I must say I adhere to this definition of liberal.

Great Debates
121

Now I’m a communist? Holy… where’s Collounsbury when you need him.

This is not beyond doubt. Anyone with arms can hit a hole in one, as well.

Like investing in people? Or does that not count?

Maybe it would. It takes more than just someone who wants a house to get a house, though. And it takes more than an empty field.

That is a great deal of my purpose, as well.

I really don’t intend to advance that they are. Wealth is created by ingenuity and labor interacting in a regulated market. Unlike communists, I don’t feel that labor creates wealth. Unlike hard core libertarians, I don’t feel that ingenuity creates wealth. If I have a great idea, I have to get it implimented. This requires an entire society for the labor pool, the demand structure, the distribution, and so on. If we retain profit and property in such a way that this structure fails or can tend toward failure in certain key areas, then I think it is safe to say we’re doing something wrong.

Wealth gap fallacy? Please elaborate.

They did. The results were, at least to me, unsurprising.

There were less jobs available than there were workers, yet people couldn’t make it on their own by competing with the factories and businesses. This meant the labor supply far exceeded demand. What happens in this case? The cost of the product—labor—drops. “Perfectly natural,” you say. Until the workers get angry that they cannot get ahead because they have to acceed to the company’s demands on just about anything just to survive. So they organized strikes. But what effect could that have, given the labor supply? If workers walk out, plenty are ready to take anything they can because right now they have little or nothing.

Because my labor is a product in capitalism, my time derives a worth based on the demand for my skills in the market. When property accumulates in the hands of a few, and the means of production also accumulate in the hands of a few, the cost of labor drastically decreases. It can decrease to the point that what keeps the labor market going is bare necessity rather than open choice. This is no longer a free market. The choices available are:

  1. Acceed to company’s demand and get nowhere ever because you have no bargaining power at the beginning
  2. Die
  3. Break the law to survive

It was a Hobson’s Choice: not a choice at all.

People chose (3), formed unions, organized strikes, and sabotaged companies when they tried to simply pick up labor from the existing pool of needy people.

Honestly, I am so far from communism I’m just shocked at the idea. I don’t care who owns how much, so long as people are afforded the opportunity to be a part of society. We want to make their life up to them—and yours up to you—but sometimes this demands a reevaluation of the mechanisms at work.

If part of the people I depend on for keeping society going fall into economic holes that it is impossible to get out of, or worse, then clearly my conception of property and wealth need to be reevaluated. Limits, you see, need to be set. :wink:

Now, as far as the zero sum game goes, just because we aren’t playing a zero sum game doesn’t mean everyone can be rich. The monopoly board game is a perfect example of this: money is constantly coming in (being created) each time you travel around the board. So why are stalemates so rare? In Monopoly, you win when everyone else goes bankrupt: your purpose in the game is your satisfaction at winning.

Even if wealth is created by wise use of resources (either in their direct implimentation or in innovating their use so as to extend their life), there is still a finite amount of them. Not everyone can be rich. Believe me, if that were true, we’d have voted ourselves rich a long time ago.

Equality is impossible. I’m not shooting for it. Removing all desire to be wealthy will remove anyone from trying to be wealthy. I’m not shooting for that, either.

122

Well, no, I did not say you were a communist, I simply suggested that a portion of you last post sounded similar in philosophy to communism. I once saw Charles Manson stop an interview so that he and the interviewer could take a breath. If was so incongrous to my mental picture of him as a homicidal maniac, that it has stuck with me. Allow me to offer this anecdote in the spirit of calming things down. I truly did not mean any insult. Also, I appologize in advance for any in this post. :slight_smile:

Well, not in the same sense I meant. People can only invest in themselves. This is because you cannot buy people. If I give you money to go to medical school I cannot demand that you be my personal physician forever. You may decide to do that, but I will have no way to claim that your medical training belongs to me. The reason for this is that individual people have a right of self determination. This is the same reason that the money I earn belongs to me. It is (in a sense) a material manifestation of my life.

Yes. That was my point. It takes someone who can create enough wealth to compensate the owner of the field, the artisans who will work the materials, and the developers of those materials for the amount of all of their lives which must go into the building of the house. While he needs all of these people, he compensates them for their efforts. Thus the house belongs to him. In the same sense that his time, his life if you will, belongs to him.

Close. Wealth is created when people trade. Ingenuity and labor can create new and more things to trade. This can happen in a regulated market. It can happen in a free market. It can even happen under a communist dictatorship. Of course it can only happen to certain degrees under each of these systems. Wasn’t it you and I who talked about the capitalistic parrallels in early hominid societies? In the Lenin thread?

Yes. It is a fallacy to suggest that because the gap between poor and rich is increasing that poor people are worse off. There are issues invoving the gap between rich and poor, but it is a fallacy to equate this with the “poor getting poorer”.

No offense, but this sounds very much like Marx’s complaints against capitalism.

I would have to add:
4) Move to another place. This is what many people did. they left bad situations to find work in the ciities. It is one of the causes of the labor glut.
5) Develop a business of your own. Many individuals did this also. Anyone else remember Andrew Carnegie?
6) Educate yourself or your children. Vast numbers of workers did this.
Finally, I’d like to ask a question. If the advances we have made in this area are due to changes forced on business, I would expect to see large numbers of poor workers. Perhaps not starving, but still there. The truth is that our economy expanded to provide more and better jobs for them. It did this not by “vote” or fiat, but because the demand for jobs (or supply of labor) proved too valuable a resource to leave untapped.

Where do you think they went? Are you saying that they became middle class because money was appropriated from the rich? Still think your argument does not assume a zero sum game?

Good. Again, no offense, but when our assumptions lead us places we don’t want to go they may need to " be reevaluated". :wink:

But this is a perfect example of the wealth gap fallacy I was talking about. The competition that takes place in the real world is nothing like the monopoly game. In real life the goal is not the bankrupting of everyone else.

123

The thing is, I’m not complaining about capitalism. I love it. It’s the best thing going. But it isn’t perfect.

And if he can’t compensate them enough, they are just out of luck?

I don’t believe moving is always on option. I don’t think we’ll ever see eye to eye on this.

America right now has about 275 million people in it. Figure 1/3 of that as the primary young work force, about 92 million people. They can’t all be Andrew Carnegies and Bill Gateses. This should be so obvious as to not even warrant mentioning. Anyone with arms can hit a golf ball. Why aren’t we all Tiger Woods? Is it just because we’re lazy? Come on.

And will continue to, no doubt about it. Great thanks can be paid to the public education system for this. A social program. One you’re forced at gunpoint to contribute to, remember? :wink:

Yes. The rich have primary control of almost all resources. Remember: we live in a world of finite resources. Always and forever. Wealth is created over time, you say through trade alone but this will tend toward stagnation as all parties become satisfied with what is available. This is a monopoly game. Eventually, some peoples’ resources will be used up faster than they can accumulate them through bad decisions, bad luck, or both. Significant advances come through applied ingenuity to the problem of finding better use of existing resources. But this takes more than one man. It takes an entire society to create aggregate demand, to create distribution channels, and so on and so forth. On that desert island you’re fond of, there are no automobiles. There are no computers. There are no roads. There are no telephones, steam engines, fission reactors, banks, or any of it. That is the existence of the lone man on an island. The wealth we gain is only possible in a society. Thus, I find it paramount to do what we can in order to keep that society functioning smoothly when natural market forces fail to do so on their own. As they will in some cases, but won’t in all. The market can be extremely efficient in allocating some resources and addressing some wants and needs, but it demonstratably fails in others.

