MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
Georgist land value taxes are probably the best possible solution, and it is kind of annoying to constantly see people constantly being oblivious to them and conflating landlords with "the rich" as if capitalists who create products that people can consensually choose whether to buy or ignore are the same thing as landlords who hold not-homelessness hostage from everyone born without a huge amount of money to buy into the Ponzi scheme of land ownership.
A fair start to life is one in which everyone starts from zero, with nothing but the support of their parents and an equal share of the land and the bounty of nature. One in which you can go out into the land and use it to feed yourself and clothe yourself and build more and better things, and trade with others doing the same. In so far as land privitization of land has deprived everyone from the ability to do this, it is only fair and just that they be compensated for the value of the land. Not by giving them some vaguely defined "wealth redistribution" of arbitrary source or amount from "people who we think ought to help them", but by directly taxing the land equal to the value it provides as "rent", and distributing it to people either in the form of UBI and/or cuts to other taxes (or a combination of both). Anyone with less than an average amount of land should be paid by people with an above average amount of land (weighted by the land values). And if that's not enough to feed and clothe them, then they can work to make up the difference. But it will at least establish a baseline that removes the exploitation of landlords while not punishing capitalists who actually create value and inhibiting them from continuing to create value. (Also, reducing income taxes will significantly help employment rates and wages)
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I personally have no interest in banning contraceptives because, again, who cares.
I want literally the opposite, largely because I am pro-life. I am tentatively in favor of forcing unmarried people to use contraceptives, except that there's no reasonable to enforce it without authoritarian government control that I'm not in favor of. At the very least, we should bring back all of the shame and stigma that used to be attached to unmarried sex a couple centuries ago, but only apply it to people who don't use birth control. Also make it free to incentivize people to use it.
First and foremost, this will reduce abortions. The argument against outlawing it is that people will just do it anyway but in unsafe ways. If so, the only way to truly prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so we should be pushing legal and social pressures towards doing so.
Second, I believe it is immoral to bring an unwanted child into existence. They will not have the love and support from their parents that a child deserves. Again, pro-choice people use this as an argument in favor of abortions, but I think having an unwanted child is less evil than killing them (otherwise we could replace orphanages with euthanasia clinics). But it's still evil, and more birth control would also reduce this.
Thirdly, I believe it is immoral to deliberately have a child as a single parent, even if you want one. I feel less strongly about this, and I'm not sure I would go so far to call it "evil", just misguided and irresponsible. All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes, I don't think one parent alone can fulfill all of the responsibilities of both paying for and actually educating and caring for a child, and doesn't have the full breadth of wisdom and life experiences to impart, since they only have their own perspective.
Unmarried people should not be conceiving children, because it inevitably leads to one of these scenarios (unless you have a shotgun wedding, which is still likely to lead to suboptimal results if your partner wasn't someone you were previously planning to marry). Therefore, unmarried heterosexual people should not engage in unprotected sex, at least in any form with a nonnegligble chance of conception. I'm not convinced it is the responsibility of the government to prevent this, I don't think it's within the range of powers they ought to have. But at the very least anyone who does this is a bad person and we need social pressure that disincentivizes people from doing it. Slut shaming is a lost cause, but I hope that unprotected-slut-shaming (Of both sexes. Men are equally culpable for their actions.) can make a comeback.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7mo ago
In a perfectly efficient market, this would be the case. But it's easily disproven in practice by the fact that market prices can change by effects which have absolutely no impact on the utility value.
Ie, suppose we have a city with a bunch of plumbers, all of equal plumbing skill/ability, and a company that hires them and manages their distribution to clients, and pays between $80k and $120k depending on how skilled and aggressive the plumber is at negotiating (aggressive meaning they demonstrate an ability/willingness to quit and do a different job instead if they don't get the salary they want). We've assumed by axiom that they provide the same value, and yet get paid different amounts, let's assume the frequency is evenly distributed across this range, such that the average plumber is paid $100k. I suppose you could say that the "utility value" is the highest the company is willing to pay, $120k, and anyone being paid less is simply a bad negotiator, but I'm not sure if you'd say the "market value" is $120k given that most of the plumbers aren't earning that, and a new plumber entering the field is unlikely to get an offer that high.
Suppose then that the plumbers unionize and negotiate that all of them will receive the same pay of $110k. That's now the market value, unambiguously, that's what the market, as created by this single local monopolistic company (which is the only company offering reliable and consistent pay for plumbers in this city) and this one union (which all employees of the company must join) will pay. And yet the utility value of plumbing has not changed, because the union doesn't impact plumbing skill/ability in any way.
Suppose that the company actually takes in revenue of $140k for each plumbing employee it has, and keeps the difference as overhead/profit. There's a sense in which the utility value of a plumber is actually $140k since that's what clients are willing to pay, although if the overhead is necessary then I suppose the utility of the plumber themself is lessened by that. However if a plumbing emergency happens and the company gets a lot more business, earning $150k per employee one year, but takes the extra as profit and changes no salaries, then the utility value of plumbers goes up that year, the market price (from the client and owner's side) goes up, but the market price (from the employees side) remains unchanged.
And suppose that the employer uses local regulations, an army of lawyers, and relationships with local politicians to crush any new plumbers that try to form their own company or go independent in this area. It is not a free market, it is effectively a local monopoly. If you want to be a plumber, you negotiate here, or you leave the city and pay whatever transition costs it takes to uproot your life and your family and be a plumber somewhere else. The fact that this changes market prices but doesn't change the utility value of plumbers should clearly demonstrate that market prices are distinct from utility prices, even if an ideal perfectly efficient and free market would cause them to be equal. In practice, no market is perfectly free, therefore we should expect deviations in precisely the areas where these imperfections drive them apart.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
"Destroy your opponent before they can destroy you" does not at all sound like the "reasonable answer". Especially since this won't literally destroy them, they'll still exist and be even more ravenous to seize the reins of power. It seems like the actually reasonable answer is to de-escalate and decrease the power and influence of the government so people can make their own choices about their own personal lives.
I don't even get why there are "sides". I don't care whether the meat I eat comes from a "farm" or a "lab", I just care whether it's cheap, tasty, and nutritious. Let them both try their best and we can judge them and eat them according to our own preferences. I'm on team freedom, and that means nobody gets shut down pointlessly just to "own" the other side.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
You always have to be careful about controlling for confounders, but there's enough evidence in the same direction that I generally buy it. HBD is probably true, but my argument is that its effect is significantly smaller than the effect from culture, so it's not an important priority for addressing or using to explain gaps. It's not as simple as reasoning "Median househould income is $77k for white people and $46k for black people, but white people are smarter so everything is fine". If HBD is false then with equal cultures, and absent racism, the median income for black people would also be $77k. If HBD is true, then with equal cultures the median income with equal cultures might be $72k or something, something between $46k and $77k and closer to the latter than the former. The gap is caused by multiple factors, and there is significant progress that can be made, and most but not all of the gap could theoretically be closed. If HBD is true, then it will eventually be important to acknowledge as true so that someday if we reach the equilibrium we don't keep endlessly looking for racists and/or cultural issues, because the gap can't ever be closed completely. But at the moment there's so much other stuff going on that it's only a small piece of the pie.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
And yet, some proportion of rapists are 6'5 attractive sociopaths who go on romantic dates with women and then rape them. And probably don't marry them afterwards, if they were interested long term they'd probably be patient. But I assume that people not being traumatized and therefore not reporting it to the police would cause a rapist to keep going and thus become disproportionately prolific than some disgusting homeless person who gets reported and caught quickly.
Also, I'm not at all suggesting that this is typical or average. It's an exception, I'm just wondering if maybe it's on the order of 1-5% rather than 0-0.01% mentally ill people that society's failure to entertain it as a possibility would imply.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I suppose if you have some sort of selfish or elitist morality system where only you and people like you matter. But even then, "helping" homeless people doesn't just mean reducing their suffering but also converting them into productive members of society.
As a utilitarian, I think all humans matter. Failure to own a home (which is a state that literally all humans are born into and only manage to avoid by having kind/competent parents or producing enough to earn money for a place to stay on their own) does not discredit one from being a human and having inherent worth as a human being.
