People will disagree, but this is the sociological purpose of religion. Religious communities bring diverse people together, elevate the weakest, and promote societies that are competitive, but tempered by the empathy which comes from a shared identity.
Is religion the answer to questions of inequality? Historically speaking, probably not on its own. However, it certainly informed most of the larger solutions we have today.
The one thing I'll disagree is with you calling it "purpose", rather than "function". One of the functions of religion is indeed better community cooperation. However, the purpose for which a particular religion was envisioned by its creator(s) is not necessarily the function it came to fulfill for some part of its existence.
The philosopher Alain de Botton is trying to push the idea of a "secular religion", or more simply to recognize that religion filled a social role and that we don't currently have a good replacement. See his TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0#t-1907...
What a peculiar perspective. Do you have any sources for this? I've never heard it argued that religions create competitive societies, in particular. I would think that the opposite would be the case.
I don't disagree. Although religion has facilitated a lot of evil (the crusades, burning women as witches, terrorism), on the whole I view most religion as a positive form of social engineering for some of the reasons that you mentioned.
BTW, I am not religious per se, but I do meditate every day. I like my spirituality unorganized.
The article does a good job of shining some fresh ideas in the discussion. The most interesting part for me is this paragraph:
As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The divide between winners and losers grows constantly. Losers multiply as winning behaviors are replicated in the smaller winners’ circles and losing behaviors are replicated in the bigger losers’ circles. This is why, in the end, the winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the divide of inequality, the bigger the price that finally has to be paid. The winners end up having to take care of the losers. Before that two totally different cultures are formed in society, as is happening in many places today.
I believe the issue that needs to be tackled is not income inequality but access to resources inequality, resources being health, education and so on. As long as a part of society doesn’t have reasonable access to those resources they’ll never be able to contribute to a bigger wealth pie.
This is important because I do agree that some people prefer to take risks on their careers and that those should get a bigger reward. Not necessarily in terms of money, but IT IS OK if it is in terms of money. After all, entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to make an impact on society.
The next part of the article distills the idea that a good way to reduce inequality is to promote cooperation and relationships over individuals and companies racing for a single prize. It’s a nice concept but difficult to translate into a series of real steps that we can take now.
Again, I think a less ideological first step is ensuring everyone in a society has reasonable access to resources, allowing them to make conscious decisions of how to drive their professional careers and have a minimum understanding of how those with political and economical relevance use their influence.
Naturally, achieving such a thing isn’t easy as governments are corrupt and a big chunk of those with economical and political relevance now don’t way their “free” wealth pie to end (and those are not startup entrepreneurs). But to complement what Esko said, there is still a middle fragment of society (we here on HN for example) that has power to drive this change, especially with the advent of technology and means to easily talk about it.
What happens after we guarantee all access to learning resources and inequality persists? At what point will you accept the science that tells us how intelligence is mostly hereditary, immutable, and important?
The dream of stamping out inequality is built on the factually incorrect notion that we are all born with equal abilities. It's much easier to explain outcome differences as ability differences than to come up with increasingly unlikely forms of oppression.
As technology improves, low-IQ contributions become increasingly less valuable relative to machines, increasing inequality.
If anything science tends to point more to the fact that there isn't a single metric of intelligence that is somehow the most important. Maybe the most important factor isn't intelligence at all and is some combination of intelligence, communication and charisma? Even if there some set of human dominating factors, there's no guarantee that the order of the world in that moment would consistently value that factor without changing to another. There isn't even a guarantee that at the same point in time the same fitness tests are applied consistently - in one corner of the world one set of characteristics if favored, and and in another it's a different set. Heck, in the same city there's a huge variation...
In this environment the best we can to is provide somewhat consistent access to resources to encourage the development human ability in all its varied forms.
That's a nice fantasy --- oh, everyone's smart, just as different things. It just ain't true.
Science tells us that IQ is a general mental cognitive factor; tasks can be more or less heavily g-weighted, but intelligence is strongly correlated to all sorts of things, like mortality (inversely), lifetime income, accomplishment, marriage stability, and so on.
I agree with everything you've said and I'm really sorry if it seemed that I was implying we are all born with equal abilities. I agree that intelligence is partly hereditary, immutable and important, the same way that is the willingness to take risks.
If there is an equality of access to resources (not only learning) the degree of income inequality will eventually be balanced. The problem, again, is that there is an increasing portion of society that is born intelligent but never able to develop it, put it in practice and finally contribute to the bigger wealth pie.
Income and wealth inequality will and should persist.
