Re: A fascinating article for XPF writers

On Jan 27, 10:10 am, David Friedman <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
In article <ujh2NvBi6FnHF...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
 Del Cotter <d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Sat, 26 Jan 2008, in rec.arts.sf.composition,
Dan Goodman <dsg...@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:

David Friedman wrote:
But you are right that the zero-sum mindset seems to be one feature
of how a lot of people--I suspect across almost all societies--view
the world. It's pretty routine to see a news story to the effect that
the lot of the poor, or some other subset, is worsening, where the
actual information is about relative not absolute wealth. And the
word "exploit" often gets used in a way that implies that if A has
gotten wealthy, he must have done it at the cost of some B.

Conversely:  There are middle-class and wealthy people who see
themselves as being worse off if the poor are becoming relatively less
poor.

And *that* is the true zero-sum thinking. It is false to claim that
people who earned someone else's wealth by their labour, and would like
the wealth they earned returned to them please, are thinking zero-sum.
They're thinking positive-sum, and noticing that the positive sum
somehow doesn't manage to come their way.

Putting aside your "earned someone else's wealth by their labor," which
assumes away a lot of interesting questions about how wealth is earned
and whose it is, that's a legitimate point. As long as one is thinking,
not in terms of activities that create wealth but in terms of
redistribution, the world may well be zero or, more plausibly, negative
sum.

Or in other words, "his getting the wealth made me poorer than if he
hadn't gotten it" is not, in general, a correct argument. "His failing
to give me some of his wealth makes me poorer than if he had given it to
me," on the other hand, is usually a correct argument.


I suspect it's a measurement problem: people actually perceive their
wealth in relative terms, but measure it in absolute terms.

People who are poor in America would be perceived as wealthy in
absolute terms in many places in the third world. They have enough to
eat most of the time, they usually have shelter with electricity and
running water, even. A luxury item like a refrigerator. More than one
set of clothes. But they *are* poor, because the standards of wealth
in the US are different than in the third world.

So in that sense, people who believe they are worse off when the poor
get richer are right. They are worse off in that intuitive way that
tells them that rich means above-average, and the average is on the
move.

Keyan
.

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