Two questions. One, are you using "poor" and "rich" in absolute or relative sense? Given a society, how would it decide whether it is poor or whether it is rich?
I'm defining absolutely. The society would have to measure its economic productivity in some sense - GDP per capita is probably a reasonable first approximation (though it begs the question of how to denominate it). I take the view that there's a certain level at which a state pension became worthwhile (that is to say, at which taxing and funding such a thing had positive utility, in some kind of maximising-what-people-value sense), a level at which public education became worthwhile, a level at which public healthcare became worthwhile and so on (or rather, a monotonic relationship between how wealthy the nation is and how much public education it should be funding, and so on), and would expect this to be borne out by utility calculations.
Two, why is high growth more valuable than reducing inequality for poor countries, but it's the reverse in rich countries? Contemporary poor countries often have more inequality than the rich ones, and surely the plight of the poor people in the poor countries is much more acute than in rich?
The marginal value of wealth increases is much higher for poor countries, whereas the cost and utility of reducing inequality is reasonably constant.
I'm defining absolutely.
So, from a viewpoint of, say, a couple of hundred years from now, would you say the current Western societies are "rich"? We would probably look as poor to them as pre-industrial Europe looks to us now.
Given the whole arc of human history, absolute measures of wealth look highly suspect to me.
would expect this to be borne out by utility calculations.
Can you give a worked example of such a utility calculation?
the cost and utility of reducing inequality is reasonably constant
Why is that so? The marginal value of w...
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: