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Thanks for high effort. I enjoyed the read.
Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.
If we consider subjective well-being, poverty amounts to permanent survival mode with almost no access to social lifts and any fruits of civilization. I think it's incomparable to any existential sufferings of idle, but otherwise well-to-do people (moreover, lack of job doesn't preclude anyone from meaningful and even societally useful endeavors).
And methodologically, I think evolutionary stories are irrelevant until we have current evidence of what they supposedly imply. And when we have current evidence, there is no need for stories.
Now a macro, long-horizon perspective. One might argue the poor are productivity hoarders in some sense, locked in the low-productivity jobs. I agree, that unconditional redistribution erodes incentives, but conditional transfers (say, of money or education in exchange for obligation to find a job from the list) to the poor might push/nudge them toward upper levels, where they can contribute more to the growth.
Growth is appealing as it enables efficiency improvements, and inefficiency (wastefulness) is a rare thing everyone agrees to be bad. I like Rawlsian scenario of a narrow economic elite, pushing the Pareto frontier, reaping its well deserved 90% share of surplus and doling out 10%. But 10% might be suboptimal for a classic welfare maximizer, who assumes diminishing utility. The latter implies it's optimal to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom until both sides meet on the utility curve. The poor are at the steepest slope, they gain much more than wealthy ones lose by helping them.
The main question here is how much capital should we set aside for growth, and how much of wealthy capital actually causes growth.
Could you elaborate on this?
I was using nominal GDP per capita. Both PPP and nominal measurements have their advantages, but that would take me too far astray here, since I am just presenting a prima facie case for right-wing utilitarianism, to clarify that it's not obviously an incoherent position. (I'm steelmanning it; I'm neither consistently right-wing nor a utilitarian.) And, as you note, there is a persistent lag in PPP.
I don't see how having room for catch-up growth is a good thing. It's the catching up that is good, not the growth per se!
As for unemployment vs. poverty, I think that this can't be solved by anecdata. It's very plausible that being unemployed in Sweden gives higher utility than being near starvation in Ethiopia, but the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation.
Sure. I see utilitarianism as a bit like the paradox of hedonism. It is very hard to know what will make one happy at an individual level, and vastly harder on a collective level. Sure, there will be massive cases of suffering and (less often) massive sources of happiness where the path to maximising expected happiness is reasonably clear, but that leaves a lot of decisions unguided. Also, since one's own biases are often hard to scrutinise, it is easy to be misled when working out individual cases on their expected utility merits. Conflating one's self-interest or sentimentalism with expected utility maximisation seems pretty easy.
Rather than trying to maximise on each individual decision, a utilitarian can set up rules and rights that are to be respected unless there is a strong case to the contrary. (This is compatible, but not identical with rule utilitarianism.) This is a bit like the rules solution to the time inconsistency problem: if maximising a social welfare function in each time period results in suboptimal outcomes in the long-run, then an alternative is to set up rules that may not be maximising in every case but which probably do relatively well in the long-run, e.g. a 2% inflation target rather than traditional Keynesian fine-tuning of the economy. Similarly, being somewhat of a deontologist seems better for aggregate utility than consciously utility-maximising, given the computational, epistemological, and psychological limitations of human beings.
This GDP per capita graph shows good growth. Which data do you use?
Per capita gap indicates possibility of a relatively easy catch-up growth via import of technologies of the leader. This might be even part of a strategy: you redistribute wealth among your population more evenly than the leader, thus slowing your own growth; then you adopt technologies of the leader, who maintains higher inequality.
World bank uses $2.15 per day (PPP) poverty line (graph), so everyone below this line consumes more or less the same across countries (poor relief programs probably aren't accounted for here). With this definition the poor, but employed might feel better than non-poor, but unemployed? I won't argue further against this claim, but I am curious what factor I neglect, which makes the US poor subjectively better off than unemployed.
Thanks for sharing. I broadly agree with your case against fine-tuning and over-fitting.
The choice of optimal "ethical framework" is an optimization problem of its own. I would frame it as a task to devise rules that, when imposed on society, produce "good" expected societal trajectories (accounting for people, gaming the rules). I agree, that more clear-cut rules leave less space for manipulation and misinterpretation for actors, and - broadly - this looks close to the current legal system plus policy making based on Cost benefit analysis.
In some sense the notion of utilitarianism is useless for policy design, as the latter is about specialized predictions and theories. On the other hand, when we devise policy we are still in "optimizator" mode, subject to all biases and unintended manipulations.
That data. If you look at the data from 2007 to 2019 (excluding the covid period, including both the Great Recession but also the recovery period) the US grew steadily from about $48,000 to $65,000, while Denmark and Sweden had stagnation. Norway, as noted earlier, is a special case of good governance + massive per capita natural resources, but it also didn't see a net increase in this period. It's true that they were doing well relative to the US prior to 2007, but my original steelman was that social democracy creates a structural tendency to stagnation as the population ages.
The technological catch up is something I haven't heard and that I think is interesting, but it's beyond the scope of my steelmanning right-wing utilitarianism, since it's not a strongly established position, and my point is that social democracy isn't obviously preferable if you're a utilitarian.
A lot depends on the details, e.g. I suspect that a lot people high in Big Five conscientiousness would be happier with employed poverty than (somewhat) less poor unemployment. There is a huge amount of literature showing the negative aveerage effects of poverty on subjective happiness (as well as plenty of folk psychology) but the same is also true of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment. Also, the margin of difference between Swedish vs. US unemployment and Swedish vs. US poverty (going on that graph) seems to be bigger in the case of the former, e.g. US unemployment is about 4 percentage points lower than that of Sweden right now, whereas the difference in poverty (using the measure you provided) is about 1 percentage point. The unemployment gap may be bigger than normal right now, but Sweden seems to have a trend unemployment rate of about 8% at best and the US a trend of about 5% at worst. So, even if the harm from poverty is greater, the difference in unemployment is bigger.
On the other hand, you could argue that the graph you give just captures one part of a bigger picture, since e.g. $2.5 a day is hardly luxurious and US poverty may be bigger. Also, poor relief may be more generous in Scandinavia (plausible). A more complex argument could refute my claims. But that's my point! When one takes into account all the differences, the utilitarian cases for right-wing or left-wing policies both need to be complex - they aren't obvious either way.
Yes, I think that an epistemically modest utilitarian is still trying to optimise, but what they can plausibly do within their epistemic limitations, which is to find good long-run moral and political rules. Even then, there is an important difference from deontology, in that in extreme cases it may be obvious that departing from the rules will result in better long-run aggregate utility. This is one of the more plausible parts of utilitarianism, I think: you have to be hardcore into rights to be willing to permit massive suffering instead of e.g. making a tiny infraction of someone's rights. The plausibility of consequentialism (with utilitarianism as one variant) in extreme circumstances was part of a debate on human rights a while back in the UK parliament, which I thought was interesting:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VO2Ry4j79LU&t=221s
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