Fairness

I often laugh when someone declares a thing to be fair. Fairness is a funny illusion. It’s one of our most useful illusions, but it’s an illusion nonetheless.

Imagine trying to “fairly” divide ten identical marbles between two kids. You could give five marbles to each kid, wave your arms and declare it fair. The kids would probably agree with this arrangement. The illusion of fairness works.

Is five marbles apiece actually fair?

Don’t you need to know how many marbles each kid already owns? What if one kid has a thousand and the other has none? The marginal utility of an extra marble is much higher for the marble-poor kid.

Doesn’t their different level of enthusiasm for marbles come into play? If you think about it, you’re trying to be fair with their happiness, not their marbles. What if one kid loves marbles five times more than the other? In that case, the fair thing to do is give most of the marbles to the kid who doesn’t enjoy them as much. He needs more marbles to obtain the same level of happiness as the marble lover gets with one. Of course that solution would cause one kid to melt down because it wouldn’t have the illusion of fairness.

Even the simplest example of fairness falls apart when you put it under scrutiny. Luckily, people are morons, so they imagine fairness where none exists. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I was thinking of fairness the other day when considering my next car purchase. I figure I need to do my part to conserve energy. I considered buying a fuel-efficient car that would give me no joy whatsoever. It’s the fair thing to do. We all need to pitch in.

Then I remembered I’ve never procreated. That’s a huge energy savings. When you create new humans, they start leaving the lights on, driving, eating, pooping, and doing all sorts of energy-inefficient things. By not creating any new humans, I’m saving a huge amount of energy!

I walk to work. That saves a lot of fuel too. If you consider my total energy drain on the planet, I could own a small fleet of gas-guzzlers and still be greener than 95% of the citizens of the United States. That seems fair to me.

If you were the judge in this decision, and considered all the facts, would you give me a Hummer?

Comments

[raul]

Forget the Hummer, adopt a child or at least sponsor one.

[Nick]

hummers are made by chevy, and chevy sucks ass.

get something nice like a lambo,viper,or ferrarri

the you'll be able to pick up chick and have kids(whick would not be environmetally friendly)

[Samar Singh]

The idea of Fairness is also governed by our other emotions/faculties. The kid with a thousand marbles would be happy with 5 more and in fact would prefer to have all 10 to further increase his collection. So Greed would play a part in deciding what is fair. If it did not, then the Body Snatchers (from 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers') would have nothing to do on Earth. :)

[Becca]

No. My reasoning has nothing to do with the topic, incidentally. Hummers are ugly and take up more space than any vehicle has the right to.

[Chrisgiraffe]

Fairness should be stricken from the vocabulary. Only an idiot could look at a situation and find fairness in it because fairness, as you point out, is much too complex for anyone to recognize much less create. I read one posting by an idiot who was yammering about the speed limit being "fairly agreed upon". Obviously that person isn't familiar with the concept of laws being put into place before you were born. Or the concept of most people vote for representatives but don't vote on actual laws. Or that most representatives are chosen based on how big their campaign is or how much they can smear their candidate's position- and such are the laws that created a speed limit written to conserve gas which few people obey or even remember why it was put into place.

That said, I don't suggest getting a hummer. First, they're too expensive to drive. Second, they're passe'. Third, if you're looking for the silliest big car around without buying an 18-wheeler, get one of those monster trucks and name it something like 'Cat-Bert's Revenge'. But I don't think that's what you're really trying to buy. I think you're trying to buy your way out of global warming. A clunker like a Prius isn't the answer. Ascetic as they are (so they must be good for the world), imagine the nightmare of disposing of all those batteries. Imagine the nightmare of finding replacement parts when they stop making them and replace them with the new and improved model. Imagine when we move to hydrogen cars and stop using gas altogether.

Necessity is the mother of invention and Prius's are simply getting in the way of our necessity to expend all oil reserves quickly. Only then will money be dedicated toward real alternative fuel resources.

That said, I'd get a BMW X-3. Kind of a comprimise. Sporty, SUV-ish but from an eco-friendly country. Not big enough to get dirty looks from the Prius crowd, not monastic enough to get dirty looks from hot chicks who like cars with more power than wind-up toys.

[hervor the howler]

sure get the hummer, but that doesn't solve your transportation issue..

[James Rose]

This is easy. Fairness is an equal, or an agreed upon unequal equation.

We have, leagally, agreed that we cannot drive over 55mph. However we have also, legally, agreeed that ambulances can drive faster than the posted speed limit.

See, equal or agreed upon unequal. Simple.

[Ben Fulton]

Get a fuel-efficient car that will give you joy to drive. Presumably you're geeky enough to have fun with all the techno-features of a Prius.

