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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#231

Post by iso1631 »

jseban wrote: post #225
jseban wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much, you stifle productivity to the point where you have no improvements at all, and your mean will start to regress. Why? Because you have removed all incentives for people to improve, and rather introduced the perverse incentive of preferring to be on the receiving end. In reality it's more like System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k) System 2: 98…

Personally I much prefer System 2 and I'm happy that I have 60k instead of 50k. Money is just a tool to give me freedom, and 60k means more freedom than 50k, so I'll take that deal any day. The rich guys who have 10 houses or whatever, doesn't bother me at all, I simply don't care, and I'm sure that they are not much happier. Exactly the same way that I don't spend my time grudging over the fact that some guys are 10…

Those rich guys owning those houses pushes up the price of the houses and means you can't afford it, or you have to work 80 hours a week to afford it.

That's not a good position to be in.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#232

Post by gadders »

TchoBeer wrote: post #116
WalterBright wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work, life, and social structure is extremely unfair It's always going to be unfair. Attempts to fix it always result in some other unfairness. The real thing that works is freedom, i.e. not having the law artificially holding you back. Instead of being consumed by envy of others, you can make your own life better.

That sounds rather defeatist. Is it impossible to make work, life, or social structure more fair? I doubt you think that.

It might be possible to make life more fair, but how much power would you need to grant an entity so that they could ensure this? How could that power be mis-used? Who gets to define what "fair" is?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#233

Post by jinjin2 »

etripe wrote: post #184
WalterBright wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to improve my own life at the expense of others. That is not what freedom is about. Your comment implies that freedom is a zero-sum system. It most assuredly is not. Under freedom, you (selfishly) prosper by creating value that other people want to give you money for. Stealing is zero-sum, this is not stealing. (Wealth transfer programs are inherently zero-sum, and are unfair.)

> Under freedom You're confusing freedom with capitalism. Understandable, since we need to spend 40+ hours a week to earn our "right" to shelter, survival and general health. In other words: the right to exist and participate. That doesn't make us free - it makes us beholden to an employer if on the payroll, the market if self employed and the greater economic system in both cases. If we were truly free, we would onl…

The birds are free. Doesn’t mean they don’t have to work to feed themselves.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#235

Post by WalterBright »

anoncake wrote: post #181
WalterBright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one's claiming we can achieve total equality I haven't seen any end to raising the bar. Where do you think it should end?

Obviously you cannot redistribute things that cannot be redistributed, for starters.

The Seattle school district decided to get rid of their gifted programs because it was unfair and increased inequality.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#236

Post by crispyambulance »

WalterBright wrote: post #190
adrianN wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is also seeing large numbers of people rising from abject poverty to a "western" more affluent lifestyle. I don't think that this is a terribly good yardstick for fairness and freedom in a society.

This rising is due to China turning away from communism and towards economic freedom. Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.

> China turning away from communism...

If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO".

China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in with authoritarian leadership.

Let's not forget, however, that China is far from an "affluent" country. If your definition of affluent is focused on measurements like income and net worth of the population, China as a whole still falls well outside of affluent.

Yes, there's a sliver of population that is wealthy even by international standards, but the bulk of the population has income in the low $100's of dollars per month. That's what enables China to be the factory to the world. Is it going to stay that way? I don't know, but I think the CCP wants to keep it like it is.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#237

Post by yourapostasy »

WalterBright wrote: post #138
TchoBeer wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds rather defeatist. Is it impossible to make work, life, or social structure more fair? I doubt you think that.

The US Constitution says nothing about things being fair. It talks a lot about rights, though, which is what freedom is about. Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.

> Note that we have a right to equal treatment under the law, but that is not the same thing as a right to fair treatment.

In practice at the aggregate population level, that is such an important distinction, and leads to the kind of pay-for-play judicial system the US increasingly practices, which weakens the US' internal signaling on important inefficiencies to root out. The more money tokens you put into the system, the more "fair" treatment you obtain, regardless of the negative externalities imposed. This is not new in history and around the world, but US rule of law has been declining for decades [1], and I believe it bodes ill for the US.

[1] https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/us-falls-out-of-top-...

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#238

Post by WalterBright »

crispyambulance wrote: post #236
WalterBright wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rising is due to China turning away from communism and towards economic freedom. Communism utterly failed at making China affluent. Free markets succeeded.

> China turning away from communism... If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO". China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in…

China even has a stock market. Isn't that the opposite of communism?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#239

Post by jseban »

iso1631 wrote: post #229
jseban wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much, you stifle productivity to the point where you have no improvements at all, and your mean will start to regress. Why? Because you have removed all incentives for people to improve, and rather introduced the perverse incentive of preferring to be on the receiving end. In reality it's more like System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k) System 2: 98…

Except it's not, system 2 might have 90 people with 60k and 2 people with 10m, but there's also 8 people with less than nothing. I'm far more interested in the quality of live of the 5th, 10th and 25th percentile than the 50th, 90th and 99th.

Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work, and the less money you will have overall.

If you redistribute too much, you will lower your overall productivity and not have enough money and your average will go down. If you redistribute too little, you will have a revolution.

What I'm trying to say, is that everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist, so there's always a trade off to be made, and when people ask for less inequality, that will also mean less money overall, and also less for you if you are in the middle.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#240

Post by adrianN »

WalterBright wrote: post #238
crispyambulance wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China turning away from communism... If you were to ask the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they "turned away" from Communism, I think the answer would be a hard "NO". China has a complicated economy. If anything, China demonstrates that Communism and Capitalism can be made to co-exist in a weird disconcerting way. I don't think it's a particularly good model for how to run things, especially when mixed-in…

China even has a stock market. Isn't that the opposite of communism?

For suitable definitions of communism, a stock market is a good way to get the means of production into the hands of the workers: they can buy stocks and share ownership of the company they work for.
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