I don’t have any firm views about it, I’m generally more interested in metaethics. There are stark cases where intent matters, like accidentally pushing somebody onto the subway tracks vs. intentionally doing so. When you get to the point where the harm is not only foreseeable but pretty certain like in the case of bombing a target with lots of civilians around, then I think you’re just making a judgment that a certain amount of harm is ultimately worth whatever military goal you are trying to achieve.
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That’s… what referring to “share of global wealth” accomplishes?
The problem in the Congo is war and politics, not just poverty and Africa. Many places in West Africa are relatively poor and very nice places to live.
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I just used Congo as an example. I’ve been to Africa (Ethiopia and Kenya) a couple times. It’s an amazing place. One of the coolest I’ve ever been.
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Just to be clear, you are saying to that you are more interested in meta-ethics than in normative ethics?
Yeah, I am somewhat interested in metaethics, but I’m generally not that interested in normative ethics. I’m guessing that my cruder, far-from-fully-informed normative intuitions are closer to moderate deontology than to a purely consequentialist point of view. I’m pretty sure I’d lie to the Romans if it meant saving the life of an innocent fugitive, on the other hand when it’s 2 am and nobody is around I still stop at every stop sign. I’m saying this to say I’m intuitively not inclined to think you can justify collateral violence on non-consequentialist grounds, but I’d have to read up a bit to make that case, that’s why I took your point.
In what way? Dividing by global wealth doesn’t adjust for local conditions, almost by definition.
It’s probably related to the question of whether there is a distinction between killing and letting die. It feels like there would be disagreements within both consequentialism and deontology based on whether one makes that distinction.
If the hypothetical is framed such that you get an equal share of global wealth (in real terms) regardless of where you’re born, then assuming you have no cultural or etc. preferences between places, you’d be indifferent to where you were born before the fact. If the hypothetical is framed such that you get $X (USD) regardless of where you’re born, you should choose a country with a highly favorable exchange rate in which to be born. This might seem like a pedantic point, but it’s meant to show that the nominal global average income in USD is not a meaningful basis for assessing poverty within the U.S. A cost of living adjustment is presumably meant to fix the problem with the second hypothetical, in which case it’s just the first hypothetical with an extra step. The important question is what’s the distribution of wealth and incomes across population, and my argument is that Gini coefficient is a much more meaningful measure than nominal global average income. As I conceded above, there’s more poverty outside the U.S. than within it.
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“(jn real terms)” is doing some unexamined work here. How do you add up the global wealth? What units does total global wealth have? If it is dollars, then you are in exactly the same place you are criticizing, because you can’t give everyone the same amount of dollars. Instead, you want to give everyone a nominal amount of dollars with the same purchasing power in their particular region. That’s a sensible adjustment, but the detour through global wealth doesn’t do it for you. At worst, it makes it seem like an equal share of global wealth is some objectively defined concept, when it’s actually based on quite a few assumptions.
It’s really not, man (pun extremely intended). Wealth in terms of goods and services. You’re either just restating my point or quibbling with economic definitions. (Or flat out not following the conversation.)
So does everyone get one 8-billionth of each asset (and service!)? Obviously not, the procedure is something like:
- Add up the market value of all assets (market exchange rates? something else? TBD, don’t worry about it) and get a number of dollars.
- Figure out how much a dollar is worth in each country.
- Parcel out the dollars so that each person has an equal worth of dollars.
(One way you can tell that shares of global wealth is an incoherent concept is that the shares won’t add up to total global wealth unless you normalize them.)
But forget the details. The original claim was that this methodology is superior to the Gallup estimate because it permits cross-country comparisons. But those are enabled by step 2, where you establish a conversion factor between market exchange rates and real costs. Gallup does the same thing to arrive at their estimate:
The $2,900 headline number is stated in an “international dollar” designed to represent the amount of Country X currency with a purchasing power equivalent to a dollar in the U.S. The average person in the world is just super poor.
And we are saying: Why would anyone care about the average global income, however denominated?
In other words, I (obviously) did not mean “share of global wealth” like a share of stock, but rather as a way of referring to “entitlement to access to the material means of well-being.” In short, the average person’s poverty just shows how skewed the wealth distribution is toward those at the top, since there are way, way, way more people at the bottom. As a Gini coefficient would quickly and easily tell you.
Obviously they’re an investment bank so read this with a grain of salt, but the data here is extremely revealing:
Super-confused. The relevance of mean global income is that it’s the income that everyone would have if existing resources were shared evenly. I guess the $2900 number is actually the median income, and the argument here is that median < mean because of unequal distribution. But that doesn’t explain why you were talking about cross-country comparisons. The $2900 number is adjusted for cost of living and can validly be compared, at least at a high level, to living in the US with $2900.
Ah, okay, I see what you’re saying. I def did not realize that while snarking off about exchange rates. But in that case it doesn’t matter where you’re born in Clovis’ hypothetical, no? That’s what I meant by saying:
If the hypothetical is framed such that you get an equal share of global wealth (in real terms) regardless of where you’re born, then assuming you have no cultural or etc. preferences between places, you’d be indifferent to where you were born before the fact.
If Clovis wants to define what “born poor” means more specifically, that’s up to him, but it seems to me that if “[t]he $2900 number is adjusted for cost of living and can validly be compared, at least at a high level, to living in the US with $2900” then being “born poor” at that level is ~equally bad regardless of where you’re born.
My point about the average (mean or median) being hugely skewed by the structure of the global wealth pyramid remains, though. EDIT TO CLARIFY: The point being that a global Lorenz curve is a better measure of overall inequality than the difference between national average and global average. If the question was supposed to be, “Would I rather be born as a randomly selected U.S. or Senegalese citizen?” obviously I’m picking U.S.
Read this today and had to do the math myself to confirm.
If you made $1.3 million every day since US confederation and paid zero taxes and hadn’t spent a cent…
You would still have less money than Jeff Bezos.
It’s hard to conceptualize how much money billionaires actually have.
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This is true.
If George Washington was still alive and made $10,000 a day since July 4th, 1776 he still wouldn’t be a billionaire.
If Jesus made $50 an hour assuming he was born on December 25th in 1 AD, he still wouldn’t be a billionaire.
It is an insane number.
And yet George Washington was the richest president we’ve ever had. Likely a billionaire himself.
Billionaires come into existence through compound interest and nothing else.