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Eugine_Nier comments on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Except that in a lot of accusations of "unfairness" there is no obvious prisoner-dilemma-defection going on.
Not lynching rich bankers means choosing to cooperate. Having a social landscape that's peaceful and without much violence isn't something to take for granted.
That is not a prisoner's dilemma.
We sort of have an informal agreement of the proletarians not making a revolution and hanging the rich capitalists in return for society as a whole working in a way that makes everyone better of.
Rich bankers not fulfilling their side of working to make everyone in society better of is defecting from that agreement.
No, we don't have anything of that sort.
Marx was wrong. He is still wrong.
Marx argued that a revolution is the only way to create meaningful social change. That's not what I'm saying in this instance.
Political power is justified in continental Europe through the social contract. Hobbes basically made the observation that every men can kill very other man in the state of nature and that we need a sovereign to wield power to prevent this from happening.
Even British Parliamentary Style debate that's not continental in nature usually doesn't put the same value on freedom as a political value as people in the US tend to do.
As far as the US goes the American dream is a kind of informal agreement. You had policies like the New Deal to keep everyone in society benefiting from wealth generation.
Then in the last 3 decades most of the new wealth went to the upper class instead of being distributed through the whole society as it had been in the decades before that point.
Marx argued for a lot of things. The particular thing that I have in mind here is his position that the society consists of two classes -- a dispossessed ("alienated") proletariat and fat-cat capitalists, that these two classes are locked in a struggle, and that the middle class is untenable and is being washed out. This is the framework which your grandparent comment relied on.
It was wrong and is wrong.
I don't think saying "That is not a prisoner's dilemma" is a useful way of communicating "those players don't exist."
Also, the topic at hand is what do people mean by "fair," not whether the situations they do or do not call fair are real situations.
The notion of "middle class" is involves having more than two sides. People calling themselves "upper-middle class" is a very American thing to do. In the US ideal a person of middle class is supposed to own his own home and therefore own capital.
Workers do organize in unions and use their collective bargaining power to achieve political ends in the interests of their members. When a union makes a collective labor agreement with industry representatives you do have two clearly defined classes making an agreement with each other.
In the late 19th century a bunch of unions did support the communist ideal of revolution but most of them switched.
Groups like the US Chamber of Commerce do have political power. Money of capitalists funds a bunch of think tanks who do determine a lot of political policy. Do you think that the Chamber of Commerce isn't representing the interest of a political class of capitalist?
Yes, individual people might opt out of being part of politics. We aren't like the Greek who punished people by death for not picking political sides.
Lastly, I would point out that I speak about political ideas quite freely and without much of an attachment. It might be that you take a point I'm making overly seriously.
Ah. OK then.
How would you apply that to Lumifer's second example?
The usual way groups of girls deal with this is to call the girl who actually twirls around a lot of guys around her little finger a slut. The punishment isn't physical violence but it's there.