Now, if the cost to help a drug-addicted violent person fuel their addiction is the blood sweat and tears of five other people who have to pay for it out of their wages and suffer from crimes, then yeah, that's not worth it. But if you can help fix their addiction, and their behavioral issues, and turn them into a functioning and contributing member of society, then you've done all that AND saved an entire person's life, and then they can go and help other people as a productive member of society.
That's a big if. But it's a big gain if done. I'm sure that some homeless people are irredeemable scum who can't be changed. I'm equally sure that some people with homes and lots of money are also irredeemable scum who cause more harm than good but do it sneakily enough not to get caught. Houses are correlated with being a good person, but not even close to perfectly.
An actual solution to homelessness means solving the root cause of the issue, be that mental, behavioral, cultural, economic, social, or some combination. And then they're not homeless in the first place and that solves their issues and the problems they cause for other people at the same time. Anything less is a bandaid. Maybe useful as a temporary patch, but not ideal.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
I think the implication was that the "solution" actually solved their homelessness (ie housing them, finding them jobs, treating their mental illnesses) rather than solving the issue of them being unpleasant for locals, like kicking them out or throwing them in jail. It's not a real solution if you simply push them off to be someone else's problem, then you're just in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone does that to each other.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
And ideally you would tax that too. A sophisticated version of Georgism would include pigouvian taxes on behaviors with negative externalities, or natural monopolies, intellectual property, and other economic niches with fixed supply that one person snatching up deprives others of being able to do.
It's just that land is the easiest to assess and the most high value, and the most reasonably confident that most of its value is not created by the owner. Even if say, 5% of land value is created by real estate developers on their own property, that would mean 95% is not, either inherent to the land itself or created by other people nearby. So even if land value taxes are not entirely costless (although the more zealous Georgists pretend that they are), they're still one of the least bad taxes possible (only being beaten out by pigouvian taxes which disincentivize negative behaviors like pollution)
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
You misunderstand. I'm not saying it's never okay to do that. If Omelas were literally the only solution then yeah, I'd probably be okay with that. I'm saying it's less than ideal. Suppose we have 1 homeless person simultaneously suffering from homelessness and whatever mental illness or anti-social personality is causing it (1 point) and inflicting suffering on 3 people (1 point each). And the following options:
-
Do literally nothing: Everyone suffers, (-4 points)
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Pay to house the homeless person. They no long suffer, but they still harass everyone else, and it costs money (though less than the suffering of being homeless or else ordinary people wouldn't buy homes. So maybe (-3.5 points)
-
Exile the homeless person to another town. They suffer double, but the three people they were harassing are no longer harassed. BUT the new town has three new people for them to harass. (-5 points)
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Exile the homeless person from all society and/or incarcerate them and/or execute them. They suffer.... I dunno, a lot, call it X. But the three other people are fine. (-X points)
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Fix the homeless person's issues so they transform into a normal person. Let's suppose this is very difficult and expensive (-Y points). But everything else is resolved. They no longer suffer, the other people no longer suffer. (-Y points)
Your imagining of utilitarianism seems to be the claim that X < 3.5, that if we sacrifice homeless people via option 4 it's better than letting them inflict suffering on others. If option 5 did not exist, I might tentatively agree. 5 Does exist. I think Y < X < 3.5, and so Option 5 is ideal. Utilitarianism does not require sacrificing people to make other people happy, sometimes it just involves making everyone happy simultaneously. That's not always possible, but given that in this instance the very issue that is causing homeless people to inflict suffering on others (mental illnesses, addictions, and/or criminality) is the same thing inflicting suffering on themselves, solving that would get us both simultaneously.
I think you're missing distinction between base land value and capital improvements. You don't tax the buildings themselves, or the entire property value, you set the tax rate according to the underlying value of the land itself (which can be assessed separately from the building's value, and real estate agents do this all the time). Which is entirely externalities from other nearby stuff. Whatever value a property has from invested capital improvements contained within itself is exempt from the land value tax. If done properly, the incentive to build is the same as the incentive to invest money in any other form of capital (and the same the vast majority of people have when they build in the current system): you can either extract money from it over time, (which is not taxed in a full Georgist system), or sell it for a profit, which people are willing to buy because they can then extract money from it over time. In fact, people are more incentivized to build with land value taxes, because it's becomes the only way for a landlord to earn profit. You can't just buy a piece of land and sit on it as it appreciates in value, or extract rents based on its favorable location that everyone wants to be in. You have to build and upkeep structures that create value such that people are willing to pay to live there, or useful buildings that earn profit, above and beyond the taxed land rent value.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5mo ago
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.?
