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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.
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.
The problem is that the road through the dictatorship of the proletariat is a dead end.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nonsense. The difference is whether those on top coordinate or decide. The first is non-hierarchical with regard to power. The second is. The rare good manager knows that he serves his workers and that it is his job to remove obstacles. The failed manager thinks that it is his job to rule his underlings.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.