Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

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LuckyR
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by LuckyR »

Equality is a myth and doesn't belong in this thread. What we mean when we throw the word "equality" around, is: the absence of formal, state sanctioned inequality.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Xeadas »

Before we banish equality completely, I'd like to make a final case for it, since I see the tension between equality and liberty in this thread as very murky. Here's the clarification I hope will be useful. (I'll be using the philosophy of John Rawls almost exclusively in my answer, since his political philosophy has liberty holding primacy over equality -- the primary attitude I saw in this thread --, yet still pushes for equality, and gives us a way to conceptualize a robust vision of an equal society. Skip to heading II to get right into the meaty stuff, if you'd like).

Starting from ground zero:
I. What is the subject of justice?
[It is] the way in which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation.

...where major social institutions can be: competitive markets, freedom of speech, the right to personal property, etc. The crucial point is that these institutions fundamentally -- right from the start -- influence our life prospects. This structure of institutions contains social positions that people are born into -- again, that they start out from. This means that people's lives are determined, to a large extent, by their economic and social circumstances within these institutions. This means that the institutions themselves favour certain starting places over others. And these can be tremendous inequalities!

For example, a Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, Mark Blyth, was born in Dundee, Scotland to relative poverty. His mother had died and there was an intense drug craze at that time in his area. All in all, the guy didn't have any hope at all. However, his government did have good educational policies for those that are disadvantaged, and he became an Ivy League professor. He describes his ascent like so:
I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.
And what is the worst case that could come about from such government policies if not everyone can become esteemed professors? I think any job is better than what those who started from an initial position of severe disadvantage would have likely resorted to had the support not been there: crime and/or drugs.
It is these inequalities presumably inevitable in the basic structure of any society, to which the principles of social justice must in the first instance apply.
II. How do we make a social contract to allow for basic equality?

Imagine that you're about to create a society and its major institutions with other people (since living in cooperation affords you a better life), but that you don't know what position you'll have (class, status, fortune, even natural strengths and weaknesses,) once the social contract is finished and the society begins. You must imagine this veil of ignorance. The principles of justice agreed to in this situation would be fair, since people can't favor their own class or whatever if they don't know what it will be once the game begins. And in the veil of ignorance, you must include the want for the best status in the society you can get, and the want for rights and liberties; since you don't know what position you'll have, you'll want to maximize your minimum prospects: maximin. This is so that even if you're at the lowest end of society, you're still content with the rights, liberties, and position you have.In this imagined scenario, any rational person would make the social contract such that:

1.
[E]ach person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of qual basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others
2.
[S]ocial and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone's advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.
...where 1. refers to those major social institutions, and 2. refers
to the distribution of income and wealth and to the design of organizations that make use of differences in authority and responsibility. [...] One applies the second principle by holding positions open, and then, subject to this [openness] constraint, arranges social and economic inequalities so that everyone benefits."
So, a society's basic structure has to be in accord with principles 1. and 2. for it to be considered just.

III. Implications

Most crucial to this thread, you can't take away a group's right to vote just because doing so will make everyone else's situation better than it would have been otherwise. If you disallow people who vote for fiscally irresponsible congressmen to vote, for example, then you'd be acting unjustly, even if everyone gets richer from a fiscally responsible congressman had that group been disallowed from voting.
Individuals, like neurosurgeons, can be paid more than everyone else, but only if anyone can be one, and their higher pay makes everyone better than they otherwise would have been.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Belindi »

Inequality in a democracy is an ineradicable fact.

The disadvantage of democracy is that a large group of voters can be unfair to those in a minority as when for instance small majority of British people voted to break from Europe and the large minority who voted to remain with Europe had their needs ignored. This situation has created some animosity. It is important therefore that a democracy is finely tuned by parliamentary or similar procedures so that the majority doesn't become a dictator.

The advantage of a democracy is that minorities and others who are disadvantaged by e.g. poverty or illness have some power. It is not possible to ensure universal equality of outcome; that is what communism aims for and in a relative world it doesn't work for well known reasons.

What equality in a democracy usually means is equality of opportunity as illustrated in the post above where the poor boy became an Ivy League professor.

