‘Society Should Socialize Away the Status Effects of My Disadvantages, While Allowing Me To Continue to Reap All the Status Effects Where I Have the Advantage’
4th December 2011
Jehu points a gimlet eye at the degenerate modern world.
Most talk of redistribution and fairness strikes me this way. Obviously, most people lack the self-awareness to recognize this even when it perfectly encapsulates their revealed preferences.
For instance, the very smart tend to want raw intelligence to be a big part of the metric according to which society hands out its goodies. They call it meritocracy. There are certainly arguments of efficiency, but there’s no moral reason why, for instance, someone with a 3 sigma IQ and a 0 sigma level of physical development should be favored over someone with 2 sigma IQ and 1 sigma of physical development for spots at say, Harvard. Those who have the power to do so or control over the cultural battlespace get to define the formula and then afterwards we all are expected to pretend that it is henceforth sacred.