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions?
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
But this should then translate to a small fraction of real life encounters, right? It's certainly not the central example of rape, but there are powerful and wealthy man in real life, and a lot of them are horny and unethical enough to wield their power and influence to coerce the women around them into sex, which in turn removes responsibility for her choice. While probably the majority of the women in this scenario have a bad and icky and possibly traumatizing experience, it seems like some of them might enjoy it because it's literally their fantasy playing out in real life.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
There are a class of cellular automata which follow some form of the rule "look at what your neighbors are doing, then copy the state that is most common among them". There are variations of this: sometimes the copying is probabilistic rather than deterministic so the most common is simply the most likely to be copied. If you attach some game theory or other fitness function you can get an evolutionary system where higher scoring traits are more likely to be copied and you can watch natural selection play out across the model.
What these tend to have in common is that under a broad range of parameters they eventually result in consensus. Even if all of the initial strategies are completely arbitrary, just numbered differently, you still by random chance have one of them end up more prevalent and then it snowballs out of control until it is universal or near-universal.
In the case of language, that would be useful. My point is not that the oldest form of language is the most correct. My point is more that the most common use is the most useful, unless some objective concern such as use efficiency or uniqueness can overcome that. Having minor dialectic enclaves within a language are burdensome and confusing. Therefore, the burden is on all new changes to prove themselves worthy of the cost of breaking consensus. If I lived in Chaucer's time and everyone said "axe", if that was just what that word meant, I would likewise oppose changing it to "ask" for no reason. But if 95% of people say "ask" and 5% of people say "axe" then, unless they've got a really good reason, it is useful to pressure them to conform and bring the language back together instead of splintering it, or trying to convert the remaining 95% their way.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
What if we create diversity quotas for Quality Contributions? Almost all of the political ones that end up actually making the list are right-leaing, or at least anti-woke. If we (slightly) lower the standards for left-leaning or rare opinions so that they get signal boosted, and in particular the highest quality of them get seen by more eyes, that might incentivize people who hold those opinions to put effort into it and feel more appreciated.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I don't want to pretend that you don't have a point. This is in fact a point I've argued on the other side of against more radical Georgists who pretend LVT has no flaws whatsoever. It exists, it is a potential issue. And a nuanced, sophisticated version of Georgism would try to figure out a way to calculate this and either reduce the tax rate of someone based on how much of their land value was created by their own improvements, or use land tax revenue to give back directly to the people who are responsible for it (though this may be vulnerable to inaccuracies and corruption). Maybe you let large developers apply for a permit which exempts them from taxes caused by their own buildings, but you still tax them for the unearned rent on their land that is caused by other people's actions. Or maybe you make land assessment prices sticky that can't increase faster than a certain rate, so that rapid changes in land value from building things will increase its economic value immediately, without the tax price changing, which allows people to temporarily extract rent from them. But the tax rate slowly goes up towards the current value such that all of the long term value of the land caused by emergent social phenomena that no individual is responsible gets taxed and redistributed to everyone in society.
So ultimately, I think this is a niche problem which has potential solutions within the Georgist framework. Most people will still build the same as what they build now. Some people will actually build more if you remove nonland property taxes and force landlords to build to profit instead of squatting on valuable land. Only large developers relying on their own land value synergies will be disincentivized, and only if the land value tax makes no exceptions for them. It will cause some economic inefficiencies, but so do income taxes. Income taxes create tons and tons of inefficiency which are not niche. So if we're comparing system to a Georgist system, especially a nuanced Georgism which acknowledges the costs and attempts to mitigate them by having exceptions and setting tax rates below 100%, I still think it's the least bad tax.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.
Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11mo ago
But this would require skill and insider information and subjective analysis. Having a deterministic, mechanical process with known inputs that can process this data goes a long way towards preventing someone from corruptly picking and choosing which places they count as "high risk" and which they don't. And lowering variance, since some individuals are going to be better at doing this sort of subjective guesswork than others, while the AI can have its performance actually tested.
And goes a long way towards laundering this in the public perception. Even if everyone "knows" that this group is high risk, having an AI with testable metrics say so is probably going to be easier to sell (in the long run) than having human beings say so.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Are you talking about like the morning after pill? Because those are bad, but I'm referring to the ones that prevent women from ovulating during pregnancy so they don't just keep conceiving babies month after month while already pregnant. I know they make IUDs that do that, but there might be pills for it to.
I actually am not super familiar with the habits of promiscuous people and their typical birth control preferences, so "most" might not be the right phrase to use here. But if it turns out that most forms of birth control are abortive, but some aren't, that just increases the potential benefit of a pro-life promotion and subsidization of the ethical ones. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $20 for non-conceiving hormones, and they don't think fetuses are people, they're likely to take the abortion pills. If someone can pay $10/month for abortion pills vs $0 for non-conceiving hormones because the government and/or pro-life charities pay the $20, then no child gets conceived in the first place, and thus none die. Assuming that the goal is actually to prevent the conception and subsequent deaths of fetuses because they die, and not just to increase the number of childbirths, this seems like a massive win to me.
Now maybe it would be healthier for society and relationships for people to just not have promiscuous sex in the first place, but that ship has sailed, pragmatically there's nothing we can do to fix that, and it seems much less of a priority to me than the millions of deaths at stake that free non-abortive birth control could prevent.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
(This is probably a conversation for the culture war thread, not SQS, but whatever)
I sincerely doubt cynical men who are willing to disfigure their bodies and live a life of deception outnumber those who are sincerely dissatisfied with their lives as men and think living as women will make them happier.
I don't think that the latter category is necessarily excluded from "white males trying to become a marginalized group". That is, cynical exploitation of the system is sufficient but not necessary for this to be a factor. Some men are sincerely dissatisfied with their lives, and have been convinced that men are privileged oppressive patriarchs who oppress everyone else, and viscerally reject that identity because they don't feel privileged or oppressive and don't want to be. Instead, they are bullied and socially outcast and don't fit in with more masculine men, and thus feel that they must be part of an oppressed group. They are being oppressed by other white men (the bullies/normies), so they must be something other than a white man, hence trans.
Or something like that. I am not a clinical psychologist, I don't purport to know exactly what goes through the mind of someone in this situation (I was a weird social outcast, sort of, but very much not woke so I coped in completely different ways). And each individual is different so will have different responses to this situation. But it seems very plausible to me that social outcasts will look for reasons and excuses as to why they are different from everyone else, and why the people who pick on them are inherently evil in a morally objective way that makes them truly the bad guys. Taking on an oppressed identity makes your bullies into bigots and allows you to unite allies against them, even if they were previously bullying you for reasons unrelated to your identity. And, importantly, you don't need to be a cynical opportunist or a sleaze trying to sexually assault women, just be hurt and confused and subject to the same mental biases that everyone has that let us justify beliefs that are beneficial to ourselves.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
There are strong deontological and libertarian arguments that if somebody earns money, or creates something which is valued via money, via legitimate means, then they can do whatever they want with their own money no matter how wasteful you deem it, even if starving people elsewhere could use that money, because it's the owner's choice to do what they will with their own property.
I'm going to put those arguments aside, and argue from a utilitarian perspective. After all, what are they doing with their money if not spending it on themselves? If it sits in a bank vault as cash forever then it might as well not exist as far as the economy goes and thus helps counter inflation, at least until they die and a lot of it goes into death taxes and heirs. If they donate it to charity then hey, it's doing exactly what you want. If they're investing it to earn even more money, then it is being invested, not sitting around being useless. Again, if we're restricting our view to ethical billionaires who earn money by creating wealth, then they invest by giving money to ethical companies which create wealth, and then they extract some of that wealth as dividends while the rest disperses into the economy in the form of cheaper goods, more valuable goods, wages, and more buying/selling in interactions between their company and others.
