Generally you get downvoted for doing so, but people still try to argue. I have a lot to say on the subject, but one thing I still need an argument for is why inequality is bad intrinsically. I'd love to hear a cogent argument that addresses that fundamental point, but what I end up seeing in the wild is camps of people who think inequality is some intrinsic evil, and those that don't think it's relevant to anything.
(1) A political system is a distributed decision making process that a community uses to, well, make decision that affect large sections of the community. One characteristic of a good political system is one where everyone gets roughly equal say.
(2) Most current politico-economic systems across the world have the feature that any given rich person has much more say in the political process than a poor person.
(3) It doesn't take much of a study of history to ascertain that, at least in the last century, rich people have used the additional power they have over the political process to make decisions that make them yet richer. Which then increases their political power even more. And the cycle repeats.
(4) There are at least two obvious solutions to (2) and (3), and which a lot of people subscribe to:
* Either, pass laws and pursue policies within the current system that make it very hard for anyone to become too rich or too poor relative to the average. This is what you will usually see a lot of regular people espousing.
* Or, redesign the politico-economic system so that rich people don't have a disproportionate influence on the political process. This is, perhaps, the motivation of some people working on crypto-currencies, even if they are misguided in their efforts.
The reason you find people who think "inequality is some intrinsic evil" is because many people believe that the second solution is not possible, i.e. it is human nature to exploit others and they will exploit in any unequal system and, hence, inequality is always an undesirable state.
No one would be talking about it if everyone was still earning a good wage, able to live a decent middle class life, have a family, had no issues visiting a doctor, etc. etc. But they aren't. People in the bottom 90% (or whatever) are feeling very much like they're falling behind, while they watch the top 10% (or whatever) get richer and richer.
If the system were working for most people and they felt they had good lives, I don't even think people would be particularly concerned about the concentration of power that comes with the concentration of wealth because they would see the system working for them.
Certainly we should talk in terms of ensuring there is an adequate floor, rather than in terms of bringing down the ceiling. What's the point of lowering that ceiling if the people at the bottom still can't see a doctor? And raising the floor is indeed what a lot of progressive proposals do aim for (Medicare for All, or Living Wage, or UBI, etc.). But providing that floor requires funding. Funding anything is always redistribution of some kind with the wealthier paying more because that's where the money is.
Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable? More envy and less feeling of being part of a group? It is good that poverty in the world is much less and there are more people in the middle class but it is also a problem that wages in the US are stagnant for large swath of the population that feels like it isn’t part of the group anymore and makes trouble because of it.
When you convince people they're being robbed because of inequality, it's a problem. Envy is the problem. It's a cognitive defect. There's a reason it's a considered a sin. You are not entitled to what other people have, and justifying that feeling is how you destroy prosperity for all.
> Isn’t the problem with inequality that it makes the society less stable?
Yes. However, too much equality also makes society too static, because no one is incentivized to innovate anymore. The problem, as always, is maintaining the right balance.
> Sorry if this is a naive question, but is that really true? What's the evidence for believing that, much less treating it as fact?
The economic collapse of the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact counties, Venezuela, North Korea.
By allowing a free market invasion in their Communist utopia, the Chinese Communist Party long ago abandoned their core ideology in favor of “pragmatic authoritarianism.” They get to stay in power, while reaping economic benefits impossible in a truly communist economy.
Yes. There was essentially zero upward economic mobility in those societies, except for the party elite. When only 0.001% of your society has any possibility of bettering their circumstances, innovation stagnates.
It is still true that most anybody can get rich in a capitalist economy if they’re some combination of smart, hard-working, or lucky. This causes lots of people to try.
I'm with you. Inequality seems to be baked into the natural world. Look at power law distributions and the preferential attachment model as one of the ways they arise. There is mathematics to suggest the notion of inequality is a fundamental part of life.