For democracy to work the electorate must be educated. In the olden days education meant only literacy and numeracy. Education of the electorate now includes the ability to think critically, and there are actual initiatives to educate people against false news, for instance.
An educated electorate is able to think on behalf of other sections of society besides their own An educated electorate doesn't react emotionally to a politician's speech but seeks balanced information from disinterested sources.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Fan of Science »

There are a number of problems with your father's position. Some have already been mentioned by others, but just a quick list off the top of my head would include the following: 1. It would undermine one of the strengths of democracies --- allowing people to have a say in how they are governed. 2. One of the ideas behind democracy is that it can create better citizens by requiring them to argue logically for their political position. Your father would undermine this aspect of democracy by telling people that they should not even bother to try. 3. It's not clear that people with advanced degrees in economics know more about economics than people without such degrees. After all, the vast majority of economists, including the head of the American Economics Association, were saying that the economy was strong, no need to worry any more about economic business cycles, just months before the crash of 2007 occurred. 4. Voting for a single politician who will delegate work to others is not the same as voting for a specific policy that requires advanced technological knowledge. An average person may have a better insight into a politician's true character than some technical expert who has little understanding of people. 5. This would cause a malinvestment in such things as people seeking economic degrees. Some people, just to have greater voting rights, would obtain such degrees, while there would be little use for them in the greater economy.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Sy Borg »

My preference is for people to do a test and earn the right to vote, just as they earn the right to drive. If people know very little about politics then they cannot make an informed vote. Uninformed voting undermines democracy, either as "white noise" or a wave that follows influential media outlets.

If people want the vote then they at least need to be able to distinguish different levels of government and their responsibilities and functions. They should understand enough about economics not to be fooled by pie-in-the-sky election claims. They should know enough about history to know some of the mistakes made that repeat throughout history.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Belindi »

Greta wrote:My preference is for people to do a test and earn the right to vote, just as they earn the right to drive. If people know very little about politics then they cannot make an informed vote. Uninformed voting undermines democracy, either as "white noise" or a wave that follows influential media outlets.

If people want the vote then they at least need to be able to distinguish different levels of government and their responsibilities and functions. They should understand enough about economics not to be fooled by pie-in-the-sky election claims. They should know enough about history to know some of the mistakes made that repeat throughout history.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/arch ... ng/263748/

To enable the mentally incompetent to vote means spending public money on extra teaching for people with learning difficulties. This should be supplied form the public purse. I am not sure about voting rights for people with uncontrolled mental illness which alters reasoning ability. Who should assess "reasoning ability"?

General education by the state for the demographic that is deemed to have normal learning ability was historically based upon the need for adequate education to enable the poor to vote. This principle still holds, and educators do pay a lot of attention to helping children to distinguish between lies and truths.

There is a greater need in the service of democracy, and that is now apparent e.g. from the recent action of Theresa May the UK prime minister in paying a Northern Irish ' conservative ' party (the bigots known as DUP, ) to support her faction in Parliament. Public and private funds should not be used with partiality towards any political party. Public media should be free and not owned by politically or financially interested persons.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Fan of Science »

Look, if knowledge and/or intelligence, has a normal bell-shaped distribution, then it is always going to be the case that the majority of voters are not going to be well-educated or highly intelligent.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Belindi »

Fan of Science wrote:Look, if knowledge and/or intelligence, has a normal bell-shaped distribution, then it is always going to be the case that the majority of voters are not going to be well-educated or highly intelligent.

Don't you agree that democracy and freedom of the individual is best served the more the electorate is knowledgeable and wise?

In any case Greta's point was about the extent of the suffrage. In that respect I believe that no citizen however stupid or mentally ill should be excluded unless exclusion from the suffrage is part of the punishment for a recognised criminal activity.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by -1- »

You can take this idea of a "smart enough electorate" to a point, too, where there are very few people allowed to vote -- for instance, people with Mensa level IQ -- and therefore they could easily form a cartel and enslave the rest of the population. If that's what they would decide to do.

Would that be good? No, I don't think so.

