freedom and equality cannot co-exist
we've run the experiments and keep ignoring the outcomes
thought experiment
why does india get married but america doesn't anymore? more interestingly, why do indians stay married but americans can't?
less well-known tidbit: before facebook became widely popular in india starting about 2010, india only had two relationship statuses: married and unmarried.
relationship statuses like single (or divorced) didn't exist on forms, applications, or in general conversations because the concept of dating or ending a marriage wasn't socially accepted. the unmarried state couldn't have possibly engaged in a romantic relationship, so the term single was non-existent until facebook just smeared it on every profile.
gini coefficient of sexual revolution
sex is so stigmatized in india that parents worry that their teenagers and adult kids might date - the same way parents in america worry that their kids might not. hooking up is so easy with dating apps and yet, almost every month a random female high school teacher in america is arrested for having sex with an underage teenage boy. you have to assume the unreported ones are at least 2-4 times higher. this is not impossible in india and i have personal stories to confirm, but it’s pretty rare.
let’s look at legal sex in america.
data from hinge, the most prominent dating app now, point out that a very few men are dating most women in circles (shown by an extremely high gini coefficient of 0.73 for men’s attention inequality). back in tinder times we decreed “no hookups” in our profiles and hooked up anyway. not a lot changed since then except inventing a new portmanteau: situationship.
in india though, men and women are matched through an organized process called arranged marriage based on similar social, economic, religious, and caste backgrounds without a free-market system of sexual selection. they are eagerly transitioning to the western free-market system, but it’s far from being a sexually liberated society. women are still shamed for having sex before marriage and taboos dissuade couples from divorce.
spoiler alert: this is not a story about mating.
paradox of freedom
when people have the freedom to make individual choices, they choose based on the rawest biological instincts. ie, “what’s best for me”, not “what’s best for the greater good”. in a collective bargaining scenario their choices might become more equitable but individually the gene wants to survive and thrive. the gene is selfish, as postulated by richard dawkins.
freedom cannot create equal outcomes even for the winners - it creates a winner-takes-all market. because in a free-market individuals exercise the power to choose the creator, the seller, and the product that offers the best value to the individual. so the true value-creating winner takes it all.
for every sanctimonious argument against amazon, walmart, and their billionaire founders, there are a million customers who are loyal. we prefer iphones over androids despite steve jobs being an egomaniacal billionaire or iphones being no better than (and sometimes worse off than) androids. phones are purchased based on our instincts for status, self-inclusion, and vanity. not based on data or morality.
india has an egalitarian system for partnering up because marriage (and sex) is ordained. indians traded freedom for collectively bargaining a system of equality in the sexual marketplace. hypergamy doesn’t choose romantic partners in india, society does based on equivalence. in the west, counter-culture movement and contraception liberated sex. we flirt, mate, and jilt at the altar of attention economy hosted by insta and hinge.
in sexually free countries hypergamy, not collective bargaining, decides the outcome. women as the gatekeepers of mating choose the most competent, dominant men using cultural proxies relevant to them. hinge’s gini coefficient score simply says that women of all attraction-levels are choosing the same few attractive men hoping the man would commit. it’s the rawest instinct from the limbic system1. sexual attention is corralled inside the apps, no longer at community venues of church, school, friends, or family circles. give a horny man a chance at polygyny - boy does he take it!
if the market is free, the participants will not be treated equal because they are not!
equality cannot be aspired for, only accomplished
equal opportunities. not equal outcomes2. progress comes from (1) high-trust societies having (2) high production of capital. wealth transfer from (2) to (1), known as taxes, is the reason rural america have better infrastructure than a metro in india. but aspiring for equality entirely at the expense of (2) kills the golden goose, no matter how kind the motive is. if the primary incentives are removed from people venturing into the frontiers of capital creation, the best we get is europe3 and the worst is every example of socialism in recorded history (every one of which made the poor poorer).4
is america providing equal opportunities? the answer is mixed but here’s a tax perspective.
40% of taxes in america is paid by the richest 1%
67% (two-thirds) of taxes are spent on the general theme of equality: welfare (47%), education (15%), and transportation (5%)
human ingenuity and motivation for wealth and power are what dares individuals to bet their safety nets in risky entrepreneurial ventures. anyone raring to risk it all have a shot at the top of the food chain. if it succeeds, it uplifts everyone else willing to take part in it by creating new jobs and second-order economic effects. the aggregate economic growth creates outsized tax revenue for the working-class and the welfare-class.
unlike what you’ve been told by your favorite political character, the proportion of wealth held by the richest is diminishing over time. wealth is no longer created from feudalism or squeezed out of the third estate.
the rich are getting richer but so are the others.
