Chelsea Clinton Makes $900,000 for Doing Almost Nothing

[K. A. Pital]

Well, I generally favor those who at least attempt to fix the issue as opposed to those that codify it as the norm. In my view inheritance is the no-strings rewarding of those that did nothing to deserve it. I can understand the logic behind it, just as I understand the evolutionary heritage of violence, but it does not mean I am fond of the situation.

I am primarily a consequentionalist utilitarian, and I strongly favor the zero start concept, I believe it (and common responsibility, with maybe common upbringing and education) are concepts for a better society.

The bureucrat getting a reward for competence is understandable; it being passed to his undeserving offspring is not.

[Simon_Jester]

One concern is that if the basic makeup of your society is in conflict with such a powerful Darwin-implanted drive as "secure the well-being of my children," this will create a great deal of tension and discord which could easily cause the society to break down under stress.

Also, if your rewards apply only to the individual and cannot be effectually passed on to their children in any way, your rewards will be most strongly desired by the people who are the most greedy, selfish, and indifferent to the well-being of their own children. Those who are most motivated by altruism toward others in their own lives will feel the least interest in those rewards.

Theoretically the value of such rewards will increase again in the eyes of people whose altruism is very abstract and oriented towards everyone around them without exception... but such people are rare.

[K. A. Pital]

One concern is that if the basic makeup of your society is in conflict with such a powerful Darwin-implanted drive as "secure the well-being of my children," this will create a great deal of tension and discord which could easily cause the society to break down under stress.

Also, if your rewards apply only to the individual and cannot be effectually passed on to their children in any way, your rewards will be most strongly desired by the people who are the most greedy, selfish, and indifferent to the well-being of their own children. Those who are most motivated by altruism toward others in their own lives will feel the least interest in those rewards.

Theoretically the value of such rewards will increase again in the eyes of people whose altruism is very abstract and oriented towards everyone around them without exception... but such people are rare.

Are you seriously saying the desire to give your child a greater share of the pie has anything to do with altruism? Note that the biggest altruists are found among monastic orders, which are extremely ascetic. These people easily risk their lives in African hellholes, often asking nothing in return.

The hereditary elite do not strike me as altruistic at all. They are egoistic, parasitic, shortsighted and sometimes plain evil.

Also, rewards for the next generation exist, but they apply to everyone. Make society better and your offspring will survive and live a better life. A harsh zero start rule will make this more important to improve the whole system.

Inheriting wealth and power will not create an incentive to improve lives of all; it will create the incentive to hide in a place of luxury to live a life of luxury, as evidenced by the epitome, aristocratic castles towering over drab lands where peasants toll or, more recently, closed-off luxury enclaves and compounds for the oligarchy.

[Simon_Jester]

Are you seriously saying the desire to give your child a greater share of the pie has anything to do with altruism? Note that the biggest altruists are found among monastic orders, which are extremely ascetic. These people easily risk their lives in African hellholes, often asking nothing in return.

Let me expand on this.

There are three general classes of people: those who live only for themselves, those who are strongly altruistic towards all humans, and those who fall in between.

The in-betweeners make up most of the human population- the center of the bell curve. They are often very caring and giving toward the people who are actually part of their own personal lives, but may be frighteningly indifferent to what happens to people outside their own immediate circle.

A reward that cannot be passed on to your loved ones will motivate those who live only for themselves, but it will be less effective at motivating the in-betweeners. More precisely, if you outlaw passing rewards on to your children, the in-betweeners will feel less motivated to participate in your social system. They may even resist being incorporated into it. They will constantly seek out ways to subvert it for the sake of their children and loved ones.

The long term result of this is the creation of a parallel 'black' economy and political structure in which the unwritten rules and the written rules don't actually align with each other... which is pretty much what happened in the Soviet Union as far as I can tell.
________________________________________

If you wish to design a society that works for humans, you have to find some way to accomodate basic human drives. You can't ignore our evolved impulse to support our children any more than you can ignore our evolved need for Vitamin C.

Personally, I have always favored methodical state programs to protect and aid the children whose parents cannot do it for themselves, by providing them with excellent education and a reasonable amount of starting money. This is well within the resources of a developed society, and unlike your idea it does not directly tread upon the basic impulses of 90% of the human race and dare them to be upset about it.

Also, rewards for the next generation exist, but they apply to everyone. Make society better and your offspring will survive and live a better life. A harsh zero start rule will make this more important to improve the whole system.

Ever heard of diffusion of responsibility?

It presents a serious problem for your strategy, because 100 million people who all feel a dilute responsibility for the good of the Nation will not labor as hard as 100 million people who all feel an intense personal responsibility because they have something to protect.

Inheriting wealth and power will not create an incentive to improve lives of all; it will create the incentive to hide in a place of luxury to live a life of luxury, as evidenced by the epitome, aristocratic castles towering over drab lands where peasants toll or, more recently, closed-off luxury enclaves and compounds for the oligarchy.

I have no fundamental objection to the idea of preventing these enclaves of power and luxury from being formed.

My point applies to the levels of personal resources and success that are 'normal,' i.e. per capita wealth broadly in line with the national average, as in the middle class of a developed nation. Within that band, being able to use one's resources to give one's children an advantage is a powerful motivator. While laboring for the abstract good of all humans... often is not.

[K. A. Pital]

Personally, I have always favored methodical state programs to protect and aid the children whose parents cannot do it for themselves, by providing them with excellent education and a reasonable amount of starting money.

Personally, I favored and still favor a clean start system since I went through one myself. You pass exams using your intellect alone; the state funds everyone's education, including tertiary education, equally. This is compensated by the strictness of university entrance exams. The smart win. The dumb lose. End of story.

If you wish to design a society that works for humans, you have to find some way to accomodate basic human drives.

Humans are and will be altered by the artificial selection process that the society itself runs; we are a long way off from the 'basic human drives' of the prehistoric humans.

The long term result of this is the creation of a parallel 'black' economy and political structure in which the unwritten rules and the written rules don't actually align with each other... which is pretty much what happened in the Soviet Union as far as I can tell.

Even so, the chance to rise up through your intellect unhindered by the amount of resources you have or don't have, is worth it. Even if eventually it fails, it opened a window of opportunity for many millions of people.

I have no fundamental objection to the idea of preventing these enclaves of power and luxury from being formed.

There is no real way to prevent them from being formed under the private property system, however.

[AniThyng]

Personally, I favored and still favor a clean start system since I went through one myself. You pass exams using your intellect alone; the state funds everyone's education, including tertiary education, equally. This is compensated by the strictness of university entrance exams. The smart win. The dumb lose. End of story.

How convenient for you, since I presume you are "smart", but this seems to replace one problem with another.

[Welf]

How about a system of progressive inheritance tax? Neither extreme sounds like a good system.

