[extropy-chat] Re: Ethics and evolution

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Mon, 5 Sep 2005, Technotranscendence wrote:

> On Monday, September 05, 2005 6:40 AM Alfio Puglisi
> puglisi at arcetri.astro.it wrote:
>>
>> Actually, further comments are needed, because I
>> often have the same doubts as Bill. For example,
>> how would cope someone with an IQ of 80 or less
>> and no education worth its name, when the available
>> grunt jobs are automated away, and his market value
>> is less and less? How can he afford a private health
>> insurance?
>
> Well, that's a made up scenario because there are plenty of "available
> grunt jobs" still available.  Also, there's the law of association.
> It's almost always of benefit for people to associate with people who
> overall have less skills or talents.  Ludwig von Mises demonstrated this
> in _Human Action_ with his subchapter on "The Ricardian Law of
> Association," which is online at:
>
> http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec4.asp
>

Thanks, I'll read it.

> Two points here.  First, private charity, whether individual or
> collective, predates current welfare states.  So, it's not like it has
> to be rediscovered in a libertarian society.  It seems a near universal
> human tendency.  Second, there is more to profit than just money.
> Elsewhere I brought up the concept of psychic profit -- meaning not
> telepathy or stuff like that, but the benefits derived which are purely
> mental, such as feeling good about something.  This has a huge impact on
> human behavior.  After all, some people will choose to work in a lower
> paying job if it provides psychic benefits.  This is why, e.g., someone
> might work in an art gallery over becoming a corporate lawyer.  It's
> also why people volunteer to help others.

I would extend it further, it's also why some people choose to purchase a 
more expensive product instead of cheaper one, on the basis that, e.g., 
the first one wasn't produced by enslaving children and the second was. 
Or, that the first one was produced in a less polluting way than the 
second. That's a meaning of "value" that goes beyond the pure material 
value of the product.

Still, I've heard people complaining that choosing products in such a way 
would make an "inefficent" market because it's not optimizing for prices. 
I would instead say that it's simply a different meaning of "value", and 
that a consumer can choose whatever definition of "value" he wants.

> I don't see why the scope of this wouldn't be wide enough to cover all
> the problem cases.  In fact, me guess is, were people allowed to freely
> choose in the first place, they would create more wealth to begin with
> and probably give more away.  Of course, it's anyone's guess what will
> happen, but my guess lines up more with economic theory and the history
> of societies with a wider latitude for free interaction.

Communism (the economic system) fails largely because it relies on human 
altruism. Capitalism works because it relies on human greediness. While 
the previous two sentences are oversimplifications, they tell something 
about which human tendence can be relied upon :-)

> This higher level of wealth creation generally drives down costs, so
> health insurance and the like will, all other things being equal, become
> better, more efficient, and less costly.  It's actually state
> intervention that has driven up health costs in modern societies.  If
> you want to talk about free markets, let's have a free market in this
> one important area, which is too vital, IMHO, to leave to the whims of
> bureaucrats or legislatures.

There aren't too many data points on what happens with state intervention 
in health care. But there are some. The OECD Health Data 
(http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/10/20/2789777.pdf, first table) shows that 
the United States has the highest percentage of GDP (about 13%) spent on 
health care of all the Western world. Traditional socialized health-care 
nations like Germany and Switzerland only spend 10%, and I believe that 
the health care is of comparable quality. All OECD nations show a slow 
rising of the GDP % spent on health care.

The second table in the paper shows that the American and German 
government spend about the same amount per capita, but American citizens 
need to spend a much larger amount for additional private health care.

The wikipedia article 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_and_American_health_care_systems_compared
looks at the differences in detail, and notes that only 9.5% of Canadian 
GDP is spent on health care.

So the availble data suggests that socialized health care is 30% cheaper 
than the US model, which I consider more marketized given the 
prevalence of private insurance. Of course this data should be corrected 
for the quality of health care, life styles, etc. but I believe the 
countries are similar enough.

>> Pure libertarian free-market environments to my
>> eyes resemble too much an evolution-like "survival
>> of the fittest" game, where you'll do great if you are
>> good (or better, if you have marketable skills/assets),
>> and suffer a lot if you aren't.
>
> The problem is thinking that the welfare state and socialism somehow
> escape evolution.  They don't.  On a pure free market, people freely
> interact to choose what they believe are most profitable means and ends.
> This goes for everyone, low or high IQ; low skill or highly talented;
> impoverished or richly endowed.
>
> In a welfare state or under socialism, it's still survival of the
> fittest, but it's just a different way of interacting.  Now, political
> usefulness and political connections become much more important.

With this reason of thinking, everything is survival of the fittest. Which 
could be true in a sense :-)  But each system can direct evolution towards 
its goal. Markets are probably more flexible, because they can adapt 
quickly to changes and different wills, but there's the question of how 
long they'll take to optimize things, how much they oscillate around the 
equilibrium, and how stable is the point of equilibrium itself.

Alfio