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Comment by Nutmog | Hacker News Reader

Isn't inequality just a polite word for jealousy? We're all peasants compared to some possible future generations 100 years in the future with all their cancer cures and Mars holidays.

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No, it is not. "Jealousy" is a subjective feeling, "inequality" says something about the bigger economy.

Most of the problems with inequality come down to envy but because people are taught to be ashamed of envy, they work hard to both overintellectualize the emotions and cast things as a moral issue in a massive societal campaign of self-deception.

It's a real shame, because it is literally impossible to solve a problem you deliberately misunderstand. That's humans for you though.

And you think possible future generations are going to want to lord things over us?

Don't play dumb. They're going to break down crying when they're told what our planet went through right now. It will be like when today's children are made to really look at photos of Auschwitz, or the Syrian Civil War, or guinea-worm cases in Africa, or child labor in coal mines.

Oh wait, some of those things are still present-day problems.

Right but his point is that those things are problems because they suck in absolute terms, not relative ones. Turning the whole world into a Syria-esque battlefield should not be considered a success, despite the fact that it would lower inequality. Similar, if the mechanisms that eliminate guinea-worm come so at the cost of improving other people's lives even more than the Guineans, we should not oppose that even though it increases inequality. What matters is our absolute quality of life rather than our relative one, and as such inequality is not the metric we should use to identify problems.

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