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The Benefits of Inequality
New submitter MutualFun sends this article from Science News:
Which would you prefer: egalitarianism or totalitarianism? When it comes down to it, the choice you make may not be as obvious as you think. New research suggests that in the distant past, groups of hunter-gatherers may have recognized and accepted the benefits of living in hierarchical societies, even if they themselves weren't counted among the well-off. This model could help explain why bands of humans moved from largely egalitarian groups to hierarchical cultures in which social inequality was rife.
So many people refuse to think for themselves. I don't really have a problem with that, except when they persecute me for exercising that right myself.
Bullshit bourgeois propaganda.
Communism is a classless, stateless society and the road to communism passes through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
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This is peer reviewed research. RTFA before you once again prove that you're just as capable of rejecting inconvenient "science" that doesn't agree with your world view as the "deniers" you bitch about.
We could stop automatically assuming a hierarchy has to involve unequal distribution. Perhaps being at the top of a hierarchy is enough of a social motivator that people would take on those responsibilities without taking an unequal share of everyone else's work?
I don't know about "benefits"...even the abstract says that one of the main triggers to accepting leadership was that the populace had nowhere to go, or that it was too costly to leave.
As a rule, I'm skeptical of everything that uses evolution to explain societal structures. Most of the time it just boils down to a nifty story devoid of any evidence. That seems to be the case here: 1) Come up with a point you want prove 2) Rejig the currently accepted but highly unrealistic assumptions in the field until the model gives the desired result 3) Publish! I see this kind of nonsense in economics papers all the time. Heartening to see that we aren't the only ones cursed with pointless theorizing.
Some people assume that totalitarian/hierarchical organizations are simply inherently bad, and "democracy" is inherently good. Really, it's more about the situation and context.
For example, even in our modern "democracy", our military still uses a top-down hierarchy with a rigid chain of command. There are good reasons for this. When you're in dangerous situations, organization and timing can become vital to the survival of the group, and survival tends to trump social justice. If the military commander has a plan that requires a troop of soldiers move to a particular location in a short amount of time, you don't want people standing around debating, or wondering whether the plan is fair. You need people to follow orders immediately, or else a lot of people might die.
There have been situations in humanity's past when this would have been true of social/governmental organizations too. If the chief needs everyone to mobilize in order to avert disaster and keep the entire tribe from being wiped out, then you don't want a lot of debate. The whole setup worked pretty well for a while.
Of course now, things are different. Most of our lives (speaking at least of the people reading Slashdot) are relatively safe and comfortable. We don't need to follow orders immediately and unquestioningly in order to stay alive. Also, our society is larger, and the concentration of power is greater. The danger of taking time for debate is not greater than the danger of a bad ruler with absolute power over a society, so totalitarianism seems like it's not such a great idea.
Tunney and the rest of the Silicon Valley "neoreactionaries" are going to be all over this...
Inequality wouldn't be so bad if we had a robust safety net and didn't fuck people at the bottom. It's one thing to be poor, it's another to have to survive day to day worrying about food, shelter, health care, etc. As long as we keep screwing people, any argument defending inequality is completely void of substance or ethics.
as if nothing exists between absolute equality and absolute inequality. "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." - Obi Wan Kenobi
In the archeological record, we can see people got smaller and weaker when they moved from hunter-gatherer societies to agrarian ones where assets were not shared on a more equal basis.
But, live in your Ayn Rand fantasy if you must.
Just stop pretending Science supports it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You can't have one without the other.
Yes, Capitalism is the accepted economic system because it produces results; if those same results persist through extreme levels of inequality is a different matter. If what you are trying to say is that the current levels of inequality are actually beneficial for society, I believe most economists would disagree. See The Great Depression, this article, or this book. No one knows what they threshold really is, but no one argues that there isn't one.
Democracy is just a terrible system of government, but it turns out it's all we can trust ourselves with to not fuck shit up. The vote of a retard counts just as much as the vote of a genius, and that's ridiculous, but what's even more ridiculous is that everything else has turned out worse.
Ideally we would be ruled by a benevolent artificial intelligence who can determine without outside input what is best for everyone.