You see, IQ measurements of smarts give you a positional difference, not a difference on a scale, of IQ. Therefore, since it's hopelessly bound to terms of comparisons, there is no way of establishing a verifiable and reasonable cut-off point of knowledge and smarts to decide who can vote and who can't. It can only be an arbitrary fut-off point.

Which we are using now... 18 years of age in some states, 21 in others, but why? Just as arbitrary as a predetermined IQ number would be.

-- Updated 2017 June 29th, 6:45 pm to add the following --
-1- wrote:You can take this idea of a "smart enough electorate" to a point, too, where there are very few people allowed to vote -- for instance, people with Mensa level IQ -- and therefore they could easily form a cartel and enslave the rest of the population. If that's what they would decide to do.

Would that be good? No, I don't think so.
It's quite possible that that has happened already.

People with money wield enough power to rig the elections. Or if not rig it illegally, rig it by buying or whipping up support or buying or whipping up the opposite of support. For instance, Big Money got Trump elected by buying out the loss of Ernie (or Bernie?) by favouriting the KKunt for Prez. Nobody wanted the two-timing no-good lying cheating colossally egotistic and self-absorbed bbbbiiiccch for a president, and the only alternative was Trump.

The election of Trump was just one step in the elaborate plan by the rich and influential to increase their own stronghold on power, and to further strengthen their attempts to enslave the population.

I AM NOT SAYING THE ABOVE AS FACT AND I AM NOT INSINUATING THEY ARE FACTS OR TRUE. THE FOREGOING IS SIMPLY MY OPINION, INCLUDING THE PERSONALITY TRAITS AND MOTIVATIONS ATTRIBUTED TO THE NAMED AND ALSO TO THE HINTED-AT-BUT-NOT-NAMED PEOPLE OF IDENTIFIABLE PERSONALITY.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Sy Borg »

Belindi wrote:To enable the mentally incompetent to vote means spending public money on extra teaching for people with learning difficulties. This should be supplied form the public purse. I am not sure about voting rights for people with uncontrolled mental illness which alters reasoning ability. Who should assess "reasoning ability"?

General education by the state for the demographic that is deemed to have normal learning ability was historically based upon the need for adequate education to enable the poor to vote. This principle still holds, and educators do pay a lot of attention to helping children to distinguish between lies and truths.

There is a greater need in the service of democracy, and that is now apparent e.g. from the recent action of Theresa May the UK prime minister in paying a Northern Irish ' conservative ' party (the bigots known as DUP, ) to support her faction in Parliament. Public and private funds should not be used with partiality towards any political party. Public media should be free and not owned by politically or financially interested persons.
My issue is with the wilfully ignorant. It's safe to say that the votes of the truly incompetent are meaningless anyway, usually just a doubling of their carer's preference. Their numbers are probably low enough that you could exempt them from the test with no consequence. If those who are not clinically disadvantaged, however, fail the test then they can always actually work towards learning and try again. Forcing the wilfully ignorant to exercise their brains for once would seem not such a bad thing. I would also open up the vote to those aged 16 and over if they can pass the test. Consider the brilliant young people sidelined while the wilfully ignorant claim their so-called rights.

People must earn the right to drive as mistakes in that area can be fatal. IMO people should also earn the right to vote because mistakes can set a nation back decades. I would think that the stakes are too high for an "every child gets a prize" approach. Education cuts and allowing ignorance an equal say to knowledge are factors behind the decline of the public conversation and denigration of expertise, with the conversation increasingly tending towards the LCD where many votes (and dollars) can be easily picked up with some sensational misrepresentation.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Belindi »

Greta wrote:
Forcing the wilfully ignorant to exercise their brains for once would seem not such a bad thing. I would also open up the vote to those aged 16 and over if they can pass the test. Consider the brilliant young people sidelined while the wilfully ignorant claim their so-called rights.
But we have to accept the disadvantages of democracy if we are to preserve democracy.

I am not sure that there are such people as the wilfully ignorant. I think that ignorant people have been caused to be ignorant partly by media (including some religious sects) that deliberately mislead by demonising. So the people who voted for Brexit were misled largely by right wind, sensationalist, newspapers such as Daily Mail and The Sun to blame foreign workers for taking British jobs. In short, I think that the established Rich support poor educational opportunities because good educational opportunities tend very much to engender rebellion against the rich owners of power and influence. The very rich don't want to be deposed.

