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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 09/10/2013 21:37, Kelly Anderson
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAPy8RwZ8uhRdH49sNsx6fZuiqiP8JUHYrUYtoTS99M+tKQ+yog@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Anders Sandberg <span
dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:anders@aleph.se" target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
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<div class="im">On 2013-09-30 15:02, Eugen Leitl wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px
0px
0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">On
Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 07:29:34AM -0600, Kelly Anderson
wrote:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px
0px
0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">I
believe that incomes almost always follow a power
curve, with a few<br>
</blockquote>
Depends on the country. It's not a natural law.<br>
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<br>
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Whether it is a natural law is a good question, actually.
</blockquote>
<div><br>
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<div>The folks at the Santa Fe Institute certainly seem to
think that it is. They are smart people, pursuing original
lines of thinking, but it makes a lot of sense to me.</div>
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<br>
That is just a disguised argument from authority. Santa Fe is great,
but remember that they also are motivated to hope for universal laws
of complexity. We need better arguments for it than that it is
popular at cool places.<br>
<br>
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cite="mid:CAPy8RwZ8uhRdH49sNsx6fZuiqiP8JUHYrUYtoTS99M+tKQ+yog@mail.gmail.com"
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<div> </div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">It
is not just that power-law tails are found in all
industrialised economies, but they seem to follow robustly
from a lot of models too (e.g. <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://arxiv.org/abs/condmat/0002374"
target="_blank">http://arxiv.org/abs/condmat/0002374</a>
). </blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Do you happen to know what they mean by "<span
style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Lucida
Grande',helvetica,arial,verdana,sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:19px">distribution
of wealth tends to be very broadly distributed when </span><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:'Lucida
Grande',helvetica,arial,verdana,sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:19px">exchanges
are limited" Anders?</span></div>
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<br>
When the interaction between agents is more limited than "everybody
trades with everybody" the distribution gets more lumpy and unequal.
<br>
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cite="mid:CAPy8RwZ8uhRdH49sNsx6fZuiqiP8JUHYrUYtoTS99M+tKQ+yog@mail.gmail.com"
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<div>The question sort of comes down to this, "Is it always
a good thing when the exponent is adjusted so that the
middle class is larger?"<br>
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<div><br>
</div>
<div>It seems obvious, but perhaps it isn't so obvious. I'm
not entirely sure, but my gut says a healthy middle class
is a good thing.</div>
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<br>
OK, here is a utilitarian argument: wellbeing as a function of
wealth is a very convex function. So the sum total wellbeing is
maximized if the distribution of wealth is equal. <br>
<br>
Of course, one might counter by pointing out that (1) maybe we
cannot sum or compare individual wellbeing, (2) maybe it is not the
sum that should be maximized, and (3) reallocation schemes might be
impermissible for deontological reasons.<br>
<br>
A classical leftist argument is that wealth is power, so a more
equal distribution distributes power in society widely. The problem
is that it is not clear how power actually scales with wealth. It
could be that it is convex like sqrt(W) or concave like W^2. If it
is convex even power law tails are not too bad, while concave might
make even very equal societies look falsely egalitarian while small
coalitions rule. And a realistic view that things are a messy
combination of skill, ambition and wealth might imply that in
different domains different forms hold. <br>
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cite="mid:CAPy8RwZ8uhRdH49sNsx6fZuiqiP8JUHYrUYtoTS99M+tKQ+yog@mail.gmail.com"
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<div> </div>
What I'm seeing is that globalization, the Internet and
dematerialization are things that push the winner-take-all
paradigm to levels that it hasn't previously attained.</div>
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<br>
Yes. This is true. It also reaches the limit: it is not possible to
be more global than totally global. Once we have good translation
everybody will be in the same big domain. <br>
<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University </pre>
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