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Notes -
(1) I talked about proportions. There's nothing by definition that says that rich people have to save a greater proportion of their incomes than the poor.
(2) Your reasoning about rich people assumes that paid labour is equally preferable to unpaid labour, e.g. working as a bank director is as enjoyable as volunteering for a charity. This seems implausible for me. Do you have evidence for this "obvious" answer?
(3) What do you mean "get more out of"? If you mean "more utility", then you are begging the question. The point of my examples was to muddy the waters: one can cite evidence both for and against a higher interpersonal marginal utility of wealth for the poor vs. the rich. I think the honest answer for utilitarians is to say that they don't know, and that intuitions to the contrary are based on a hedonistic analysis of utility that ran aground in about 1850-1950, when it proved impossible to find a non-arbitrary interpersonal scale for utility. That's why economists and many ethicists ditched the hedonistic analysis of utility in favour of a preference-ranking analysis, but a preference-ranking analysis doesn't give you an interpersonal scale.
Yes, there in fact something about the definition that says that poor people save a smaller proportion. Again, "poor" by definition means that your income is barely enough to cover basic costs, so, by definition, a poor person will have very little surplus income and hence will be able to save a very small proportion of their income. In contrast, if your income is large enough that you can save a large proportion after paying your costs, then by definition you are not poor.
No, my reasoning does NOT imply that working as a bank director is as enjoyable as volunteering for a charity. I said merely that, given the same job, getting paid yields more utility than not getting paid.
Yes, I meant more utility. And, if you think that economists think that my example is wrong, then I think you are misunderstanding them. There is a $150 check on my desk right now, waiting to be deposited. I can literally throw it away, and will not miss it. That is how little marginal utility I get out of that $150. In contrast, $150 for a homeless person can make the difference between sleeping on the subway and sleeping indoors, for more than one night.
(1) But the issue is marginal income - that's where there's an additional dollar. If a poor person has an increase in marginal income and their income is enough to cover basic costs, then there is nothing in the definition of "rich" and "poor" that implies that they save a higher proporiton of that additional dollar than someone with greater wealth.
(2) If the job is different, then you've not explained why many rich people prefer paid labour like being a bank director to unpaid labour like volunteering for a charity.
(3) But what's the common scale for the comparison? Assume you prefer throwing the $150 away and the homeless person does not. That tells us about the internal structure of your respective utility scales, but doesn't tell us that their utility is higher on a scale that incorporates the preferences of both of you.
No, the specific issue is not marginal income; you referred to pct of** total **income: "Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people?"
Because they get paid for the paid work. You seem to think that the argument is that a rich person gets zero marginal utility from money. That is not the claim. If I am a lawyer or doctor making $300,000, then obviously I by quitting I am giving up quite a bit of utility. But that says nothing about the issue at hand: It tells us noting about whether I would get as much utility from an extra $1000 as would a poor person. And, btw, people who are rich enough not have to work quit work all the time -- it's called retirement -- and often they spend some of their time volunteering. So, your assumption that rich people don't never quit work and go volunteer is empirically false.
Then let's ignore money. Suppose 100,000 people own three cars each (call them "Group X"), and 100,000 other people ("Group Y") have no cars. I give each of them a 2003 Honda Civic. Which Group members are most likely to use their new cars" It is Group Y, right? Why, if that obviously true, if it is so impossible to make a comparison between the utility each gets out of the car? It isn't.
(1) That was me being sloppy. I should have said "proportion of their marginal incomes", since the issue is the marginal utility of money.
(2) I didn't say that rich people never quit work and volunteer, I said that many rich people still work as many hours as poor people, which is odd if they have a diminishing marginal utility of money. Maybe are competing for extra-monetary status, which is associated with a lot of paid labour. My point is that the view that the marginal utility of money is greater for poor people isn't obvious, though it may be true for all I know.
(3) I agree that we might be able to infer that Group Y probably prefers using their new 2003 Honda Civic relative to other activities that Group Y can do and that Group X does prefer other activities to using their 2003 Honda Civic. What is harder to infer - arguably impossible to infer - is that the preference of Group Y for using their new car is stronger than the preference for Group X for using their new car, relative to a common scale.
As it happens, I suspect that we can roughly estimate interpersonal strengths of pleasure (as opposed to preference) across people. I think that behaviourism is a useful methodological guide in social science, but it isn't literally true, and we can make inferences about interpersonal intensities of pleasure, pain etc. based on our similar neurochemistries. So, while I haven't thought about it a lot, I can imagine that there is a true and plausible sense in which e.g. an additional $100 causes more pleasure to a homeless person than it does to Jeff Bezos. However, modern utilitarians and economists have largely abandoned the pleasure analysis of "utility", in favour of preference accounts. This is partly to handle paradoxes like the Experience Machine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine
The modern utilitarian is that what matters is preferences, which are normally about the world, rather than psychological states like pleasure, which aren't about the world as such.
Anyway, to reiterate, I'm not saying that the original view about utility is wrong. I'm saying that it's not clear that it is true in the sense that it needs to be to produce a (modern) utilitarian argument in favour of income redistribution. This is part of my broader claim that right-wing (to be precise, conservative) utilitarianism is not obviously wrong, even though I suspect that it is wrong both in virtue of being conservative and in virtue of being utilitarian.
If that is what you meant, it greatly weakens your point.
If they value status, then the status is part of the utility they derive from working. You have answered your own question.
It really seems like you are not saying anything. If X are not using the car, then it must not be providing much marginal utility to them. The fact that they are driving their other cars instead shows that they got little extra utility from the Honda, and in fact, miles driven is a perfectly useful common measure of utility, because that is why people acquire cars: to drive them, because driving them makes up most of the utility they get from them.
The problem with your approach is that it completely unable to explain why I turned down a free cookie today after lunch, whereas a homeless person almost certainty would have accepted the cookie.
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