So there are a number of reasons, from a utilitarian perspective, why billionaires might sometimes be good:
1: Charity
Scott makes a strong post arguing that billionaire charity is good because it can pick up blind spots that government charity misses: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/ Bill Gates in particular has devastated malaria, which was previously being underfunded relative to its value, because governments have systematic biases in what they do and do not fund. Such cases are not one person hoarding wealth that they can't possibly use on themselves, it's individuals choosing where to donate their own money that they created instead of the government appropriating it and then deciding for them. And they earn this right be creating the wealth in the first place.
2: Capital Allocation
I read a good argument (I forget where, maybe Paul Graham?) comparing investors to a natural selection process for determining what projects should be invested in. That is, people who are systematically good at telling the difference between promising companies and doomed failures can repeatedly invest in good companies that others underestimate, earn a profit, and have even more money. And then they repeat the process but more and bigger because they have more money to utilize. People who are bad at doing this will end up with less money and eventually be forced to do something else with their time. Therefore, smart investors will end up with more money, which they have demonstrated their ability to use wisely. And again, if they are investing in ethical companies then the more money they earn is a fraction of the wealth generated by the companies they finance, the rest going to grow the economy. Importantly, this process is brutal and unbiased. A bureaucrat trying to decide where to allocate public funding is going to have personal biases, conflicts of interest, and legibility concerns that they have to justify to others. A wealthy investor can chase hunches, whims, make their own plans based on their own industry knowledge, or just be unreasonably biased in favor of some industry that happens to be a good idea but nobody knows why yet. Evolution doesn't need to understand why the things it does works, it just has to kill the things that don't work and let the ones that do multiply, and eventually you have good things that work.
This second point demonstrates that how a billionaire spends their money is not necessarily decoupled from how they earned it. If they're spending it on making more money, and if they're investing in an ethical way (a big if) then they are creating even more wealth. And any limits or disincentives, soft or hard, will disincentivize this behavior and make some of them not try so hard. What genius business creator is going to super hard for a 10% chance of turning their 10 million dollar company into a billion dollar company, if you're going to cap them at 20 million dollars and they can just sell it now for a guaranteed 10 million? What $999 million dollar banker is going to risk $10 million dollars in a startup with a 2% chance of earning them another billion if you've capped them at $1 billion?
Poor people matter, it would probably help them in the short term if you snatched all of their billionaires wealth and just gave it to poor people, but you don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There's a teach a man to fish versus feed a man a fish sort of thing going on here. Capitalism is a strange alien beast which, when carefully tuned, can/is/will lift billions of poor people out of poverty. And billionaires are mostly a side effect of that process, but in some cases a direct contributor.
There's a large extent to which all of this is just a rephrasing of trickle down economics, which is 90% bullshit. But it's 10% not, and I would argue that to the reason it mostly doesn't work is largely because a significant fraction of wealth people and companies aren't actually behaving ethically. There is a lot of rentseeking and exploitation and imbalance in bargaining power between labor and capital, which means that many companies create wealth and then keep 90%+ of it as profit for themselves rather than a more fair ~50%, and some companies actually destroy wealth via externalities but manage to extract profits that they didn't legitimately create.
But also, from a brutal utilitarian perspective, maybe 10% is good enough. Like, if a group of rich people have $1 trillion dollars, we could snatch that and give it to the poor, and then the rich people and all the economic potential they represent is gone, the goose is dead. Or maybe we take 10% today, so the poor people only have $100 billion and a bunch suffer in poverty (though not literally starving). And then the remaining 900 billion the rich people invest grows to 1.8 trillion, and then we take another 10% giving $180 billion to the poor. And then the remainder doubles again and then we take another 10%. And wealth inequality continues to grow as the rich get richer and richer and richer, and yet pretty soon the amount we've extracted for the poor has exceeded what even existed in the first place, and they're not so poor. Maybe in a hundred years we'll have billions of "poor" people living in luxury apartments with all of what we would today consider modern luxuries, while the uber rich fly to pluto for vacation in gigantic space castles that the poor could never hope to afford. And if the alternative is to snatch the trillion now and hope that it feeds enough people for long enough before the money runs out and they go back to how they were before, then maybe it's better to let them stay poor until the economy grows enough to lift them out organically via wealth creation.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2yr ago
I think so. It's been a while since I learned about this so I don't remember all the details or studies off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure there were many such studies and probably at least some controlled correctly. I'm not completely certain though.
