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Your total net worth is not equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because people spend and consume things. Your per-moment income is (or should be) equivalent to your lifetime productivity, because that's inherently fair. You do things for other people, other people do things to you. You get what you do. Your profit is equivalent to the amount of value you've provided to others that you have not yet been compensated for. If you provide labor which is worth $1000 of value when consumed by other people, and they pay you $1000 for it, the $1000 is literally pieces of paper. You have done good in the world and you haven't yet received a real reward for it. You deserve to have other people do stuff for you, because you've done stuff for them. Until you spend it. If you buy $500 worth of food, that represents farmers in the world doing labor on your behalf, in exchange for you having done whatever it is that you did, which is either directly on their behalf, or more likely on the behalf of someone else who did labor on the behalf of someone else who... eventually somewhere along the chain the farmer benefits from labor that someone did who benefited from labor that you did. But half as much. Because you earned $1000 and only spent $500. If you eat $500 worth of food and save $500 in your bank account, that means you have provided $500 worth of value that you still haven't been rewarded for. You're a net moral positive, in that you've created more than you've consumed. Money represents favors owed to you by society because you (or whoever legitimately earned the money you currently possess) did favors for society and hasn't received the equivalent reward in real material goods and services yet.
If someone legitimately* earns $10 million and then spends all $10 million on themselves, they're a net neutral. They produce and consume in equal measure. They do good by stimulating the economy by the consumer surplus that other people extract on top of what they themselves earn from their work. It's not an exact science, but it's proportional. On average, people who do this are probably fine, and we should consider them to be neither a saint nor a monster.
If someone legitimately earns $10 million, spends $1 million on themselves, and then donates $9 million to charity, that represents $6 million worth of real value they've provided to someone and then chose to give the rewards to someone else. This person is a saint. They create value and keep only a fraction of it for themself.
If someone legitimately earns $10 million and then spends $1 million on themselves and keeps the $9 million in their bank account to spend later, that represents $9 million worth of real value that they have provided to someone and have held the remainder in abeyance for the moment. They deserve $9 million worth of goods from society because they have done work that society has deemed to be worth $10 million, and society has promised them $10 million in exchange for their work, and they probably only did the work in the first place because they were promised this $10 million. And they've only used up 1/10 of that promise, they are entitled to the remainder. In truth, due to consumer surplus they have enabled more than $10 million to society as a whole, with the rest being captured by their employer, customers, business partners, and taxes. The $10 million is the remainder they've been promised themselves for their contributions.
If by "moral worth" you mean "is this a good and kind charitable person who sacrifices things for other people at their own expense" then no. But I reject that entire premise. Economics is not zero sum. If you are clever and efficient there's no reason you have to sacrifice your own good for other people when you can both mutually profit. A person who creates $10 million over the course of 20 years has done 10x as much for society as a younger person who has created $1 million over the course of 2 years. It's not that the former is a "better person" than the latter. Both are providing $500k to society every year, both receive $500k per year. It's that the former has chosen to behave like an intelligent long-term thinker and stockpile their rewards over time. Someone's net worth represents the total contributions they've made to society that they haven't yet cashed in. They've produced more than they've consumed. Someone who is older has had more time to do more good.
*Note that my use of the word "legitimately" is doing a lot of work here and almost begging the question. There are exceptions where people get paid money for not creating value. But, on average, as a rule of thumb, this is the case for most people. If everyone involved is mutually consenting and there aren't weird monopolies, government regulations, excessive taxes, government waste, subsidies, or rentseeking distorting things, the base case capitalist exchange creates legitimate profit for everyone involved, in which case people do morally deserve the fruits of their labor.
Two different issues are here, the nature of the economy and the moral question. Regarding the first, you take simple deterministic equations seriously. Balance = Promise Given - Promise Spent, Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost. I think this is a mistake. It's too simple. Econophysicists showed that random agents trading randomly will end up with exponentially distributed net worth. Income among people who are not in finance or entrepreneurship can be modeled that way. Those in entrepreneurship and finance play multiplicative games with their money, so they get a Pareto distribution which has an extremely fat tail. Those who end up at the far right edge of the Pareto distribution can just be repeatedly lucky; the model does not require intrinsic talent differences. In other words, the economy is largely a stochastic process, not a simple equation. So the person who ends up with more „promises from society“ probably just won a hidden lottery. Their luck in crypto, web software, their career, their business, does not at all trump a good moral claim to their excess wealth. You can see this in the person of Elon Musk. He ran twitter into the ground. He bought Tesla and got lucky. He originally made his money riding his wave on a fad with a company that went no where except to the typical old merger and acquisition murder-execution (t. Patrick Bateman) of a company. He won some hidden lotteries 2 or 3 times, which is expected given the size of the population, and that's why he's the richest man in the world. He's actually not smarter or harder working than a lot of FAANG developers who didn't get so lucky and who have 1/100.000th or less of his wealth as a consequence.