I sympathise with "forcing the ignorant to use their brains" but it's not possible to force that much- to -be -desired outcome. The ignorant have to be freed from their misapprehensions before they can use their brains. For instance children who have been indoctrinated with belief in a material entity called God Who controls all, have to be shown that is not the only way to think.

The pictures of Glastonbury 2017 were evidence that the young are involved. The numbers of votes for Jeremy Corbyn are evidence that the young are involved.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

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If a voter cannot distinguish between local, state and national functions and issues, then how can they make an informed vote? In an ideal world where I ruled (which admittedly, would not be ideal) then people would have to learn at least some fundamentals about the system and basic economic concepts, then they could have their say.

I do think, however, that democracy as we knew it is a goner - if it ever existed at all, in hindsight. China's rise, the US's retreat into infantilism, Europe's inundation with refugees, and the concentration of media ownership suggests to me that democracy no longer has any strong champions and, with rising population density, an Asian-style command economy beckons. In surveys a surprising (to me) number of westerners would prefer democracy to be replaced by a benign dictator. There is a sense amongst some that democracies can't function properly any more and are prone to logjams and lost opportunities.

The identified problem is true, but I'm not convinced that the answer is the removal of checks and balances that prevent the worst case scenario - a dictator gone rogue. We need to take the vagaries of human nature into account when changing established systems.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

Post by Belindi »

Greta, I had to look up what a command economy is:-

http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/gloss ... d-economy/

I cannot see that a command economy doesn't accommodate democracy. When I read the link I posted above, it seemed to me that a command economy is what I think of as socialism, and this is what I support, as described in the link
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

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Greta wrote:If a voter cannot distinguish between local, state and national functions and issues, then how can they make an informed vote? They can't but it's not required of them. In an ideal world where I ruled (which admittedly, would not be ideal) then people would have to learn at least some fundamentals about the system and basic economic concepts, then they could have their say. But you ruled them, so they could not have their say after all... so which is it, they have their say, or they don't have their say? You are saying they both have their say and at the same time don't have their say, in the same respect. This has nothing to do with being ideal or not; it has to do with self-contradictory proposition.

I do think, however, that democracy as we knew it is a goner - if it ever existed at all, in hindsight. China's rise, the US's retreat into infantilism, Europe's inundation with refugees, and the concentration of media ownership suggests to me that democracy no longer has any strong champions and, with rising population density, an Asian-style command economy beckons. In surveys a surprising (to me) number of westerners would prefer democracy to be replaced by a benign dictator. There is your chance, Greta. Seize the day. (-: There is a sense amongst some that democracies can't function properly any more and are prone to logjams and lost opportunities.

The identified problem is true, but I'm not convinced that the answer is the removal of checks and balances that prevent the worst case scenario - a dictator gone rogue. We need to take the vagaries of human nature into account when changing established systems.
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Re: Can Inequality In A Democracy Be Good?

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Greta wrote:If a voter cannot distinguish between local, state and national functions and issues, then how can they make an informed vote? In an ideal world where I ruled (which admittedly, would not be ideal) then people would have to learn at least some fundamentals about the system and basic economic concepts, then they could have their say.

I do think, however, that democracy as we knew it is a goner - if it ever existed at all, in hindsight. China's rise, the US's retreat into infantilism, Europe's inundation with refugees, and the concentration of media ownership suggests to me that democracy no longer has any strong champions and, with rising population density, an Asian-style command economy beckons. In surveys a surprising (to me) number of westerners would prefer democracy to be replaced by a benign dictator. There is a sense amongst some that democracies can't function properly any more and are prone to logjams and lost opportunities.

The identified problem is true, but I'm not convinced that the answer is the removal of checks and balances that prevent the worst case scenario - a dictator gone rogue. We need to take the vagaries of human nature into account when changing established systems.
I am not interested in living in an official 2 tiered system (since currently living in an UNofficial 2 tiered system is bad enough).
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