Do you actually believe some people are so lazy that they would rather starve on the streets than work? That they would commit crimes just to get caught and go to jail for food and shelter rather than own their own house? Is this the world you want to construct? Make no mistake: you are building it. Laws have determined the scope of your property. Laws protect it with the same guns you fear I turn on you. You desire a limit to public spending, yet wish no limit on wealth accumulation, and no notion of responsibility for the very society that enables this wealth to exist. Again: IMO you don’t owe anyone anything. But you need a society for that wealth, and that society consists of people, and in a world of finite resources, unequal skill, and unlimited wants and needs if we let human nature run its course we will screw each other big time. Any view of history that misses the point of warfare as aggressive accumulation of resources (and hence wealth) or defense from those who desire aggressive accumulation of resources is failing to account for a basic facet of the human animal: aggregately, we’re greedy. Capitalism thrives on this. That makes it one of the best economic systems ever devised, IMNSHO. Problem is, we’re greedy. This greed needs a limit and I propose that the limit consists of ensuring the same society that serves us so well to satiate a lot of our needs continues to function smoothly. This means providing an economic floor to the best of our ability without significantly impacting the reward system inherent in the market.

Of course “worse off” is a relative term. Even today’s working poor are better off than a caveman fifty thousand years ago. This does little to address problems we find in modern economies.

But it is happening anyway. If that’s not the purpose of capitalistic living, then it needs to be addressed.

124

Are you being deliberately obtuse? If he can’t compensate them enough, they DON’T BUILD THE HOUSE! Likewise, if they are not willing to build the house for a pitance HE HAS TO PAY MORE. Both sides of the equation need each other. The trick, and the point where I think you are tripping, is how to determine “enough”. The only possible answer is “the rational volition of both parties”. That is, the voluntary choice of each party to the agreement.

Let me add a little diatribe of my own. I agree with you that cooperation amongst people can produce more wealth than individual labor. This is another example of what I meant when I said that wealth is created by trade. So you are right much of the wealth that is created today is a result of the fact that we have a large society. The question we are struggling with is the form of that society. You have become convinced that resources are finite and that therefore only some people can be rich. While it may be true in a relative sense (that is some people will always have more than others) it is not true in an absolute sense. The amount of wealth available today for “distribution” is so much vastly greater than that available in the previous century that it boggles the mind. Only a couple hundred years ago famine was a common occurance. It is an extreme rarity in the modern world.This site (waning pdf) contains a history of world population estimates from 0 through 2150. I’d just like to point out that the first 1800 years achieved less world population increase as the next 50. And the 200 years from 1800 to 2000 achieved a population growth 18 times that of the previous 1800 years. Did the victorians suddenly discover the joys of sex? Or was the world introduced to the beginings of capitalism?

My point being that while resources may be finite, 1)we are nowhere near exploiting them all, and 2) wealth is not finite. Most of the world’s land is not inhabited. And the potential uses of many of the inventions from the previous 50 years have barely been tapped. I’m sorry, and I agree we will not see eye to eye on this, I know you have a vested interest in defining the problem as one of taking wealth from those who have it. But I feel that a much more appropriate approach is to define the problem such that we discover new ways for the poor to have more.

As I said in the begining, I think we can find a way to create a safey net which allows us to protect ourselves against many of the unpreventable disasters which can occur. However, such efforts are useless if we do not have a healthy respect for property rights in the first place. What good does it do to work hard for yourself and your family if the government simply takes most of it away? While few would argut that working hard for 20% of 100 million is a good bargain, what about working hard ( and I mean 80-100 hour weeks for years on end) for a 1 in a thousand chance at 20% of 100 million. Think of all the time you spend here, watching tv, going to movies, spending time with your family etc. Would you give all of the up over the next 10 years for a small chance to get rich? What if we change the number from 100 million to 1 million? Remember you can only keep 20%. And remember the odds I gave of 1 in 1000 are extremely generous. What if they were really only 1 in 10,000 and the payoff was only 1 million dollars. Finally, imagine that the payoff is completely unknown and so are the odds. It starts to look like it would be much simpler to go and get a job. No, I do not think that people who choose this path are lazy. In many ways they are quite wise. The problem occurs when they look at the fortunes of those who did take such risks and claim some right to that wealth, unearned. That they want the wealth is not even the problem. That they allow themselves to be convinced that they have a right to force it away from those who earned it is the problem.