The Polya process is another thing that comes to mind. In that model, if you were picked in the past then you are more likely to be picked in the future. That's the classic competitive exclusion "rich get richer" at work.
But here's the equalizer:
Every distribution of possible outcomes under the Polya process has an equal probability of happening.
That strikes me as very interesting. Basically, if you were to run history forwards from the same starting point again and again, in some of those iterations your life would turn out significanty better than others. So, there is equality for everyone in that sense, but on a case-by-case basis it's more of a better luck next time.
One argument: influence of big money on the shaping of politics.
Economic stratification is effectively a stratification of people's degrees of influence over the natural world, so unchecked economic stratification necessarily means that there's a breaking point where a system which was previously democratic stops being so.
Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high standard of living".
It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that...
I'm certain we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the West's distance from the depravation of the state of nature (capitalism certainly causes), and you're talking about some cherry picked metrics that make some countries in the West look better than others.
The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not because it disproves your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms.
>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K
This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US which is what your average citizen truly cares about
Post-Hard Brexit it will probably change, EU PPP has already been damaged by the current Brexit scandals, and the last few years of increased US Dollar interest rate has increased relative US PPP, but because of income inequality those financial changes aren't really transferred to the everyday US citizen
Also, the difference in raw incomes is mostly based of the so called "Exorbitant Privilege" the US has for having its currency be the default world reserve currency, it is quite easy to understand when one comprehends that the US central bank basically "prints gold", and that like ~60% of all international transactions are done abroad but with the US dollar as transaction medium
"This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US"
I find it rather unbelievable that things are cheaper in Europe. A few years back, I used to work for a multinational, which opened an office there, and some people I knew went and at least one or two stayed, which lead me to idly consider the idea of being an expat, and my cursory research indicated salaries are lower and the cost of living is higher.
I mean, from my perspective, just the fact that you had the chance to work abroad for a multinational would put you way ahead of the wage the median US citizen has to survive on, so your experience is not representative of the median, let alone PPP stats
EU includes some poor countries that were recently under Soviet occupation.
And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it.
At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin.
Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.
2) Just look at the chart I linked to - on decadal timescales, the EU was catching up to the US rapidly and then plateaued, in more than one cycle. No idea why, but something significant was happening and then stalling. Obviously history wasn't retroactively occurring and being eradicated.
2) It's good data, the graph shows 2008 as an inflection point. I think that's the disastrous austerity programme chosen by political leadership throughout europe. Instead of investing they decided to cut spending in a recession. That's my take anyway.
1) You can't brush off foreign occupation 29 years ago as cherry picking. This dataset starts in 1960s, when all of Eastern Europe were soviet puppets. There is nothing comparable in recent US history.
"There is nothing comparable in recent US history."
Of course there is. What transition happened in the US in the 60s, that the country is still not completely out of? You'd know instantly if an American was using it as an excuse (as is quite common) for not matching various European metrics.
>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists
For one, the EU has dozens of ex Eastern Bloc communist countries (including areas of ex-USSR) which still play catch up and wages are still much lower.
Second, money is not everything. If the state, every day life, cost of living, etc is set up in a good way, you can get 2x or more the quality of life for half the money.
Is it just me or does the biodiversity crises seem a bit blown out of proportion? I mean, I think it's true that humans are causing faster species loss than the historical average. But I think it's hard to suggest we're an historical anomaly in this regard compared to Yellowstones and meteors and such.
I mean, I know that ecology is very complex and small changes can have big impact. But the world isn't really much different having lost mammoths and dodo birds. And if ecosystems do collapse in catastrophic ways, I find it difficult to believe that the gap wouldn't be filled by other creatures after the previous distribution of life changed dramatically. There's nothing particularly balanced or normal or good about the ecology we had yesterday. It merely is.
Like... If you cut down the Amazon, hypothetically, it's not like that land will necessarily become a barren lifeless wasteland. Other life will move in after the culling, right?
