The Chalmer Delusion: Outcome Bias & The Static Pie Fallacy
https://t.co/X5uAtgEL0y
I encourage you all to look at the excellent interview of Jim Chalmers by Philip Coorey of the AFR.
What struck me is that he appears genuinely sincere that he has a good policy and that it will work in delivering intergenerational equity and productivity.
It reminded me of Oscar Wilde's letter when he was in jail...
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation".
Jim Chalmers is not you, and he is certainly not me, so how can his mind arrive at such bizarre conclusions.
I think the answer lies in the field of psychology: outcome bias combined with the static pie fallacy.
Jim Chalmers sees the successful founder, investor or business owner - but not the thousands who failed, lost capital, went bankrupt or spent years building nothing. Capitalism’s winners are visible; its graveyards are invisible.
Then comes the static pie fallacy: treating wealth as something merely to be redistributed rather than created through risk, incentives and relentless trial-and-error.
He doesn't see that for the pie to grow, incentives must be rewarded, and that outcomes are destined to be fundamentally inequitable If the model works properly. However if the pie grows large enough we have enough wealth to bring up those at the bottom. But we will never be all the same, and rewarded the same, if we were that would be socialism.
But he cannot see that, as trapped in his own psychology, Jim Chalmers feels taxing success is morally righteous rather than economically destructive.
The problem is that innovation only exists because extreme rewards compensate for extreme failure.
The argument is not one of intelligence, but of philosophy, and there is no common ground or resolution.
This is a very old dilemma, and Thomas Kuhn would say Jim Chalmers and the business community have "incommensurable frameworks", and trapped in his own paradigm he is unable to view the world differently. What we see as an apparently rational disagreement is actually a failure of shared meaning rather than a failure of intelligence.
The conclusion is sobering that the only way to resolve the problem is to remove Labour through the election box because the framework in which they make decisions is so foreign to economic reality that they will inevitably fail to interpret the world around them in a way that will grow the pie.
They are prisoners of their own ideology.
https://t.co/X5uAtgEL0y
The more time passes, the more distant I feel from Western political and ideological discourse.
Where once there was debates over facts, its increasingly tribal & defined by feelings instead of reality at the coal face
Are other societies dumb enough to tear themselves down...