[ExI] Social justice and transhumanist

[Anders Sandberg]

On 20/02/2012 21:15, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> On 20 February 2012 11:30, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se 
> <mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:
>
>     But the Scandinavian model does not scale well to big and diverse
>     societies, since the consensus-seeking is not possible or
>     efficient enough.
>
>
> This might in fact be an argument against "big" and "diverse" 
> societies. :-)

Indeed. I suspect that small homogenous societies can be quite 
functional and happy - at the price of entrepreneurship, individual 
freedom and dynamism. If we look at where the groundbreaking 
intellectual insights have occured, they tend to appear in cosmopolitan 
zones, not in the middle of homogenity.


> But of course many people were very frustrated with the Scandinavian 
> models in the sixties and seventies of last centuries. A few even 
> emigrated.

Exactly. As an emigrant I feel quite free. And last year more Swedes 
emigrated than during the big emigration to America in the 1880s - 
although besides the US it is the rest of Scandinavia, Britain and China 
that are popular. Many tend to return eventually, but it seems that the 
most entrepreneurial stay abroad.

Free migration is a good way of keeping states in line - if their 
policies are too bad, people vote with their feet. Not frictionlessly, 
but enough to put some check on the policies (or just allocate people 
more economically efficiently).

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University

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