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Comment by coffeecat | Hacker News Reader

> Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try.

Having recently decided that I dislike leftist politics and that I align more with right-wing politics (in theory, if not in practice), the thing that switched in my mind is: why does it matter whether or not society is fair? I think that's the wrong question; I don't see any intrinsic value in fairness.

I think the right questions are: (1) how can we improve our average level of well-being, and (2) how can we reduce suffering?

So in my view, progressives incidentally get some important issues right including single-payer healthcare and environmental conservation. These policies tangibly improve our quality of life. But all the emphasis on equality, fairness, etc? Useless, in my view.

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You can never make life fair for someone who is disabled. I wouldn't trade my health for a billion dollars. There are endless people taller, smarter, faster, younger, handsomer, healthier, etc., than me. Obsessing over the implicit and inevitable unfairness of that is a total waste of time and energy.

More generally, no two people are the same. It's not possible to make it fair even for two people, let alone billions.

That's a strawman. No one's claiming we can achieve total equality.

> No one's claiming we can achieve total equality

I haven't seen any end to raising the bar. Where do you think it should end?

Obviously you cannot redistribute things that cannot be redistributed, for starters.

It's not uncommon among leftist to suggest systemic punishments and disadvantages for people who are born with certain physical and/or mental strengths and talents.

The Seattle school district decided to get rid of their gifted programs because it was unfair and increased inequality.

Seems like they reversed course though.[1]

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/gifted-programs-worse...

That could be reasonable if the resources used for that are reallocated to students who are behind.

At our nearby state high school, during physical education class, they didn’t allow people to lap anyone during running periods because it was unfair to those not fit.

You can imagine what that looked like and who was walking around the gym with everyone else following slowly.

That isn't redistribution -- redistribution requires that someone actually gains something. That's plain stupid.

Whoever made that decision didn't go too far, they went into a completely wrong direction.

Yeah but the point is that any attempt of redistribution in the name of fairness, is also equally unfair from the opposite perspective. So there is no way to make anything "more fair", if you take from one person to give to another, it's always unfair for one of them.

It feels unfair to one of them. That doesn't mean it is.

> I wouldn't trade my health for a billion dollars.

That's a decision that thousands of americans make every year they can't afford the healthcare they need to keep them healthy.

Those that can still work ridiculous hours damaging their health for far less than $1b - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/opinion/work-hours-us-hea...

I absolutely agree, the idea of a fair society needs to go away, it's just a dead end that only leads to fighting over crumbs and stifling productivity, what we need to do is get rid of jealousy and resentment.

> how can we improve our average level of well-being

What average?

MEAN:

Two systems of 100 people

System 1: 1 person with $10m and 99 people with nothing (mean=100k)

System 2: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k)

The latter is far far better despite on mean being worse.

MEDIAN:

Two systems of 100 people

System 1: 51 person with $1m and 49 people with nothing (median=$1m)

System 2: 100 people with $250k (median=250k)

The latter is better despite median being worse.

If you want to decide if a system is fair or not, think which system you'd like to live in if you rolled a D10 and ended up being born into the decile you landed in. Roll a 10 in america and it's great. Roll a 1 and you're collecting cans and hoping you don't get an ingrowing toenail.

Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much, you stifle productivity to the point where you have no improvements at all, and your mean will start to regress. Why? Because you have removed all incentives for people to improve, and rather introduced the perverse incentive of preferring to be on the receiving end.

In reality it's more like System 1: 100 people with $50k (mean=50k) System 2: 98 people with $60k and 2 people with $10m (mean=259k)

And then people argue that System 2 is worse because the small increase for the most people is not worth the humiliation of some times seeing a person with 10m which is unfair.

Personally I much prefer System 2 and I'm happy that I have 60k instead of 50k. Money is just a tool to give me freedom, and 60k means more freedom than 50k, so I'll take that deal any day.

The rich guys who have 10 houses or whatever, doesn't bother me at all, I simply don't care, and I'm sure that they are not much happier. Exactly the same way that I don't spend my time grudging over the fact that some guys are 100 times more handsome and charming and talented than me

Those rich guys owning those houses pushes up the price of the houses and means you can't afford it, or you have to work 80 hours a week to afford it.

That's not a good position to be in.

Except it's not, system 2 might have 90 people with 60k and 2 people with 10m, but there's also 8 people with less than nothing.

I'm far more interested in the quality of live of the 5th, 10th and 25th percentile than the 50th, 90th and 99th.

Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work, and the less money you will have overall.

If you redistribute too much, you will lower your overall productivity and not have enough money and your average will go down. If you redistribute too little, you will have a revolution.

What I'm trying to say, is that everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist, so there's always a trade off to be made, and when people ask for less inequality, that will also mean less money overall, and also less for you if you are in the middle.

> Yeah but my point still stands: the more you redistribute, the less incentive people have to work

You'll have to back that claim up

> everyone wants to have a system where you can simply raise the mean without any increase in inequality, but such a system doesn't exist

Well I don't care about the mean - not much use if Rockerfeller takes 90% of the income of a country and the rest have to deal with the 10% even if the mean is high. I care about how much money I have (specifcally what goods and services I can get with it), and how that is affected when various things happen (someone crashes their car into me, I get a cancer diagnosis, find that the CEO has been running the company into the ground and we're all laid off)

During the Great Compression, income inequality dropped dramatically, while the median increased. This was driven by policies like strong unions, the New Deal and Price Controls, and resulted in America's golden age, where the working and middle classes were far better off in 1960 than they were in 1930.

Yeah but all these sucessful policies driven by strong unions happen in the aftermath of winning a major war, do you think this is a coincidence?

> Yeah but in reality what happens is that if you redistribute too much

In reality this doesn't happen.

This is what has happened to all of the failed communist countries.

[citation needed]

Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Austria, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Germany, hellholes like that where you can't even have the joy of going bankrupt because your kid got shot at school and you need to pay for the surgery

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