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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   28136 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Perhaps some, but not all of them.

If we can't raise the floor for some people, that still means that we can't raise the floor, because that's what it means to be a floor--it's the lowest person.

I get where you're coming from, but to overextend the floor metaphor, I feel like over-focusing on uniquely disturbed individuals who are not simply unproductive, but will actively ruin anything that is given to them - the "bottomless pits of need" - is like saying that you can't raise the floor because there's this crazy bastard with a shovel who will dig his way down to the basement however high the floor is. Like. Okay. But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.

This is what I was trying to get at with the the "average unemployed pauper" stuff at the end of that same paragraph. If, while otherwise under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you are told that you are going to be penniless and unemployable in a given society - i.e. on the lowest rung there is, if not personally the single lowest person - how bad should you expect your lot to be? Maybe there's a fixed probability (corresponding to a fixed percentage of the population) that you're going to turn out to be one of the irrecoverable wretches. But that's not the only term in that calculation, and I think it's fair to talk colloquially about improving your expected outcome in that situation in terms of "raising the floor".

The more you improve the lot of the people at the bottom, the more the people who remain at the bottom are going to be the truly hopeless. If society is good enough at helping people, the ones at the bottom will all be hopeless because nobody else stays at the bottom for any length of time. You end up with a floor that just can't be raised any more.

But we can still talk about how low a randomly-chosen individual can expect to get if they wind up penniless and friendless.

We can talk about it, but not in any meaningful way. The metric isn't available. And it wouldn't be a floor.

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