Thanks very much for the discussion. I’m not sure how this thread turned into a three way between you, me, and 2sense, but it has been most fun. BTW, 2sense, I still owe you an answer to the question of objective morality. I am still formulating it.

125

And I’m trying to show you that a series of natural events and rational choices can place people in a position where they are no longer able to choose freely, unless you consider “starving” a viable choice in a free market.

126

I have never disputed this. Your have to give up the anthropomorphism of the universe. If a meteor strikes your house, it is a mistake to think of this as injustice. It is certainly a tragedy, but it would be an injustice to force your neighbors to rebuild your house. If they choose to do so (for your undying grattitude for instance, or perhaps for a ticket to heaven) that’s one thing. But forcing them to help is another.

Remember from the begining of the thread, that I am not even opposed to taxes used for this purpose. But unless we acknowledge that such a program is charity (and are therefore willing to put a cap on how much we will spend on it) it amounts to forcing people to give resources to people who have not earned them.

127

Of course not. Why would I say such a thing? I have tried very hard to not inject any moral component into this debate at all. I don’t think it is necessary and I think it really clouds the issue.

We need people to have the society we have. Our economic system will not naturally support what we desire. So we adjust it. An economy is still a man-made creation, even if its justification is tied to natural behaviors. If a man-made creation has a flaw, we fix it to the best of our ability.

We don’t need to recognize that a program is charity to put a limit on spending. I have no problem with setting spending limits myself.

128

I mean “of course it isn’t injustice”, not, “Of course it isn’t a mistake.” I agree that it is a mistake!

129

I’ll jump into this debate late.

Erislover, you say

Since humanity’s desires are boundless and Earth is finite, I assume you’re not just complaining about that. That’d be idiotic, and you don’t seem to be an idiot. Rather, you’re complaining about the distribution of resources.

Some changes in the economic system can create enough wealth to compensate whoever might lose from the change and still make someone else better off–what’s technically known as a Pareto Improving change. I assume you’re not just saying that we should try to harvest all the Pareto Improving changes–that’s a banal no-brainer.

I assume you’re talking about wealth transfers. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. But the economic system was supporting Peter’s desires as best it could. Which ‘we’ should we listen to? Peter? Or Paul?

Should we rob Peter of enough to lift Paul out of **absolute ** poverty (defined in terms that don’t relate to how much Peter has) or enough to lift him out of relative poverty (defined in terms of how much Paul has in relation to Peter.)

My experience is that people who worry about absolute poverty are motivated more by compassion, people who worry about relative poverty are more motivated by envy (they would say ‘social justice’.)

130

I do not search for any brand of egalitarianism, HayekHeyst. I find such schemes fundamentally untenable simply because, apart from ideals, men are not created equal. Some can excel where others fail, and by golly we should encourage those who excel to do so, and those who fail should not be rewarded for such failure. At its core, I believe free market solutions are the foundation for a solid and fair society.

I don’t believe there is a way to assign when a person leaves poverty absolutely. If a man is living on the streets, he is living, correct? So who is to say he is “truly” poor? This sort of hair splitting is unending. For every person who thinks he deserves a one bedroom apartment, there’s someone else who points out (correctly, of course) that he could live in a studio with a shared bathroom for the entire floor.

That is why it is hard for me to go on a crusade of setting limits here in this thread. My limits are fairly low, I think, but they are relative to society at large (not Peter’s wealth). First, life on the outside, legal existence, should at least be better than life in prison. There should be no reward system in place for committing a crime. As anyone can see, there is a definite and immediate reward for the destitute to commit crimes: they get food and shelter out of it. Whether these souls are moral and upstanding people or not is beside the point, we don’t want to give people a rationale for crime. As it is there is too much already from people who do have real property, jobs, or places to live.

Peter’s wealth is not strictly an issue. Since wealth is created, it is perfectly plausible that some people will be extremely wealthy. However, I feel we have a long way to go before we severely strain this. We are nowhere near the place where people are actually discouraged by being wealthy; as it is, the tax burden doesn’t come close to the “being poor” burden.

