Martinez, Raoul. _Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth, the Illusion of Consent, and the Fight for Our Future_. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016. # Progressive Summary # Key points Three pronged argument: 1. The lottery of birth. Who we are is a result of luck. A thought experiment that chips away at out notions of desert. 2. Lots of studies show that money doesn't incentivise people. 3. On the other hand, equal societies have many benefits. > “Why do Earth’s bountiful resources and humanity’s endless creativity serve so few at the expense of so many? Not because the rewards in our society go to those who deserve them, not because it’s necessary to incentivise people, and not because it benefits the whole of society. The great imbalance of wealth simply reflects the great imbalance of power.” Power is the ability to control other people's choices. One way to limit someone's choice is through ownership. By owning something, a nation or individual can deprive someone else of that resource. In the most extreme case, slavery allows those at the the top to own other people's bodies. ## Rewards Behavioural scientists distinguish between algorithmic tasks or heuristic ones. The former can be completed by following a set of instructions. The latter require some creativity. It has been found that rewards and punishments work for algorithmic tasks, but not heuristic ones. Tomasello^[Warneken, Felix, and Michael Tomasello. “Extrinsic Rewards Undermine Altruistic Tendencies in 20-Month-Olds.” _Developmental Psychology_ 44, no. 6 (2008): 1785–88. [https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013860](https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013860).] found that infants as young as 20 months old have an innate tendency to help adults, but that rewarding them dramatically reduced this. In the 1970s, Edward Deci found that using external rewards diminishes people's intrinsic motivation. It undermines their autonomy. It may boost short-term motivation, but reduces long-term motivation. He argues that external control systems such as monetary rewards undermines our "inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise ... [our] capacities, and to explore, and to learn." > “Speaking of his own professional performance, former chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer, once declared, ‘if I had been paid 50 per cent more, I would not have done it better. If I had been paid 50 per cent less, then I would not have done it worse.” People seem to be driven by a combination of physical needs, external rewards and punishments, and intrinsic needs governed by competency, autonomy, and relatedness (Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's Self-Determination Theory.) # Resonances # Quotes ## The lottery of birth > “As Bertrand Russell observed, if we ‘had to be tempted to work instead of driven to it, the obvious interest of the community would be to make work pleasant’. > > What of the unpleasant work left over? It should either be shared out fairly or carry financial incentives to compensate proportionately for the sacrifice entailed by doing it. Other strategies are coercive and incompatible with a free society.” > “Incentive-based arguments are often little more than ad hoc justifications for inequality. When examined, they betray a double standard. Cuts to social welfare programmes are justified by the claim they incentivise people out of the ‘poverty trap’ – as though poverty weren’t incentive enough. The reasoning is that if we make poor people poorer by removing their social safety net, they will be forced to go out and find a job or, since many benefit claimants are already in work, a second job. On the other hand, when it comes to discussing incentives for the rich, the opposite reasoning is employed. High salaries for corporate executives are justified as incentivising higher performance, which ends up benefiting the whole of society. The double standard is glaring and ugly. As economist Ha-Joon Chang asks, ‘why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?” > “For millennia, those with power and privilege have used convenient myths to justify their position. Arguably, these myths arise as much to reassure those with wealth as those without it – it’s harder to enjoy privileges if you don’t believe you deserve them. A sense of entitlement to wealth is nearly as valuable as wealth itself.” > “The nineteenth-century English philosopher and father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, based his moral philosophy on the idea that ‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’. According to Bentham, the best allocation of resources is one that maximises human well-being. A key assumption he made was that the well-being a person experiences from an additional dollar decreases as that person becomes richer. That is to say, ten additional dollars produce more well-being in someone extremely poor than in someone very rich. The radical implication is that society as a whole becomes better off as material equality increases.” > “What the data suggest is that, beyond a certain level of affluence, more money makes no difference to a person’s happiness. One analysis of more than 450,000 responses to a daily survey of Americans in 2010 revealed that ‘The satiation level beyond which experienced well-being no longer increases was a household income of about $75,000 [roughly £47,000] in high-cost areas (it could be less in areas where the cost of living is lower). The average increase of experienced well-being associated with incomes beyond that level was precisely zero.’ [[Thinking Fast and Slow]] > “Based on the analysis of extensive data spanning many countries and decades, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson confirm that reducing inequality benefits the whole of society in fundamentally important and sometimes surprising ways: >> In societies where income differences between rich and poor are smaller, the statistics show that community life is stronger and levels of trust are higher. There is also less violence, including lower homicide rates; physical and mental health tends to be better and life expectancy is higher. In fact, most of the problems related to relative deprivation are reduced: prison populations are smaller, teenage birth rates are lower, educational scores tend to be higher, there is less obesity and more social mobility. What is surprising is how big these differences are. Mental illness is three times more common in more unequal countries than in the most equal, obesity rates are twice as high, rates of imprisonment eight times higher, and teenage births increase tenfold.” > “The distribution of penalties and privileges is ultimately a product of power. Power defines what counts as a crime, who should be punished and how severely. Power shapes the laws which set the rules of the market, strengthening the bargaining hand of some and weakening it for others. The highly skewed distribution of power in our world is central to any explanation of the outcomes we see around us. ## The illusion of consent > “In nature, the struggle to survive and the drive to procreate maintain a relentless battle for control. Some species exert control by brute force, others have evolved more subtle strategies. Organisms fight to the death to access the myriad forms of energy locked up around them – in sunlight, plants, flesh and bone. The outcome of this endless struggle determines which creatures gain control over the resources available, including that most valuable resource: other organisms.” > “Social conditioning provides us with a common set of assumptions that colour the way new information is interpreted. From one perspective, a war can look like an act of justice and liberation; from another, an act of theft and murder. To one group, a natural disaster may signify the wrath of God; to another, a symptom of global warming. Within some ideologies, poverty looks like inferiority; within others it looks like exploitation. Dominant narratives tell us what is worth striving for and what can be sacrificed. They tell a story about why things are the way they are, what problems must be addressed, who is to blame, and how the problems should be solved.” > “According to some scholars, the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century played a key role in breaking the hold of the Catholic Church and bringing about the Reformation.19 In part, this was due to the proliferation of different interpretations of the Bible, which cast doubt over the idea that there was one infallible text.” > “Upon the obedience of the many, be it secured by inducing fear, ignorance, cynicism or loyalty, rests the power of the few.” > “It is no accident that neither the US Constitution nor the Declaration of Independence describes the US as a democracy. In fact, for much of its history, ‘democracy’ and ‘democrat’ were terms of abuse. The Canadian political philosopher Francis Dupuis-Déri has shown that major political figures only began to refer to themselves as ‘democrats’ decades after the American and French Revolutions.36 Such resistance to democratic reform among elites meant that by 1900 the world still did not have a single country in which all adults could vote.” > “Historically, the majority of venerated political thinkers have been critical of democracy in both theory and practice. Influenced by the writings of Le Bon, Joseph Schumpeter, one of the twentieth century’s leading theorists of democracy, believed that ‘democracy does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule in any obvious sense of the terms “people” and “rule.” Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them. Reflecting a common attitude, he saw the public as weak, overly emotional, impulsive and lacking the intellectual capacity to think for themselves about complex issues. Not even education could help: ‘people cannot be carried up the ladder’ for they are able to discuss complex issues only in ‘an infantile way’ and are ‘incapable of action other than a stampede’. > > Power, he believed, should be in the hands of ‘governments of experts’. His justification is interesting. Living through the emergence of advertising as a potent social force, he observed the increasing power of advertisers to shape needs, cultivate desires and direct behaviour. For him, this process discredited the notion of an authentic ‘popular will’. If public opinion could be shaped by outside forces, it must lack any independent or rational basis. ‘If all the people can in the short run be “fooled” step by step into something they do not really want, and if this is not an exceptional case which we could afford to neglect, then no amount of retrospective common sense will alter the fact that in reality they neither raise nor decide issues but that the issues that shape their fate are normally raised and decided for them."