[K. A. Pital]

Personally, I favored and still favor a clean start system since I went through one myself. You pass exams using your intellect alone; the state funds everyone's education, including tertiary education, equally. This is compensated by the strictness of university entrance exams. The smart win. The dumb lose. End of story.

How convenient for you, since I presume you are "smart", but this seems to replace one problem with another.

No, it does not. It removes a problem. Intellect is the resource of merit in this case. You don't want a dumb person building your bridges, designing your hospitals and the like. Why? Because he is in the job only due to the money of his parents. So when the test comes, a bridge built by an incompetent who only moved up using parents' pockets will fall and kill people. A house will collapse and kill people. And so on.

Moving incompetents up the ladder just because their parents are rich does not solve any problems at all (except 'I'm a dumb fucktard but my daddy can pay so I'm occupying a position which in any other case I wouldn't even come close to' - but have fun trying to find people who'd emphatize with that!). It is itself the problem.

Moreover, there is no problem in intellectually weak people failing university exams and going to receive technical education - in industrialized nations technical jobs do pay well. That is normal. No amount of money should be ever able to compensate a lack of intellect which is critical to do a certain job or even science.

I am standing on the position of meritocracy, if that word could be applied here. I see no reason to deviate from this position, other than for the sake of being more acceptable to the common man. But my goal is not downgrading my ideas so they could be 'acceptable' to the everyman.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally, I have always favored methodical state programs to protect and aid the children whose parents cannot do it for themselves, by providing them with excellent education and a reasonable amount of starting money.

Personally, I favored and still favor a clean start system since I went through one myself. You pass exams using your intellect alone; the state funds everyone's education, including tertiary education, equally. This is compensated by the strictness of university entrance exams. The smart win. The dumb lose. End of story.

The problem is that there is no quality of "smart" or "dumb" that can be measured separately from "how well prepared are you for this task?" People who are not especially intelligent but have great experience and training in a specialized area (such as, say, carpentry) will appear far 'smarter' at tasks related to the area than a person of high native intelligence but inferior preparation.

Now, if you were to take everyone's children away from them in infancy and raise them in creches under some hypothetical, robotically uniform system, you could at least do a sort of controlled experiment: "is this child inherently smarter than that child?" Except in that case you may not be measuring intelligence, you're measuring which children are least dysfunctional when taken away from their parents and raised in a creche by robots.

The human mind is too complex, and the human personality far too complex, for us to objectively reduce everything relevant about it to a single performance metric such as "smarter" or "stupider." I question whether it's even possible, or desirable, to try and test for whether children are "the smartest" in a way that removes all question of how well prepared they are.

Thing is, if they're allowed to prepare for the tests, and they have families, their families will predictably do all they are able in order to prepare for those tests.

If you wish to design a society that works for humans, you have to find some way to accomodate basic human drives.

Humans are and will be altered by the artificial selection process that the society itself runs; we are a long way off from the 'basic human drives' of the prehistoric humans.

For a selection process (natural or otherwise) to alter humans (or any other animal) it has to kill them. Or at least forcibly prevent them from breeding. Is that what you have in mind?

More seriously, are we really that far off from the basic human drives of prehistoric humanity? Our social group size seems to naturally cap out at the maximum size of a hunter-gatherer band, invariably requiring rigid hierarchical order to organize more humans than that in a group... and we chafe under such hierarchies in a way that makes it obvious we are not naturally adapted to them.

We still routinely see "primitive" behaviors such as males displaying their attractiveness to females by engaging in risky behavior. Or violence within social groups and (on massive, staggering scale) between social groups. Or heedless destruction of our environment, which is a practice that all species tend to engage in when they reach a place where opportunity allows them to overuse their resources... and that our intelligence does not make us immune to.

I would argue that we are still very much motivated by the same basic instincts our ancestors of twenty thousand years ago were. And that no one has ever enjoyed any profound, long term success in suppressing these instincts. If they managed it even locally over short spans of time and space, it was usually at considerable cost.

We are who we are. If we are not who you dream of us being, then you may need to adjust your expectations.

The long term result of this is the creation of a parallel 'black' economy and political structure in which the unwritten rules and the written rules don't actually align with each other... which is pretty much what happened in the Soviet Union as far as I can tell.

Even so, the chance to rise up through your intellect unhindered by the amount of resources you have or don't have, is worth it. Even if eventually it fails, it opened a window of opportunity for many millions of people.

So your response to "the system you propose needs modification if it's going to work for any real length of time" is "who cares if it works for any real length of time?"

Just trying to make sure I understand you.

I have no fundamental objection to the idea of preventing these enclaves of power and luxury from being formed.

There is no real way to prevent them from being formed under the private property system, however.

It's called a graduated income tax, Stas, and while it was in place to sufficient degree, it worked.

[K. A. Pital]

The problem is that there is no quality of "smart" or "dumb" that can be measured separately from "how well prepared are you for this task?" People who are not especially intelligent but have great experience and training in a specialized area (such as, say, carpentry) will appear far 'smarter' at tasks related to the area than a person of high native intelligence but inferior preparation.

True. But since child labour is prohibited, it is unlikely children would suffer from a huge experience gap. Some factors cannot be eliminated (such as, say, parents relaying some of their experience and/or knowledge to the child), but frankly, I never said my goal is a system where people are raised in a uniform environment (although one must say that it is not clear which is 'more natural': common parenting by the tribe was a defining feature for millions of years, and one may argue that the current exclusion system is, in fact, unnatural).

The human mind is too complex, and the human personality far too complex, for us to objectively reduce everything relevant about it to a single performance metric such as "smarter" or "stupider." I question whether it's even possible, or desirable, to try and test for whether children are "the smartest" in a way that removes all question of how well prepared they are.

Well, the 'smart' metric cannot be well-defined as it includes both intellect, reaction capacity, experience and effort spent on task preparation. But still, these are all objectively important for doing the job in the future. Wealth just moves up dumb fucktards and that's it.

Thing is, if they're allowed to prepare for the tests, and they have families, their families will predictably do all they are able in order to prepare for those tests.

Okay. Who am I to disallow their family, or extended family, to help them pass the test? But if they prepare them by making them more knowledgeable or experienced, that actually improves the quality of the human. If they prepare them by cashing out, that does not improve the human. It does nothing to the human in question.

Two examples. Grandfather is a nuclear physics specialist. He prepares grandson for university exams, and the grandson passes. One can say that the grandson became more experienced and more knowledgeable, which is very important for anyone who would work as an engineer in the future. And another example: grandfather is rich and he buys the grandson his education, which the latter barely passes. Is the second situation desireable? No. The first one, one may say, actually is desireable for society.

For a selection process (natural or otherwise) to alter humans (or any other animal) it has to kill them. Or at least forcibly prevent them from breeding. Is that what you have in mind?

No. Some changes occur even if people die routinely without forced breeding prevention or killing. Say, the consumption of alcohol in a group leads to the creation of genetic tolerance. It is very well known.