I don’t think we’d need to come close to that point, even. There is plenty of wealth to go around and work on social programs without jeapordizing the incentives to be wealthy in the first place. However, I think that the compromises that have been made on such social programs have hindered their effectiveness strictly because they seem to have a foundation in compassion.

I do not enjoy seeing people in stark poverty, but that has never moved me personally to give to charity. I have probably never given more than ten bucks to beggars. I tell myself any number of things at the time that seem sound and valid as to why I shouldn’t have to give my money up. Yet I simultaneously notice that there is a vast pool of labor available. Even when unemployment was at a staggaringly low 4-something percent and everyone was hiring we still had homeless people. Clearly something is not right in the way we’ve set up our economy if this is the case.

131

Damn you, erislover that’s all so reasonable and temperate it’s hard to find anything to argue with.

As a matter of logic–rather than an actual desire to change policy–I’ll point out that we could make life in prison less attractive than life outside by making prison more unpleasant rather than by making the minimum standard of life outside more pleasant.

As a matter of fact, I suspect there are few people, even amongst the most destitute, who consider prison an attractive alternative to even homelessness and begging. They may fear prison less than they would if conditions ‘inside’ were worse or if conditions ‘outside’ were better, but they still fear prison, I suspect.

I’ve only encountered one coherent approach to the concept of absolute poverty. Essentially it says that the institution of private property has deprived people of the ability to earn their living by hunting and gathering or primitive agriculture. Essentially, this means they’ve been deprived of the ability to eat a relatively balanced diet, own some functional clothing, and live in housing that lacks electricity, phones, etc. Therefore, if they’re willing to work something like 20-40 hours a week, they should be provided with those goods. (Assuming their society is affluent enough that providing this isn’t a huge burden.)

132

P.S.

In my view, the two main government assistance programs which could really mess up the economy are the transfers to retirees and national healthcare.

The percentage retired grows larger and larger into the foreseeable future as child bearing decreases and lifespan increases. They are very motivated voters. They are a politically empowered parasite class who, since they’re near the end of their lives, have one less incentive not to think about the long term health of the economy. Italy and France are in serious danger of having their economies wrecked by transfers to the elderly, thanks to the generosity of their pension systems, their early retirement ages, and their low (about 1.2 children per woman) fertility.

Publicly funded healthcare is less of a problem, but because the demand for healthcare, unlike the demand for something like food or even housing, is so potentially unlimited (MRIs in every doctor’s office!), an entitlement to publicly funded healthcare is incredibly open-ended.

133

Just to jump back in for a second, why do you limit yourself from considering Perter’s wealth? It seems to me that that is preciesely where we need the limits. That is, we need to define an upper limit to the amount of wealth we are willing to expropriate from an individual and then worry about what we can provide poor people with. The idea being that as the economy slows, we take less from people who produce wealth.

134

I think it touches on the basic issue. There isn’t anywhere for people to go anymore. They can’t just go build a house in the middle of nowhere and hunt or farm for themselves. The expansion of society coupled with the concept of property has ensured that you can’t “just” go somewhere and get it done. You have to be mobile, and be prepared to leave in order to find work at an existing property owner’s sufferance. This is not always practical, and sometimes not even possible, but workers don’t have enough bargaining power to increase their salaries in order to account for this. Finally, the closer to poverty one gets, the more one bases choices on short-term existence. It is hard to plan for the future when you’re not sure if you’ll be able to eat next month. This all spells disaster for rational choice.

Oh, quite so. Also I believe most homeless people aren’t human scum and probably wouldn’t want to commit crimes. But from some perspectives, prison can be seen as a step up. This should pretty much never be the case. I don’t believe worsening prison conditions is a solution; the goal of all non-life sentences is rehabilitation, and in order to do that I think it is important to treat them well enough. In a capitalist democracy, the loss of freedom is, or should be!, huge. If prison isn’t a deterrent to some, it isn’t because prison is too nice but because their outside existence isn’t!

