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Attributing one's own win in one of the many money lotteries that exist is a form of the fundamental attribution error. Most of the time, such a win is just a lucky windfall, although most people nonetheless claim they „deserve“ their luck due to being a „predictive genius“ by winning at gambling or a „hard worker“ by spending a lot of time buying figurative lottery tickets, which can take the form of oil futures, polymarket bets, or cryptocurrency. If money were distributed on a „deserving“ basis, the correlation between wealth and age would be near-zero, since existing longer does not make one morally better and therefore more deserving. But lotteries have entry fees and take time to play, so they produce a positive relationship between age and wealth.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? People who have worked longer are deserving of more?
I don't see most work that is done in reality today as being related morally to its wage, and consequently to whatever savings are accumulated from it. For example, a lot of San Fransisco 50 year olds made way too much money in a software boom, often being head button style changer for Google for 10 years. I don't see this as entitling them to the $1 million they probably saved from that career. Yes, it's how they made their money and got it to be legally recognized as theirs, but morally they did nothing to „deserve“ it. Another way of looking at this is that I think the correlation between market wages for an occupation and deserved wage is zero, or maybe even negative. Someone who works for decades in cargo driving has done a lot to fuel the actual economy, but since their job pays close to subsistence wages, they will not have a lot of wealth at the end of a long career. But by the labor theory of deserving, they deserve a lot more than an ex-Googler.
But I reject the labor theory of deserving too, because it assigns preeminent value to people who happen to exist right now. The cargo driver may have fed his neighbors, but why do they deserve that? Why would that entitle the feeder to anything? Through the preeminent value of the people who are alive right now? How do we justify that?
If you do not take egalitarianism as an axiom, then people have different moral worths. And these worths precede anything they do, including labor. And also, serving the labor market does not actually fulfill a duty to people of higher moral worth, since the labor market is a mixture of random (in the case of the Googler's wage) and egalitarian (in the case of the trucker deserving a lot of wealth).
Either moral worth does not change with age, or it does. If it does, I think it seems the most sensible to say that it peaks during the reproductive window. This is when people need the most resources, so they can have children, and when they are the most capable in all aspects of life. So again, it seems off that old retirees would be the most deserving class of people when it comes to having wealth. They are definitely not the highest value age group, and whatever they spent their career doing probably did not increase their moral worth.
If we take a consequentialist libertarian perspective then wages are heavily correlated morally to wage. That is, whenever two people transact in a mutually consensual exchange, profit is generated and split between them in some way. That is
Total Value Produced = Consumer Value - Producer Cost
If producer can produce good X for $10 and consumer values it at $30 (subjective internal evaluation), then them buying the product generates $20 of value, distributed between the two depending on the price. If the producer sells it for $20 then both of them profit $10. If the producer sells it for $29 then the producer pockets $19 and the consumer profits $1 (in terms of getting a thing that they wanted more than they want the money they spend)
There is some ambiguity about what a fair/reasonable split should be, which is not automatically identical to the ultimate market price, but for any level of split the amount of profit someone earns will be proportional to the value created by their transactions. Which in turn means that the value someone creates is heavily correlated with the amount of money they earn. One exchange which produces 10x as much value as another exchange will result in 10x as much profit to be distributed, and likely result in both the producer and the consumer(s) getting approximately 10x as much. Google probably generates trillions of dollars of value for consumers (though the exact amount is subjective and hard to measure), and in turn earns billions of dollars of revenue. Which they deserve, because they create value. A button engineer who works at Google and does their job competently helps generate this value, in that Google would not be as convenient and usable without their work, and would have outages or errors if they messed up. The difficulty of their job is one component in the cost, but the dominant term in the moral desserts is the consumer value. The Google button engineer has done a LOT to fuel the actual economy, it just doesn't seem like a lot because the indirectness of the value they produce is hard to parse as a human, and the amount of actual labor they needed to leverage to this effect was low.
Working hard at a fixed task will create more value, so on average moral desserts will correlate with working hard. But it would be silly to Goodhart this by thinking that working hard IS moral desserts. Value created is what actually matters. Any system of moral desserts which rewards people for being inefficient is absurd.
Now, obviously there are tons of counterexamples where people get paid despite not creating value. If Google hires 30 employees for a team and one of them does the actual meaningful labor and provides $100 million of value while the others do stupid stuff, and each gets paid $1 million, then the competent one deserves more than they got while the other 29 deserve less. But somewhere in that system the $100 million is actually being earned.
Even a step up, you can have an entire company which is rentseeking, bullying competitors, squatting on legal loopholes, etc, and earns lots of profit despite not providing value to anyone. But by necessity this is rare because someone somewhere has to create the value for them to earn. I'm not saying the correlation between moral dessert and wages is 1. But it's high, even when the value someone creates is indirect. A lot of white collar work is incredibly important and impactful, which is why selfish greedy investors are willing to pay for it in the first place.
You're just assuming my trucker logic applies ten-fold to a Googler. But that begs the question of value and moral worth: the Googler only deserves what he has in that case if the trucker does too. But I was skeptical that even the trucker deserves it. Because why should economic productivity determine moral worth? This is implicitly egalitarian, because productivity is defined as serving anybody, and privileges people who have simply been alive longer, because they will have more total lifetime productivity. I think it's more fruitful to debate egalitarianism and elderly privilege directly, instead of assuming that economic productivity as normally defined in 2026 is a perfectly just way of determining who gets what.
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.
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