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Arnold Kling's avatar

The point that poverty is a normal state is missing the obligatory Heinlein quote:

'Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.”'

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David Pinsof's avatar

Great post. Another puzzle I’d add is why we care about distant abstract things at all. It’s not obvious why we should have *any* beliefs about such things, given their lack of relevance to everyday decisions. Why do we even care? Why do we form beliefs about them at all? I genuinely don’t know the answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the social functions such beliefs serve, and the need to segregate these social functions from the epistemic functions of our normal beliefs.

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