51–60 of 61 posts
How does individualism, "the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual", imply envy? That's just a weird non-sequitur assertion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ability to move between lots of autocratic states wouldn't be seen as freedom. The most probable result of your decision to move around in the local labor market is that you just end up under another boss who restricts your freedom.
I'm not sure how you would enforce freedom of movement if every country in the world was autocratic, but if that happened somehow then one of the countries could simply become free and take all of the best people from every other country. Sure if every employer was wordlessly conspiring to torture their employees for no reason things would be pretty bad, but that's not what happens.
Um. Bullying poor neighbors is how we solve elder n childcare. Bullying Bangladesh n India is how we solve hard manual labor. How does the author imagine singapore maintain all that greenery? Or how is the place kept clean? Or how can the people below median income afford to have kids(do u know how much a flat with 2 bedrooms cost here?)..or pay for their parents' healthcare?
I feel Ike the feeling of being served on our society has everything to do with economic equality. There are professions that pay more or less, and people with professions that pay more are able to afford services that people with lesser paying professions can provide. Using words like "profession" and "service" tend to imply that these are normal, usual things that happen in "free" societies, a.k.a. capitalistic soc…
"If everyone earned the same living, then there would be very little serving happening" So, if lawyers and surgeons' compensation were similar, lawyers would do their own operations, and surgeons would represent themselves in court? You seem to be arguing that, if all specialisations have equal market value, then there are no/few gains from specialisation.
1. I don’t think that fits into the category of servitude that the other was talking about. 2. Why would one put in the effort required to go through specialized school and certification processes if there wasn’t a huge payout waiting for them? I think only the most passionate would bother.
I feel Ike the feeling of being served on our society has everything to do with economic equality. There are professions that pay more or less, and people with professions that pay more are able to afford services that people with lesser paying professions can provide. Using words like "profession" and "service" tend to imply that these are normal, usual things that happen in "free" societies, a.k.a. capitalistic soc…
There are still economies of scale i.e. it's a lot easier for me to make 100 lunches than for 100 people to make their own lunch. That's aside from how good I'll get at making lunches after making 100 every day.
> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
Funny, a personal servant makes us uneasy, but a personal/executive assistant does not. What’s the difference? They’re both employees and both are being paid to do tasks that need to get done but aren’t worth their boss’s time. Is it the extra indirection of the salary coming from company instead of personal coffers that does it? What if the person hiring the assistant has 100% ownership of the company like in the ca…
> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
> In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of societal and legal inequality. If the master has 10x the income of their servant, that means they are spending only 10% of their income on the servant. I.e., that's a manageable proportion to spend for the significant time-savings that having a servant repres…
[0] https://voxeu.org/article/consumption-and-income-inequality-...
There are some horror stories on masters abusing their servants, but my family treated our live in servants well though we are not by any means rich. Most of the work for the servants are light such as cooking, washing clothes, watering plants, helping moms taking care of the babies, etc, and they can do whatever they want, watch TV in their own room or in our lounge, etc.
Inequality? Sure. That is one thing that I can't fix. But one thing for sure that I know. Most of our servants like working with us, and actually do not want to choose other jobs or work for other families despite higher pay. Average tenure of our servants were about 4 - 5 years. Our longest servant has been with us before before I was born (I am 32).
> It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me. >And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. In order for the economics of having a personal servant to work out, there needs to be a fairly grotesque level of income inequality, driven by high levels of soci…
I honestly don't see why people are so uncomfortable with inequity. A worthwhile thought experiment is to imagine a world with perfect equity across everyone in society. Once you consider the consequences of perfect equity, especially second and third order effects, it gets pretty dystopian pretty fast.
For example, most of those with the most talent to offer to improve the lives of everyone else cease to pursue vocations where they provide the most value to the world. Instead they pursue vocations they enjoy or find easy if they pursue a vocation at all. If there is perfect equity, why work. The pace of improvements in quality of life across all society would slow to a crawl, if not stop or possibly even reverse.
Seeing as all humans, regardless of where you are in society today, are all basically on a hedonic treadmill and are most content when they see improvements in their circumstances over the course of their life, perfect equity would be a disaster. The only exception to this would be maybe someone who has reached a Daoist/Buddhist level of contentment in all aspects of how they experience and interact with the world.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that extreme inequity is good either.
Instead what I'm saying is that inequity can be benign or even beneficial and that the ideal outcome for the most people is achieved when the power law distribution of inequity isn't extreme. e.g. a distribution of -10/x is preferable to a distribution of -1/(10x). The more smoothly sloped the power law distribution of inequity (less extreme tails), the more room there is for individuals to experience gradual improvements in one's circumstances and the more clearly does a individual experience a positive relationship between effort and reward. Experiencing an improvement in one's condition and have stewardship over that improvement both contribute to being content wherever you are on that distribution.