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[Criptfeind]

Edit:  Sorry if this came off a little ranty and I missed the point of your question.  I rattled it off very quickly on the last few minutes of my lunch break.

No, that's fine. And you sorta touched on what I was getting at a bit. My thought here was, if you can only own what you yourself use. Why would you make more then you could personally use? In a factory, why make more (for instance) cars then the number of people working in the factory. Why grow more food on a farm then the amount eaten by the people working the farm. If you can't own it, it won't benefit you. And if you can own it, you just opened the gate to things that create wealth and not utility for you count as something you can use, which is exactly the thing you have been trying to get rid of.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I'm still waiting for a response to this:

That doesn't change that your influence removal efforts are still unequal,, just randomly unequal.

Could you elaborate, please?

Your system wouldn't achieve equality because while you have removed many influences you have inflated one: random chance. The children that prosper and the children that don't won't have started on a level playing field due to you constantly switching everything around. You have only focused upon the elimination of societal inequality, while the circumstantial inequalities remain uncompensated for.

[GreatJustice]

I'm still waiting for a response to this:

That doesn't change that your influence removal efforts are still unequal,, just randomly unequal.

Could you elaborate, please?

Your system wouldn't achieve equality because while you have removed many influences you have inflated one: random chance. The children that prosper and the children that don't won't have started on a level playing field due to you constantly switching everything around. You have only focused upon the elimination of societal inequality, while the circumstantial inequalities remain uncompensated for.

Every child has an equal chance at benefiting from random chance, though. Similarly, some children are naturally stronger or more intelligent; that isn't something that can be compensated for in any realistic way.

If you REALLY want to reduce inequality, the (100% successful) method is quite simple:

-Take every child in the country and put them in a heavily guarded city block
-Make sure they stay in as small an area as possible
-Carpet bomb the block until it is impossible for anything to have survived (ideally blow it up in such a way in as to ensure that every child dies the same way)
-There are now no children, and they are equally dead. There is absolutely no inequality (so long as you ensure no one disturbs the ruins and arranges elaborate funerals or something).

[Leafsnail]

"You want to move towards thing X?  Well here's a staggeringly stupid way to go way further than thing X!  You are wrong."

[EnigmaticHat]

No the problem isn't even that "Poor kids exit school with less education" either.

It would matter if the reason this happened is one that was "Unfair" so to speak. For example if they simply do not have the time or money to study or go to higher education.

The point I would make about poor families in the school system, isn't that the schools are particularly biased against them, but that ability to choose schools requires some combination of money or luck, often large amounts of those things.

If you want a good private school, you're probably going to have to pay a lot.  I've heard that religious schools can be affordable, but A. a lot of them aren't that great, and B. its not really a reasonable solution if it only applies to a portion of the population.

If you want a good public school, you're either going to need to get lucky and get a good one in your area, or be economically capable of moving into a different school district.  On top of that, wealthier areas tend to have better public schools, meaning even if they can move poor families might not be able to afford living in the area of a school that they want.

If you want to get into a charter school... good luck.  If there is one in your area, AND that charter school is better than the public schools, it might be so popular that applicants who get to attend are chosen via raffle.

It doesn't have to be that way.  First of all, people should either be given reasonable options as to which schools they can go to, or alternatives to assigned public schools should be denied to everyone equally.  Its ridiculous to have free pre-college schooling to everyone but to deny people a specific aspect of their schooling (choice of school, and most of the higher end schools) unless they have large amounts of money to throw around.  (Everything everything in this post applies specifically to schools in the US, because that's where I live and what I know)

[SalmonGod]

Edit:  Sorry if this came off a little ranty and I missed the point of your question.  I rattled it off very quickly on the last few minutes of my lunch break.

No, that's fine. And you sorta touched on what I was getting at a bit. My thought here was, if you can only own what you yourself use. Why would you make more then you could personally use? In a factory, why make more (for instance) cars then the number of people working in the factory. Why grow more food on a farm then the amount eaten by the people working the farm. If you can't own it, it won't benefit you. And if you can own it, you just opened the gate to things that create wealth and not utility for you count as something you can use, which is exactly the thing you have been trying to get rid of.