And that no one has ever enjoyed any profound, long term success in suppressing these instincts. If they managed it even locally over short spans of time and space, it was usually at considerable cost.

Cannibalism and slavery were also normal behaviours. For millions of years. You seem to think that common parenting is a dangerous idea not natural for humans, for example, whereas it was also present for many millenia, but what about the former?

We are who we are. If we are not who you dream of us being, then you may need to adjust your expectations.

Or maybe not, see above. I am sure that the line 'if we are not who you dream of us being' was often uttered in defence of every hideous thing that ever existed on this planet.

So your response to "the system you propose needs modification if it's going to work for any real length of time" is "who cares if it works for any real length of time?" Just trying to make sure I understand you.

No. I say that sometimes social change is irreversible. No one can take one's education away once a person acquired it. Emancipated slaves cannot be enslaved again, or at least it will be very hard. So even if something does not last, its effects will last.

It's called a graduated income tax, Stas, and while it was in place to sufficient degree, it worked.

Really? So cities aren't divided into closed compounds and neighbourhoods for the ultra-rich, middle-ground 'sleeping quarters' and ghettoes... due to the graduated income tax? Well, thanks for enlightening me, to me it does not look that way.

[AniThyng]

Now my question is - is it not so that wealth also buys better preperation, better access to subsidiary learning materials and tutors etc, while the children of the less fortunate will have to make do with what they get in the baseline. It's not just about buying your way past an exam - wealth also gives people a better leg to stand on from the get go, so the system would still need a way to balance that as well, otherwise the universities would be dominated by the most determined and smart of the poor, and the above average of the middle classes, and the average of the wealthy. And the average or worse of the poor will still be left behind.

[K. A. Pital]

Now my question is - is it not so that wealth also buys better preperation, better access to subsidiary learning materials and tutors etc, while the children of the less fortunate will have to make do with what they get in the baseline. It's not just about buying your way past an exam - wealth also gives people a better leg to stand on from the get go, so the system would still need a way to balance that as well, otherwise the universities would be dominated by the most determined and smart of the poor, and the above average of the middle classes, and the average of the wealthy. And the average or worse of the poor will still be left behind.

Wealth can buy better preparation - but only if that is allowed. In where I come from, students did not have to pay anything for textbooks: they were provided. Additional classes - say, facultative math, etc. - were open to everyone willing, and not anyone paying. I proposed to at least flatten the field somewhat - and only as an observation on possibility, by the way. You point out that it can never be truly flattened and some irregularities due to wealth will persis, but does this mean nothing should be done?

Would you, as a poor person, want the only advantage of the wealthy be his better access to tutors or subsidiary learning, or would you want his advantage to be actually directly buying a place in the class? I'd choose the former. With the latter the battle just can't be won, since the rich guy already has a place even if his grades are sub-par; with the former the rich guy actually has to get better grades, which at the very least means he gets the knowledge hammered into his head by tutors.

[Ralin]

Cannibalism and slavery were also normal behaviours. For millions of years.

Source? Kinda hard to have slavery as a hunter-gatherer, and I'm pretty sure we haven't had agriculture for that long. Not nearly.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, I have overshot with slavery, it being a product of the Neolithic Revolution and not present in hunter-gatherer tribes (but still, that's many thousands of years). As for prehistoric cannibalism, I would think it is pretty much established.

[Simon_Jester]

Since this is a tangent I have moved it so it would not weaken the ending part of my main argument...

It's called a graduated income tax, Stas, and while it was in place to sufficient degree, it worked.

Really? So cities aren't divided into closed compounds and neighbourhoods for the ultra-rich, middle-ground 'sleeping quarters' and ghettoes... due to the graduated income tax? Well, thanks for enlightening me, to me it does not look that way.

The graduated income tax ceased to work because it became too close to a 'flat tax.' The flat tax is worse than useless as a means of restraining the rich and protecting the middle and the poor. The progressive graduated income tax can have this effect, and has the huge advantage that it can be calibrated- which other means of limiting the rich, such as shooting them or taking all their property, do not.

One of the reasons that the capitalist West managed to win the Cold War is that, largely against their will, the capitalists were compelled by circumstance to accept social democracy as a cultural framework. Social democracy has the effect of securing most of what the majority of people would ever actually want and removing most of their reasons to have any problem with capitalism... as long as it remains in effect.

Of course, the catch is that in this case it required an outside threat to keep the capitalist system in a state of social democracy. The defeat of that threat caused things to revert to an earlier and darker era in labor relations and economic status. But the system did work, and in my honest opinion worked better than the fully controlled command economies and propertyless utopias it was competing against.

The problem is that there is no quality of "smart" or "dumb" that can be measured separately from "how well prepared are you for this task?" People who are not especially intelligent but have great experience and training in a specialized area (such as, say, carpentry) will appear far 'smarter' at tasks related to the area than a person of high native intelligence but inferior preparation.

True. But since child labour is prohibited, it is unlikely children would suffer from a huge experience gap. Some factors cannot be eliminated (such as, say, parents relaying some of their experience and/or knowledge to the child), but frankly, I never said my goal is a system where people are raised in a uniform environment (although one must say that it is not clear which is 'more natural': common parenting by the tribe was a defining feature for millions of years, and one may argue that the current exclusion system is, in fact, unnatural).

Communal parenting is quite natural, what's problematic is trying to enforce a situation where nobody can gain meaningful situational advantages over anyone else. I suspect you'd have to tip too far over towards the Harrison Bergeron end of the scale to accomplish that.

Well, the 'smart' metric cannot be well-defined as it includes both intellect, reaction capacity, experience and effort spent on task preparation. But still, these are all objectively important for doing the job in the future. Wealth just moves up dumb fucktards and that's it.

It is not that simple, because wealth (or, more accurately, broad access to educational resources such as tutors) can help people develop their functional ability to use all those things. In particular,

Thing is, if they're allowed to prepare for the tests, and they have families, their families will predictably do all they are able in order to prepare for those tests.

Okay. Who am I to disallow their family, or extended family, to help them pass the test? But if they prepare them by making them more knowledgeable or experienced, that actually improves the quality of the human. If they prepare them by cashing out, that does not improve the human. It does nothing to the human in question.

Two examples. Grandfather is a nuclear physics specialist. He prepares grandson for university exams, and the grandson passes. One can say that the grandson became more experienced and more knowledgeable, which is very important for anyone who would work as an engineer in the future. And another example: grandfather is rich and he buys the grandson his education, which the latter barely passes. Is the second situation desireable? No. The first one, one may say, actually is desireable for society.

The first situation has a lot more to do with the relationship between socioeconomic status and educational outcome than the first does.

There is a measurable correlation between being in the upper middle class in a country like the US and doing better on objective metrics of academic performance. Children brought up in the petit-bourgeois world have more opportunities to learn, and have their own special talents cultivated more effectually, than children brought up in the semi-permanent underclass.

