= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Psychohistorian comments on The Second Best - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (53)
By way of clarification: it is easy to oppose individual Pareto-efficient distributions... it's more difficult to oppose every Pareto-efficient distribution.
E.g. if the possible distributions are (10,0), (9,9) and (9,10), it's pretty easy to oppose (10,0) even though it's Pareto-efficient. Indeed, many people would rank (9,9) above (10,0) even though (9,9) is Pareto-inefficient. But it's tougher to prefer (9,9) to (9,10).
Of course, there are probably strong egalitarians who would prefer (9,9) to (10,9). Are such people necessarily crazy?
I'd think the more realistic egalitarian opposition would be between, say, (100, 35) and (50,34), i.e. the very rich getting even richer while the poor stay still. There are probably a few who would hold the (10,9) < (9,9), but that's much less realistic.
The real problem with PE is that it specifically determines the "fairness" of a marginal transaction, not the fairness of the actual distribution.