I pretty much always get downvoted for these posts where I bounce heterodox ideas of y'all. And it's totally worth it. I'd like to understand why I don't understand the biodiversity concern.
WRT that guy who's going to post about the medical breakthroughs from rainforest specimens... That's cool and all, but why wouldn't we expect a similar thing to happen with the life that moves in after the hypothetical clear cutting of the Amazon? After all, such events tend to be catalysts for punctuated equilibrium which appears to be responsible for much of the biodiversity we have today.
The problem is not so much that we are causing species loss at a higher than average rate, it‘s more the we are causing species loss at a higher rate than the end-permian extinction event (which no land animal with an adult body mass over 25kg survived).
Life will recover from the anthropocene over the next few million or so years even if we continue business as usual. It will just not be a world I want to die out in.
What changes and what food chains? Your statement is just false. We don't live off the wild. We're long past that point, and the developing world is increasingly past that point.
I see your point. If we can survive on Mars without bringing along a huge amount of biodiversity then we can survive on Earth after turning it into Mars. Awesome. But maybe we can't survive on Mars after all.
What you’re describing is basically Iceland. It used to be richly forested. It lost its forests and then its topsoil. Essentially an ecological disaster brought on by the vikings. But life finds a way.
Well, smells like a troll but it's a well-phrased one! :) So let's try...
> Other life will move in after the culling, right?
Not necessarily. I can't speak for the amazon, where burning down a small patch (traditional agricultural practice for millennia) will leave a hole surrounded by life that will move in, but ecospheres disrupted in the large may break what's supporting that ecosphere.
I read an article about cloud forests being disrupted. A cloud forest gets its humidity from mist, which flows in from the ocean a small (18 inches/50cm?) above the ground. This condenses on anything there, trickles down to the ground, waters the plants. But the plant life had been razed, so there was nothing for the mist to settle on; the soil stayed dry so nothing could grow after. The author of the article was requesting ways to restart that (I made a suggestion, he wasn't too impressed).
Also thin soil can be stabilised by plants so it stays. Kill the plants, the soil blows away. Not sure this is 100% relevant but to some extent it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
"With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers had conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains during the previous decade; this had displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. The rapid mechanization of farm equipment, especially small gasoline tractors, and widespread use of the combine harvester contributed to farmers' decisions to convert arid grassland (much of which received no more than 10 inches (~250 mm) of precipitation per year) to cultivated cropland.[4] During the drought of the 1930s, the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away"
Related to that I've heard of similar happening, poss. in the amazon, where a thin skin of soil is left in some areas, and gets washed away when the plants are not there to fix it - but I can't provide a reference, so treat that as hearsay.
Disruption can also be astonishingly subtle. This does not answer your question but FYI!: https://www.environmental-research.ox.ac.uk/long-shadow-mega... to summarise, now-extinct megafauna are thought to have moved lots of phosphorous around in their poo, benefitting amazonian plants ("For [the plants] the only input of essential phosphorus comes from dust blown from the Sahara and from the dung of animals that had foraged on the fertilised flood plain."). Humans killed them starting ~12,000 years ago, consequence:
"Nonetheless, the huge amounts of phosphorus that were moved by the collective action of the megafauna has left a long legacy and their calculations suggest that the Amazon is only 2/3 of the way through a transition towards a low nutrient state. Today’s trees are still benefiting from the actions of the prehistoric beasts, but as time is progressing the forests are losing fertility."
> 's cool and all, but why wouldn't we expect a [medical breakthroughs from rainforest specimens] to happen with the life that moves in after the hypothetical clear cutting of the Amazon?
AFAUI, no. Varied biochemicals are what produces these breakthroughs, which is linked to varied plant life. If that gets wiped out then it will take millions of years for that diversity to re-emerge, so except in the longest timescale, it's gone. However I am not an expert on this. (But frankly do us humans have to be such tosspots towards anything that doesn't immediately benefit us?[0] These things are jewels in their own right, why can't we value them for what they are)
> I pretty much always get downvoted for these posts where I bounce heterodox ideas of y'all. And it's totally worth it. I'd like to understand why I don't understand the biodiversity concern.