The only class of people who present a problem because their education was 'bought' without improving their 'quality' are at the very richest end of the scale. Breaking that power structure has little to do with changing the overall nature of the educational system for the 95% of humanity that isn't part of the oligarchy.

For a selection process (natural or otherwise) to alter humans (or any other animal) it has to kill them. Or at least forcibly prevent them from breeding. Is that what you have in mind?

No. Some changes occur even if people die routinely without forced breeding prevention or killing. Say, the consumption of alcohol in a group leads to the creation of genetic tolerance. It is very well known.

Yes- because the people who lack such tolerance die. Over a period of many generations, only those who have genes for tolerance survive. Natural selection is still killing them. Note that the verb "to kill," when applies to a natural process, doesn't imply you're planning to have anyone dragged out and shot.

The point remains, though, that if a quality was bred into humanity by evolution, getting rid of it will require a lot of death. In this case, I think such death is so staggeringly unnecessary that it's pointless to consider it- so, realistically, we will not and should not be thinking in terms of somehow 'overcoming' the human impulse to provide for one's own children.

Channelize it, yes, use it for constructive ends, yes. Remove? No. Thus, the idea of taking communal childrearing which works in a tribal band and scaling it up to an entire nation is a joke. Humans don't think that way.

If you want a society capable of making good use of the tools of industry, you need that society to be capable of larger-scale organization. Which means it cannot be clannish, cannot be based on small tribalist groups. And it's in small tribal groups (where everyone is related and knew each other from birth) that rearing children in common becomes viable.

And that no one has ever enjoyed any profound, long term success in suppressing these instincts. If they managed it even locally over short spans of time and space, it was usually at considerable cost.

Cannibalism and slavery were also normal behaviours. For millions of years. You seem to think that common parenting is a dangerous idea not natural for humans, for example, whereas it was also present for many millenia, but what about the former?

There is little evidence of cannibalism being universal to humans the way caring for one's offspring is. Many ancestral human groups either did not practice it, or practiced it so rarely that it can hardly be said to be 'normal.' Many did thus practice it, of course- my point is simply that we can't say it's universal or instinctive for us to desire to eat each other.

There is (as discussed) NO evidence of slavery being normal human behavior in the ancestral environment; slavery only works in hierarchical societies that can afford to support slavemasters in idleness, and organized cadres of overseers.

Common parenting, now, that IS a normal thing for humans... in the context of small tribal societies. Societies which are limited to a size of about 50-150 people, and which are brutally, intensely xenophobic and untrusting of all outsiders.

...

So here is a point I'd like to make, as I try to loop back to something I imagine is comfortably within your frame of reference and on which you might have interesting ideas to express... I would argue natural human condition is in fact, more or less, the "primitive communism" of Marx. But with the caveat that this 'primitive communism' includes a number of features like xenophobia and regular feuds between small communal tribes.

Slavery is not a part of that at all; it doesn't fit into that socioeconomic framework.

Cannibalism may or may not be but is at most a secondary expression of the fundamental desire to, well, not starve to death. Starving men sometimes resort to cannibalism; remove the starvation and you nearly always remove the cannibalism.

But devoting all one's resources to childrearing, and devoting more resources should one be lucky enough to have them? That is another matter. That is something you will always see people doing.

So removing the first and second traits from human behavior is easy- they are NOT fundamental in the sense that, say, language or the gag reflex is. Cannibalism happens when you place humans in a condition where protein is extremely rare and hunger is widespread. Slavery happens when you create social conditions in which it is possible for wealthy oligarchs of some kind to own other humans without being shot or beheaded for doing so. Change the conditions and you change the behavior; the trait no longer expresses itself.

But the third thing, the childrearing, is different- try to suppress it and it will re-express itself in different ways, as we observe when children growing up in a condition of linguistic chaos (usually a byproduct of imperialism) create a fully functional 'creole' language and start using it, despite no one making any organized attempt to impose order on the chaos.

So if you want to suppress it you'll fail, and in the process undermine the stability of the social order you sought to create.

We are who we are. If we are not who you dream of us being, then you may need to adjust your expectations.

Or maybe not, see above. I am sure that the line 'if we are not who you dream of us being' was often uttered in defence of every hideous thing that ever existed on this planet.

It was probably also uttered in an attempt to dissuade the Year Zero purges in Cambodia, so I don't think that concerns me very much.

If you're going to pull the "well, Hitler was a vegetarian, so vegetarianism is crap" argument on me, all you're going to do is lose my respect.

This is a very serious argument I am presenting: that it is possible to distinguish between human behaviors that are MERELY OLD, as in they have been practiced for a long time, and behaviors that are FUNDAMENTAL, as in they are bred into us by evolution. If a behavior is merely old, it can be changed and there will be little or no price to pay for changing it.

Thus slavery, which only emerged as a consequence of biologically identical humans going from living in small tribes to large Neolithic city-states, can be easily abolished and it causes no real problem. Asserting that the New Soviet Man has no need for slavery is perfectly believable. Even ignoring the moral issues and that slavery is simply and profoundly wrong, the New Soviet Man has no need for anything slavery could possibly accomplish. Just as he has no need to start fires by banging two rocks together- a better way has been found to do everything that banging rocks could possibly accomplish.

But you cannot abolish a behavior like sleep without consequences, to pick something from the opposite extreme- the desire for sleep is in fact a physiological need. Asserting that the New Soviet Man has advanced beyond the need for sleep turns the very notion of New Soviet Man into a farce, unless of course you are planning some very serious genetic tinkering.

[Note that to a biologist, both 'sleep' and 'slavery' can be described as behaviors of the human animal.]

'Childrearing' may not be as profound a physical need of humans as 'sleep,' so there is somewhat more flexibility. But that does not translate into infinite flexibility. So asserting that in a truly enlightened society, parents will not desire to raise their own personal children as best they personally can and with all the resources at their disposal... to me, it is not believable. Unless, again, you are planning some very serious genetic tinkering and/or to kill everyone in the world who exhibits strong parental instincts.

[K. A. Pital]

Writing from tablets makes it hard to use quotes, so I'll answer concisely for now.

First of all, humans are a predatory species with no reservations to kill each other; as evidenced by nature, the intraspecies survival struggle is often even more intense than outside competition. And yet, we punish murder. What is evolutionary hard-wired can and most likely is altered even as we speak. Natural deaths are part of the process. I see no reason why murder, in particular, is not a hardwired behaviour but child-claiming is.

With common parenting it is very hard to give someone an edge using resources accumulated via private property. You yourself admit that this was the natural order (quite possibly it was the one and only order, stretching back far into the paleolithic). This, however, does not mean paleolithic people did not care for the survival of offspring.