Terrible summary and title.
From TFA:
Our model predicts that the transition to larger despotic groups will then occur when: (i) surplus resources lead to demographic expansion of groups, removing the viability of an acephalous niche in the same area and so locking individuals into hierarchy; (ii) high dispersal costs limit followers' ability to escape a despot. Empirical evidence suggests that these conditions were probably met, for the first time, during the subsistence intensification of the Neolithic.
So availability of resources to a minority and the inability to escape cause large despotisms, much like CO2 and Greenhouse gases cause global warming. Climate science should be renamed "The Benefits of Global Warming". Or after a man's parachute fails to open he "realizes the benefits of gravity in assisting his painless disassembly".
I know it would be odd to ask for editors to, uh, you know, edit.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Capitalism is a dead end, literalluy. Mass thermonuclear holocaust.
Where the workers have taken power (Paris commune, October 1917 revolution) they made advances that no capitalist government ever could make. Despite their encirclement by bloodthirsty bourgeois armies. Despite the bureaucratic degenration of the Russian revolution. The facts don't lie. Read about the vital statistics in Russia before and after the 1992 Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution.
Revolution meant emancipation for women, gays, national minorities, Jews, and it meant the transformation fo Russia from the poorest, msot backward country in Europe to a global scientific-industrial superpower.
Wha we need now is a SOVIET AMERICA as part of a WORKERS WORLD!!!!!!
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Groups of hunter-gatherers may have recognized and accepted the benefits of living in hierarchical societies such as not getting killed by resisting whoever had seized power through use of force.
I'll take a meritocracy over a completely egaitarean society any time and I suppose that makes me in favor of inequality but I also reject the kind of society the USA has become where a few have risen to the top and roll boulders down on anybody else trying to rise by his own merit. Now feel free to color me radcal but any meritocracy will eventually become a plutocracy which is why bloody revolutions (pandemics like the black death also work wonders) are necessary at regular intervals to level the playing field. I'm not sure that's quite what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" but it's close.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The word "equality" is meaningless without the clarification: equality of what? Hair color? Penis size?
In the context of politics, the following two equalities are usually meant by the arguing sides — even when neither side makes their own meaning explicit:
Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Results .
The "all men created equal" concept is about equality of opportunity: you start with (roughly) the same things as everybody else and whatever you achieve (or not achieve as the case might be) is due to your own industry, frugality, and, perhaps, genes. We might be created equal (subject to gene variations), but what we do after the creation is up to us.
The equality of results is the opposite: whatever you do, you will have (roughly) the same things at the end: if you are more successful than average, the State will tax you to ensure the results of the less successful aren't too different from yours — a concept lovingly referred to as "spreading the wealth around".
A large number of politicians made careers of conflating the two equalities — by harping at the absence of latter and implying, the former does not exist. Such demagoguery patently dishonest not only in theory, but also in practice...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Social structures evolved to fight the perpetual battle for survival.
Where survival is no longer a battle, such structures may not be optimal.
basically has the same meaning as the title of this article.
Small tribes typically ran on some basic math. A charismatic leader would band together with a small group of thugs who would then tax the rest of the tribe right up to but not the breaking point. The idea was to balance having enough thugs that no grouping of the remaining tribe members (except for maybe all) could take them on, while not having too many thugs that the spoils were spread too thin.
Then if the chief's son took over and didn't understand this balance either he would cut back on the thugs and get overthrown by someone who could then gather more thugs, or he would have too many thugs to feed making thuggery unattractive, or he would over tax the tribe resulting in being killed by an angry mob.
Basically nothing has changed in the last 100,000 years. My hope for a truly modern society is one where we brutally tax thuggery. My suggestion has long been that tax levels should be partially set by the ratio of the average salary to the highest salary. So a guy earning 20x the average salary would find himself facing a 100% income tax level. The corporate tax would also be based upon the salaries of the employees as compared to an area average. So a Walmart may very well find itself owing 150%+ corporate income tax in a rich city if it tried to pay its employees minimum wage.