On morality you mention „fairness“ and „society.“ But this is more assumed egalitarianism. What if fairness and society matter less than the best individuals? Why not? I think fairness and society stand against the true, beautiful, and just. We currently have a very fair and society-approved system. Some people noticed it was not as fair as it could be, but it turned out trying to make all wealth equal, which was super fair and society-approved, actually made everyone worse off, because modest meritocracy with a lot of random slack actually brings up the median wealth a lot more than setting variance to exactly null.
What has never been tried is progressive redistribution of wealth. We currently have a moderate amount of regressive redistribution (based on progressive taxation). You know how IQ and income correlate at .4? What if we cranked that up to .9? Society would hate it, and it wouldn't be fair, but I think it would be just.
I aknowledge that there is quite a bit of randomness in the realized outcomes of money, but note that the expected value is still pretty close to average production. Lotteries in the economy are not the zero sum scenarios set up by a greedy casino in order give you negative expected value and enrich themselves in the process. They are a complicated mess of scenarios with different expectations. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. Someone who chooses good lotteries, invests in promising companies, dissolves unprofitable money sink companies, will on average end up winning more often than someone who chooses bad lotteries. Therefore the actual people with lots of money will tend to be people who had both luck AND intelligent choices that benefited the economy. Once again, this leads to a "money held" to "value provided to others" with a correlation solidly between 0 and 1.
Where did that come from? Money earned is money deserved is very unegalitarian, unless you're a blank-slatist who believes that equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are the same thing, which you clearly aren't. When I use the word fair here, I mostly mean something pretty similar to what you mean by just. This is a pointless strawman nitpick on language use, and doesn't matter.
This is absurd. Why would we favor intelligence like this? Intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently. To that effect, making a meritocratic system that rewards economic output measures the actual thing that we care about. And is easier and more direct that some Goodhart measure of IQ. Your idea makes about as much sense as observing that cows eating more grass are correlated with producing more milk, and then selective breeding cows to maximize the amount of grass they eat and ignoring milk production. Why would you optimize a proxy for the thing you care about, when the proxy is actually harder to measure and select for, and only vaguely correlated with it. Someone of average intelligence who works really hard is more valuable to society than someone of great intelligence who doesn't do anything with it. The latter might as well not even exist. And it's not like high IQ people are necessarily good people who do good things, there are plenty of intelligent sociopaths who leverage their great intelligence to commit more evil. If an intelligent person is 3x as powerful as an average person, able to accomplish 3x as much at whatever they try to do, then an evil intelligent person sabotaging society is 3x as horrible as an evil average person. You might as well award the Medal of Honor to powerful enemy soldiers who were especially horrible and slaughtered your own side's soldiers. Good people do good things for other people. We want to incentivize more good things, so we should reward people proportional to how much good they do.
Because more intelligence means more qualia.
Ants are more biologically successful than humans, composing much more of the Earth's biosphere. Do you support an ant takeover of the Earth involving human extinction? Since intelligence only matters in-so-far as it allows you to make better choices and thus accomplish more stuff more efficiently, ants are perfectly equal to humans, so if they figure out how to take over while having no qualia per ant body, that's perfectly fine right?
Only if you are an egalitarian who thinks we should Goodhart what the median person finds to be productive. A tree is a living organism, and fortunes have been made by reducing their GDP per capitas. For example, logging companies. In this case, an organism is simply chopped down for the sole benefit of a superior being. There is no credit from trees that one must earn by pandering to the forest. Extremely intelligent people should not be the slaves of 100 IQ people. Your economic model says that they are and that that is fair. It is predicated on the egalitarian idea that all humans have equal moral worth and therefore get equal economic rights. Polygenic scores applied to apes showed they have gene scores between 40 and 55 IQ points. That means a bright ape is 45 IQ points from the median person. Nietzsche said the Übermensch will see the median person of his day like an ape. This implies the median Übermensch will have an IQ a little north of 145; a society run for and by such people will not give equal economic rights to most people alive today. We can create such a society by increasing the correlation between wealth and intelligence, and through it the correlation between fertility and intelligence.