You are confusing the primary evolutionary imperative (enable survival and successful mating of your offspring) with the same imperative acting inside the private property system. If survival and mating are not depending on property, there is no evolutionary drive involved in accumulating it. If propertied classes face discrimination, they will shed property in an attempt to give their offspring better chances at survival and mating. If buying your way up is a social stigma, then successful mating will be impossible for such people, and the very hardwired instincts you allude to will channel human energy towards finding other ways up.

At no point I am saying that anyone unwilling to seriously improve humanity is a Hitler or something. That is simply not true.

You combine parental instincts with private property, but truth is the extremely strong parental instincts of the prehistoric man came to support common parenting rather than oppose it. And likewise, if it is seen by humans that common parenting produces better future for the child, simply because one human can never amass as much resources as society itself.

You claim that property can help people to get extra knowledge via paid tutoring; I see no reason for this to hold true anywhere except the private property based education. Tutoring can be distributed based on merit; those with good grades are allowed to take more facultatives and extra classes, while those who fail or do poorly, cannot. That can work quite well.

Besides, if parents had such a strong property instinct as you say they do, the nationstates would have hard days manning the army. But generally they did not, until the very recent days. It has little to do with instinct and more with a conscious humanism-oriented policy.

I am not suggesting silly things like people not sleeping, but rather conditions in which the human instincts can still work towards success and reproduction; meanwhile, the official instituitions of the industrial countries and the Church lead a battle to criminalize polygamy (an evolutionary successful mechanism), and of course they fail, but you seem to think that their policy is within the normal, as neither has collapsed, whereas my ideas are outside normal and will not function in a human society at all.

Do tell me, why?

[AniThyng]

You claim that property can help people to get extra knowledge via paid tutoring; I see no reason for this to hold true anywhere except the private property based education. Tutoring can be distributed based on merit; those with good grades are allowed to take more facultatives and extra classes, while those who fail or do poorly, cannot. That can work quite well.

I think the problem here is that the % of people that can buy their way to success in education while being utterly incapable is insignificant next to the fact that the children of middle class families will on average outperform the children of lower class families even if the education provided by the state was equal in all respects, and making the system based purely on objective technical merit will only worsen the gap - this is the entire reasoning behind why affirmative action for minorities exists in academia.

Eliminating easy ways out through buying yourself out is something we can all agree is wrong, but what I find objectionable to is the immediate emphasis then on "only merit and smarts will get you through", which while actually quite pragmatic and to be honest, probably for the best since no one wants a borderline failure building bridges or doing brain surgery, still does seem to not really solve the problem for poor people who simply lack the ability or the means due to a hard upbringing to go any further (counterpoint: instead of being cast out of university and told to go try to make a living as a failure, they should be immediately reallocated to a vocational school etc)

Actually I think you'll find that on average this will give everyone a theoratical equal opportunity, but you'll still find on average that the rich/privileged get the better out of the deal. Though after writing this out it seems that pretty much the poor get a raw deal either way, but at least in a pure meritocracy, those can can hack it would get their success and climb out to the middle class to continue the cycle, while those that can't still can't.

I guess the thing is it will always suck for <somebody>.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I don't have a bone in this Simon-Stas argument. I am only stepping in because evolution/selective processes have been brought up, and I feel the need to clarify on those points specifically. I don't intend this as an attempted rebuttal of Stas' main argument, only as a commentary on the evolutionary aspect.

First of all, humans are a predatory species with no reservations to kill each other; as evidenced by nature, the intraspecies survival struggle is often even more intense than outside competition. And yet, we punish murder. What is evolutionary hard-wired can and most likely is altered even as we speak. Natural deaths are part of the process. I see no reason why murder, in particular, is not a hardwired behaviour but child-claiming is.

I don't think this is quite accurate, from an evolutionary perspective. As we see with modern primates, it is very rare for a member of a family group to kill anyone else within that family group. While sometimes a male may die while fighting for alpha-status, that is comparatively uncommon. Killing insofar as it happens is BETWEEN family groups. The modern equivalency isn't murder, per se, it's more akin to what we could call warfare. There is no evolutionary imperative to murder that society has "unwired" from our brains. Our social attitudes towards killing are actually almost exactly in line with what our Paleolithic ancestors probably were; it is accepted as a means of protecting a social group from perceived external threats, but it is not accepted within a social group. The only difference is that what "social group" means has been reparamaterized from family groups/tribes to national identities.

If survival and mating are not depending on property, there is no evolutionary drive involved in accumulating it.

I am not going to argue that there IS an evolutionary drive towards accumulating property, but it isn't quite accurate to say that if it isn't directly dependent on survival and mating that there definitively is not one. The old Darwinian idea that survival/mating are the only driving factors in selective processes has been shown not to hold in a general sense. That is, there are numerous driving factors for selection that may not depend directly on survival and mating. That said, I don't actually think that property IS one, mind you, but rather that you can't discount it out of hand by simply noting that it isn't correlated with mating. Modern evolutionary theory doesn't make that prediction.

You combine parental instincts with private property, but truth is the extremely strong parental instincts of the prehistoric man came to support common parenting rather than oppose it. And likewise, if it is seen by humans that common parenting produces better future for the child, simply because one human can never amass as much resources as society itself.

On the other hand, prehistoric humans would have lived in relatively small social groups where most people in that group were related. At the very least, everyone in the group knew everyone else, and had for most or all of their lives. That is, common parenting from a prehistoric perspective is more likely having your sister babysit your kids while you're at work or something. We are talking about, maybe, a dozen children being watched by a half-dozen adults, or numbers somewhere in that range, where those adults have a relationship with those children already. I don't think it is strictly comparable to some industrial-scale common parenting where the care of kids is being relegated to strangers, or to an abstract institution.

meanwhile, the official instituitions of the industrial countries and the Church lead a battle to criminalize polygamy (an evolutionary successful mechanism),

There is actually quite a debate among scientists about whether humans are "naturally" polygamous or monogamous. Here is an interesting article on the subject. I'm not disagreeing with your point, mind you, this is just a minor FYI situation. What some people have taken to calling our situation is "polygynous monogamy", where males enter into one-on-one relationships with a female but then "cheat" around with other women without developing long-term relationships; similar behavior has also been observed, interestingly, in species like swans, which are classically considered to mate for life.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't think this is quite accurate, from an evolutionary perspective. As we see with modern primates, it is very rare for a member of a family group to kill anyone else within that family group. While sometimes a male may die while fighting for alpha-status, that is comparatively uncommon. Killing insofar as it happens is BETWEEN family groups. The modern equivalency isn't murder, per se, it's more akin to what we could call warfare. There is no evolutionary imperative to murder that society has "unwired" from our brains. Our social attitudes towards killing are actually almost exactly in line with what our Paleolithic ancestors probably were; it is accepted as a means of protecting a social group from perceived external threats, but it is not accepted within a social group. The only difference is that what "social group" means has been reparamaterized from family groups/tribes to national identities.