This is a naive article. For a better analysis, see "How Asia Works", which is a comparison of the coastal Asian countries, how they developed, and why. Development requires several phases. One is raising agricultural productivity. There's the heavy-handed approach, which comes in the communist form of collective arms and the capitalist form of big plantations. Then there's the light approach, which involves lots of little services like tractor rental and agricultural agents. (The heavy-handed approach works well only for flat land. Hill operations require too many local decisions.) There's thus a visible relationship between what a country looks like and its Gini coefficient.
The second phase of development is about industrialization. Where investment goes really matters. Market forces do not direct investment towards overall economic growth, but toward short-term profit. The successful "Asian tigers" all had very directed investment controls, and how well countries did relative to each other depends on how well investment was directed.
The book has lots of country-by-country comparisons, both statistical and on the ground. It's worth a read.
Egalitarian is for people below average. Elitism is for people above average. Nearly everyone believes they're above average.
This is also why conspiracy theories abound. If you are above average, but cannot excel, it must be the fault of some dark conspiracy that oppresses you.
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."
~ Sir Winston Churchill
In any group of people some are going to be better at some tasks than others. We put value on those tasks depending on how much they're needed or wanted by society. In a society like we have today, doctors are more valuable than burger flippers so they're paid more. It's not always that simple, but that's the way we tend to perceive it.
True superiority is actually unifying. False superiority is where the problems come from. When the king (or democratically elected government) begins to believe that they are all-knowing and infallible, people are right to oppose them.
I was about to write the same thing (sorry, no points to mod you up).
About the strongest claims from evolutionary sociologists / psychologists / etc. that I'm willing to entertain are of the form "We can see how X could have led to an evolutionary benefit when we assume their world operated like Y. So, if the world really did operate like Y, then maybe evolutionary pressures were a reason X was true." Modulo the plausibility of X and Y having been actually true for a significant fraction of the population being discussed.
I've sometimes wondered if I'm being too hard on those academics because I don't fully understand their claims, or because they know stuff that I don't. But I find it completely plausible that their community is simply engaged in a huge group-think circle-jerk.
and still is rife.
Models aren't evidence by definition. And it's a reasonable concern to consider whether the axioms of evolution apply in the first place.
The huge obstacle is the assumption that societies have inheritable traits. There are examples of societies that adopt traits from successful past societies. And there are examples of societies that were unable to do because the previous society was far more advanced and the technology was needed to adopt many of the previous society's features (eg, the barbarian kingdoms that sprung up in the wake of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire).
There will never, ever be a "classless, stateless society". Humanity simply doesn't work that way.
There will always be people who want to lead and there will always be people who want to be told what to do.
I do not see a classless society as a desirable or even possible goal. I'd be willing to settle for at least pulling the very bottom class of people who can't take care of themselves up to lives of relative comfort - at least have their basic needs met.
After all, after basic needs are met, happiness and fulfillment in life has _absolutely nothing_ to do with wealth. People who don't understand that are doomed to lives of discontentment no matter how hard they push for their greed and desires.
I agree with the top-down perspective, it's especially noticeable that a lot of people try to find only evidence that proves their preconceived opinion, rather than finding evidence to develop an opinion.
It's not proof of correctness, certainly, but it is evidence of plausibility. How much weight it has is of course up to you.
There has never been an egalitarian society of any significant size. After all, there always has to be somebody who determines whether or not everyone is equal or not and that somebody cannot define, determine and enforce equality without having authoritarian power.
Look for a society based on egalitarianism in principle and you will find a dictatorship in practice.
Makes sense when rising to the top is based on personal qualities and leadership abilities. However, today rising to the top is more or less decided by who your daddy is. A huge percentage of the ultra-rich are in that position by chance of birth.
Inheriting is actually even more likely to get you into the top 1 percent by wealth: 45 percent of those in the top 1 percent by net worth only have ever inherited (Source: http://inequality.org/meet-ame... ). Essentially about 50% of your likelihood of being 1 in 100 is decided by birthright.
Either this was a troll submission or a right-leaning submitter desperate for any supporting evidence.
The article isn't to do with modern inequality at all, but rather how likely societies are to form hierarchies.
