That choice of two gambles has switched the conversation from utility to money. Isn't diminishing marginal utility the reason that the higher expected value bet is worse, making it lower expected utility?Also, I wonder if refusing to accept an exceptionally small risk of a bad outcome is just a case of the human brain's tendency to irrationally overweight to very low probabilities (a phenomenon well documented by Kahnemann and Tversky).
I have no very important objection to growth maximization. I do wonder if I should pass up that slice of pie just so a thousand generations from now people who will be far wealthier than I can be just a little bit more far wealthier.
However in the here and now I am much more concerned about about mistaking positive sum transactions for zero some transactions. People who oppose immigration, taxing net emissions of CO2, freer trade, or lower deficits, for example, do not seem to be aware that they are giving up growth in favor of some kind of "equity" at all.
No growth does not equal zero sum. If all technology were to stay the same and all factories would stay the same and all workers in same jobs, there are still embedded gains from trade that could be reversed. Invading China would still break the global supply chain leading to much lower output. Most wealth is still not in stealable resources, but instantiated processes that would be harmed by conflict.
Relative deprivation is a source of misery, irrational but very human. That certainly does not argue against growth, but it argues for a higher "floor" even at the cost of some growth.
I prefer Nozick + Rawls: People like his contractarianism because it's an explicit, consensual process. In his thought experiment, we actually sign a social contract.
Rawls made into a process --> Nozickian liberal archipelago of voluntary communities
This is an interesting article, although you clearly have not read Rawls lmao. First, you (purposefully with an intent to cast blame on interest groups) misrepresent the philosophical justification for using the veil in the first place. Then, you move on to misrepresent maximin (it's a decision making principle, not a system that can be used for normative judgements). Also, you gloss over Rawls' nuanced justification for use of minimax in two sentences. Then, you completely ignore Rawls' philosophical justification for WHY the difference principle is chosen, instead asserting that because most people do not select the difference principle in experiments, the difference principle is not just. Some side points, you quite clearly are ignorant of the fact that Rawls' theory is, as stated by him, only meant to be applied to wealthy western liberal democracies, which are in a specific point of economic development. Also, Rawls does provide an answer to questions of how we should value economic growth and the ell-being of our descendants. I'm not sure how you can avoid even mentioning Rawls' position in this article. This is made all the more disappointing by the fact that I talked about you with all of this last week. I even offered you my copy of a Theory of Justice, and I pointed you to the specific chapters relevant to your argument!! SMH
Rawls stipulated for agents in the original position having 'plug-ins' of Econ 101, Politics 101 etc. However, Sociobiology 101 would tell you that
1) some purely genetic uncorrelated asymmetries are not effaceable behind the veil and this means, inter alia
2) likelihood of being a founding ancestor is highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, the Price equation will work differently for different agents.
This means that preference diversity is too great for a one-shot contract to be Muth rational. In other words, everybody (provided they have sufficient knowledge of Econ) would stipulate for incomplete contracts regulated by canons whose outcomes are not computable rather than for constrained optimization. In practice, fiscal policy is about canons of taxation and the art of administration. It isn't about substantive outcomes. Another way of arriving at the same result would be to emphasize 'regret minimizing strategies' to deal with Knightian uncertainty.
There are other reasons why Rawls was obviously barking up the wrong tree. Consider the concurrency problems, the agenda control problems, the aggregation problems, the problems of computability and complexity involved. The thing is simply foolish.
What of 'growth'? The problem is that we don't what is or isn't Income because we can't be sure we are reducing our stock of assets such that the thing is sustainable. Even if we could be sure that growth had occurred- as opposed to a bunch of White elephants having been accumulated- the fact remains that our progeny may have reduced reproductive fitness because of it. Hysteresis effects predominate in determining such outcomes- especially for men- so ergodicity has limited purchase.
The fact is, before you can have contracts, you have to a notion of 'commercium'. But this is not a 'universal' homonoia at all. It is essentially a mechanism which privileges the transactions of those who pay for the mechanism. There will be no universal rights under it. There will only be a separating equilibrium based on a costly signal. True, the pretense of the former might be kept up- like the notion that America was going to help Afghan women- but there is a quick entitlement collapse because providing the remedy to the rights violation is incentive compatible.
If Rawls et al. had kept abreast of developments in maths and biology and so forth, this foolish availability cascade would not have been allowed to trundle along for five decades.
