As Taleb points out here it's not even clear that socialism promotes less inequality.
In the U.S., when I look at a room with hotshot businessmen in 2014, I know that the 2024 one will be different (except for businessess subject to bailouts). The same cannot be said in Europe or in places where the state is powerful. And if I look at the bureaucratic and academic establishments, the only people who would drop out of the 2014 cohort are the retired/deceased ones.
Static measurements of inequality are defective (in addition to their traditional lack of mathematical rigor). True equality in income is probabilistic: it requires downward mobility. This should map to opportunity. I quickly wrote down the sketch of what such a true measurement of equality would be like.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIX3AzcHFkaGtORkU/edit
Apple's and oranges. Virtually nowhere is socialist in the one party state sense.
Politics as gymnastics for rationalists. No one one Less Wrong is quite sure why politics is a taboo topic or how things got to be that way. What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people. So why not take advantage of that and use politics as a way to measure rationality? Since politics brings out the most irrationality, it should provide the strongest signal. Since there aren't useful objective metrics of how a political discussion went, we'd have to use subjective judgements by neutral third-party raters, kind of like they do in gymnastics. (In the comment thread for this post, feel free to find fights that you have no dog in, improvise a rationality rubric, and grade participants according to your rubric... let's see how it goes.)
Be a sheep. This is probably the exact opposite of what you were taught in your high school civics class. But if my friend Jane is more intelligent, more informed, and less ideological than I am, it seems like voting however Jane is going to vote is a strict improvement over voting however I would naively. It also saves me time, and gives Jane an incentive to put even more time in to carefully considering political issues since she now controls two votes instead of one. Done on a large scale, this could provide an interesting twist on representative democracy. Imagine a directed graph where each node represents a person and an edge is directed from person A to person B if person A is auto-copying person B's votes. There's a government computer system where you can change the person you're auto-copying votes from at any time or override an auto-copied vote with your own personal guess about what's best for society. Other than that, it's direct democracy... all bills are put before all citizens to vote on. Problems this might solve: