Kanazawa today hits on a very Hansonian point: why do we care about some kinds of inequalities but not others? Bottom line from an ev bio perspective is the "right" to have kids. But some folks are stuck without a willing partner.
In the United States, millions of people – mostly, young, poor men, the same people who don’t have health insurance or choose not to take advantage of the available health care – are left mateless, sexless, and childless, and are destined to die as total reproductive losers. In every human society, there are more childless men than childless women.
How come nobody cares that millions of people in the United States fail to achieve the ultimate goal of all biological existence, the meaning of life itself? Why isn’t it the government’s job to make sure that every American has sex regularly and frequently and produces children? Why doesn’t the government import surplus women from Russia and Ukraine and distribute them at taxpayers’ expense to millions of young, poor men who can’t otherwise get laid?
Back in September,
Hanson wrote:
Yet other “insensitive” categories are associated with huge inequalities, which few folks seem interested in talking about, much less considering how policy might influence. There is no social pressure whatsoever against maligning these groups. Especially striking are inequalities in attractiveness as a friend, lover, etc. not mediated by sensitive categories. These factors include physical appearance, vigor, charisma, personality, height, etc. Folks are well aware such inequalities exist, but have little concern about them, and no interest in policies to reduce them.
An especially striking example is inequality among men in their ability to attract women as lovers. If you don’t like “alpha/beta” labels, then call it what you will, but there are consistent correlations among men in this regard, which are consistently correlated with insensitive categories. While this inequality has large consequences for utility and happiness, there is no interest in reducing it, and people feel quite comfortable insulting these type of “losers”.
The second welfare theorem works for money endowment, but I have a hard time seeing how it could work for these other kinds of inequalities, or at least how it could work without insanely high deadweight costs.
