This idea came to me while watching HBO’s “Rome:” Despite being a pinnacle of ancient civilization, Rome was poor. The very few aristocratic families scraped out an existence comparable to a middle-class American (They had the bonus of having slaves but also lacked medical technology that we take for granted.) The vast majority, from the mercantile class downward, are arguably materially poorer than inhabitants of third-world countries today. If Rome existed today, without technology diffusion it would be perhaps one of the worst-off countries in the world. Slave labor is nice but it cannot get you past primitive technology and (at this point) poor governance.
What this implies is that if you’re really concerned about income inequality, you should be just as concerned about *temporal *inequality as with inequalities in a static time frame, such as in the present-day USA. (This is forgetting about concerns about redistributing from the rich US to the global poor, which no serious politician places as a high priority). Redistribution to those poor blokes in the past is, of course, impossible. But - again, if you value equality - what we should really be worried about is improving our own lot at the expense of those lucky bastards who live in the future, where technological progress makes material goods increasingly cheap, and who will probably look at *our *living conditions as backward savagery.
What policies achieve this? Higher consumption, and lower investment. Spending more money today will make us better-off today. The downside is that we don’t get the payoff of investment in the future - but they almost certainly won’t “need” it, what with their Playstation 10,000s and flying cars. Yes, at some level, underinvestment will decrease the total welfare of humanity, but this is a tradeoff that current static-time-frame redistributionists are already willing to make to some extent. (Again, the people who lose from this policy are those well-off far-future people.)
You could argue that we already do this tradeoff to some extent, saving below the welfare-optimal amount. But I think that we naturally care about our children and descendants, more so than we care about our poor neighbors, and more so than would be welfare optimizing. Given this powerful emotion I think it’s safe to say that we aren’t consuming anywhere near what intertemporal redistribution would imply.
So, thoughts about this redistribution program? One bonus from it is that next time you hear criticism of Americans spending too much and saving too little, you can smile and say that we’re not being selfish; we’re just ensuring equality!
Another consequence of this belief, by the way, is that we shouldn’t do that much about global warming. People in the future will be better-off and will be better able to deal with the problems. This is in contrast to those climate-change activists today, who use literature like the Stern Report which have a positive discount rate: ie they value future welfare more highly than present-day welfare. Temporal redistribution means that we should have a highly negative discount rate.
We can pursue policies to improve our lot in future time, but not to improve the past. To pursue a policy to make the future worse is irresponsible, because the future is what’s left once the present is gone.
As for your proposal, it relies overly much on an assumption that progress is always upward. Despite the fantasies of 1950’s Americans, this is not definitely the case.
Well, most empires in the past (such as Rome) went bust in a big way. Income inequality when it becomes so egregious lead to such nice times as the Russian, French and Chinese revolutions to name a few.
Your notion of trading future prosperity for current equality is faulty. Left to itself income inequality tends to accelerate leading to boom-and-bust cycles. So, if you get to live in the boom times then you are likely not keen on anything in the past that would have limited you. If you live in the time where the peasants revolt and chop off your head I am willing to bet you would wish you had traded some of your prosperity to see to a more egalitarian society.
As a measure of society as a whole it is a helluva thing to trade some years of prosperity to see it all crash down at some point. Far better to maintain a more healthy and sustainable growth and a more even growth. The US became exceptional because it was one of the first countries to really allow everyone to prosper. Even the poor were often better off than the poor elsewhere.
The most stable and healthy societies are ones characterized by a large middle class and a small upper and lower class. Edge out the middle class to make a few smashingly wealthy people and a whole lot of destitute people and you will have problems.
You have not really traded future prosperity for today’s prosperity at all if done right. A healthy middle class actually generates more rich people since you have a lot of people able to buy stuff to make them rich. When everyone is poor not so many rich people since few can buy anything.
Axiomatically true, but that’s not a meaningful statement in this debate - in fact that’s arguably a manifestation of that parenting instinct that I mentioned: we *will *inherently value the future, but this doesn’t make sense from the utilitarian framework. What’s important is that the people in the future will be better off than the people alive today, and that person-to-person comparison is comparable to the ones we use for present-day redistribution.
Is there a time in the past that you would prefer to have been born in, and stay there forever? I can agree that pre-Industrial-Revolution society might have been caught in Malthusian stasis, but things have only been looking up since then. This is especially true when we’re talking lifetime-length spans of time.
The trend emerges? You’re comparing 250 years of relative progress against all of human history, which has had periods of up and down much longer than that period. I don’t think your premise that only progress is possible for the future can just be taken on faith.
In any case, I was asking because I was genuinely curious. I don’t really know what life was like in Italy during the 400-1000 CE period as compared to Roman living.
The other problem is that there’s a heck of a lot more future than there is present. If I help future peoples, then I’m helping a lot more people than if I just help those who are alive right now.
That, and the reason for progress in the first place is that people invest in the future. If we selfishly squander all our wealth on the present, then the people of the future won’t be able to console themselves with their Playstation 10,000s, since we wouldn’t have invented the Playstation 10,000 in the first place.
Hmm… I think I’m gonna hafta cite you for “populist history”, and issue a warning. Don’t let me catch you speeding off to illogical conclusions based on whatever personal bits of history you claim to have understood.
Define better off. This is a subjective thing, clearly. There are people rich by any objective measure dreadfully unhappy because they are not as rich as the guy in the mansion next door, and plenty of people who are not rich but very satisfied anyway. People feel worse off in comparison to others, or by not having material things they have been told they need.
