Friday, May 26, 2023

Reparations

I have paid attention slightly over the years to the research into whether winning the lottery makes one any happier or not. When I used to listen to WFAN in New York in the late 90s there was even an add for the NY lottery (they had many clever ones) in which a black voice assured the listener with a chuckle that while winning the lottery might not fix everything, it sure did fix everything that had to do with money, as it had for him. I had long said that winning made no difference, but then read things about a decade ago assuring me that people who won the lottery did report somewhat levels of happiness. In particular, older people, interviewed five years later, reported greater happiness, while a greater percentage of younger people ruined their lives.  But this age advantage leveled off at about age fifty.  It makes some sense.  Winning millions of dollars would be a burden now, as I would feel bound to give it away with some wisdom and intentionality, which would be work.

But I think the NY advertising angle has held up.  An infusion of money does solve money problems.  But it doesn't solve any other problems, and it doesn't even solve the money problems for more that a few decades. Greg Cochran wrote almost a decade ago about the Georgia land lottery of 1832 and the Swedish study of lottery winners.

But those ideas have stuck with me in looking at other "lottery of life" evaluations, on many fronts. I have experienced some great unfairness, and I do catch myself dwelling on those at times.  But I mostly have won the lottery of life, having been given much I did nothing to earn. I try to be careful not to pretend that I have made it farther up the mountain because I am a better climber. I was born in America in the mid-1900s with some abilities that conferred status and advantage in the society I lived in. Unfairness that occurs after that can still keep you at a high elevation. One can become as abjectly miserable as a human can be here, all through no fault of your own, but that is rare.  What we call miserable would have been considered a wonder of wealth, safety, and approval by most of the rest of humanity. 

I think there is a strong sense of punishing the people who supposedly benefited from slavery over the centuries (they didn't) as much as rewarding the people who were left out. The actions and words in the discussion betray that the former goal is the more important one to at least some people. Wanting to take down the toffs, the snobs, the elites seems to be a common motive across humanity.  We know that whatever car our neighbor drives should have no effect on our happiness, but somehow it does. Or some sneaky thing distantly like it, if not the car. Someone has something.

To desire that the last shall be first seems quite proper and honorable, but hoping for the first to be last is more worrisome. Yes, Jesus said it and it's right there, but it's still worrisome to me. But not the point for now.

My concern is only secondarily that it's not fair and threatens to reward and punish unfairly. More to the point, I don't think reparations will do much good helping people's lives long term, and maybe even harm them.  Because after reparations, if those don't work, what next?

3 comments:

  1. How could they possibly work? Let's not even get into paying reparations to people based solely on the color of their skin and what happens when all the recent immigrants from the last 100 years demand to be let in on the greatest rip-off of all time? Can you imagine all those Somalis taking a big fat, "no, you aint entitled to reparations so you don't get so much as one thin dime," lying down or will they burn down Minnesota?

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  2. Also, bear in mind that EVERY race and ethnicity without exception has both wronged some other race/ethnicity and been wronged by some other race/ethnicity at some point. Do the ethnic Assyrians of today owe the Jews, Arabs, and Phoenecians (Lebanese) reparations for atrocities of yore? Do the Sioux, Comanches, and non-Native-American folks in the States owe EACH OTHER reparations for the sheer gray-and-gray-and-gray morality of the Indian Wars? Heck, do African-Americans owe the Native Americans reparations?

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  3. What happens when it doesn't work? We'll get more of it, like we always do. Welcome to liberal democracy.

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