Sunday, February 24, 2013
Saturday, March 31, 2012
The Harrison Bergeron Memorial 5k Race
I recently read an article on Kiplinger about the distribution of income and taxes. I found it somewhat interesting, but then I made the mistake of reading some of the comments.
These threads depress me. So many intelligent people just don't understand the basic concept of life chances, and how they limit the supposed freedom of opportunity we crow about so much in this country.
Let me provide a little thought experiment, in the form of an analogical wall of text. Suppose there were one hundred people standing at the starting line of a 5k race. The physical ability of these people to run follows the normal distribution (i.e. the 'Bell Curve'), with a few people really unfit, a few conditioned athletes, and most folks somewhere in the middle. They were randomly selected out of the general population, and participation in the race is compulsory. The race also has a special buy-in: each participant has to put everything they own into the jackpot, to be distributed according to the results of the race. If they choose not to race, they lose everything.
Before the officials kick things off, the Handicapper General (Credit: Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut) randomly assigns a handicap to each runner, in the form of ankle weights. Some get light weights, some get heavy ones. A few get no weights at all, and a few get phenomenally massive ones.
After handicaps have been dished out, they line up at the starting line; the starting gun fires, and they're off! Now, how would you expect the results to work out? Here's what I think: I think that you can basically determine how well someone is going to do by taking the product of their initial ability (how fit they were), and how severe their handicap was. On the one extreme, you might have someone who is an Olympic runner with tiny one ounce anklets, and on the other extreme you might have an obese, octogenarian chain smoker with a manhole cover strapped to each leg. There will be some people that were pretty unfit, but because they weren't heavily handicapped, perform well. There will be others that were very able, but received a huge disadvantage, so they finished at the end of the pack. In the middle, you would find people of moderate ability, and with a moderate handicap.
Not everyone can win the race, but just for finishing you get something. The prizes are distributed by a power law distribution, though, so that the very fastest get several times more than those just a little slower, who in turn get a lot more than those further down the curve. The last ones across the finish line get practically nothing. Kind of like this:
Here's the question: Was this a fair race? We took a random sample of the population; we assigned them random handicaps; everyone ran the same 5 kilometers. Was it a fair race? Yes or no? Why or why not?
One could argue that it was fair, in the sense that a game of roulette is fair, because everyone had an equal chance of getting a handicap at the start. Isn't that a little disingenuous, though? Gamblers choose to gamble, and they know the odds. Further, the equal chance of getting a handicap doesn't address the issue that some of these people were simply unsuited for the competition in the first place. They didn't get a choice about racing; they were compelled to do it. The poor old fat smoker just lost pretty much everything he had, and he never got a choice in the first place.
I contend that the race was not fair. I assert that the requirement that everyone be forced to risk everything based on their ability to compete in a rigged competition that they may be inherently unsuited for, and which they have no reasonable alternative but to participate in, and in which they may randomly receive ridiculous handicaps also outside of their control, was fundamentally an unfair means of capital distribution.
I further contend that, as long as the handicaps remain, there can be no pretense that the prizes were distributed according to merit, because merit is considered as an intrinsic attribute, where the handicaps are clearly extrinsic, imposed by forces outside of the individual. The presence of the handicaps actually weakens the argument from merit, because the affect of the handicaps directly reduces the correlation between running ability and winning the race. You can imagine a race in which the handicaps are so crushing that it no longer matters if you can run at all; if you get a handicap, you can't even walk, and if you don't, then you can crawl to the finish line and still win.
So, what's a better way to administrate this race? How could we improve it to be fairer? Should we? Everything is fair play. Would you make it non-compulsory, or remove the buy-in (socialized welfare programs)? Try to take off everyone's weights (socialized education and medicine)? Leave things the same, maybe because you have the fortune to be a fit runner with no handicap? Perhaps you might handicap the fastest runners, so everyone has about the same chance of winning?
These threads depress me. So many intelligent people just don't understand the basic concept of life chances, and how they limit the supposed freedom of opportunity we crow about so much in this country.
Let me provide a little thought experiment, in the form of an analogical wall of text. Suppose there were one hundred people standing at the starting line of a 5k race. The physical ability of these people to run follows the normal distribution (i.e. the 'Bell Curve'), with a few people really unfit, a few conditioned athletes, and most folks somewhere in the middle. They were randomly selected out of the general population, and participation in the race is compulsory. The race also has a special buy-in: each participant has to put everything they own into the jackpot, to be distributed according to the results of the race. If they choose not to race, they lose everything.
Before the officials kick things off, the Handicapper General (Credit: Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut) randomly assigns a handicap to each runner, in the form of ankle weights. Some get light weights, some get heavy ones. A few get no weights at all, and a few get phenomenally massive ones.
After handicaps have been dished out, they line up at the starting line; the starting gun fires, and they're off! Now, how would you expect the results to work out? Here's what I think: I think that you can basically determine how well someone is going to do by taking the product of their initial ability (how fit they were), and how severe their handicap was. On the one extreme, you might have someone who is an Olympic runner with tiny one ounce anklets, and on the other extreme you might have an obese, octogenarian chain smoker with a manhole cover strapped to each leg. There will be some people that were pretty unfit, but because they weren't heavily handicapped, perform well. There will be others that were very able, but received a huge disadvantage, so they finished at the end of the pack. In the middle, you would find people of moderate ability, and with a moderate handicap.
Not everyone can win the race, but just for finishing you get something. The prizes are distributed by a power law distribution, though, so that the very fastest get several times more than those just a little slower, who in turn get a lot more than those further down the curve. The last ones across the finish line get practically nothing. Kind of like this:
 |
| Credit: nytimes.com |
Here's the question: Was this a fair race? We took a random sample of the population; we assigned them random handicaps; everyone ran the same 5 kilometers. Was it a fair race? Yes or no? Why or why not?
One could argue that it was fair, in the sense that a game of roulette is fair, because everyone had an equal chance of getting a handicap at the start. Isn't that a little disingenuous, though? Gamblers choose to gamble, and they know the odds. Further, the equal chance of getting a handicap doesn't address the issue that some of these people were simply unsuited for the competition in the first place. They didn't get a choice about racing; they were compelled to do it. The poor old fat smoker just lost pretty much everything he had, and he never got a choice in the first place.
I contend that the race was not fair. I assert that the requirement that everyone be forced to risk everything based on their ability to compete in a rigged competition that they may be inherently unsuited for, and which they have no reasonable alternative but to participate in, and in which they may randomly receive ridiculous handicaps also outside of their control, was fundamentally an unfair means of capital distribution.
I further contend that, as long as the handicaps remain, there can be no pretense that the prizes were distributed according to merit, because merit is considered as an intrinsic attribute, where the handicaps are clearly extrinsic, imposed by forces outside of the individual. The presence of the handicaps actually weakens the argument from merit, because the affect of the handicaps directly reduces the correlation between running ability and winning the race. You can imagine a race in which the handicaps are so crushing that it no longer matters if you can run at all; if you get a handicap, you can't even walk, and if you don't, then you can crawl to the finish line and still win.
So, what's a better way to administrate this race? How could we improve it to be fairer? Should we? Everything is fair play. Would you make it non-compulsory, or remove the buy-in (socialized welfare programs)? Try to take off everyone's weights (socialized education and medicine)? Leave things the same, maybe because you have the fortune to be a fit runner with no handicap? Perhaps you might handicap the fastest runners, so everyone has about the same chance of winning?
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