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. 

https://bit.ly/2HMKlyF

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. 

Could universal basic sex be managed in such a way that it protected individual freedom and dignity?

Sex bots, anyone?  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

https://ti.me/2eMg09t

 

So if happiness is the big inequality, how do we fix it?

We’ll explore further in part 2.

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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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