People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
theatlantic.com
People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
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Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#2History rhymes. Read Thomas Piketty's Capital and Will Durant's Story of Civilization to understand the cause and recurring nature of economic inequality.
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#3This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose.
Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium?
Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even a dropout?
Maybe we should compensate workers based on responsibilities (ie dependents, that, in some ways would be fairer, the woman with three dependent children gets paid more than the man with one, but the man with two where one requires extra care gets paid more than either, to compensate for added medical expenses)
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#4Seems to me this hits on a very important point. There's a terrible language barrier that is damaging our ability to come together on this issue in the US. Inequality of income growth is a great metric for indicating that there's a problem, but that language is counterproductive for solving the problems. There's a gut reaction that since "inequality" is the problem that the goal is income equality which (I think most agree) it's not. Economic fairness might be a better way to explain the goal.
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#5Even "Fairness" isn't quite as useful a metric - where do you draw the line between things that should be eliminated as being unfair and things that are valuable culture and individuality? Parental intelligence is strongly causally coupled with their children's future intelligence simply through their working vocabulary and talkativeness, which is clearly unfair from the perspective of the newborn child; how do you fix this unfairness without invasive changes to home life starting from the minute the family goes home from the hospital?
And, of course, this entire thing is a symptom of fixed-pie mentality. When inequality exists - when some people have bigger slices of pie than others - people seem to be reliably made happier by throwing chunks of the pie on the floor as long as they're someone else's chunks of pie. They're happier about throwing away chunks of pie than they are about getting an entire new pie to split up. It really bugs me when I see "fairness" valued over actual goodness.
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#6This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose. Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium? Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even…
Which is explicitly not Fair
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#7This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose. Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium? Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even…
Which is explicitly not Fair
Not fair in what context to whom?
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#8This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose. Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium? Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even…
There's no guarantee that the parents would be spending their added income on these dependents.
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#9This makes sense. It's not that we should all be uniform but rather we all have access to being uniform if we so choose. Even if we attempted equality, time would introduce inequality due to the risks people take. One invests wisely, the other gambles away. Do we compensate the gambler to reestablish equilibrium? Should a soon to be retiree have the same wealth or earning power as a new graduate of X degree, or even…
There's no guarantee that the parents would be spending their added income on these dependents.
We don't typically distrust people to not spend on their dependents to appropriately provide for them. But, let's say we don't we could compensate with vouchers.
Re: People Want Fairness, Not Economic Equality
#10Seems to me this hits on a very important point. There's a terrible language barrier that is damaging our ability to come together on this issue in the US. Inequality of income growth is a great metric for indicating that there's a problem, but that language is counterproductive for solving the problems. There's a gut reaction that since "inequality" is the problem that the goal is income equality which (I think most…
This makes a lot of sense. What do you think of the other term often used to describe the same idea: "level playing field" ? Sure you can (inevitably so, maybe) have unequal distributions of wealth but we at least want to rid 'systematic bias' from the list of reasons why.