Hi all,
Today, I'll riff off a couple more stand-alone ideas from Skin in the Game that I did not get to in my first post.
Animosity towards wealth often ties back to the zero-sum nature of wealth accumulation in the country in question. When wealth is created (or gained after destruction) the view is a little different. A good rule of thumb is that inequality is almost always zero-sum (because it is measured relatively) and therefore any policies that increase inequality will always be seen with suspicion.
People tend to use numbers as a substitute for solid logical arguments.
There seem to be two ways people tend to look at inequality. One method is to take the difference between top earner and the bottom earner. The other method is to ignore the top and consider what is happening at the bottom.
I think there is a good argument for the former approach but ultimately its usefulness fails when compared to the latter. One problem is that the former is prone to creative thinking about what ‘policy’ means. Our default ‘policy’ of allowing e-commerce means we all buy packages from Amazon, benefit from its superior delivery experience, and then complain when inequality goes up after the revenues accumulate with one of the world’s richest CEOs.
The approach I favor is to allow endless inequality so long as everyone at the bottom has 1) enough to live on without my being asked to help via charity, panhandling, tax breaks, and etc, and 2) everyone has the same opportunity to move up if they so choose. In other words, I think income inequality is a distraction for those who want to come up with good social policy because it allows someone to cut income inequality in half without actually helping the poor, the sick, or the hungry. When I’m hungry, I don’t care if some new policy takes away half of Warren Buffet's money, I care about getting a sandwich, and to me a good policy would bring me a sandwich regardless of how that changed some calculation of inequality. If everyone has enough, who could complain if some people ended up with a lot? I think if we lifted the bottom of the income distribution up above a humanely defined sustenance line, we can all consider ourselves free to become whatever form of capitalist a-hole we want to become.
Social friends require balance in contribution and hierarchy. A conversation is a good place to see this – if the contributions are equal, the relationship is likely to last.
This sharp insight reminds me of the lesson I drew from the otherwise forgettable Working Together – fifty-fifty, or it won’t work.
Whether formally stated or otherwise, there is an underlying expectation of equal contribution in any relationship that, if left unacknowledged for too long, can suddenly expose itself as a fatal crack in the foundation.
Relationships between countries are often conflated with relationships between governments.
I thought this was an intelligent observation yet also one that probably cannot be helped. A relationship between governments makes some sense because the groups are small enough to interact regularly if they so desire. But the concept of a relationship ‘between countries’ is essentially meaningless.
In fairness to the author, I think the main point here is that the way an ordinary citizen of one country views a counterpart of another country is often far from how that citizen’s head of state views his or her counterpart. It makes me wonder how many people around the world would assume prior to meeting me in person that I was a Trump-like (or Trump-liking) personality, just based on my citizenship.
Change for change’s sake often causes us to lose the benefits of previous changes. Evolution requires slow and steady change – any faster rate means progress is being traded for the equivalent of mutations.
Taleb’s comment exposes a relationship I’d never given much thought to previously – that between evolution and mutation. I think many of us have been involved at one time or another in a sudden change whose purpose seemed to have no point beyond the feeling that a change was needed. As I think back to my own such experiences, I can’t say these changes always worked out one way or the other.
However, there was almost always something I lost in each instance, something positive that depended on the prior condition in order for me to make anything out of it. Although in some cases perhaps the new positives outweighed the loss, I can’t look back and say this needed to be the case – with a little more care, the new could have been gained without requiring the trade-in of the old.
