Premise: The potential for genius on the order of Einstein or Hopper are, if not uniformly distributed through the population, are at least not confined to a particular economic or gender or racial strata.
Premise: A single genius on that order is worth economically, oh, everything. Approximately.
Lemma: Feeding, clothing, and educating everyone is worth, economically, approximately everything.
Don't get me wrong. There's also a very good moral argument for feeding, clothing, and educating everyone. This does not preclude that.
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This is of course the lead up to an argument for a minimum basic income + free health care + free education for all. But, that's probably obvious.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you buy the lemma, getting to that is easy.
I find it amusing that I managed to open Barrayar to within one page-flip of this section:
ReplyDeleteCordelia: You're not joking. That's horrible... why, think of all the geniuses you must be missing!
Piotr: I doubt we're missing very many, from the caravanserai.
Cordelia: Why not? They have the same genetic complement as you.
Piotr: My dear girl! They most certainly do not! My family has been Vor for nine generations!
Cordelia: How do you know, if you didn't have gene typing until eighty years ago? Besides, if you Vors got around half as much as those histories I've been reading imply, ninety percent of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father's side?
Aral: Cordelia, you can't... you really can't sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It's a mortal insult here.
While agreeing with your overall point, I think the idea that the lemma leads to an easy path to all of these things is skipping over a lot of difficulties. Examples:
ReplyDelete(1) The return to the world is not localized to the people who make the investment in education and support. Geniuses are not well known for their loyalties, and the ideas geniuses create are even more fickle. All that energy spent in educating Newton, and Britain ends up with hardly any lasting advantage in physics over other countries who contributed nothing.
(2). The feedback cycle is several-generations slow in many cases. A person requires time to grow, and then their ideas require time to have an impact. That means that there is the possibility of cash-flow issues in a way that there wouldn't be if the payoff were instant. If I can trade one dollar for two right now, as often as I want, that's unlimited wealth. If I can trade one dollar now for two dollars in 2025, that's a different investment.
Not saying I disagree with your conclusion, just that you're leaving an awful lot as an unstated "exercise for the reader."
Oh sure, there's some work from the lemma to my end goal. I'll probably show some more in a few days, but if you want to show some of the work that'd be great.
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