It is not a matter of limiting myself from considering it. The important part of being wealthy isn’t that the property is “mine mine mine” (base human greed) but that there is a significant reward for being greedy (that they get to keep wealth). This limit is not, and cannot, be absolute. It will be an aggregate effect from thousands of people independently making decisions that would affect their wealth. I simply don’t know what this numerically means. For me, the idea would be to extend the progressive tax structure, roughly like so (this is meant to be illustrative only!)
The first $0-15000 0%
next 5K 15%, gross max 20K (worst net income: 19250, total tax rate: 3.75%)
next 10K 25%, 30K (26750, 10.8%)
next 10K 35% 40K (33250, 16.9%)
next 10K 40% 50K (39250, 21.5%)
next 10K 45% 60K (44750, 25.4%)
next 100K 50% 160K (94750, 40.8%)
next 300K 53% 460K (235750, 51.3%)
next 500K 56% 960K (455750, 52.3%)
next 1000K
next 1000K
and so on. Here is where your limit would be: the maximum tax rate. I assume this is what you’re looking for.

Ideally, the guy that loves math in me would set up an increasing tax rate function that approaches a limit, and the bracketing function would eventually peter out as well, yielding the same sized bracket over time.

Now, I’ve set these numbers up off the top of my head, I’ve not looked at the existing tax rates or distribution of incomes across the population, etc; but, even if the tax rate is over 50%, no one in their right mind would say, “Nah, I’ll take a pass on the next million because I would only get 400K off it.” I mean, 400K is 400K is 400K. The profit structure doesn’t disappear, nor does the ability accumulate wealth. Notice that it is never in your advantage to not make money. You will always collect more. You are not punished for moving into a higher tax bracket. The taxes will never work out in such a way as to mean that the lowest income in one bracket has less net income than the highest in the previous bracket. That’s the beauty of progressive taxation like that. The incentive to accumulate wealth is always there. You always get to be a little more wealthy net if you are more wealthy gross.

135

Erislover writes:

Suppose we have a group of hunter-gatherers. Suppose that they eat pretty well in summer and fall, but food is fairly rationed in winter and spring. Are they less able to undertake rational choice in the winter and spring than in summer and fall?
Suppose Winter is Hard one year. Spring comes late, summer and fall are stingy. Are they less rational?

I won’t deny that starvation or other forms of absolute physical deprivation make people value the present more heavily than they would otherwise. They may even kill the goose that lays the golden egg. (Overfishing their river. Or, in a more modern context, dropping out of school to take a job.)

But I don’t think I’d want to deride that choice as irrational.

As far as your suggested scheme of progressive taxation–what is all that tax money going to be used for. Eyeballing it, it looks like you’re planning to collect something like 40% of GDP in taxes. For what? Just to restrain the rich? Suppose 20% is used for miscellaneous infrastructure, defense, law enforcement, and education.
Surely we don’t need 20% of GDP to keep people out of absolute poverty. Suppose that 20% were distributed to the poorest 20% of the population. They’d then have incomes that were 100% of per capita GDP. Surely you can’t intend anything like that.

136

HayekHeyst
Oh, I don’t intend anything with those numbers. They really are only meant to illustrate where a cap would be, not what it would be, and make sure we’re all on the same page WRT progressive taxation not instantly curbing the desire or ability to accumulate wealth. Taxation is motivated by the programs we want the government to impliment. Whatever that ends up being, I don’t know.

That really depends on the expected utility of the choices and how much we are willing to restrict the context. What are poor short term decisions often end up being the best long-term decisions. Of course, if we’re starving and about to die we’d cook our goose if we didn’t cook our goose. Even at that, conservative estimates tend to restrict long-term goal seeking. Dominant strategies sometimes seem incorrect in the short term.

Context is very important. Of course a well-known dilemma is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The “best” course of action depends quite completely on the context we are willing to consider. For example, the intuitive selection is to consider what will result in the least time served for both prisoners in an abstract sense, but the psychological effect of being a participant can really tip the balance in favor of self-interest. Of course, in some ways the PD is illustrative of a sort of begged question since it is constructed deliberately to illustrate such circumstances as those where short-term, self-interested behavior intuitively yields the worst result.