Is that true? If that were true, how would you know? It seems vaguely plausible, but I'm fairly certain that consciousness and qualia are not well understood enough to conclude that. You only know about your own qualia in your own internal experiences, and can only attempt to extrapolate to other people based on similar brain chemistry. I'm not confident, but I'm fairly certain that computers do not have any qualia at all, and yet as AI gets smarter and smarter their IQ increases. Even when it surpasses that of humans, they still probably won't have qualia. It's still just a mathematical function that turns numbers into other numbers in a deterministic way.
I'm a human supremecist. I think that humans have moral value, and animals don't except in-so-far as they are useful or psychologically pleasing to humans. If there were an AI computer with IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support it taking over the world and replacing you? If the ants formed a hivemind that, when all of them combined their thought processes together, had an IQ equal to one more than yours, would you support them taking over the world?
Who is being enslaved? My economic model says that people should do things which are mutually profitable. That both people gain from their mutual interactions. You should do good things for other people and then they should reward you for it in equal measure! That's why people who are more productive should be paid more. YOUR model says that low IQ people should be enslaved to high IQ people, and do things that high IQ people want without getting compensated for it. My model does not involve slavery, because anyone can do anything they want, but they get rewarded from the value they actually create. We can chop down trees because they are trees, not people. If you could earn just as much money from chopping down a 60 IQ human being and harvesting their organs this would be horrible and evil, even though they're less intelligent than us, because they are people and would experience real suffering that we should care about. They are less economically useful than a 100 IQ human, and therefore will be less productive and will earn less money on their own. Therefore they will earn less money and have less money, automatically, without us needing to authoritarianly go in there and decide for them how much we think they're worth. Reality tells people how much they could be worth if they tried, and then they themselves determine how much they're actually worth by their own decisions and efforts.
Why? That sounds like a miserable society for most people to be in. I think you're just using a maximally selfish definition of the word "good", where you imagine a society which maximizes your own personal hedonic value, or some sort of aesthetic preference for order or unity/conformity/dystopia. Usually the words we use for this is "selfish", not "good". The classic evil dictator wants to have themselves enslave everyone below them and maximize good for themselves and themselves alone. This is not what people mean when they talk about "good" in the moral sense.
How do you justify that? I'm just applying logic like that upwards with more consistency.
I support a non-human super intelligence, yes. It could be alien or sillicon based as long as it has superior qualia/consciousness. As Nietzsche writes, the Übermensch will not be a human, it will merely be evolved from humans biologically. A human is a particular animal that has been around in forms biologically close to now for a few thousand years. Predecessors from before that are at the very least racially distinct.
No, because it is evolved, there won't be low IQ people in it at all. So it will be an incredibly jovial and wonderful place.
It's hard to categorize it as either selfish or non-selfish. I would be a low status member of such a society, if I would even make the cut. I am, after all, merely a human. I think I will die before 2100 and that I won't get to personally benefit from the fruit of a society like this, but I still see it as good for it to come about. What is really selfish, to me, is egalitarianism. It's a form of mass selfishness, where people get together and decide rank selfishness is fine as long as there are a lot of other people just like them being similarly selfish. This is where you get illogical speciesism is two directions from. Subjugate those below, prevent the coming about of those above, never question why the median person today is apparently supposed to be perfect and infinitely deserving given this behavior. Call anybody who opposes the maximally self-serving stable egalitarian coalition a variety of names, including selfish or self-serving, böse, a dictator, enemy of our democracy, etc.
No it doesn't. First and foremost my model says smart people should stop having their own wealth redistributed away from them. Second it says reverse the redistribution, which is fair after all of the years of servitude. The lower people owe a debt for taking from the higher for so long. Third, it doesn't have to go to things smart people want. Primarily, it should go to the reproduction of smart people, which is typically undesired by smart people themselves. It shouldn't go to more leisure or vacations from the start.
Are you a vegan? Chickens, cows, and pigs definitely experience real suffering by being butchered too. Unfortunately I selfishly struggle to cut out all meat, but I don't eat pork because they are more intelligent than cows and chicken, and I make effort to avoid buying factory farmed meat. I'm of the opinion that grass fed cows seem pretty happy and lack the intelligence to know that they will be killed in the future. It's possible to kill them painlessly and without them knowing. I'm also optimistic about lab grown meat as an alternative to farmed meat and its perfection by the close of this century.
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