House of Eratosthenes

From the Foundation for Economic Education. Their article, which embeds the clip above, explores the “you should help starving people instead of buying luxury goods” argument in great detail, hacking away at its most vulnerable points: The difficulty involved in defining a luxury good, and the power of exponential growth of material assets.

I have never understood why the discussion drags on so long, how this starving-is-all-your-fault mindset persists among those who are supposed to have at their disposal, and to apply, any sort of above-average mental horsepower. Undeniable: Yes, we do start out in life with disproportionately distributed, unearned, advantages. Undeniable: Yeah, but some of those advantages are earned. It’s not all-one none-of-the-other, it’s a blend. Undeniable: Assets can be used to make other assets; properly managed, a portfolio will grow exponentially.

Unavoidable conclusion: Just as “distribution” is not the genesis of the problem, it cannot be the solution to the problem either. In fact, a measured and perfect redistribution of all of human civilization’s material assets, just might be the best conceivable recipe for keeping poverty going, short of lunging for the short-cut and actually destroying those assets.

I just don’t see how people can work it out any other way. Unless they’re being deceived, or trying to deceive others.

The core problem, I think, is that once your actual (economic) needs are met, Social positioning becomes very important for most people (A holdover of our tribal time, maybe?). This is just the same old fight of “New Money” vs. “Old Money”…..
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 06/02/2015 @ 09:14
People like Singer are so pernicious because they have a type of cleverness entirely devoted to rhetoric. They’re the type that was absolutely fantastic on their debate team, but they have never really solved a problem in their lives.

Through a gift for metaphorical sleight-of-hand, Singer has actually made a whole bunch of people think that his arguments actually have merit. But they simply don’t. They’re utter hogwash suspended by ephemeral flights of clever word play.

The first mistake is to even fight on Singer’s ground — to accept the “Save the drowning child/Feed the starving child” analogy. He maintains that the scenarios differ only in the details, not the essentials. That’s the magician’s sleight of hand, right there.

They absolutely DO differ in the essentials. The FEE article spends a lot of time deconstructing the “Save one/Save them all” dichotomy, and that’s helpful, but you only have to do that if you’re falling into Singer’s trap in the first place.

You fall into his trap by conceding that sending the $1000 to the starving child is the equivalent of saving him. As the article has pointed out, this has been disproved repeatedly.

A more accurate analogy would be if the drowning child has his ankle trapped in a branch so that he is prevented from reaching the surface. You run to a nearby dive shop and you trade your shoes for bottles of emergency scuba air. You start handing the bottles down to the kid. As each one runs out and your money is used up, yeah, the kid is still alive, but he isn’t saved he’s still just as trapped underwater as he ever was. No matter how many bottles of air you buy, even if you set up a permanent air pump and provide air from a hose, you’re not saving him if he’s still trapped underwater.

That’s what our progressive charity efforts are like. Singer should ask how many people think it’s a good idea to just keep providing the kid air bottles, as opposed to doing something that actually saves him.

What saves the starving kid, ironically, is Louis CK’s Infiniti. Jobs. Opportunities. You can dump charity money into third world hellholes until you turn blue, but until they have a civilization that can protect private property rights, public safety and the rule of law with minimal corruption — establishing the environment were businesses want to start — nothing will ever work.

And you cannot, as far as I can tell, impose those things. You have have to leave the cavemen alone and them them work those things out for themselves. Prime Directive, anyone?
- cloudbuster | 06/02/2015 @ 15:27

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Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015