Hey, Everyone! Lets all vote ourselves in as serfs, except that guy over there, we'll elect him as Baron. He'll own everything and be responsible for everything so we don't have to. All in favor? Hands? Yes, I can just see how folks chose to be be kept down, working the fields, chattel of the local lord.
Most of the time it just boils down to a nifty story devoid of any evidence.
Yup, and such things belong in novels, not scientific papers: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Which would you prefer? Like that's a sensible choice that's getting offered anywhee anytime soon?
how about a liberal free market economy with good social health care and safety net for those at the bottom of the pile?
I'm betting that those who waffle on about the benefits of inequality haven't experienced the harsh reality of those enjoying the "benefits" at the low end of the scale themselves. Still, they're only one misfortune away from testing their loudmouth theories in person...........
Equality of opportunity
Us as society ensuring that everyone is treated fair whatever the sex,religion or economic state and giving to every one the best chances to achieve their betterment
Equality of results
Us as a society ensuring that enough is shared to allow a decent standard of living for everyone enough so equality of opportunity is actually achievable
A bump living in the tunnels of a New York metro hardly have any of the above
Hierarchy goes hand-in-hand with specialisation of roles in a society. Even in a hunter-gatherer society, the more physically endowed were hunters whilst the frailer members of the band gathered or engaged in child-care; even in pre-agricultural times, larger groups certainly had various factions even if they viewed other factions as peers. As agriculture took hold and a warrior caste developed, the more physically-armed members of society (or those were were under the protection of such) could keep the rabble down via the threat of violence.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" - Winston Churchill
...about how the West is not really special about democracy:
http://www.straight.com/news/g...
Writing about your original, even pre-homo-sapiens hunter-gatherer groups, who had democracy since we had language:
it's a dictatorship and/or kleptocracy that happens to use communist rhetoric. Why this fact escapes so many people is beyond me. Maybe it's the 75+ years of indoctrination and thinly veiled McCarthyism...
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I think if you look you'll find most basic research (e.g. the really expensive stuff that's hard to do) is paid for by your gov't (or European gov'ts if you live in the USA, we've been cutting funding left and right since Reagan...).
NASA (along with a lot of German Rocket scientists) got us to the moon and DARPA + the Universities created the communication network we're using now...
I guess Capitalism got us the 99 cent double cheeseburger. Oh wait, it was gov't farm subsidies that make that possible too....
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the truly smart people, you're Eisenstein and what have you, are too busy with the incredibly interesting problems they can comprehend to bother with the sort of wealth gathering that you're thinking of when you say "meritocracy". The ones that we're talking about when we say "inequality" aren't all that brilliant. They're loaded with advantages from generations of accumulated wealth. They're rent seekers. The "Investor Class". People who spend their entire day not solving problems or building things or making new things but just figuring out who to gather wealth.
You'll never have your meritocracy. Eisenstein was too busy with relativity to bother trying to run a county. Now Mitt Romney, he's got plenty of time for it. He's also got a Car Elevator...
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The bigger picture suggests that we do not have a choice and that things move in cycles. Capitalism ends when all the resources are used up and then there is a small period of cannibalism and then it turns into communism.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Republic_(Plato) if you really want to check which one is better or not...
You can't get equality without totalitarianism. You can't get it with it, either.
Some inequality is normal and expected. HUGE inequality is risky and ridiculous. Some are so rich they forget how many houses they have.
Some water is good and necessary. Too much water and you drown.
Table-ized A.I.
I went and examined the paper, and damn right the /. summary is misleading.
First one, the researchers don't use the vague term "social inequality". Second, they are merely reporting on the results of a computer model, and not on some new archeological findings. From the abstract:
They did a computer simulation of the classic Coase argument about transaction costs affecting market structure (and its consequences on asymetry of information which equate to inequalities of human capital), applying it to individuals undergoing the agricultural revolution (food surpluses but with delayed returns and higher need for coordination). Well, yeah, a hierarchy emerges in this situation, because the rapid change in productivity is not uniformly distributed and depends on information that is costly to disseminate. That idea's been around at least since Hayek's works on spontaneous order. It's kinda nice to see it verified in a computer model, but it doesn't teach us anything new.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
I know a lot of you love to argue about politics and social policy, but trying to argue that this is tech related would be a stretch. Keep this crap to the Huffington Post, if you will.
too much is. if people die because others hoard all the resources (which is essentially whats happening now) then you have a problem.