So when we approach situations like this, we have to be careful what context we’re considering. The prisoners that see no further than the time they’ll spend will end up spending a lot of time. Does this make the choice less rational for them? Well, no, not strictly, so long as we ensure that “acting in self-interest” is a key component of rationality. Yet such situations are there to illustrate that they aren’t, and that we can really screw ourselves to think that way.

137

Quoting erislover

Doesn’t that all depend on preferences, esp. the discount rate? You seem to talk about ‘poor’ and ‘best’ as if there were some objective standard of evaluating those terms. Are you contending that some subjective discount rates are so high that they are irrational? Who gets to decide?

Are all positive discount rates somewhat irrational, and the bigger the discount rate, the more irrational the agent? Would someone who values the future more than the present be super-rational? I suppose the pinnacle of rationality in this context would be consuming just enough to stay alive as long as possible, then consuming all your resources on the last day of your life?
I agree that a one-shot PD game is generally a poor model of reality. Reality is often more like a series of PD games, where the length of the series is unknown. And, as we all know, tit-for-tat is then the best-performing strategy.

I think I recall that if the players have ‘trembling hands’–where they sometimes accidentally play a move they didn’t intend to–then tit-for-tat with occasional random acts of forgiveness is the best-performing. Otherwise, you can accidentally end up in an infinite series of mutual betrayals due to a hand-trembling.

138

A great question! We all do—through democratic principles and open debate, and avoiding plutocratic tendencies which reveal incredible bias. In a pure meritocracy the only rich people would be those who have proven that they can earn it and maintain it, and from the statement “A is rich” we could deduce “A is highly skillful and earned every penny”; in this reality no such assumption can be made. There are more factors than skill involved, and the meritocracy falls into a plutocracy (witness the outrage at campaign finance limiting which only affects those who wish for “one dollar one vote” rather than “one person one vote”). The crucial point is that there is no dominant strategy—even if one thinks it is the “moral” one (e.g., what I work for is always and only mine). The illusion of a final resting place for the spirit of human endeavors is not just folly, but possibly fatal (well, to someone, anyway).

The crucial component of making game-theoretical analogies is to grasp two things:

  1. How we set up the game/analysis will heavily bias what the winning conditions are; and,
  2. The point of human existence is to never stop playing.

(1) is all about the context under consideration, and (2) requires us to think outside our own egoistic bubble of perception. If the game ends, there’s no more fun to be had. The Crucible is there to remind us, or at least me, that a strategy that ensures competition isn’t just beaten but removed will yield a definite winner who ultimately loses when he realizes it was playing the game that was so enjoyable, not just winning.

Infinite games only are practically infinite if you don’t remove competition, only best them.

139

PS, I think we’re breaking some kind of law by having a debate between competing ideals be this civil for this long. :smiley:

140

Without as you say “inject[ing] any moral component”, how do you defend this? If we accept that money is a measure of the effort a person has expended to create wealth (thus elliminating thefto for a moment) how do you say that the point is not to keep it? What is the point of my effort if not to enhance my life? That is, my satisfaction?

But the question is NEVER like that. Entreprenuers NEVER have to decide whether they want more money next year. They have to weigh risks and costs. So, if I have to invest 500,000 on an unspecified risk (no guarentees, you know) to gain 1,000,000, why would I do it if the payoff is limited to 400,000? You see, as you limit the amount of wealth a person can attain, you limit the risks he is willing to take with the wealth he has. I would never risk half my money in order to double it. I might risk half of it in order to raise it by an order of magnitude.

I would just like to remind you that competition games assume a winner and loser. They tend to dismiss the possibility of 2 winners. Economically speaking the idea of winners and losers is somewhat silly. Why have I lost if I did not attain Bill Gate’s wealth? If I did the best I can under the circumstances, why is that not a win?