Comments on: The Las Vegas Paradox

By: Kenny

Kenny — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:33:14 +0000

I’m not sure. Decreasing marginal utility might justify redistribution, because the money is worth more to the person you’re giving it to than the person you’re taking it away from. As for the progressiveness, it’s not clear whether decreasing marginal utility justifies that. If the dollar is already worth less to you than the earlier ones, then why should you get less of it? Mightn’t one see that as adding insult to injury? (Of course, the only “injury” here is having so many dollars that additional ones aren’t worth that much to you.) But I guess the idea is that if we need to get $100,000,000 dollars for some government project, it’s better to take it from the people that won’t miss their dollars all that much?

Anyway, it’s two slightly different arguments. Decreasing marginal utility automatically makes equality valuable, and presumably derives (at least in part) from the badness of poverty.

By: K. C.

K. C. — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 03:45:18 +0000

Isn’t the decreasing marginal utility of money used to justify the progressive nature of the income tax structure, and not redistribution of wealth in general? The logic is that since each dollar is worth less to you, it is not so bad to take away a larger percentage, as your income is increased. The redistribution of wealth is justified on various grounds, like the value of equality, the badness of poverty, the government’s need to provide services. . .

By: Michael Greinecker

Michael Greinecker — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 07:20:30 +0000

I�m talking about the reasoning that says there is no cost to anyone but someone gets $3,000,000.

“For a variety of reasons, I’d rather suggest that in general it’s only a partial ordering, and that additivity doesn’t quite make sense.”

But than the justification of “that money (and basically any other good) has a generally diminishing marginal value. This is perhaps one of the biggest justification for redistributive taxation, in which we take a bunch of money unequally from people and give it to people in some much more even distribution, as with social security and some other government programs.”
breaks down.

By: Kenny

Kenny — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:20:09 +0000

Which logic are you talking about – the reasoning that says the gamble can be good, or the reasoning that says that a bunch of good things can add up to a bad one?

It’s true that utilitarianism (and decision theory) presuppose that utility is a real number, and therefore additive. For a variety of reasons, I’d rather suggest that in general it’s only a partial ordering, and that additivity doesn’t quite make sense. Of course, a wide range of circumstances can be modeled well with real values, but just not all.

By: Michael Greinecker

Michael Greinecker — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 04:18:21 +0000

That logic is incompatible with utilitarianism if utility functions are continuous. But if you have discontinuous utility functions, repeating the thing several times may suddenly lead to non-zero losses for the involved persons.

So the idea is incompatible with utilitarianism the way it is usually conceived of.

By: Jordan DeLange

Jordan DeLange — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:22:54 +0000

Alastair Norcross was a professor of mine who published a bullet-biting ethics paper where he advocated a form of consequentialism where it was justified to kill a person in order to relieve billions of people who had headaches. Seems like an analogous case to your Las Vegas paradox, although here its causing lots of harm to one to minimally help lots of others, rather than minimally harming lots to help a few.

That said, in this case I would still think the reason we would see overall negative utility in the large-scale case would be because of increased marginal utility for the people who lost a bunch and never won, as compared to the people who won more than once, right? Due to decreasing marginal utility, someone-winning-lots wouldn’t be more well off enough to offset the multiple people who would have lost and never won, I think.

By: Kenny

Kenny — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:29:28 +0000

Greg – I figured you were probably out of town at the time (either at the Eastern or with family) but next time I’ll certainly look you up.

By: Greg F-A

Greg F-A — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 15:41:13 +0000

Hi Kenny –

1. When I first moved to Vegas, I had my own kind of ‘Las Vegas Paradox,’ which was an instance of Moore’s paradox:

(LVP) I live in Vegas, but I don’t believe that I live in Vegas.

The manifest truth of this sentence for the first few weeks I was here convinced me, in a very vivid and concrete way, that Moore’s paradox is not really paradoxical.

2. Next time you’re in Vegas, you should give me a call if you want to meet up.

By: mike love

mike love — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:17:27 +0000

http://youtube.com/?v=Ju_iQucOrH4 you guys should redo mathporn with processing, no?