I think it may be the case that we are 'done' at that point. There needs to be some inherent inequality and luck, otherwise we can't improve... It would be like evolution without the mutations. We couldn't evolve if it weren't for that variation. Is it fair or right? I'm not sure... that's up for debate. But I do think that the inequality that would persist after resource-equality would be considered acceptable by most people.
Actually as technology improves, people are freed to do fewer technological tasks. Technical IQ becomes less important. Ultimately most folks can return to reading, writing, art and leisure. As we used to call it, utopia.
The challenge is to redistribute resources fairly once the concept of 'working' is no longer pertinent.
The need to capture increased productivity as increased leisure time is the reason I support a basic income --- or a "technological divided", to put it differently. But we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that everyone is capable of making an equal contribution to society and that wage disparity somehow reflects unfairness.
The rest depends on the definition of 'contribution'. A grandmother involved in raising grandkids is a significant contribution that is uncompensated at present. We could fix things like that. Definitely room for improvement in our antiquated economic system.
Sure. What really bothers me is equating pre-redistribution income differences with unfairness, -isms, discrimation, and so on. I resent being called a terrible person when all I've done is do my best work. Post-redistribution income is another story.
Esko Kilpi is my favourite author on Medium at the moment. His articles on the redefinition of work are very inspirational to me. And although cooperative interaction is above all a human action, I have high hopes that technologies like the blockchain can help to ease these interactions between humans. Or at least to make these interactions more transparent and insightful.
This article may be inspirational to you, but it's not very well written or well argued. Is the California gold rush really an example of "sudden discovery of underutilized resources"? And isn't the subject of that sentence actually the technological changes that inspired the "major changes in economic patterns"?
Okay, so zero-sum games and scarcity economics are based on the idea that resources/valuables are limited and I'm all in favor of agreeing that there is no end to resources, creativity, or human sympathy. And I would even be willing to take that a step further and say that, no matter what the problem, there will be people willing to devote their time to it.
But the crux is not available resource: the key is defining something as a problem. Are schools the problem, or poverty? Are broken windows the problem, or mandatory minimums? Take away the assumptions from this article, and you aren't left with much more than a half-reasoned book report. I would be much more inspired if the conclusion of this article was something like "nuanced solutions are the only option" rather than what was presented: "be excellent to each other".
"In games that were paradoxically competitive and cooperative at the same time, losers would not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to learn from the winners."
This is, in practice, what we already have.
Two companies in the same space, A and B, compete. Initially, both grow into their space. Eventually, one does better than the other, and B fails. B dies. What happens? A goes and hires the best parts of B, or acquires them, or many variations on that theme. Most of the remainder go find a job somewhere else, perhaps in an entirely different economic sector. The employees of B are not cast into the outer darkness never to compete again, to starve and die.
Capitalism competes at the level of companies, and companies live in a highly Darwinian live-or-die environment. But the people making up those companies actually live on a different level.
Combine that with ensuring that your business environment makes it easy to start a new company, and the process continues. (Meaning that one of the key things to worry about is ensuring that we do not accidentally destroy that property.)
In fact that's the core brilliance of a limited liability company; all societies and cultures, whether they like it or not, are Darwinian, because we live in a rather harsh Darwinian universe of limited knowledge and resources. Many other social structures have been developed to directly cover it up or deny it, and in the process, fail miserably. It can not be covered up or denied. Since it isn't even caused by a human process, it doesn't care if you vilify it, and it is not amenable to politicking. You can't shame Darwinian competition into not existing any more.
But you can move it. You can move it into entities that are not human. You can move it into things that, when they die, mean a lot of people may feel really bad, but then they by and large go get another job or perhaps retire or worst case live on the largesse of the social safety net that a capitalistic society is wealthy enough to provide, but they don't actually die. You can get the Darwinian benefits of competition increasing fitness, while not actually killing the components of the system. Removing the Darwinian benefits from the system...
... well, actually, it's not like we need to hypothesize about what happens. Have we not already witnessed entities that are so large that they internally function without effective competition and, hypothetically, nothing but "cooperation" inside them, transcending the "system"? Old-school IBM. Many governments. We do not associate these systems with producing paradisaical cornucopias of happiness and resources. We associate them with massive resource wastage, favoritism, law-breaking, and extensive internal infighting. "Cooperation" unconstrained by competition has a concrete historical track record of ceasing to be "cooperation".
If you just "cooperate", you need a mechanism to remove those cooperatives that aren't working properly. People living under the shield of the current system and mistakenly diagnose what the system is actually shielding you from as being caused by the system will always find these methods distasteful. But they are necessary lest the whole system dissolve into useless, wasteful flab. As in biology, so in economic life.
Is religion the answer to questions of inequality? Historically speaking, probably not on its own. However, it certainly informed most of the larger solutions we have today.