Earlier quoted context omitted.
As John von Neumann said: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
You probably misunderstood what they're doing. They are not fitting data with a model; that's what economists and statisticians do. They show that a simple mechanism, with very few assumptions about real world behavior could reproduce a remarkably realistic phenomenon.
Is Inequality Inevitable?
481–490 of 628 posts
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#482Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#483There is a popular political perspective that rules on campus these days that treats wealth as something that just magically exists and is simply "redistributed" by one means or another like, say, a phase change in physics where no magnetism/charge/energy/etc. is ever created or consumed. I waited for a point in their model where people actually produced wealth and consumed it, made something or ate it, in addition t…
I received a Ph.D. in physics in 2010, throughout my training, my anecdotal experience was that of an echo chamber. I didn't fully realize it until I left academia. Although, it was slowly becoming apparent as the years passed. My experience was of a relatively small and closed group of physicists who reaffirmed each other's assumption that they were at the absolute peak of intellectual thought. Most of the professor…
I don't agree with it. Poor people tend to be very risk-averse (they teach their kids to get "stable jobs" above everything else), and this puts them in a self-reciprocating loop of poverty. Many rich people who i know became so by repeatedly getting involved into "bold" things looked totally bullshit, and usually indeed was - apart from 1-2 in their lives that wasn't, and made them millions.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#484Without inequality we would not have airplanes, transatlantic cables, jet engines, electric cars, SpaceX, cloud computing, radar, internet phones, steel, automobiles, the textile industry, fuel, plentiful food, fresh fruit year round, etc.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#485Of course it is...it's a natural consequence of compound interest. One's ability to accumulate additional wealth scales exponentially with their level of existing wealth.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#486Let's pose the opposite: Is it possible to enforce that 8 billion people be and have exactly the same? Seems pretty obviously absurd.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#487Inequality is the core concept which keeps everything in balance on this planet. Humans are destroying this planet by trying to achieve a utopian world of perfect equality. The only equality that we should strive for is equality of opportunity, but we can't aim for equality of distribution of resources as this would lead us into eating up our entire planet.
If everyone in this world would get the medical care to live until 100, if everyone would get fed with the same amounts of fish, meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, etc. then we would pretty quickly end up in the tens of billions of human beings consuming everything around us until nothing will be left and we have killed ourselves.
Resources are limited and unless we can build more planet Earths at random will, then resources will always remain scarce and the only fair way to distribute these resources without looting everything to its extintion is to let all animals on this planet (including humans) compete for it. The strongest lion will catch the Zebra, the smartest human will afford a big mansion, etc.
Humans need to become comfortable with accepting the laws of nature which kept our planet flourishing for so many million years or we will put an end to it very quickly. No human has a right to anything. Whatever you are given is what you have either earned, stolen or you've been given out of mercy, but never because of entitlement. The sooner everyone can accept that fact the better things will turn out for us as a species.
Also it's important to understand that what's good for humans (today) is not necessarily good for humanity. It's good for humans to burn fossil fules like mad people to keep our homes warm in the coldest areas of the planet or to install energy wasting air cons in hot places which we want to inhabitate, but in the long run this is damaging our environment and bad for humanity. It's good for humans to fly everywhere and drive everywhere today, but it comes at a cost for humanity at some point in the future.
Humans are ego centric, self entitled and selfish animals which think that what's good for them today is good for us tomorrow, but it's often quite the opposite. The truth is, the more we live in animalistic conditions like survival of the strongest, the better it is for us as a species in the long run.
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#488Without inequality we would not have airplanes, transatlantic cables, jet engines, electric cars, SpaceX, cloud computing, radar, internet phones, steel, automobiles, the textile industry, fuel, plentiful food, fresh fruit year round, etc.
So should we have more inequality to have more of all those things, then?
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#489There is a popular political perspective that rules on campus these days that treats wealth as something that just magically exists and is simply "redistributed" by one means or another like, say, a phase change in physics where no magnetism/charge/energy/etc. is ever created or consumed. I waited for a point in their model where people actually produced wealth and consumed it, made something or ate it, in addition t…
Re: Is Inequality Inevitable?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
So should we have more inequality to have more of all those things, then?
Someone is always going to be stronger, faster, taller, younger, better looking, have more things, etc., than you do. If you use the envy to improve your life, then it's good. If you use the envy to tear down others to your level, that's not so good.