I will note that Simon argues exactly against the possibility of such reparametrization. Nations are millions or even billions of humans; that exceeds the Dunbar limit by such a huge amount it cannot feasibly be described as evolutionary hardwiring. You seem to say that humans managed to change the 'protect family, kill others' program into 'don't kill millions of strangers around; only kill when leaders command you to', in the process forcing people to relate to others on a scale way above the Dunbar number. I suggested that humans might collectively install a strict meritocracy and stop thinking about making conditions good for immediate family members and think about making them better for the entire social group. How is that different from what we did to stop random killings and monopolize violence in the hands of a select few to oversee an immense construct of the nation-state?

[Channel72]

The graduated income tax ceased to work because it became too close to a 'flat tax.' The flat tax is worse than useless as a means of restraining the rich and protecting the middle and the poor. The progressive graduated income tax can have this effect, and has the huge advantage that it can be calibrated- which other means of limiting the rich, such as shooting them or taking all their property, do not.

One of the reasons that the capitalist West managed to win the Cold War is that, largely against their will, the capitalists were compelled by circumstance to accept social democracy as a cultural framework. Social democracy has the effect of securing most of what the majority of people would ever actually want and removing most of their reasons to have any problem with capitalism... as long as it remains in effect.

Of course, the catch is that in this case it required an outside threat to keep the capitalist system in a state of social democracy. The defeat of that threat caused things to revert to an earlier and darker era in labor relations and economic status. But the system did work, and in my honest opinion worked better than the fully controlled command economies and propertyless utopias it was competing against.

I'm fascinated by this argument, and I'd like you to expand on it a bit. You think the Cold War indirectly supported the welfare state and prevented capitalist excess? That's an interesting argument, and at least throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the rich/poor divide was much less absurd than it is today due to a graduated income tax.

Although, the voting public overwhelmingly loved Reagan, whose anti-Soviet rhetoric is legendary, and who constantly mocked the welfare state and other tenets of Social Democracy. He starting pushing the United States towards more radical capitalism during the Gorbachev era, before the USSR was out of the picture, and the public loved him for it.

[Simon_Jester]

Well Stas, I think you're oversimplifying and thus underestimating the 'basic drives' that I'm talking about.

Take the "and yet, we punish murder" argument. I would argue that it is instinctive in us to direct violence toward outsiders who do not belong to 'our' group, but non-instinctive for us to direct it against people inside our group. At least, outside of a few basic behaviors that we share with animals, such as violent jealousy in the face of marital infidelity, or bullying among adolescent males. There is little sign that we're biologically hardwired to kill those we are close to, discounting people with serious mental health disorders.

The catch is, of course, that drive to kill and eliminate the "other," the person not of our tribe. That may be what you're talking about. But we don't block that drive, we channelize it. Human groups commit genocide against other human groups often enough that we can hardly pretend it isn't part of our behavior as a species.

Turks kill Armenians. Englishmen kill Tasmans. American prospectors kill Yahi Indians. Hutus kill Tutsis, in other places Tutsis kill Hutus. Old People killed New People in Cambodia. Et horrible cetera. Large groups of humans tend to identify other groups of humans, rationalize them as the source of all their problems, and kill them in a massive, bloodyhanded chaos that is beyond even the already-murderous class of behaviors we exhibit during "war."

And war itself is, again, yet another channelization of the instinct to fear and murder the dangerous 'other.'

Now, I think we can reasonably aspire to do better. There are enough precedents to suggest that room for serious improvement exists, should we care to make the effort. If you tell me "New Soviet Man has progressed beyond the idea of committing war and genocide," and you clearly mean genocide against anyone, be it against ethnic rivals or class rivals (e.g. New People in Cambodia)," I can believe that. Someone else might not, but I can.

...

Childrearing, on the other hand, is more entrenched for three separate reasons. One, it is more fundamental in a Darwinian sense. Two, it is harder to expunge from a population. And three, it is less desirable to expunge even if you could.

One

It's more fundamental because while some people might lose out in an evolutionary arms race for not being willing enough to kill, under the primitive-communism conditions of the Stone Age, not everyone would lose out by lacking the killer instinct. A tribe where some or most of the people lack killer instinct may actually be safer and more stable than one where they have it, because cooperation is pro-survival, and killing people doesn't automatically ensure that your offspring live to adulthood. As long as there are enough aggressive cavemen to repel aggression by other groups of cavemen and animal predators, natural selection is satisfied and the population's genetic level of killer instinct is unchanged. So murder is not bred into us with truly unrelenting pressure.

By contrast, doing everything in your power to ensure that your own genetic offspring survive, even at the expense of a stranger's offspring, will always be promoted by natural selection. Humans are far from the most extreme species in doing this; it is very rare for a stepfather to kill his stepchildren, whereas in many other animal species this is common behavior (e.g. lions). If anything, humans are actually closer to the notion of communal parenting than other large mammals.

Even then, though, there are limits. The caveman is willing to teach his son to hunt or his daughter to feed a fire. He will almost certainly be willing to teach his nephew or cousin's child to do the same, or the child of a close friend.

But it is almost unprecedented to see ordinary people deciding to teach the children of complete strangers outside of a hierarchy. Hierarchy is the key idea here, hierarchy is what allows us to mobilize human efforts and enable us to cooperate in units larger than a tribe. The catch is that hierarchy does this by taking individuals and providing them with some compensation for the time and trouble they spend educating strangers' children. It doesn't try to reprogram them to care just as much about a stranger's child as they do about their own.

And yet this works, because it allows humans to fulfill the basic drive (ensure that own family is cared for as well as possible) in a way that lets them also provide greater good for the community (have all children educated by specialist educators).

Two

I would argue that the instinct to raise one's own children is more widespread than the instincts we DO see being totally rewired or suppressed in humans. Because, again, in the ancestral environment, it is very much possible to be an evolutionary success without wanting to kill any other human... but not possible to be an evolutionary success without wanting to take care of one's own offspring.

We are only somewhat the descendants of successful killers. We are universally the descendants of people who worked hard and sacrificed and maybe even took personal risks to make sure their children would be safe and healthy and able to take good care of themselves.

So that instinct is present in virtually all of us, and if you try to expunge it by selecting against it in the Darwinian sense, you'd have to kill off most of humanity. Which ties into the third point.

Three

While the 'killing people' argument would certainly make it unethical to change human childrearing behavior by Darwinian means, that may not be what you have in mind. Even if it isn't, though, I question whether on a fundamental level it is ethical in ANY sense of the word, including utilitarianism, to attempt to change this human trait.

See, the thing about murder is that we can all agree it's a bad thing. Decreasing the net number of murders is an unambiguous positive change.

But we can't automatically agree that decreasing the net amount of childrearing in the world is positive. It might be that by suppressing the extra 'spark' of desire parents have to see their own children succeed, you cause a net decrease in the total amount of energy and care they put into childrearing for the world as a whole. In which case the total amount of effort put into raising the next generation of humans, everywhere, diminishes.