I can understand why I would work to improve my own situation, but not to improve other people's. If someone gave me the choice between working all day so someone else (who I don't know) can benefit, or sitting at home and masturbating* all day, I'm going to masturbate.

It's simple mutualism.  You produce more than you need for yourself, because you rely on other people to do the same.  If you work at a factory making cars, you'll want to make enough cars for the community, not just yourself.  Access to cars increases the productivity of your community.  The prosperity of your community increases, and you get to share in that prosperity. 

What practical reason do you have to not be an asshole to everyone you know?  It's because such behavior would make you ineligible for many social benefits, and encourage others to be an asshole towards you in return.  It's the same concept.  You specialize and produce goods for others to use, so that they will do the same.  This is exactly the same as our system works now.  The only difference is the way motivations and benefits are structured.  It's more straightforward.  You don't work mainly for the benefit of some upper class that doesn't care about you, just for permission to survive.  You work when you believe there is a problem that needs to be addressed, such as a lack of cars.

[pisskop]

Edit:  Sorry if this came off a little ranty and I missed the point of your question.  I rattled it off very quickly on the last few minutes of my lunch break.

No, that's fine. And you sorta touched on what I was getting at a bit. My thought here was, if you can only own what you yourself use. Why would you make more then you could personally use? In a factory, why make more (for instance) cars then the number of people working in the factory. Why grow more food on a farm then the amount eaten by the people working the farm. If you can't own it, it won't benefit you. And if you can own it, you just opened the gate to things that create wealth and not utility for you count as something you can use, which is exactly the thing you have been trying to get rid of.

I can understand why I would work to improve my own situation, but not to improve other people's. If someone gave me the choice between working all day so someone else (who I don't know) can benefit, or sitting at home and masturbating* all day, I'm going to masturbate.

It's simple mutualism.  You produce more than you need for yourself, because you rely on other people to do the same.  If you work at a factory making cars, you'll want to make enough cars for the community, not just yourself.  Access to cars increases the productivity of your community.  The prosperity of your community increases, and you get to share in that prosperity. 

The world doesn't work like this, and Im sure you know it. People are selfish in nature, and actually more likely to be less helpful if their community size is larger than not.

[SalmonGod]

I reject all "People are _____" statements.  Human beings are variable enough that these universal attributions simply don't work.  You can't even say that the majority of people are selfish in nature.  The only reason this is such a common belief is that our social structure encourages and rewards selfishness, and very few people can achieve beyond a minimum wage quality of life without behaving selfishly.

[GreatJustice]

Even if most people are selfish, Mutualism tends to reward the least productive.

A worker-owned factory has 1000 workers producing 100 X each, a total of 100,000 X. Each worker is given a set share of the "profit" of this factory, if you could call it that, and votes on issues of capital allocation.

Yet (A) There is no incentive to invest in capital expansion, risky technologies, etc because each worker naturally wants a more secure position rather than risk (when you have a Capitalist Exploiting Pig, he takes that risk so the workers are still getting paid the same amount even if he cocks it up and loses a ton of money), so any "successes" go into higher wages/benefits rather than capital, so production across the world is lower (Note how most "Worker owned factories" that succeed are in places with terrible economies and little capital accumulation eg. 1930s USA or modern Argentina) and (B) Each worker, even if he tends towards "goodness", is rewarded for being a slacker.

So I'm working in this factory, and let's say I work my ass off until I practically die of exhaustion to increase my productivity by 100%, meaning I am now making 200 X. The factory overall, however, is now making 100,200 X, so I am now making .2 X more in pay for 100% more productivity. Meanwhile, if I slack off and produce nothing, or am even a shitty worker and break things, the factory now has 99,800 X, and my "pay" is now 99.8 X. So in other words, I have absolutely no reason to put in any effort beyond the appearance (so as to not get voted out of the factory) of effort unless I consider the value of .2/.4 X to be worth putting in significantly more of an effort.

Now there are other ways to "run" things besides mass vote in this way and equal pay for all workers, but when the workers themselves are voting on what they want, they'll naturally tend towards forming cliques to get themselves big paychecks at the expense of others, even if they're good-intentioned.