FWIW, not trying to troll. I grew up with and was in favor of 90s environmentalism, which seems to mostly have been a success [0]. The latest environment doom and gloom doesn't have the impact and persuasive power that the previous environmental crusade had. Maybe it's just that I had school indoctrinating me then and don't have that now. But I like to believe that's not the only factor here. There's something lacking about the biodiversity and climate change outrages of the late. Some scientific persuasive power, some rigor missing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally supportive of the fundamental argument that we ought not to change anything too fast because the consequences are terrifyingly unknown -- that's what makes me a conservative, in fact. However, there's a damn good reason to make that gambit: the elimination of global food scarcity, lifting the developing world out of poverty through industry, allowing developing worlds to be self-sufficient and not dependent on the West. If we lose the Amazon in the process and sea levels rise many meters, as a hyperbolic example, maybe that price is worth paying until we figure out how to not do that. We definitely don't know how to not do it yet. I don't know, and neither does anyone else. Well, that's only half true. We could force every country on the planet to build nuclear fission reactors and electric vehicles at threat of war. But nobody's willing to do that, so it seems like climate change must not actually be that pressing.
In summary, it's risk, and it's scary, but I guess my biggest problem is the idea that it's likely to be bad for us. The opposite seems true, in the medium term. I mean... If Coruscant is devoid of naturally grown life and is fed exclusively from hydroponics, is that planet instrinsically bad?
Sorry for the shallow response and analysis in this post, but I wanted to respond with something before my busy afternoon today. I'll be back.
I addressed your questions as cogently as I could. Your reply ignored all of that. I didn't downvote you but you deserve it.
Maybe you're right. If you're wrong though, many people's lives may be far different than they'd like. People like you give me no hope for the future, having sold it for an easy life in the present.
Let me try this again. Seriously today was busy as hell.
I'm not sure exactly the point with respect to the soil and soil nutrients. The dust bowl area isn't unfarmable, it's a goddamn breadbasket. And if the Amazon, if it's a cloud forest goes more arid, that's (a) not intrinsically bad, and (b) might make it a farmable breasbasket of South America instead of the hostile, relatively uninhabitable place it is now. Although, if it does become more arid, which still seems unlikely, I'll admit the probability that biodiversity will be replenished is low. We might lose some cancer cures or whatever, but gain the elimination of South American food scarcity.
I'm just fucking tired of the doom and gloom that has no room for seeing the potentials for exploitation. The good kind. The kind where South America might be able to turn into a high standard of living, developed world power, for example.
> I'm not sure exactly the point with respect to the soil and soil nutrients
If you're referring to the megafauna + phosphorous point, I said "This does not answer your question". It was mentioned as a fascinating point about the interconnection of things, and how consequences can be so unexpected.
The amazon is not a cloud forest as the tiniest bit of knowledge would have told you. I gave that as an example of when an ecosystem is damaged it can't recover.
WRT the dustbowl, from the wiki link
"In many regions, more than 75% of the topsoil was blown away by the end of the 1930s. Land degradation varied widely. Aside from the short-term economic consequences caused by erosion, there were severe long-term economic consequences caused by the Dust Bowl.
By 1940, counties that had experienced the most significant levels of erosion had a greater decline in agricultural land values. The per-acre value of farmland declined by 28% in high-erosion counties and 17% in medium-erosion counties, relative to land value changes in low-erosion counties.[25]:3 Even over the long-term, the agricultural value of the land often failed to recover to pre-Dust Bowl levels. In highly eroded areas, less than 25% of the original agricultural losses were recovered"
If you can't see the relevance, that's on you.