I question whether that is even desirable, totally separate from my question about whether it is plausible.

...

Now, separate from all this we have your argument that "raise your own children to the best of your ability" is NOT a fundamental imperative, that it is simply a second-order imperative created by the interaction of basic imperatives with private property.

Here, I think I disagree, because we see the tendency of parents in hunter-gatherer societies to form tight-knit groups whose internal bonds are even stronger than those of the tribe at large, even though those bonds are themselves quite powerful. While common parenting applied to a degree within small in-groups, even there it did not generalize fully and one does not see every adult treating every child equally.

And I very much question whether you can hierarchicalize childrearing instinct into a new form as easily as you can hierarchicalize the murder instinct into a new (and less murderous) form.

There is a good practical reason why in order to become viable in a state, communism stopped calling for the abolition of the family...

You claim that property can help people to get extra knowledge via paid tutoring; I see no reason for this to hold true anywhere except the private property based education. Tutoring can be distributed based on merit; those with good grades are allowed to take more facultatives and extra classes, while those who fail or do poorly, cannot. That can work quite well.

Distributing tutoring on merit mainly serves to perpetuate and artifically widen a gap between 'smart' and 'stupid' classes of students, while denying any student who falls behind the opportunity to catch up. This will artificially shrink the pool of competent educated graduates, because many students who are objectively capable of learning and mastering the content still need support at some time.

If you say "so sorry, you failed this class therefore the extra support resources are not available to you," you are flying in the face of good educational design.
_____________________

Also, and I am STILL not sure you're really understanding this, to me the wealth gap and resulting educational gap is not about the gap between millionaires and paupers. It's about the gap between, say, doctors' sons and paupers' sons.

If you create a society where doctors live no better than paupers, sure, fine, no one will have any extra resources to devote to childrearing and it makes no practical difference what they do. But such a society has its own problems, among other things that there is no real reward within the system for being one of the desirable 'smart' people in the first place.

If being 'smart' nets you rewards, and those rewards have any value whatsoever, they can be used as opportunities to accomplish certain goals- informal trading of resources for tutoring opportunities, more living space equaling more room for books and study areas in the home, more travel opportunities being used to take children to places that stimulate their curiosity and intellect (zoos and museums on the small scale, natural marvels and national historic sites on the large scale).

So you have a choice: do not reward those who do things you deem socially useful, or accept that a chunk of the rewards you hand out will get plowed back into childrearing by those parents.

I am not suggesting silly things like people not sleeping, but rather conditions in which the human instincts can still work towards success and reproduction; meanwhile, the official instituitions of the industrial countries and the Church lead a battle to criminalize polygamy (an evolutionary successful mechanism), and of course they fail, but you seem to think that their policy is within the normal, as neither has collapsed, whereas my ideas are outside normal and will not function in a human society at all.

Do tell me, why?

My fundamental point here is that you are trying to change something that is almost uniquely hard to change among purely behavioral traits in human beings.

Changing our need for sleep would be harder. Changing our tendency to use language to communicate among ourselves might be harder. But changing our impulse to use our personal resources to raise our own children as well as possible... I think that is uniquely difficult. Far harder than fighting polygamy, for that matter.

[Simon_Jester]

I think the problem here is that the % of people that can buy their way to success in education while being utterly incapable is insignificant next to the fact that the children of middle class families will on average outperform the children of lower class families even if the education provided by the state was equal in all respects, and making the system based purely on objective technical merit will only worsen the gap - this is the entire reasoning behind why affirmative action for minorities exists in academia.

YES.

Stas Bush seems so preoccupied with the idea of millionaires buying their children's way through prestigious private school networks that he's ignoring the broader issue of inequality in educational outcomes: that between the upper middle class (who are on the whole still wage earners and not capitalists) and the underclass (including ethnic minorities and the very poor).

Eliminating easy ways out through buying yourself out is something we can all agree is wrong, but what I find objectionable to is the immediate emphasis then on "only merit and smarts will get you through", which while actually quite pragmatic and to be honest, probably for the best since no one wants a borderline failure building bridges or doing brain surgery, still does seem to not really solve the problem for poor people who simply lack the ability or the means due to a hard upbringing to go any further (counterpoint: instead of being cast out of university and told to go try to make a living as a failure, they should be immediately reallocated to a vocational school etc)

For that matter I question the 'probably for the best' argument simply because it is not so easy to objectively measure a child's intelligence. Some children bloom early and appear smarter than they really are. Others bloom late and appear uneducable for years. Still others appear smart to the teacher because they're good at making educated guesses and sitting quietly, but have little understanding of what is being taught. Others learn in different ways and profit from having someone speak to them aloud, or draw them pictures, or let them read quietly, but not from all three of those.

It is a tremendously difficult task to accurately assess what parts of a child's success are due to native intelligence and what parts are due to other things, like whether the child was raised by parents who taught them to value reading as a mode of gathering knowledge.

And yet without doing that, it's absurd for us to claim that we can single out among a bunch of little children, which of those children are most qualified to become future doctors and engineers. At most, we can figure out which children are qualified if we do not intervene to assist those who are 'naturally' falling behind. But what's the point of even having professional educators if they do not perform such interventions when they can?
_____________________

I will note that Simon argues exactly against the possibility of such reparametrization. Nations are millions or even billions of humans; that exceeds the Dunbar limit by such a huge amount it cannot feasibly be described as evolutionary hardwiring. You seem to say that humans managed to change the 'protect family, kill others' program into 'don't kill millions of strangers around; only kill when leaders command you to', in the process forcing people to relate to others on a scale way above the Dunbar number. I suggested that humans might collectively install a strict meritocracy and stop thinking about making conditions good for immediate family members and think about making them better for the entire social group. How is that different from what we did to stop random killings and monopolize violence in the hands of a select few to oversee an immense construct of the nation-state?

Stas, stop, you have misunderstood me.

OK. One, I do NOT argue against the possibility of reparametrizing people's instincts. I embrace it, but there is a difficulty.

The more fundamental an instinct is, the harder it is to reparametrize it and redirect it towards large groups rather than small groups. The more fundamental the instinct is, the harder it is to eliminate it rather than channelizing it.

Murder is not as fundamental to us as raising our children, because from a Darwinian perspective a pacifist is far more likely to pass on their genes than a person who does not raise their children. Especially if pacifists can live in the same tribal groups as non-pacifists who will provide military defense.

So the murder impulse is less prevalent, easier to redirect, and easier to suppress. Hierarchies are therefore pretty good at suppressing it. If they weren't they would cease to exist, and Darwinian pressure applies to hierarchies such as nation-states, not just to individuals. There is lots of precedent for suppressing the murder impulse, and for imagining that we can suppress it more effectively in the future than we can today.

But by contrast, NO society has ever had much success in suppressing the individual impulse to care for one's own children. It is debateable whether we'd even want to try. So I am pessimistic about your idea of suppressing individual childrearing in favor of state-run collective childrearing, which does NOT have a good historical track record and where there are few precedents indicating that success is possible.