20% of american households are millionaires! microsoft did not just create a handful of billionaires, it also created thousands (not hundreds!) of millionaires. and that's not mentioning second order economic effects it spawns - the truckers, plumbers, teachers, nurses.
in this regard, the discontentment about economic inequality can only be explained by three situational vices: (1) envy (2) rebellion of the youth (3) ignorance on the recorded history of how civilizations emerge and fail.
there’s an alternate theory posited by authors like helen andrews that the recent increase in feminization of institutions is causing the uprise in discontentment. the theory is that nurturing babies and having to socialize in unfamiliar clans that women were married to evolved women to choose equality over meritocracy, and consensus over debate. mothers feed every child, no matter their merit. women bonded with in-laws particularly other women, prioritizing group consensus and agreeableness. men on the other hand tend to disagree face-to-face, honor the best hunter in the wilderness, and reward the strongest protector against barbarians - or people die. the loophole in this theory is that it cannot explain male discontentment about inequality.
if you have a fully developed neocortex5 equality is the most virtuous social order to want. but as in mate selection, you can have either freedom (hypergamy, lack of commitment, polygyny) or equality (sex with legal spouse only, everyone gets a shot, no divorce), never both.
enforcing inorganic economic equality in free markets will take the freedom out of markets and the ambition to create markets with it. the state then has to feed not only the welfare-crowd but also the working-class, with zero net gdp growth to finance the feeding. part of history is then written up by the revolutionaries who saw the fleeting success of equality. they are all smug and squarely dead in their coffins when the economy starts free-falling upon the next generation of citizens.
equality or freedom?
i often think the “be kind” crowd and the “be just” crowd on either side of governance haven’t had the time to figure out navigating a post-scarcity first-world under the pressure of rage-bait news. until about a decade ago, being on one of those two sides didn’t feel like a violation to the center-left and center-right americans.
smartphone owners are now armchair experts and revolutionaries - without having to pore over tomes of history, without ever having to depend on the mob for civil code, and without having to live in overwhelmed, seemingly anachronistic democracies6. it trapped us all in an echo chamber of news cycle ever-so-slightly tainted to perfectly trigger our intransigent minds.
do you want a world that’s equal or free?
luckily you’re free to choose either! this is the freest, the richest, and ironically the most misinformed you’ve ever been since the tectonic rumble under panama isthmus triggered the evolution of human race out of african apes.
a study done on mate choice of about 10,000 people across 41 countries collected their stated preference (what they say) and revealed preference (what they do). most people said they preferred a mate who is a good listener, confident, loyal, emotionally available and so on. but their actions showed they chose someone who they thought was sexually appealing. the traits they used to make this choice were good smell, being attractive, sexy, good lover etc.
it’s not impossible to engineer equal outcomes. we’ve tried this in education. california eliminated standardized tests, delayed algebra, and made grades easier to achieve so that that the system is equitable to low-performing students. academic performance dropped across the board and the policies were reversed. harvard inflated grades, again to be equitable to all students. this combined with group-preferential admissions made the value of a degree questionable. harvard recently reversed the practice by capping A grades. we love to pretend that school outcomes result from pedagogy. it’s politically incorrect to say that student abilities vary and that intelligence is heritable. but school outcomes are a result of selection not teaching.
america is a class heirarchy bound to capital creation. europe is a race heirarchy bound to america’s capital creation. post-war europe is an american economic offshoot. i will explain why:
american consumerism: trade and tourism since bretton woods to build a dilapidated post-war europe
american healthcare: free euro-care subsidized by pharma companies that charge high prices in the us.
american aid: 90 cents (!) from every philanthropic dollar (america is the biggest giver) have to invariably go to the ngo industrial-complex (of which europe has plenty).
american defense: protecting ocean freight, financing indirectly via nato, providing intel, and above all…
american capitalism: entirely new job titles and industries that american innovation spawn that percolates to europe.
every time a european refutes these arguments i find it funny coming from thier iphone, backed up by google searches, and placed on a social networking app whose founder might even be european to be fair but is waiting for his green card in his vc-funded shack in san francisco.
i grew up in a state that still elects socialists. how did socialism succeed there? feudalism had to be abolished and it required revolt. in the 1960s the communist party succeeded in that revolution and came to power. but since then they executed the playbook of marxist labor theory of value through trade unions and violent activism, eventually crippling all successful economic resources. but the state hasn’t crumbled due to tourism, remittances, state-run alcohol sales, and most recently offshore IT. the communist party continues to attract youth looking to cool their blood with dissent and muscle-power.
guess who is the most violent group in the history humanity? if you guessed the mongol hordes, it’s close enough. they likely had a fully developed neocortex. the most violent group is toddlers!
if vacationing outside anglo-saxon countries cured ignorance (as many in the first-world seem to think) america would have had the most scholarly journeymen. reading a book by the beach, climbing a volcano, or drinking coffee by colonial vestiges doesn’t make any difference to who you are. go apply for a driver’s license. haggle at the fish market. try to assimilate.