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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.

This is completely consistent with the thesis that we should not reward people for things they cannot control (e.g. their genes).

Here's an alternative:

Analyze everyone's genome. Use that to estimate their income. Subtract their predicted income from their real income. Give everyone the average income for free.

We can definitely play the hole-poking game here – it's not practical to predict 330M people's incomes from genomes, your income-prediction model is bad, the welfare is too high so people will work less, etc. But that's ultimately a complaint about the implementation, not the core concept.

If people can't be incentivized to make good genes, then the economic justification for the inequality that is caused due to genetic differences is gone.

If people can be incentivized to improve their skills and found business, then, yes, we should definitely keep incentivizing that.

Doesn't work as an incentive to get high end people working unless they're already going to be earning their predicted income. Working harder to make 90% of your predicted income Vs 80% gets you nothing (in both cases you're just getting given average societal income), so you just don't do it. The fact that a non zero amount of people will be in this situation causes a dead weight loss that can be avoided.

The fact of the matter is that IQ is so so correlated with good things and anti correlated with bad things that even if you hold income constant, the IQ 130 person will have a much better life than the IQ 70 person. And that's that.

Wouldn't no one work if you are gifted average and only make money if you exceed expectations? It also would vastly reward people with very strong ingroup solidarity. If every Elbonian conspired to earn zero income, your test would predict Elbonians earn zero, so they never have to work.

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