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Unknowns comments on (One reason) why capitalism is much maligned - Less Wrong
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"Many people find such stark inequality troubling." Not only for the reason stated. It is also a fact, perhaps because of the bias under consideration, that great economic inequality causes envy in humans (given their present constitution), and envy is bad. So economic inequality is also bad for this reason.
So whether or not a system that produces such inequality is better than another that doesn't, does not only depend on how rich or poor the other society would be. It also depends on exactly how much envy is caused by the inequality, and how bad envy is.
I agree with this. But if people could recognize that their envy borne of inequality proper will not help them get what they want, then their envy might vanish.
Yes, that's true. But it might be difficult for you (or for anyone) to get all 10 million of those people in Chad to recognize that, since there will be a whole lot of bias that you will have to overcome, multiplied by 10 million.
Agreed.
The amount of inequality in the world may not be very salient to the citizens of Chad on account of their geographic distance from wealthy people and low access to information. I don't know what the situation is there - I guess this is an empirical matter.
In the United States, the factor that you mention pushes in the direction of the desirability of redistribution of wealth. There are other factors that push against the desirability of redistribution of wealth. I'm presently agnostic on the subject of exactly how much the US government should redistribute wealth.