A very interesting post, and the point about no growth = zero-sum world makes 'secular stagnation' all the more worrying
That choice of two gambles has switched the conversation from utility to money. Isn't diminishing marginal utility the reason that the higher expected value bet is worse, making it lower expected utility?Also, I wonder if refusing to accept an exceptionally small risk of a bad outcome is just a case of the human brain's tendency to irrationally overweight to very low probabilities (a phenomenon well documented by Kahnemann and Tversky).
I believe Rawls called his preferred system "economic democracy", although I don't know how that was supposed to differ from democratic socialism.
"social contact decision"
You meant to write "contract".
I have no very important objection to growth maximization. I do wonder if I should pass up that slice of pie just so a thousand generations from now people who will be far wealthier than I can be just a little bit more far wealthier.
However in the here and now I am much more concerned about about mistaking positive sum transactions for zero some transactions. People who oppose immigration, taxing net emissions of CO2, freer trade, or lower deficits, for example, do not seem to be aware that they are giving up growth in favor of some kind of "equity" at all.
No growth does not equal zero sum. If all technology were to stay the same and all factories would stay the same and all workers in same jobs, there are still embedded gains from trade that could be reversed. Invading China would still break the global supply chain leading to much lower output. Most wealth is still not in stealable resources, but instantiated processes that would be harmed by conflict.
Relative deprivation is a source of misery, irrational but very human. That certainly does not argue against growth, but it argues for a higher "floor" even at the cost of some growth.
I prefer Nozick + Rawls: People like his contractarianism because it's an explicit, consensual process. In his thought experiment, we actually sign a social contract.
Rawls made into a process --> Nozickian liberal archipelago of voluntary communities
This is an interesting article, although you clearly have not read Rawls lmao. First, you (purposefully with an intent to cast blame on interest groups) misrepresent the philosophical justification for using the veil in the first place. Then, you move on to misrepresent maximin (it's a decision making principle, not a system that can be used for normative judgements). Also, you gloss over Rawls' nuanced justification for use of minimax in two sentences. Then, you completely ignore Rawls' philosophical justification for WHY the difference principle is chosen, instead asserting that because most people do not select the difference principle in experiments, the difference principle is not just. Some side points, you quite clearly are ignorant of the fact that Rawls' theory is, as stated by him, only meant to be applied to wealthy western liberal democracies, which are in a specific point of economic development. Also, Rawls does provide an answer to questions of how we should value economic growth and the ell-being of our descendants. I'm not sure how you can avoid even mentioning Rawls' position in this article. This is made all the more disappointing by the fact that I talked about you with all of this last week. I even offered you my copy of a Theory of Justice, and I pointed you to the specific chapters relevant to your argument!! SMH
Rawls stipulated for agents in the original position having 'plug-ins' of Econ 101, Politics 101 etc. However, Sociobiology 101 would tell you that
1) some purely genetic uncorrelated asymmetries are not effaceable behind the veil and this means, inter alia
2) likelihood of being a founding ancestor is highly heterogeneous. Furthermore, the Price equation will work differently for different agents.
This means that preference diversity is too great for a one-shot contract to be Muth rational. In other words, everybody (provided they have sufficient knowledge of Econ) would stipulate for incomplete contracts regulated by canons whose outcomes are not computable rather than for constrained optimization. In practice, fiscal policy is about canons of taxation and the art of administration. It isn't about substantive outcomes. Another way of arriving at the same result would be to emphasize 'regret minimizing strategies' to deal with Knightian uncertainty.
There are other reasons why Rawls was obviously barking up the wrong tree. Consider the concurrency problems, the agenda control problems, the aggregation problems, the problems of computability and complexity involved. The thing is simply foolish.
What of 'growth'? The problem is that we don't what is or isn't Income because we can't be sure we are reducing our stock of assets such that the thing is sustainable. Even if we could be sure that growth had occurred- as opposed to a bunch of White elephants having been accumulated- the fact remains that our progeny may have reduced reproductive fitness because of it. Hysteresis effects predominate in determining such outcomes- especially for men- so ergodicity has limited purchase.
The fact is, before you can have contracts, you have to a notion of 'commercium'. But this is not a 'universal' homonoia at all. It is essentially a mechanism which privileges the transactions of those who pay for the mechanism. There will be no universal rights under it. There will only be a separating equilibrium based on a costly signal. True, the pretense of the former might be kept up- like the notion that America was going to help Afghan women- but there is a quick entitlement collapse because providing the remedy to the rights violation is incentive compatible.
If Rawls et al. had kept abreast of developments in maths and biology and so forth, this foolish availability cascade would not have been allowed to trundle along for five decades.