If you are going to have a reasonable idea of how to divvy up the spoils of human society, you need to have some basis for deciding how to do it. Most such efforts ultimately founder on the apparent contraditions which quickly arise. But let’s at least see if we can capture some useful pointers to help in a discussion.
- People need incentives. At the very least, they need a net absence of negative incentives. What constitutes an incentive may differ from person to person and time to time, and a ‘one size fits all’ approach fails to take into account the diversity in human nature.
- It is at least as important to worry about how the pie gets created as how it gets divided up.
- The vast majority of people will always care more about people they know than people they don’t know. Celebrity and social media etc may distort the definition and in particular create very one-sided relationships. They will also care more about people ‘like them’. This is primarily a cultural, not an ethnic, definition. It doesn’t mean that they will necessarily bear others any ill-will, or discriminate either consciously or unconsciously. But..
- People do differ in their talents and abilities, both intrinsically and as a result of their education and life experience. They also differ in their motivations and aspirations.
- People care about fairness, even if they don’t always agree what’s fair. Ideas of equality, whether of outcome or opportunity, are important, if only to identify gross unfairness, even though they are at best fuzzy concepts – comparing two very different lives for equality is essentially meaningless, but noticing that the children of serfs fare consistently worse than those of landowners is extremely meaningful.’
- Societies in which the difference between those at the top and those at the bottom is relatively small are nicer to live in for those at the top as well as those at the bottom.
- People are more influenced by relative than absolute levels of things once bare essentials are met. This is relative both over time and in comparison to others.
- People seem to be relatively relaxed about gross inequality of outcome if they perceive the opportunity to be fair. Look at lottery tickets. People don’t resent the winner if they trust the lottery. ( Is this only true when the opportunity is repeated? What if there were a lottery which only happened once every century? )
- People get most exercised about situations where they perceive that they have decisions to make whose outcome could make a difference but where the ‘correct’ answer is not obvious. So, for example, choosing a career because you want to get rich is extremely tricky. Choosing a career because you know what you want to do with your life is much easier.
