it probably wouldn't sway the moral argument too much. *All* of our moral intuitions are likely the result of such ancestral adaptations, and we don't typically use those origins as a reason to ignore them.
So really, this is an argument to be more consistent in our morality, right? Other things being equal, we might (in light of your observation) choose to enforce all forms of inequality to the same degree. But this is *not* an argument against redistribution per se.
While I believe that self-made billionaires have special abilities, I don't think the grabbers share this belief. They think billionaires' wealth was somehow gained illegitimately. Or maybe more accurately, they are jealous and covetous but don't want to admit to this, so they put on a superhero cape and convince themselves that they are heroic by re-distributing the ill gotten into good works.
is that you, Karl Pilkington? Quit being a div and get back to making good shows.
if by "Markets aren't designed, they are emergent" you mean "The rich and elite change the market design so that they disproportionately benefit at the expense of the majority" you are correct and repeating what I said. Look at the last two nobel prize winner Tirole and Roth, both won for a lifetime on research in market design and looking into how large corporations manipulate and abuse markets that are poorly designed. Markets are "emergent" anymore than software code is emergent. Someone set the market up and consequences follow from those rules. There is no naturally existing market. Pretending that markets exist and naturally provide efficiency and that they are born as egalitarian systems just like the wildebeest and lion on the Serengeti one of those fantasies that doesn't hold up to even a modest acknowledgement of reality. Is the US bank/insurance/drug/big oil not a consequence of market design. The state
Markets aren't designed, they are emergent. Elitists can use the state to coercively limit markets, and to regulate the following inevitable market "failures" that pop up when the market spontaneously reacts to the situation.
while people usually justify their inequality concerns by noting that inequality can make lower folks feel bad, that justification can apply equally to a great many sorts of inequality
I may have read your post when it was originally published (and subsequently forgotten about it), but a couple days ago I wrote something similar in "The inequality that matters II: Why does dating in Seattle get left out?" Someone on that post left a comment pointing back to this one.
In the last year I've seen a lot of writing about financial inequality and almost none about non-racial, non-financial forms of inequality.
Obviously, it's a contested claim that the tweaking really diminishes output and especially well-being across the board.
You can't grab something that already belongs to you. All capital that physically exists in the US is ultimately owned by the citizens of the US, collectively.
It's just that we use individual - transient! - property rights as a legal vehicle to create market incentives. This is merely a function of democratic will. We want billionaires to have some property rights. That's why they have property rights. Every investor knows that elected officials can raise taxes as they see fit. They know this before they start investing.
"human capital is approximately three-quartersof total wealth in the aggregate economy, and that this ratio is remarkably stable over time."
http://julian.digiovanni.ca...
But you didn't think so six years ago. In "Sex versus food charity" ( http://www.overcomingbias.c... ) you say it's "obvious" that food charity concerns equality.
"No, you don't understand Chinese politics. The parliament is NOT part of the party; the party rules."
I know this, yet the rich who sit in parliament for the communist party don't do it for charity (it's probably a reward ofr service and a great place to network) and the very rich are severely overrepresented in bodies with real power. I don't know why you assume people involved in state enterprises are not rich: many of China's ultra rich became rich through shady real estate deals via state owned enterprises (this is usually the domain of the completely rotten local governments which do not hold the supreme power but can easily, through party members, block extreme proposals, such as a 100% tax on multimillionairs and billionaires, from the national government).
"The author of the article you cite heads a far-rightwing think tank. The author refers to some survey of Chinese where the people complain that wealth comes from politics in China to "prove" that it does."
I don't know who the author is but the survey was Chinese, by the Chinese and even the publically known millionaire party members represent 35% of the millionaires in China (while the party contains only 5% of China's population). Also, not officially inviting billionaire and multimillionaire party members to meetings, but not expelling these members from the party isn't any different than American politicians complaining about the banks but taking huge campaign funding checks from those banks behind the scenes.
Simply put, if the Chinese communist party were to eliminate billionaires and multimillionairs they'd be eliminating their own a lot.
No, you don't understand Chinese politics. The parliament is NOT part of the party; the party rules. The article I cited spoke of the Party Congress, which is important; the "parliament" is unimportant. The very rich have greatly increased their numbers in the parliament while proportionately greatly declining in the party's leading bodies. Only the second trend has political significance. The "parliament" definitely is not constituted of high ranking party members. (It seems the "input" of the rich can be obtained through their participation in parliament without giving them real power.)
The author of the article you cite heads a far-rightwing think tank. The author refers to some survey of Chinese where the people complain that wealth comes from politics in China to "prove" that it does.
The majority of China's billionaires are high ranking communist party members (they elevate the term "champagne socialist" to a whole new level). Many other high ranking members are multimillionairs and the party leadership has been communist (or even socialist) in name only for a long time now.
I think that's a popular misconception. In fact, government bureaucrats remain dominant in the party. The number of rich have been curtailed.
See, for example, http://tinyurl.com/8mndn39 :
"The CCP, more than a decade after former President Jiang Zemin tried to open it up to private businesspeople, remains dominated by Party and government bureaucrats, military officers and executives of state-owned corporations."
"The data from Hurun, publisher of a luxury-goods magazine that tracks China’s affluent, show the number of billionaire delegates at the Party Congress will rise by at most one since 2007, when it last convened."
State-run enterprises remain economically dominant in China. The country is Communist--but in a kind of ultra-Bukharinist way.