Universal Basic Happiness, Part 1
Last Weekend, Robin Hanson stirred things up by inquiring why the people concerned about income inequality aren’t worried about other forms of inequality:
Those w/ less access to sex plausibly suffer similarly to those with low income, & might similarly hope to organize to lobby for redistribution along this axis. Strikingly, I see little overlap between those concerned about income & sex inequality.
Phil and Stephen discuss: If Universal Basic Income becomes a thing, will Universal Basic Sex be next?
It would be a difficult solution to implement. Some of the hysterical reactions have been that Robin is calling for rape and/or sexual slavery to cure the sex inequality. (Of course he isn’t calling for anything — just inquiring why different kinds of inequality are treated differently. In a fairly trollish way, yes, but then that’s Robin.)
(Stephen tells a funny story about Mike Nichols and Robert Redford. Suffice to say that Redford’s life has probably been pretty different from most guys’.)
Could universal basic sex be managed in such a way that it protected individual freedom and dignity?
Sex bots, anyone? (Katie Couric has been talking to them, apparently.) We will come back to sexbots in a later podcast.
Meanwhile, here’s a much bigger inequality: happiness.
Some people are a lot happier than others. Some just seem to have happy dispositions. Doesn’t that transcend most other inequalities? Think about it:
There are poor people who are happy.
There are rich people who are miserable.
They are people who have a lot of sex who hate their lives.
There are people who are completely celibate who love every minute of their lives.
Related: Why $50,000 May Be the (New) Happiness Tipping Point
So if happiness is the big inequality, how do we fix it?
We’ll explore further in part 2.
WT 433-746
Eternity Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
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