rigorousintuition.ca

Almost Everything We're Taught Is Wrong

8/24/2011

We grow up learning that some things are just bad: child labor, ticket scalping, price gouging, kidney selling, blackmail, etc. But maybe they're not.

What I love about economics is that it can show that what seems harmful is actually good for society. It illuminates what common sense overlooks.

This is all covered in the eye-opening book "Defending the Undefendable" by economist Walter Block.

Most people call child labor an unmitigated evil. David Boaz of the Cato Institute and Nick Gillespie of Reason.tv say that's wrong.

"If we say that the United States should abolish child labor in very poor countries," Boaz said, "then what will happen to these children? ... They're not suddenly going to go to the country day school. ... They may be out selling their bodies on the street. That is not an improvement over working in a t-shirt factory."

...

Ticket scalpers are seen as sleazy guys who cheat you by marking up the price of tickets. Profits go to middlemen instead of the performers. What good could they possibly do?

"I like to think of ticket scalpers as the guy who stands in line so that I don't have to," Gillespie said.

Time spent in line is part of the ticket cost. Scalpers let you pay entirely in money, rather than partly in valuable time.

Most people say that selling body parts is wrong.

"It also seems wrong to have people dying because they can't get a kidney," Boaz said.

"If we say that the United States should abolish child labor in very poor countries," Boaz said, "then what will happen to these children? ... They're not suddenly going to go to the country day school. ... They may be out selling their bodies on the street. That is not an improvement over working in a t-shirt factory"

Few people have much sympathy for the rich who have lost millions in the latest share price crash.

But then a new study has revealed the wealthy are unlikely to be to bothered about those who are struggling to make ends meet.

According to psychologist and social scientist Dacher Keltner the rich are usually self-obsessed and only worried about their own well being.

Keltner said they were 'less empathetic, less altruistic and generally more selfish' as a result of having so much money.

He said they have an 'ideology of self interest' and more likely to think about themselves whereas those less well off were more likely to help others.

'We have now done 12 separate studies measuring empathy in every way imaginable, social behaviour in every way, and some work on compassion and it’s the same story,' he said.

'Lower class people just show more empathy, more prosocial behavior, more compassion, no matter how you look at it.'

Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, said the rich tend to stay focused on themselves.

He said wealth, education and prestige and a higher station in life gave them the freedom to only worry about themselves.

To prove his point Keltner video recorded various groups of people in conversation.

He said rich people appeared more distracted, checking mobile phones,doodling and avoiding eye contact.

(From Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists, by Daniel Dorling. Policy Press, Bristol, 2010. Slightly reformatted for the screen.)
The five tenets of injustice are that: elitism is efficient, exclusion is necessary, prejudice is natural, greed is good and despair is inevitable.

Because of widespread and growing opposition to the five key unjust beliefs, including the belief that so many should now be ‘losers’, most of those advocating injustice are careful with their words.

And those who believe in these tenets are the majority in power across almost all rich countries.

Although many of those who are powerful may want to make the conditions of life a little less painful for others, they do not believe that there is a cure for modern social ills, or even that a few inequalities can be much alleviated.

Rather, they believe that just a few children are sufficiently able to be fully educated and only a few of those are then able to govern; the rest must be led.

They believe that the poor will always be with us no matter how rich we are.

They have also come to believe that most others are naturally, perhaps genetically, inferior to them.

And many of this small group believe that their friends’ and their own greed is helping the rest of humanity as much as humanity can be helped; they are convinced that to argue against such a counsel of despair is foolhardy.

It is their beliefs that uphold injustice.

Joe Hillshoist wrote:Sociopatholigarchy is a great word, and you must have coined it cos it doesn't appear on a google search.

Coined it for a blog post that is almost ready to post...

Jeff wrote:Example A: John Stossel

Wombaticus Rex wrote:WHY YOU HATING ON MY SWAG YO???

Jeff wrote:

Joe Hillshoist wrote:Sociopatholigarchy is a great word, and you must have coined it cos it doesn't appear on a google search.

Thanks, Joe. Coined it for a blog post that is almost ready to post, but ran a google search myself first before claiming it.