"The fight of our live's been drawn to this undying love." Viva La Gloria, Green Day
In the nearly three years that I have failed to write on this blog - in fairness, most of my writing is now done with The Edge and covers a lot of what I would have written here (Edge articles) - I think the topic that has captured my head and, if I'm being honest, my heart the most is that of inequality, specifically inequality of luck.
To be clear, I still view inequality as a societal, national and global issue. I should say, I have never once thought that there should be equality of outcome; the socialist argument that, "From each based on his abilities, to each based on his needs" has never convinced me. The need to reward innovation, hard work, and sometimes downright nerve is very important.
When I was younger, perhaps during College days, I was more persuaded by equality of opportunity. Let everyone have the same opportunity to show what they can do. What the final outcome is is less important. If we think of a 100 meter race, equality of outcome means everyone finishes the race at the same time - and therefore, finishes the race at the slowest runner's pace. Equality of opportunity - back in College - I took to mean, everyone - rich, poor, man, woman, transsexual, straight, gay, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist - starts at the same starting line and they all race from there.
I held this view until I came across the Veil of Ignorance and John Rawls during the course on Justice by Michael Sandel in the Fall of my Senior year at Harvard. In it, I was forced to confront the fact that my initial view was horribly naive; life, as it turns out, gives different people different starting positions. And even within those starting positions, the equipment that the runners used was different, the training that each of them received was different. Isn't it abundantly obvious that some people had a starting position for the 100 meter race at the 50 meter mark, with a professional coach and the best shoes money could buy? Wasn't it also abundantly obvious that others were not so lucky; some had to start at the 0 meter mark, with no training, and running barefooted? In my earlier conception of the race, I naively thought that - hey, everyone starts from the same place, let's just give everyone the opportunity to run. I still believe everyone should have the opportunity to run, but equality of opportunity, in this more nuanced - and I believe more accurate - view was still unjust.
For many years after this realisation, I did not give too much thought for this. I mean, I learned that the appropriate contextualising of events is important and that affirmative action was the right policy, even the optimal policy, under certain circumstances. Where the principle behind affirmative action often gets clouded in policy debates is when affirmative action is invariably linked with race and other forms of generalisation of under-privilege. Perfect discrimination (in the Economics sense) for affirmative action is impossible in the policy world given imperfect information; after all, not every African American needs affirmative action to succeed and some White Americans do need affirmative action to succeed.
Where I think I really doubled down on this topic in recent years is my deeper reading on 'luck.' I have now come to the belief that something like 95% of all things in life is down to pure luck. I should be clear. I see luck as just another word for chance. I mean, think of the confluence of events that would have happened in your life for you to have met your spouse or your best friend. If you think that you are lucky to find that person, just think how much of that luck depended on their (and your) parents meeting at the right time, choosing to have the child in the right time, and all the experiences that led that individual to meet you at the right time in the right place. It boggles the mind.
The same is also true of your birth. If you believe, like me, that birth is not pre-ordained by some Higher Power, then the parents to whom you were born is pure luck. I could as easily have been born to a poor family in Malawi, or to the King of Spain, or to my own parents. I did not get to choose and here I am. I got lucky. And that is just parents. You can have the best parents in the world, but if you were born in some god-forsaken village in the middle of the Indian deep jungles, how likely would you be to achieve whatever you achieved in life? So, for me, I was born to great parents, who managed to ride the wave of economic development to a life of middle-to-upper-middle class, in a country which is relatively peaceful, with no natural disasters and lots of great opportunities. How's that for luck?
Many billions of others are not so lucky. And you know what's the cherry on the cake? Good fortune or good luck is highly correlated with parental wealth (or initial good luck). It's really like an exponential function and where you start on that function (whether before x = 1, or after x = 1) will really determine a lot of the good luck you get in your life. Good luck here just means being in the right place at the right time for an opportunity to fulfill.
So, my take on this issue now is as follows. I think the largest reason for inequality of wealth or income (the hot topics today) is really the inequality of birth, and therefore the inequality of luck. I see it as the moral imperative of society and of individuals to distribute that unequal distribution of luck. The primary purpose of government, to me, is to redistribute luck (normally in the form of income but it should be more). Tax luck, not innovation, not effort. Of course, determining which portion of an income is luck-based and which is innovation- or effort-based will be tough but we need to start. For individuals, if you buy this argument, then the imperative is to try, as best as possible, to follow the Transversality Condition of Macroeconomics (basically a fancy term for, at the end of time, your net debt must be at least zero). Translating this to luck, it basically means that all the luck you have received (you are therefore in a net negative state) must be redistributed to others as best as you can (therefore reducing the net negative state to zero or perhaps even positive). This, I think, is worthy to be an undying love.
