On Redistribution
How can we guarantee redistribution?
Saul recently wrote a response to my post ‘Vitae per person’, in which I argue for abundance. In it, I argue that redistribution is a comparatively simpler problem than getting to a world of abundance. Saul says:
But my biggest point of disagreement is that it seems like Lydia is totally underestimating distributive concerns. […] For example, there are subpopulations of humans where there are >10 VPP — e.g. luxury hotels in very poor countries — and where plenty of the humans (e.g. the cleaning staff) living there have <1 vita.
I think one reason for this is that the guests at the luxury hotels don’t automatically relate to the cleaning staff. Relatability → redistribution.
There are two ways to increase inter-group relatability.
Expand the moral circle of the high-vitae people, so that they’re better at relating to their low-vitae peers. This can involve highlighting ways that the low-vitae people are ‘like them’.
Historically—and when vitae have split along ethnic/geographic lines— this has sometimes involved holding up a ‘poster child’ representative of a marginalized group, who for some reason is considered particularly relatable. This is controversial, and I want us to roll with more respectful, sustainable, and dignified ways of relating to each other.
Sometimes, it’s involved bringing vita-stratified groups into closer contact with each other. This has sometimes worked well, sometimes backfired, and I don’t think we should predicate something as life-or-death as our redistributive strategy on it.
More favorably, this can involve lowering the threshold for relatability: saying “they don’t need to look like you, they don’t need to speak the same language as you, but come on guys, you’re both human.” Here, relatability routes through the most robust, general similarities: shared humanity, or, in the case of the animal rights movement, sentience.
I think this last mechanism is pretty reliable, and enforcing “yes, we will provide vitae to all sentients” is good, with the sole caveat that population explosions (either because we produce lots more sentients, or realize we need to consider many more entities sentient that we previously did) might render it unsustainable. Right now, we have a fertility crisis. But, if we get artificial wombs and so on, I think we might need to keep population growth proportional to resource growth. Then we’ll be alright.
The second mechanism flows in the opposite direction.
As low-vitae people, become more relatable to high-vitae people.
I did some of this. This is what parents do when they urge their children to learn an instrument, learn English, learn golf, go to Ivies, etc..
This is a controversial but empirically powerful mechanism. It shows up in revealed preferences every day.
It’s not very robust. It’s also weird, and kind of degrading. It requires you to appeal to high-vitae people; historically, this has looked like people leaving behind their culture against their will.
As transhumanism kicks off, it will by default start to involve getting enhancements.
I think it’s important to ensure ‘no one left behind’ as we transition to a higher-vitae world. Mutual comprehensibility and relatability begets redistribution: high-resource people help the lower-resource people they can relate to. So I care about equitable access to enhancement technology, so that humanity grows and learns together rather than some rich minority riding off into the sunset, leaving the rest in the dust. I also care about avoiding ‘race-to-the-bottom’ / goodharting scenarios — where we trade away things that matter in a race to max out some dimension, or get stuck in a positional arms race no one wants.
Also, I guess the ‘relatability appeal’ has historically rested on signaling that you’d be able to become a productive member of the high-vitae society if welcomed. Will it hold up when humans are no longer economic players? That’s unclear.
A combination of the two mechanisms: sometimes, low-vitae people bootstrap to becoming high-vitae, then redistribute back to their low-vitae community of origin. They’re helped by high-vitae people on the way up, and still remember their roots once they have vitae to spare.
Ultimately, I think relatability only goes so far. Requiring legibility for survival isn’t great. We need redistributive mechanisms that rest on more solid, dignified ground. It’s clear ‘relatability’ tactics help on the margin, but I don’t have a solution for the limit. Saul raises an important problem.
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