Given this, not having as good health care or food or internet access as someone in the future is not likely to make someone feel worse off, since everyone is in the same boat. if everyone goes in a chamber pot, you won’t miss a warm place to crap.
As for robbing tomorrow for today, we seem to do a lot of that already (see budget deficits.) As people, if we are old and save, we are doing it not for us but as the basis of a risk free gift to our descendants. (Risk free in that we can give the money away knowing for sure that we won’t be needing it.) Those people with either no descendants or no one they want to have the money are allowed to spend their inheritance, and no one will be critical.
As a society though, we might be immortal, and so we don’t want to risk tomorrow for pleasures today. Not that people don’t do this anyhow (smokers …) but it isn’t a good move.
Slavery was almost certainly a drag on their economy and society, not a benefit. It may have been profitable for the elite, but it was a drag on society in general.
Except they won’t be well off in your scenario; they’ll be living in an impoverished wasteland, probably pissing on our graves whenever they come across them. Assuming that we aren’t still alive, and they can’t nail us to a wall and peel our skin off, then piss on our graves. That’s already the direction we are heading; we are using up the world, and destroying a lot of what we aren’t using. Your proposal just means that they’ll be even worse off, and less able to drag themselves out of the wreckage.
I admit, I can’t think of anything more typically American than attempting to redefine greed and malice as good; of claiming that it is your moral duty to be as self indulgent as possible and leave a wasteland behind you.
No; we’ve made it quite clear we care very little for them.
No one will notice the difference; piggish self indulgence with a self righteous smirk is a hallmark of America.
Ah, that’s where knowing the term on the margin is helpful - there’s an entire sliding scale of how much we can invest for the future, and you’re acting like only the extremes exist. Here’s an example: people in the '50s were materially worse off than we are now. They could have spent some of their resources buying fun stuff, and we would maybe be 10 years behind where we are now, economically speaking, putting us on a GDP par with France and Germany. We would still be better off than they were, just by less.
Are you willing to bet that life in 2059, with 50 years of technological improvement, will be materially worse than life in 2009? I know that doomsday prophesy is fashionable, but wreckage? Seriously?
We already have people claiming it’s their moral duty to take from one group of people and benefit another. Some of these people happen to benefit from said redistribution (for example non-top-95% earners who support raising taxes on the top 5% of earners). This proposal is no different, except that the groups we’re transferring between are separated by time rather than space. People are still people.
What you have described is essentially what is know as “credit” or “debt”. Esentially borrowing money to have now and worry about how it will be paid back sometime in the future. When done in moderation it makes sense. For example, taking out a mortgage on a house that you will live in for the next 30 years instead of buying it with 30 years worth of cash.
The problem with excessive debt is that if it becomes unsustainable, it will eventually cause some sort of financial collapse. And while that collapse may happen in the future, it may happen within your lifetime and at a time when you are least prepared to deal with it.
With the attitude you are pushing ? Certainly; I’d expect a world that looks like Road Warrior. They wouldn’t have better technology; they’d have worse. Most of the population would be dead of starvation and the plagues and chaos accompanying the collapse of civilization and the ecology. And technological improvement would not exist even before then; under your philosophy it would stop dead.
Civilization only keeps going because of constant investment in its maintenance and its future; you want to end that. Naturally, that would mean the destruction of civilization.
Garbage. That “top 5%” isn’t the equivalent of the future; they are the equivalent of the present. Self indulgent parasites and predators who have grown fat upon the ruthless exploitation of the world, regardless of the cost to others. Raising their taxes is no more than forcing them to give back some of their loot. To contribute to the running of the society they have always regarded as nothing more than something to be exploited.
Nope, again, you need to think about the sliding scale. Along our current trajectory, standards of living will improve. There exists a quantity of investment less than our current amount that still supports an increase in the standard of living, merely slower. If you cannot see those two points (just extrapolate from a point in time within the last 200 years!), then you cannot participate in this argument - you should start a thread arguing that we’re already on a downward trajectory. Of course then you’ll have to defend that claim.
I see little reason to think that. We are using up irreplaceable resources and doing serious harm to the environment, and not seriously trying to find alternatives. By the time we have no choice but to switch to more sustainable behavior, we won’t have the resources to do so without massive costs and deprivation ( at best ). I expect something on the order of a combination of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in our future.
There’s more than one dimensional to your scale. There is a dimension in which reducing investment just slows things down, but has no really ill effect. The reduction in investment in the space program is one example. If no one moved to the next process node in silicon, the rate of speed and power increase in our ICs would slow a lot, but we’d be fine.
The other dimension is investment needed to stem conditions that threaten our civilization. It is at least possible that not investing in technology to reduce carbon emissions will lead to a disaster. 40 years ago lots of people thought the year 2000 would be a polluted nightmare. We actually invested in pollution reduction, and our air is better today than it was then.
Failing to invest in these two types of infrastructure might have dramatically different consequences.
Exactly. For example; we are heavily dependant on fossil fuels, which WILL give out and are pumping greenhouse-gas CO2 into the air. If we choose to, we can build, say, nuclear plants and electric vehicles to replace fossil fuels; if we wait to do that until we are extracting the last drops of oil our industry and economy will be already in the process of collapsing and it will be far harder to do so, if we can at all before collapsing entirely. If we start switching now, we can spread out the effort and the resources needed.
And something like the greenhouse effect might well be just too big to stop if we wait; it may well already be too late.