Wow, James, this is brilliant!
Thank goodness someone has taken on Graham for what he's worth!
Bravo!!!

Trixie

And here's another one of your words of true wisdom that I copied from 
another email:

the introduction of mathematics into simple human transactions will often 
just add overhead and produce little tangible benefit.

Applause!!!!!



>From: James W Mickens	
>To: Daniel Reeves  
>CC: Michelle Sternthal  , Dave Morris	,   
>      improvetheworld Æ umich.edu, Steven Reeves	,	 
>reeves-hayos Æ umich.edu, reeves-kalkman Æ umich.edu
>Subject: Re: mind the gap
>Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 18:32:23 -0400 (EDT)
>
>>This is a big contribution to this debate.  Thanks Michelle!
>>
>>Quick thought though:
>>
>>A life expectancy gap is bad and efforts to narrow it are laudable. Unless 
>>the solution is to kill old people to harvest their organs to save people 
>>who are dying younger.
>>
>>I'm just pointing out that an income gap being bad doesn't mean that 
>>forced redistribution is good (or even necessarily helps the poor in 
>>absolute terms).
>
>
>I realize that this is just an analogy, but it presents a misleading view 
>of wealth redistribution. After all, it may be that older people have 
>larger organs that are packed with redundant tissue. Thus, we could extract 
>a sliver of an older person's organ with no penalty to her, and transplant 
>that sliver into a younger person (with no organ at all!) for a great 
>increase in net utility ;-).
>
>For a more concrete example, suppose that the economy has generated a 
>single "new" dollar and that we can give this dollar to an extremely poor 
>person or an extremely rich person. I claim that giving the dollar to the 
>poor person almost always increases net utility more than giving that 
>dollar to the rich person. Relatively speaking, that single dollar will 
>afford the poor person many more opportunities for acquiring food, shelter, 
>medicine, or simple peace of mind than it would for the rich person.
>
>Now let's suppose that the dollar is not "new," but instead has been 
>redistributed from the rich person to the poor person. I would still claim 
>that there is a net increase in utility. In other words, I claim that a 
>public policy can be net-zero with respect to aggregate wealth generation 
>but net-positive with respect to aggregate utility generation.
>
>One might argue that, in some cases, the rich person should receive the 
>dollar so that she can invest it. This is a valid point, since the returns 
>on the investment might result in a net increase in utility---for example, 
>the investment might result in new entertainment technology or the creation 
>of high paying jobs. I agree that investment helps to improve our quality 
>of life and that, to some extent, investment is driven by the existence of 
>people with surplus funds (and thus is driven by income inequality). I have 
>no problem with this. However, I also believe in John Rawl's notions on 
>inequality. As he says in his book "A Theory of Justice":
>
>
>"All social values---liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the 
>bases of self-respect---are to be distributed equally unless an unequal 
>distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone's advantage."
>
>
>Thus, I can tolerate (and, in fact, celebrate) the existence of wealthy 
>entrepreneurs to the extent that the fruit of their labor and talent helps 
>everyone. However, I see no reason to celebrate wealth in and of itself, 
>since wealth isn't welfare, and welfare is what I care about.
>
>So, here's my question to the wealth-equals-welfare economists: do we 
>currently live in a society with an acceptable level of wealth inequality? 
>If the answer is yes, then why is this level of inequality acceptable? 
>Furthermore, could it be that even *greater* inequality is acceptable, or 
>even preferable? For example, could *fewer* people have health care in an 
>acceptable world? Could *fewer* people have access to clean, safe 
>neighborhoods? What areas of American society are too equitable for their 
>own good?
>
>If the wealth-equals-welfare economists agree that there is too much 
>inequality in our society, I have a different question. Now I want to know 
>why people like Paul Graham spend so much time writing about America-Prime, 
>which is just like America but where poor people deserve their lot in life 
>and rich people are swept by the Darwinian tides to the shores of luxury? 
>Why would Graham claim to derive deep insights about our current society 
>based on the sociology of an alien nation bereft of discrimination and 
>institutional injustice? Sometimes I feel that Graham is not an economist, 
>but an ethnographer for some strange extraterrestrial civilization.
>
>Simply put, Paul Graham is not my boyfriend.
>
>~j

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