> I'm just fucking tired of the doom and gloom
And here we get to the heart of it. You posted originally
> And [bounce heterodox ideas off you is] totally worth it. I'd like to understand why I don't understand the biodiversity concern
So I gave you 25 mins of time to dig up some details and post a useful reply, but what you got wasn't what you wanted and now you're pissed off. Reality doesn't respond to your moods. Like I said, people like you sap my hope.
I know that was an example out of thin air and not to be taken literally, but I can just see the commercials a la Juicero or Morus or Waterseer. What you need is an overpriced device that makes doing laundry even more exhausting and time consuming because technology! Now when the laundry piles up, you'll feel daunted AND fat!
The best advice I can give us to build something for pain you feel. Maybe it's edtech integrations or a part of your workflow or life that needs optimization.
If you build something for other people, you'll need user discovery and project management skills up the wazoo if you don't have a team with that expertise. And you're at risk of building Facebook for Cat Owners or something like that. Start with your own pain until you have more experience transforming user pain into something they'll pay for.
I just want to second this. The most satisfying work I've ever done, and the work I'm most proud of (that I speak of with interviewers etc) is work that scratched a real itch that I had.
Nearly all the most interesting start ups I’ve seen around me have done this.
They identified something that was frustrating and clunky, then picked away at it until there was a useful alternative and then kept iterating.
If you're talking wood and clay and stone, I think your supposition is potentially reasonable for some very narrow definition of civilization. Perhaps two digits worth of humans.
Surviving artifacts of the metal ages are very much the norm though, so I wouldn't expect early human villages to have gone beyond the stone age. And with coastal weathering it would be hard to identify any stone tooling from that long ago.
Kinda puts the old religous flood stories in a different context eh? There were almost certainly costal communities who were consumed by rising sea levels the world over. Recent global flooding.
The most likely origin of the middle eastern religious “meme” of the flood (Noah etc) is Sumerian plain floods (Mesopotamia). In fact, the stories in Genesis are most likely the retelling of Sumerian technological achievements (farming, building and the concept of time and seasons).
14 years in the industry, and I often describe typing the code as the easy part of software engineering. Once I'm typing the code, I already know in large part what code needs to be typed. The hard part was understanding the problem model enough to know what code to type.
That being said, executing the code while typing it is critical. You cannot build a mental model of all edge cases. At best, your personal discipline will allow you have habits around preventing and catching edge cases. But you won't find enough edge cases just by thinking about the code to type. You do have to discover them by running the code, and the sooner you discover them, the faster you will be at producing high quality code.
As far as how much time I spend building a mental model vs coding... It's at least half mental model time. If I happen to predict enough edge cases, then it might be 90% of the time. But the critical part is that I'm not done until I've exhausted the edge cases I can imagine. If I discover sufficiently big edge cases that brick my code, it's time to step away from the computer and fix my broken mental model.
Note: tests are a way to do this, but so is white box poking and prodding at your program in debug mode.
Are you me? I started coding professionally in 2004 or 2005 (if memory serves) and a few years of tinkering before then. Your process describes mine almost to a T – building the mental model is the hard part, writing it down is mechanics more than anything else. It used to be the other way around; I didn't know how the mechanics worked so I worried more about that than the ideas, they seemed the trivial bit but over time that shifted. Not quite sure when it tipped over, but it definitely did.
(The last nota bene of your comment is particularly striking to me. I love tests and I try to automate them as much as possible, but sometimes you just gotta prod and poke the thing to really get a feel for it.)
For me - it's sometimes like that, but sometimes it's the exact opposite: I understand the problem through starting to code. Depends on the coding task; also on the language.
I'm sure everyone is different, but it's worth saying that I find myself spending more time in the writing code phase with dynamically typed languages than statically typed languages.
So this. Go down rabbit holes when you get stuck. Understand your tools deeper as time goes on. Learn by doing. You can't learn programming by reading. Learning programming has more in common with plumbing and carpentry than medicine and law in this regard.