It's almost like division of labor and specialization is beneficial or something!
I for one demand that I pay my dentist no more than I pay the kid who mows my lawn ...
Which would you prefer: egalitarianism or totalitarianism?
The question makes little sense - for one thing, egalitarian is not the opposite of totalitarian - to quote Wikipedia:
- "Egalitarianism ... is a trend of thought that favors equality for all people"
- "Totalitarianism or totalitarian state is a political system in which the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever possible".
Arguably, the opposite of egalitarianism is elitism; there isn't really a good word for it that I could find. The same holds for totalitarianism - no good antonym, but democratism might be close enough. These concept occupy two, independent spaces, although it may be that totalitarianism is found more with elitism than with egalitarianism.
The other problem with this question is that they are not binary concepts, but define a continuum - IOW there are different degrees of both scales.
When it comes down to it, the choice you make may not be as obvious as you think. New research suggests that in the distant past, groups of hunter-gatherers may have recognized and accepted the benefits of living in hierarchical societies, even if they themselves weren't counted among the well-off. This model could help explain why bands of humans moved from largely egalitarian groups to hierarchical cultures in which social inequality was rife.
There is nothing new in this. Even back in the day, when we can imagine that humans lives like the other, large apes in small groups, there would have been leaders - alpha-males or -females. Or in family groups, one or both parents would have been in charge. This makes sense, since a more experienced, older adult makes better decisions than a younger one, and a physically stronger individual is able to take what he/she wants as well as offering better protection against attackers etc.
But what recent research of the Egyptian culture actually shows is, that hierarchical society developed, not because hierarchy is inherently better, but because the alternatives were worse. If Egypt hadn't been surrounded by desert, people would have moved away, and hierchical society wouldn't have been established that early. Compare to North Europe, where it is possible to live more or less everywhere, and hierchical societies seemingly didn't arise until much later, when population density got high enough.
It's a problem wth all absolutists? ;)
Yes, there are two kinds of binary absolutists: those that can be put into one of two mutually exclusive categories, and those that cannot!
It's very useful. In C++, it would be awkward to write a for-loop to iterate over items in an STL container without one.
Ah. You're one of those loudmouths the poster was talking about who will hopefully get to test your theory.
I had a girlfriend who lost the end of her finger in a kitchen accident at the restaurant she was working at full-time. Thankfully, she lives in Canada and was able to have it re-attached through the publicly funded healthcare system. She didn't have to lose a couple of years of her life via bank debt in order to pay for doctors.
She's today a valued and very well-loved member of our community. She also now owns a successful business which employs several people; a benefit to life around here. The world is, literally, a better place because shared resources allowed her to bloom. But I guess because she needed help at one point in her life, she's just one of those people you casually brand as "worthless" from your position of arm chair ignorance and obsessive tunnel-vision hate.
Those who do not understand money will not recognize their abusers.
our great ape social hierarchies per se, but rather that they emerge at highly inappropriate scales.
These are two sides of the same coin. You can't have egalitarianism without force--ultimately totalitarian force.
The paper posits that early societies were relatively egalitarian. That's ridiculous. In any group of human beings, a hierarchical structure is always created. What creates the hierarchy changes (brawn and hunting skills back then, brains today), but one always forms on the basis of something. Have the authors never even been in first grade?
Holy false dichotomy, batman!
The Benefits of Inflation
Casteism
Buffett's secretary Bosanek pays a tax rate of 35.8 percent of income, while Buffett pays a rate at 17.4 percent.
http://news.yahoo.com/warren-b...
Casteism
Exactly. Using similar arguments, I can "prove" that cats were predated upon by string-like creatures given their response to the stimulus.
People who repeat this talking point don't understand republics or democracies.