I'm not sure why a more equitable labor distribution is a bad thing?
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
This doesn't mean women should be barefoot and pregnant, there is plenty of room in the world for exceptional women and men to take each other's roles, but it does mean that in general the distribution will more closely resemble traditional societies.
The latter is too large of a discussion to have.
I understand why avoiding it is wise, but it's not a particularly large discussion. The facts are pretty damning; the least capable elements of society are fast outbreeding the most capable, and immigration is not helping matters. The only solutions which come to mind are either very ugly or rely on the rapid maturation and implementation of technology which the Left strongly opposes.
So if I understand, this can be paraphrased as, "a government that is designed for the purpose of benefiting its people is likely to be worse than a government designed to exploit its people because the former has no concrete incentive".
Yup. If you want a game theoretic argument look at Stiglitz's work on the theory of information asymmetry in firms. [Edit: initial link was to overly-technical and not particularly demonstrative article; I'll look for a better one but his books might have to be sufficient]. He doesn't make the political connection, but it's a trivial one.
Hopefully this will also make the "widely distributed voting shares = bad management" point clearer as well.
(Note: I've read his conclusions in his book 'Whither Socialism?' but not the research behind them. In either case I'm not an economist or a game theory expert.)
b) Your solution didn't even stipulate that our rulers must act in self interest. It didn't hand them any real power. Wouldn't a better solution (to maximize Order and Self Interested Rulers, not to maximize utility) be to hand over all our weapons and military power to China and tell them to rule us as they see fit? Or, if we really had faith in this concept, wouldn't North Korea suffice?
I gave Dean Minow total control of the executive branch (a power Presidents have lacked for the better part of the century) and the ability to arbitrarily re-interpret the Constitution currently reserved for the Supreme Court. Considering we're taking about the mammoth USG here, that's more power in her hands than I can easily imagine. But of course she'd be far from my first pick for the job, just better than the current state of affairs.
China is a half-way decent choice, definitely better than the Harvard Dynasty, but still not really ideal. The Communist Party rules as a sort of semi-meritocratic natural aristocracy, very much like the old Eunuchs did really, but there is no dynastic Emperor to balance the equation. Each individual Party member is both a state employee and a shareholder in the People's Republic of China; while mild compared to the Western welfare state, graft and patronage within the Party is severe. Furthermore, any ambitious young Commie could eventually climb their way up and replace the Premier himself, which means the leadership will always be insecure and tempted towards purges as a means of stabilizing their positions.
North Korea on the other hand is a communist dictatorship out of time; even in it's relationship to the US it mirrors the USSR. We prop them up with food aid and timely blackmail payments while sympathetic liberal elements in the US systematically oppose both a definitive conclusion to the (ongoing) Korean War and any attempt to sever our economic umbilical cord with them. Even their legitimacy depends on our support; without the constant threat of an American invasion which will never come the Kims couldn't possibly hope to keep their sustaining isolationism alive. They are an obsolete form of Leftist government but leftist nonetheless.
Ideally we'd want someone more like the Saudi Royals or any of the UAE's Emirs; capable established dynasties with existing ties into the US political structure and a traditionalist-yet-irreligious worldview. They wouldn't be able to rule directly, they're too foreign for one thing, but if the House of Windsor could rule India for three centuries the House of Saud could probably manage the continental US as a suzerainty for a while.
If me and the eminent Professor Hawking found ourselves sharing an apartment, it would be insane to distribute the labor equally between us. Comparative advantage tells us that he should use his enormously powerful mind and reputation pay a much higher share of the rent while I can use my young and increasingly muscular body to do any household chores which need doing. This turned into a slash-fic way too fast, but you get my drift here; men and women need to pursue tasks which complement their natural advantages.
By “equitable” I'd mean that we each sta...
People want to tell everything instead of telling the best 15 words. They want to learn everything instead of the best 15 words. In this thread, instead post the best 15-words from a book you've read recently (or anything else). It has to stand on its own. It's not a summary, the whole value needs to be contained in those words.
I'll start in the comments below.
(Voted by the Schelling study group as the best exercise of the meeting.)