[Aaron Bickerton]

Your last line makes me feel uncomfortable.

perhaps you should try auto-fellatio

if i could, i would put extra emphasis on the word auto, because it has something to do with your topic and otherwise there'd be no segue to my mildly response

[DANEgerus]

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." -- Winston Churchill

Any equitable system will, through a combination of luck, ability, etc. follow the 80/20 rule and the resulting Poisson distribution will leave the marbles fairly distributed... unequally.

It is tyranny to play judge and force the distribution to be "fair" because, as you've illustrated, the most simple distribution throws the judge into a death-spiral as each increased increment of knowledge creates an exponential increase in the variables to be balanced.

[Julie D.]

It's not what you don't do, it's what you can do!

[Penina Rosenzweig]

I wouldn't GIVE you either one -- you can afford to buy your own ;-)

[Ashi]

ur new fan :P

[malignor]

I think you are wrong about fairness. It's not an illusion so much as a judgement call, based on "all else not being considered". In the case of the kids and marbles, fairness starts with no assumptions - you have 10 marbles and 2 kids, so you divide it in half. Only when more information gets included in considering the division can the numbers change.

So if you want to stack fairness, you simply include extra information which suggests you are more deserving. Other parties can always refute your information or include their own to put the bias in their own favor. Eventually, you could include the state of the entire universe if the means to record or calculate it all were available, and then fairness is truly objective and absolute.

But the point of fairness is perception.

Why is it when something is a matter of perception, everyone calls it "an illusion"? Uncross those wires and think again, please.

[bubba]

If you don't drive much, then it doesn't matter what you own.

A Hummer driven 1 mile is better than a Prius driven 50.

And, you help the planet by driving up the price of Hummers, and making it more expensive for wasteful people to purchase.

Or, were you talking about blowjobs?

[bubba]

If you don't drive much, then it doesn't matter what you own.

A Hummer driven 1 mile is better than a Prius driven 50.

And, you help the planet by driving up the price of Hummers, and making it more expensive for wasteful people to purchase.

Or, were you talking about blowjobs?

[Rich]

Fair - a transaction where both parties walk away believing they screwed the other guy.

[Chris]

In a similar vein, there is no such thing as altruism. People who do apparently altruistic things generally explain it by saying "I couldn't just walk by when I knew the guy was suffering"... ie the altruist was altruistic to make themselves feel better, or to avoid feeling bad, which is the same thing. Pure selfishness.

The deeper question is: why would the person have felt bad for allowing the suffering to continue? It's not their choice to feel bad about it... Free will, anyone?

[Mark]

"Fair" would be

"Do I need a 4x4?" If no, don't get it. Buying a car of a style you don't need has nothing to do with "fair". Extravagance or selfishness, yes, but not fairness.

If you buy a 4-seater comfy car for long distances but don't deliberately up your driving miles, your choice of car is completely fair. I.e you don't get such a nice car that you decide to drive when you would have cycled.

If you had 120 acres of rough ground around your house out in the middle of nowhere with a need to get to the shops which can snow up, then you have a good reason for a 4x4. Oddly, though, farmers (who could be said to need a 4x4) tend to buy a cheap third-hand banger and keep it running. Better tyres make it grippy enough and it's cheap enough that you don't risk anything expensive breaking.

[JST]

Sure, get the Hummer. The fact that you walk to work and (assumedly) do other things that are environmentally friendly means you're doing your part. Although to my (admittedly limited) understanding, all of the Hollywood stars are driving Priuses and things like that these days, so you may be reducing your cred in some circles;).

[TJ]

hey Scott,

Talking about Fairness, 4% Americans control 22% of World's wealth (thats before accounting for the Iraq oil).

Is that fair?

[anoop]

no hummer, but i would give you my GT40. i have the same theory on children - i object to them as they would be a net drain on my resources. though i can't say i articulated my thoughts around buying a car. do tell us what you end up buying. i'm betting a pleseant looking (resonably) fuel-efficient japanese machine. with an automatic transmission. :)

[Alsadius]

And this is exactly why we have capitalism - the economy provides as much utility as possible, and doles it out in proportion to the amount you provide for other people. Take our host for example - in exchange for the services of one underworked blogger, society gets tens of millions of morning chuckles every day. They're not worth much individually, but in the aggregate, they're worth enough to give a guy a presumably-good lifestyle. Compare that to a guy who works in a crappy comedy club - he provides better laughs, and he spends more time delivering it, but because it's delivered to a couple dozen patrons once, he gets twenty bucks and a pitcher of beer. It's not "fair", in some sense, but in both cases the reward is commesurate with the value society places on the work.

[DAN RATHER]

If you do not procreate you are robbing the universe of its designated planetary destroyers.

[Ben Hyrman]

What a long post to get to a bit of innuendo (in your endo).

I wouldn't; I don't swing that way.