However I don't think it would even be appropriate to control for money/wealth/family-income directly, because part of the value of a two-parent household is the increased income. And even if you look at income per parent that's not necessarily appropriate because being a single parent forces them to juggle career and child rearing which would lead to less opportunities to take on high paying but demanding jobs. You'd have to control for socio-economic status of the families the parents came from (ie the grandchildren of the kids) or something complicated like that which controls for potential earning power rather than actual earnings.
Do some people enjoy being raped?
I normally don't wade this deep into controversial gender stuff, but... once I had this thought it won't leave my head. It's super anti-memetic, the sort of thing that if true nobody would want to admit and everyone who found out would suppress other than misogynists who people would ignore. If it were known to be true and widely admitted then rapists would just use it as an excuse, therefore the media/scientists/everyone lie and say it's not?
A bunch of people have rape fetishes. They are aroused by power and strength, or the courage and audacity to defy social conventions, or the idea of being so desirable that they drive someone insane and make them lose control. Or I've heard someone describe being raised in a super conservative household where you need to be pure and chaste, but they secretly want sex, so fantasize about being raped so that they could experience sex but it wouldn't be their fault and they haven't done anything wrong. I personally can imagine scenarios in which as a teenager a hot girl could have offered to have sex with me and I'd say no because I was a good boy who didn't do that sort of thing, but maybe would have ultimately been happy if she had forcibly insisted? But that never happened so I don't actually know.
Now of course, fantasies are not reality. Actual rape is going to be more violent, less perfectly tailored to someone's ideals, more terrifying, and probably with a much less attractive person than in an imaginary hypothetical. Lots of people have fantasies that they wouldn't actually want to carry out in real life. But it seems like the translation should be nonzero. And the translation of that it actual rapes is also nonzero. That is, if the proportion of people with rape fetishes is A, the proportion of those people who would enjoy actually being raped is B, and the proportion of those people who experience rape is C, and if all of these proportions are nonzero (and not so tiny as to pragmatically be zero), then the product, ABC is the proportion of people who have actually been raped and enjoyed the experience.
And it seems like they would experience an entirely different set of issues than normal rape victims. On the one hand, the experience is going to be a lot less traumatic: Instead of a horrifying and degrading experience they got to have an enjoyable if unexpected sexual encounter. On the other hand, they probably feel guilt and shame for their feelings, which they cannot voice without severe backlash from society. Rape is "the worst crime" possible, it's victims are permanently "Victims" and "Survivors". Its existence is a weapon to bash men and promote women. Mainstream culture is super well equipped to support and assist typical rape victims, at the expense of absolutely silencing and shunning anyone who might have not had a terrible experience and not been traumatized by it. And that itself might just amplify the shame and guilt and trauma for this subset of people. Like the kid who doesn't cry until they know someone is watching, I suspect that this subset of rape victims might not be traumatized from the rape itself, and wouldn't ever be traumatized in a different society, but are traumatized by our society's reaction to them and the need to stay "in the closet" so to speak, because of the backlash they'd receive if anyone found out the truth.
I'm not crazy, am I? Is this secretly a thing that nobody is allowed to talk about? I'm not sure it's really actionable if true. I don't think it makes rapists less horrible people even if they get lucky and target someone who secretly enjoys it, because the expected value of their crime is still catastrophically negative. So it wouldn't indicate reducing criminal or social penalties for rapists. And I don't think it would indicate reducing support or funding for rape victims, a majority of which are still traumatized in the normal way that everyone thinks they are. But maybe it would suggest something along the lines of... giving people the benefit of the doubt? Having more options for how people are allowed to cope with rape on their own terms without assuming they are "victims" when they might just be fine? I'm not sure this makes much difference, but I'd like to hear thoughts and/or statistical/scientific evidence for or against this (if that's even meaningful given the massive reporting biases this would create)
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