In the nearly three years that I have failed to write on this blog - in fairness, most of my writing is now done with The Edge and covers a lot of what I would have written here (Edge articles) - I think the topic that has captured my head and, if I'm being honest, my heart the most is that of inequality, specifically inequality of luck.
To be clear, I still view inequality as a societal, national and global issue. I should say, I have never once thought that there should be equality of outcome; the socialist argument that, "From each based on his abilities, to each based on his needs" has never convinced me. The need to reward innovation, hard work, and sometimes downright nerve is very important.
When I was younger, perhaps during College days, I was more persuaded by equality of opportunity. Let everyone have the same opportunity to show what they can do. What the final outcome is is less important. If we think of a 100 meter race, equality of outcome means everyone finishes the race at the same time - and therefore, finishes the race at the slowest runner's pace. Equality of opportunity - back in College - I took to mean, everyone - rich, poor, man, woman, transsexual, straight, gay, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist - starts at the same starting line and they all race from there.
I held this view until I came across the Veil of Ignorance and John Rawls during the course on Justice by Michael Sandel in the Fall of my Senior year at Harvard. In it, I was forced to confront the fact that my initial view was horribly naive; life, as it turns out, gives different people different starting positions. And even within those starting positions, the equipment that the runners used was different, the training that each of them received was different. Isn't it abundantly obvious that some people had a starting position for the 100 meter race at the 50 meter mark, with a professional coach and the best shoes money could buy? Wasn't it also abundantly obvious that others were not so lucky; some had to start at the 0 meter mark, with no training, and running barefooted? In my earlier conception of the race, I naively thought that - hey, everyone starts from the same place, let's just give everyone the opportunity to run. I still believe everyone should have the opportunity to run, but equality of opportunity, in this more nuanced - and I believe more accurate - view was still unjust.
For many years after this realisation, I did not give too much thought for this. I mean, I learned that the appropriate contextualising of events is important and that affirmative action was the right policy, even the optimal policy, under certain circumstances. Where the principle behind affirmative action often gets clouded in policy debates is when affirmative action is invariably linked with race and other forms of generalisation of under-privilege. Perfect discrimination (in the Economics sense) for affirmative action is impossible in the policy world given imperfect information; after all, not every African American needs affirmative action to succeed and some White Americans do need affirmative action to succeed.
Where I think I really doubled down on this topic in recent years is my deeper reading on 'luck.' I have now come to the belief that something like 95% of all things in life is down to pure luck. I should be clear. I see luck as just another word for chance. I mean, think of the confluence of events that would have happened in your life for you to have met your spouse or your best friend. If you think that you are lucky to find that person, just think how much of that luck depended on their (and your) parents meeting at the right time, choosing to have the child in the right time, and all the experiences that led that individual to meet you at the right time in the right place. It boggles the mind.
The same is also true of your birth. If you believe, like me, that birth is not pre-ordained by some Higher Power, then the parents to whom you were born is pure luck. I could as easily have been born to a poor family in Malawi, or to the King of Spain, or to my own parents. I did not get to choose and here I am. I got lucky. And that is just parents. You can have the best parents in the world, but if you were born in some god-forsaken village in the middle of the Indian deep jungles, how likely would you be to achieve whatever you achieved in life? So, for me, I was born to great parents, who managed to ride the wave of economic development to a life of middle-to-upper-middle class, in a country which is relatively peaceful, with no natural disasters and lots of great opportunities. How's that for luck?
Many billions of others are not so lucky. And you know what's the cherry on the cake? Good fortune or good luck is highly correlated with parental wealth (or initial good luck). It's really like an exponential function and where you start on that function (whether before x = 1, or after x = 1) will really determine a lot of the good luck you get in your life. Good luck here just means being in the right place at the right time for an opportunity to fulfill.
So, my take on this issue now is as follows. I think the largest reason for inequality of wealth or income (the hot topics today) is really the inequality of birth, and therefore the inequality of luck. I see it as the moral imperative of society and of individuals to distribute that unequal distribution of luck. The primary purpose of government, to me, is to redistribute luck (normally in the form of income but it should be more). Tax luck, not innovation, not effort. Of course, determining which portion of an income is luck-based and which is innovation- or effort-based will be tough but we need to start. For individuals, if you buy this argument, then the imperative is to try, as best as possible, to follow the Transversality Condition of Macroeconomics (basically a fancy term for, at the end of time, your net debt must be at least zero). Translating this to luck, it basically means that all the luck you have received (you are therefore in a net negative state) must be redistributed to others as best as you can (therefore reducing the net negative state to zero or perhaps even positive). This, I think, is worthy to be an undying love.
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