Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Paul Graham Article: Inequality and Risk

Paul Graham on "Inequality and Risk". About the benefits, and prime importance, of encougaging people to take economic risks -- and what this has to do with inequality. "...It sounds benevolent to say we ought to reduce economic inequality. When you phrase it that way, who can argue with you? Inequality has to be bad, right?..." As pretty much always, his conclusions seem pretty contrarian, but are very well argued.

Certainly there is a need for arguments that are laid out like his one is. We need to get beyond the simplistic arguments about economics and politics our society seems mired in, in which policies/strategies/whatever are justified or attacked on the grounds of whether they superficially sound like they'd benefit/disadvantage some particular part of the population. We need to start evaluating them on the basis of actually looking into and working out the details of what effect they would have, without prematurely reaching decisions based on superficial critiera.

1 comment:

  1. That was a really interesting article, James. It resonates strongly with my own feelings and kind of pre-empted an article I've been drafting for the last two months (damn!).

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