[Gantolandon]

I always loved this argument, how workers of a factory will inevitably slack off and do not invest in it, because they are stupid and don't really care. Only a capitalist übermensch will make rational decisions because for some reason he likes taking risks. And everyone supposedly works harder when there is a guy at the top who does nothing and takes most of the money.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

so, a plutocratic dictatorship is the only possible way to run a business? and socialists are the autocrats?

[Neonivek]

Anyhow Meritocracy is pretty much a sham way to run anything because the "Value" of merit is entirely biased towards management.

And the only balance would entirely bias it AWAY from management.

[ed boy]

Your system wouldn't achieve equality because while you have removed many influences you have inflated one: random chance. The children that prosper and the children that don't won't have started on a level playing field due to you constantly switching everything around. You have only focused upon the elimination of societal inequality, while the circumstantial inequalities remain uncompensated for.

But the switching around means that if there is an influence somewhere that benefits some children more than others, then any given child will have their exposure to it limited. The more you spread out their developments over different sites, the less variation from the norm in total development you'll see. The development variance is approximately inversely proportional to the number of sites switched between.

What practical reason do you have to not be an asshole to everyone you know?  It's because such behavior would make you ineligible for many social benefits, and encourage others to be an asshole towards you in return.  It's the same concept.  You specialize and produce goods for others to use, so that they will do the same.  This is exactly the same as our system works now.  The only difference is the way motivations and benefits are structured.  It's more straightforward.  You don't work mainly for the benefit of some upper class that doesn't care about you, just for permission to survive.  You work when you believe there is a problem that needs to be addressed, such as a lack of cars.

I certainly agree that such a system would work in a small community, but not in any large ones. I live in a city of over eight million people. I'm never going to even meet one per cent of them, and the population that I'll know and care about will be a lot smaller.

[SalmonGod]

What practical reason do you have to not be an asshole to everyone you know?  It's because such behavior would make you ineligible for many social benefits, and encourage others to be an asshole towards you in return.  It's the same concept.  You specialize and produce goods for others to use, so that they will do the same.  This is exactly the same as our system works now.  The only difference is the way motivations and benefits are structured.  It's more straightforward.  You don't work mainly for the benefit of some upper class that doesn't care about you, just for permission to survive.  You work when you believe there is a problem that needs to be addressed, such as a lack of cars.

I certainly agree that such a system would work in a small community, but not in any large ones. I live in a city of over eight million people. I'm never going to even meet one per cent of them, and the population that I'll know and care about will be a lot smaller.

And this is what I've heard from people my whole life, but I never understood what they were getting at.  What is it about a larger community that makes it impossible to organize in an egalitarian fashion?  What is the common feature of large scale societies that allows them to organize? 

Eventually I figured out that the common feature is centralization, and the obstacle that centralization overcomes is limitations in communication.  Now those limitations are gone, and the need for centralization with it. 

Before mass communications, you needed to know all of those eight million people to in order to communicate with them.  The best you could hope to do was pass out flyers or put up posters in commons areas.  Information traveled slooowly and was culturally processed even slower.  This is why we developed formal channels on social hierarchies.  Relevant information could reliably get around to where it was needed in a larger scale society, without the need for everyone to know each other or frequent the same areas.

Now communicating with millions of people is nothing, and information is culturally processed very quickly on an immense scale.  If we put a concerted effort into developing the infrastructure, we could get massive societal-scale consensus problem-solving/decision-making engines up and running quite easily.  The only thing we're really lacking is the sophisticated formal understanding of memetics necessary to develop the information structure that will get people involved in the community decision-making processes that are most relevant to them, so that they don't have to devote all of their time to providing input on everything.

[ed boy]

And this is what I've heard from people my whole life, but I never understood what they were getting at.  What is it about a larger community that makes it impossible to organize in an egalitarian fashion?  What is the common feature of large scale societies that allows them to organize? 

Eventually I figured out that the common feature is centralization, and the obstacle that centralization overcomes is limitations in communication.  Now those limitations are gone, and the need for centralization with it. 

It's one thing to be able to communicate with people, it's another to be able to care about them. It's quite easy to logically arrive at the conclusion that all people should be treated equally and you should look out for the interests of all people equally, but to actually do so is quite hard. There's a leading theory in anthrpology of Dunbar's number, which is that it is impossible to properly care about more people than a certain number (usually given as being around 150).