[K. A. Pital]

I don't buy the hardwire argument because humans hardly even had any property to speak of for 99% of the species' existence period. Using immaterial resources such as experience is not what I oppose. That very well may be hardwired - but even here, the pooling of resources clearly wins, so communal parenting arose in small communities and universal education evolved and won, now implemented almost everywhere in hierarchic systems that are in competition with other such systems.

How could this be so fundamental if property is a very recent invention? Strikes me as a post-facto rationalization.

I will also take a break to go re-read some books that I read before, because the evolutionary optimality of communal parenting in propertyless societies is quite an important topic.

[Simon_Jester]

Oooh, I messed up my italics in the post above. Embarrassing.

I don't think property is a fundamental evolved trait. Some sense of property might be, there are certainly lots of primitive societies where individuals have some concept of personal property. But I'm sure we could adapt biologically in an environment where it was not possible to lay permanent claim to any specific belongings or places... with a certain amount of difficulty and reshuffling.

I do think that attempting to take whatever resources are available (immaterial, material, whatever) and think "how can I improve my child's future and prospects with this?" is a fundamental evolved trait.

The question really is, if a society has no individual property whatever, in the sense that no thing is yours, not just land and capital but also honors, access to better living quarters, the means to travel or make use of entertainment options... well, how do you create an incentive to do certain kinds of work?

One can dream of a state in which New Soviet Man feels no particular need or concern for this, and those with natural aptitude as engineers and doctors accept that they will be no better compensated than a janitor. But it's a little hard to imagine the transitional state in which doctors and janitors receive equal compensation and yet people are willing to study hard to become doctors, before the full imagined transition to New Soviet Man.

Certainly this didn't work out very well in historical communist societies, and as a result, it was inevitably found useful to society to compensate technical specialists for performing labor that not every person was fit to perform.

So if there is no property, how to create incentive to work at things which are non-trivial? And if there is property, how (and for that matter why bother) to prevent individuals from using this for the betterment of their children?
_____________________________________

We would also want to examine why previous experiments with taking the communal parenting of a tribe or a small commune and scaling it up into a nationalized system failed, i.e. with the Romanian creches under Ceaușescu.

[K. A. Pital]

I do think that attempting to take whatever resources are available (immaterial, material, whatever) and think "how can I improve my child's future and prospects with this?" is a fundamental evolved trait.

How can this be reconciled with the non-exclusive parenting in tribes? It is more like 'I will use every possible resource, even if I have to hand my child over to others for it to be successful'. Immaterial (the transfer of experience and knowledge) is usually always involving more than the immediate family, although they do the most, and there is no need to change that - see the nuclear physics relative example. Wealth, however, is a completely alien concept to human evolutionary heritage. I am sure you will not deny this, so the idea to use it is a byproduct of private property with the desire to give offspring a better chance. I would not even describe this urge to transfer property to a child as innate; it was not a feature of evolutionary heritage. Children were supposed to care for the elderly when they were old enough; that was the deal. Not the other way round, as the preceding generation usually had nothing to give but experience. Which is kind of my point, the society I envision is actually much closer to the evolutionary heritage of humanity. Likewise, I do not envision the common education system as a faceless machine, it would be more like community centers. In fact, the difference between homo sapiens and an ape lies in the common parenting that is not present in any other species, so we are - and maybe, as some theorize, even owe our very intelligence - to the collective. Not to the individual. Not to privacy. Not to property or to personal attachment. But to community and interaction.

The question really is, if a society has no individual property whatever, in the sense that no thing is yours, not just land and capital but also honors, access to better living quarters, the means to travel or make use of entertainment options... well, how do you create an incentive to do certain kinds of work?

I would say that this is an interesting question (the allocation of any limited resource is, especially if the resource is immaterial), but it is not directly related to the evolutionary point you were stressing. I am not sure now what exactly you are arguing, because you said my separation of property and childrearing is artificial, but then you agreed that people survived without property for most of their existence and in fact, a propertyless but still caring society is the norm for humans. The fact that small societies are ultra-xenophobic also requires some proof. Anthropological dogmas are being challenged these days.

But it's a little hard to imagine the transitional state in which doctors and janitors receive equal compensation and yet people are willing to study hard to become doctors, before the full imagined transition to New Soviet Man.

It might be a bit hard to imagine the transition from homo sapiens to homo ludens, the playing human, in the words of my country's sci-fi writers, but it can occur nonetheless. If society is using gamification to produce valuable rewards that only enrich the life experience without actually enroaching on the life of another, it is very well possible that people would be striving for completely virtual achievements. Look at how gamers waste hours to become competent and get a virtual badge that is just a collection of numbers in an entertainment software. We are a funny species, I think.

And if there is property, how (and for that matter why bother) to prevent individuals from using this for the betterment of their children?

That is a good question too. If there is property, but we are looking to create a meritocracy as opposed to a cleptocracy (which inevitably occurs, just give the offspring time), it is in the best interests of man to create perhaps a more harsh, but more merit-oriented system. I find it more fair, especially to those that lack material resources. They are no less, and often more than (!) capable of mastering the higher education than the 'upper middle class', the bourgeois children. Why create additional barriers for them in the form of property and punish children for failures of their parents? That sounds a lot more social-darwinistic than my suggested improvements. Besides, I did not suggest to take the family entirely out of equation. Many people already now only proceed to help offspring at the very start; thereafter it is up to the teachers, sometimes in isolation from parents, to give the necessary knowledge. Are we to assume that the bourgeois who send their kids away care less about them? And if they can and are willing to do it, why would the others not use such an option if it is clearly preferrable to homeschooling? That's the question. I haven't seen any homeschooled children in my life at all, and I didn't find the humans I communicated with badly brought up.

We would also want to examine why previous experiments with taking the communal parenting of a tribe or a small commune and scaling it up into a nationalized system failed, i.e. with the Romanian creches under Ceaușescu.

Maybe because of Dunbar's number, in which case it makes sense to create community parenting centers on the basis of existing communities, rather than breaking communities up.

But I am not sure why you think that when bourgeois give their children over to complete strangers - well-paid professionals - and barely spend any time with them - that somehow produces upper-middle class specialists that do better than the others, better than the poor who are often in greater direct contact with their unprofessional parents. And then you say that communal parenting is a failure.

The changes that happened since children were primarily educated in the family are profound. No family can ever adequately homeschool a child, the depth and width of knowledge offered by the modern school is just immense. And this is only with limited funding, as people do not yet give a very huge part of their income towards common education system. Instead, they conserve the property for their personal use.

The very young child and common parenting is a bit more complex; like I said, I would not completely deny the importance of attachment. Therefore it is good if the institution is centered around a pre-existing community and not separated from it. That would make it more acceptable. Completely severing the connection between a child and the biological parent is not necessary.