Imagine a future where every person on planet earth gets exactly the same money, house, standard of living etc etc. Its all controlled by a super efficient united nations that ensures every one has exactly the same level of food, education, clothing etc etc.
We work for this super united nations and everyone in the world is living a contented life.
Obviously no one on this planet has experienced this at any time in history. It is well nigh impossible to achieve. But why is it that, even though this type of extreme equality has never been achieved, there is almost unanimous agreement, that this equality will quash human creativity. How do people reach that conclusion. On what basis?
See the short story Harrison Bergeron (full text here; Wikipedia summary here) by Kurt Vonnegut.
TL;DR: In a dystopian future, absolute equality is enforced. Any deviation, which includes any creativity, is suppressed, violently if necessary. The office of Handicapper General oversees and enforces this.
It may free us to be all that we can be by being who we were made to be. People don’t like to be blobs, they like to have meaning and purpose and a fulfilling life, taking away the need to be a slave for others for brief moments of a sense of freedom may enable this and set humanity free.
Practically, it’s hard to imagine how you’d achieve and enforce such perfect equality, at least not without producing other problems.
Hypothetically, if you just imagine a world in which everyone has equal material resources, I imagine it would lead to greater creativity on the whole. Removing the need to earn a decent living would free people up to devote more time and energy to creative pursuits, but it might also remove some of the incentive. Although in a world where everyone was equal materially, there might be even greater drive to stand out, to achieve status and popularity, through one’s creativity.
The equality you mentioned is physical – money, house, etc. There is still the possibility of recognition or respect setting certain people apart from others.
If the person living next door has the same house & car as me, but is a Noble Prize winner, he will get way more respect than me. And as long as you allow that kind of inequality, people will still strive for it.
Even if you somehow outlawed that, people would still strive for the inner satisfaction of doing something well. We all know people like that – look at all the caring professions like nurses or teachers – most of them could make more money in other professions. But they stay, because they get personal satisfaction from their jobs.
No…because equal access to an audience would imply that no performer is better than any other. There would be no market decisions. We’d all watch the same movies: preferring one kind of movie over another would be an attack on the “equal rights” of the movie makers.
Even specialization in profession is an attack on “perfect equality.” What do you mean, “I’m a machinist and you’re a movie maker?” We’re equal, buddy. If we do different jobs, or, worse, if we compete for the same job (and only one of us gets it) then “perfect equality” has failed.
Competition for success runs counter to the ideal of equality. All we really demand is that opportunity for success not be limited by non-relevant criteria. That’s the basic degree of “equality” we must have. (“No, no, you can’t be a machinist, because you’re Jewish, and we don’t allow Jews to run machines.” Not good…)
t-b: So, you’re saying people will work just as hard for fame alone as opposed to fame plus money? That’s is laughable on the face of it. We all know lots and lots of people who will happily work longer hours in order to make more money.
As long as people experience loneliness, alienation, and disillusionment, there will always be music, poetry, and literature.
As long as we have music, we will have dance.
As long as we have literature, we will have theater and film.
I think technological innovation might correlate better with societal content. If society is totally devoid of problems (disease, crime, natural disasters, war), then there is no need to create a new tool or system. But I’m guessing there would still be someone curious enough to ask “What if we did it this way?” Anything can be improved.
Seems to me this bizarre mind experiment isn’t even necessary. We can look at the creativity and innovation of developed countries and see that material wealth and higher standard of living enables creativity rather than squashing it.
Bertrand Russell proposed an economic model in which (highly simplifying here) everyone woujld automatically receive anough income to live on with basic needs met. He argued that those willing to work and produce goods and services would balance the demand by those who wished to consume more, and work more in order to consume more. Technological advancement would enable the production of more goods with less human labor. The desire to consume more while working less would trigger creativity.
I suspect it depends on the person; after all, there are loads of people who spend enormous time and effort on creative things like fanfiction where there isn’t any possibility of money, just fame. And not even very much fame, just fame among the population of fanfiction readers.
Of course, they’re probably not working just as hard as they would for actual money, since in most cases they probably have to do other stuff to make money. But they’re still putting out an astonishing quantity of work, just for the acclaim.
(Also, there’s open-source software contributors, but that usually also has a component of making or improving software they at least want to use.)
Except for the people who have the fruits of their labor stolen from them, to support everyone else.
You will never have everyone creating the same amount of goods or services. The only way to achieve equality of income is to steal from some, to support others. Of course it destroys creativity. Why do you think there’s more creativity in relatively capitalistic countries, and less in relatively socialistic countries?
I think you might get a dramatic increase in creativity if people are freed from the drudgery of trying to survive. I know after another mind-numbing day of working for a living I often don’t have enough energy to do anything much and I am hardly unique in this aspect. Most people are not content to just sit around and if allowed to seek their own paths they end up doing all sorts of interesting hobbies and arts.
Or even start a business, if they don’t have to fear being ruined if they fail.
The more plausible way to describe the hypothetical would indeed be this, not a universal equality but a universal “bottom” beneath which you may not fall and which is not a state of near misery, not a mere “safety net”, but enough so that it is actually your choice and your call to do something more. You don’t lose it for getting a job like means-tested aid.
This of course would require a highly optimized production economy that can actually generate enough wealth to redistribute to that extent and still sustain itself, 'cause housing, food and education don’t fall from the sky. (And yes, almost certainly the relative marginal taxation at the top would give an American the vapours but it doens’t take much for that to happen.)
Interestingly, people speak of risk in the context that extreme risk pushes people to work harder to succeed. But it can also push people to take the safe route. Take a corporate 9-5 job instead of pursue their art or some business venture.
Although many believe that the best art is derived from struggle and life experience. Compare the music of Billy Joel or Bruce Springsteen singing about the common working man vs…I don’t know…Arcade Fire singing about the freakin suburbs.
But who will do the “drudgery”? If everyone’s basic needs are met, how many people will choose to dig the ditches or install sewers or clean bedpans? Who will build all the houses for everyone to sit in, being creative?
Which is the other end of the high taking from the top end of the economy - at the bottom that which could not get automated/mechanized could end up requiring a service mandate. And that’s where the notion of total equalization can fail: will people be free to choose to reject the “baseline living” and just exist off-grid, however badly but unbound?
This is almost exactly how I feel. A society of total equality is by its very nature a totalitarian society. And I don’t believe that it would prevent problems like homelessness, drug abuse, domestic violence and other things that destroy human potential. It would probably stigmatize them even more, and make it more difficult to get help.
But all this has little to do with creativity. IME, people are generally creative regardless of its pay value. Plenty of creative people do other things to pay the bills, in order to allow them them to be creative for free. Even among the minority who are ultimately compensated well for their creative work, the value of their work at various times often has little relation to how well they were being paid for it.
I think even “for the acclaim” overstates the ‘pay’ impetus for creativity. People create because a muse possesses them–because they need to.
