How Do Dead People Drive Inequality?

In today’s world, general equality is a hotly debated topic. It is closely associated with fairness, and makes its way strongly into politics of all sorts. In the past, it has been known to cause wars and uprisings. In in this article, we go over some of the general properties and misconceptions of equality, and finally, try to figure out what dead people have to do with inequality.

This essay is supported by Generatebg

Equality of Opportunity

In its purest form, the debate around equality aims for equality of opportunity. If everyone in a society gets access to the same resources to develop as everybody else, each person gets a fair starting-point in life (refer to this article on Universal Basic Income). However, despite our fierce discussions and actions, we are nowhere near this ideal point. This is partly because of the exponential rate of development of a minority of people in the society; they position themselves such that their next generations have better starting points, thereby skewing equality of opportunity in their favor. Can we blame them? Every human being wants his or her family to do well beyond generations.

So, from all we know so far, it appears that equality of opportunity is not a single starting point, but something that needs to be ensured continuously over time. But how do we ensure a fair equality equilibrium-state continuously without authoritatively capping high-performers in the society? In one form or the other, questions like have been making their rounds, and have caused devastation in the past. In short, we are still trying to answer these questions and solve these problems.

Equality of Outcome

The people who are hard-done by life are often the ones who wish for equality of outcome. But most capitalistic systems stamp this thought out citing poor logic. If you think about it, why would we wish to reward someone who is working hard, and someone who is not, the same way? However, more subtle forms of poor thought of equality of outcome have afflicted our present society. Some gender equality warriors have been fighting for the equality of women, in that, they wish to see (ideally) an equal number of women in current male dominated positions. Unfortunately, this line of thought leads to the same reasoning as the former, and tries to achieve an unfair equality of outcome.

The question we should be asking instead is: Given an equal starting point, would there be an equal number of women in the current male dominated positions in the first place? Scandinavian countries are the closest states we have when it comes to perfect equality of opportunity for all genders. What we observe there are even fewer women in current male dominated positions compared to typical capitalistic societies. So, based on these observations, we may choose to say that equality of outcome would be the wrong way to go about solving this problem.

Cue in Vilfredo Pareto

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian scholar who developed himself as a competent civil engineer, economist, and philosopher (among others). To this day, he is known for his Pareto Principle, where he noted that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to 20% of the population. Other mathematicians and statisticians following him have only confirmed this observation and have generalized it. The skew might vary (not necessarily an 80/20 distribution), but the skew exists in almost all social phenomena. In some cases, the skew can be as aggressive as 99/1.

There has been abundant research into this topic, and what we have managed to confirm so far is that it is linked to nature itself. In other words, nature’s expression follows this skew. Here are a few examples from everyday life (please note that the skew need not necessarily 80/20, but would be closer to 80/20 than 50/50): In any spoken language, the most frequently used 20% of words are expected to amount to 80% of the total words used. An average person is expected to spend 80% of her time with 20% of her family members. In a forest, 80% of the sunlight is expected to be taken by 20% of the trees that are tall and robust enough. You get the picture. The point is that this kind of inequality seems to be baked into nature.

How Do Dead People Drive Inequality?

You might think that with our technological advancements, we might have a chance at attaining equality. Considering one of Taleb’s observations, let’s go back to an era where technological innovations did not exist in the music and entertainment industry. Every semi-decent opera-singer and every semi-decent actor had an audience. This is because they were reasonably competent in their locale. However, with the advent of technology, we became able to store people’s voices and works of art in storage devices such as vinyl, cassettes, DVDs, and eventually, the internet.

What this enabled is two-fold: 1. Music and entertainment became decoupled from time (of existence of the artist), and 2. Music and entertainment resources became globally available. As a result, the top of the top artists began getting most of the market-share, thereby completely eliminating the mediocre artists who previously had individual markets (a Pareto-distribution). In this world, the majority of the entertainment-work that is consumed comes from a tiny minority of the artists. What’s worse, since we decoupled time from artists’ existence, a dead artist who once produced great work is likely to have more audience than a mediocre artist who is still alive (don’t curse the dead).

What’s the lesson we all could learn from this? To even start debating equality, we might need to ensure that everyone at the table understands inequality first.

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