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Brillyant comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
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I like your whole comment, but disagree with the first sentence.
Apart from reading about it explicitly on LW, I was also able to approach politics as less of a mind-killer once I realized that different ideologies approach issues believing different outcomes would be ideal. But neither side realizes that (or how very different "ideal" is to each), so one just says, "ABC will work! XYZ is crazy!!" and the other says, "What?! ABC will never work! History shows XYZ is clearly the best policy!" Each side means something different by "work", and so spiralling mind-kill ensues...
Actually, I've found my best friends, with whom I end up discussing politics with, are very consequentalist, and care very much about what ends up "working best". Those who disagree with me simply don't define "working" or "best" in the same way I do, and so we really ending up talking past each other and giving each other funny, mind-killed looks.
For instance, as a liberal, I concede de-regulation is better for maximizing economic growth and so I concede that right-wing fiscal policy is "better" to that end. But I'm admittedly more interested in anti-oppressionizing the world (a la your strawman progressive) and providing the basis for relatively economic equality than I am in max growth, so I am for more regulation and wealth redistribution to that end. We each believe the best possible world looks differently, and so we are asking different questions when we ask the same question. But we are approaching the issue from a consequentialist standpoint.
And so my righty friends still think I'm a bleeding-heart weirdo and I think they are greedy and heartless ;) ...but at least we've moved our discussion passed arguing over definitions without realizing that's what we were doing.
The other half of this is that you and your friends presumably don't assume that those with opposing political views have the (real or hypothesized) ill effects of their preferred policies as primary goals.
What do you mean by this? Would you support policies that make everyone worse of if the resulting distribution is more equal?
It would depend on what you mean by "worse off". I wouldn't define it as less wealth, per se. Though even if I did define it in strictly economic terms, I'm not sure any policy or redistribution could "make everyone worse off", since a large portion of the world has zero wealth.
In economic terms, with wealth defined more or less as "stuff people want," I find it hard to see how that could be the case, since it should follow that there's nothing that you could take away from them which would leave them worse off. Do you think that's accurate?
Look beyond the short term.
Okay. Please help me understand a scenario where everyone was worse off in the long term because of the redistribution of wealth.
Take a simple scenario of two cities -- one is high-tech and one is a big stone-age village in the hills of New Guinea. The high-tech city is much richer.
You take half of the city's technological bounty and bring it over to New Guinea -- you redistributed wealth.
Fairly quickly the technology becomes completely useless in New Guinea, but the villagers liked it for the short period that it worked -- so they abandon working in the fields and build something resembling air strips with mock airplanes sitting on them...
I must be misunderstanding. I can imagine many hypothetical scenarios where redistribution of wealth would have a net negative effect, in terms of technological advancement, economic growth, etc.
In the globe we currently inhabit, there exists some huge chunk of people who live in utter poverty and, therefore, have no wealth. In strictly economic terms, they cannot being doing any worse than they are right now. Therefore, any redistribution of wealth will either (a) not affect them or (b) benefit them. This seems to me to be true in the short term, as well as the long term.
That is not true. A small value does not equal zero. The number of people who literally have nothing is vanishingly small. Almost everyone who lives in utter poverty has some wealth, just little.
This is not true either. Consider a country like Haiti where a large chunk of population is very very poor. A few years ago they had a large earthquake. Beyond the loss of life, you are arguing that the poor did not become worse off in the aftermath of the earthquake. I don't think this is so.
Since you are talking about a large number of people, presumably you have in mind somebody like Chinese and Indian peasants. Do you really believe they "cannot being doing any worse than they are right now"?
From my Wikipedia research, there were 923 million undernourished people in the world in 2008... where undernourishment is (roughly) a cumulative or average situation where the average person is not consuming enough nutrients to remain in good health while performing light physical activity.
Of course, I can dream up a "worse" situation. (Like they are malnourished and in a deep hole.) But I think that is beside the point. You have ~12-15% of the global population that is progressively dying via malnutrition. Any way which you define "wealth" in which these people 923 million people have non-zero wealth values is fine. I guess I'd technically agree. But practically, these people seem to have maxed out the possibilities of "worst", short of being in a deep hole. Or being in a natural disaster.
My view of wealth has something to do with abundance beyond the minimum requirements for living. If I have a ham sandwich, it's just hard for me to count that as wealth. And I guess a hungry guy with one ham sandwich could be doing worse in your view, correct?
Try Central Africa -- multiple civil wars, child soldiers, mass rapes as standard operating procedure, limbs hacked off as punishment for minor things, an occasional bona fide genocide...
Lumifer's point is that if you do an extreme enough redistribution, what will happen is that the whole technological system will just collapse.
Well, my point was more limited -- in the example the rich high-tech city lost wealth (which they will replenish eventually) and the poor village didn't gain anything.
You can get into a deeper analysis which would involve e.g. motivations and incentives (what happens to people who get used to living on free handouts?), necessary concentration of capital (a semiconductor fab costs a few billions of dollars, who will build it?), etc. but it's a large topic.
Easy. Kill everyone. Perfect equality has been achieved, so the egalitarians are happy, and everyone is worse off.
Or if you think some people's lives are currently worse than death, instead go for the (slightly more logistically challenging) option of torturing everyone equally.
Yeah, on reflection 'consequentialist' is probably too broad.