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If he was to do that his post count would be about a hundred.

Nah man you don't get it, money is to the man what horcrux is to voldemort.
Part of their soul.

No it isn't, Pareto improvements require everyone being >=. Someone might just not like poor people being helped (for any reason whatsoever( and that already would make it not pareto efficient.

Also you don't "play the game" only once, it has to be pareto efficient in the medium and long term as well.

It's absolutely not obvious that helping the poors is going to be good for every single member of society down the line.

What if they ask for more and more and more, maybe violently? Then maybe you would have been better off letting they die of starvation.

Btw it's not that you have to agree, it's that even a single member of society thinking that makes your purported solution to the conundrum a non solution

Pareto efficiency has to do with how well off people actually are, not with their feelings about how well off others are.

But if it did, it would almost certainly be right to do something like taking every cent away from every billionaire, because that would make millions of people extremely happy and only a very few people unhappy.

Feelings are part of what makes you better off or not.

Btw this is a specific definition not a subjective evaluation.

A solution isn't Pareto efficient for a group unless every single individual will tell you he does prefer the solution to the status quo, that's the definition. And they can prefer that for any arbitrary set of reasons.

So you are back to violently force a portion of the group to accept something they do not prefer, which is the normal collectivist approach.

Also , I don't know why you think so many people will agree with you right now about sequestering billionaires wealth, because they do not vote for parties that propose that right now.

They actually just voted in the USA (in 2024), for the House, and they voted slightly in favour of a party that run on a platform of reducing taxes for billionaires which is what they are doing right now in Congress.

So again you conflate what maybe is obvious to you with what people actually prefer and express as preference in real life.

Anyway the topic was and is and neither cutting taxes for billionaires nor increasing them nor any other violently forced change (through the power of the state) can be defined as progress in any objective sense when looking from far away. It all depends on personal preferences well detached from the survival of the species and other more objective elements.

While a society which has 10x the material resources at their disposal per person than another will be found to be preferable (=better, more advanced) almost always by almost any neutral , detached, observer including alien ones

btw chillrob for the USA specifically please remind that there are 50 states each and every one of which have vast powers to fix local poverty if they want.

states can tax residents with almost no limits, both income and wealth, barring some state constitution provisions which afaik are very rare /non existent.

and not a single one of them does not did for 250 years, not to the extent that would be required to permanently fix absolute poverty.

I don't know what else you need to acknowledge that even in the most pro collectivist area of the USA the people aren't willing to fix absolute poverty at any cost.

some places do a little more than others for poor people but no state agrees with your take

Why do you even talk about pareto to begin with, wtf is your goal here except diluting arguments and arbitraly claiming stuff to gain points?

we were discussing group welfare and the idea that for me one of the very few things you can use to claim a group is better off is increased material measurable prosperity (per Capita GDP), while a lot of other ways people attempt to use don't reflect universal preferences.

tldr everyone can see why having more stuff is better, not everyone at all agrees that equality (rich vs poor but also men v women but also if present among ethnic groups composing a society) is inherently better

Again bullshit.

Some people might disagree, does that make your whole argument crumble?
Because it's exactly what you are constantly doing here.

You seem to live in a theoretical world, but in the real world most people would say something more along :
tldr everyone can see why having more stuff is better but not at the price of X.

You are always speaking in absolutes, you have zero nuance.

I don't agree that having more stuff is always better. That's a stupid and simplistic statement.

I didn't realize until now that Luciom was one of those weird hoarders.

we are talking society wide production, most things can't be hoarded long term anyway (food, electricity, healthcare and so on and on)

Your definition is not my understanding of Pareto efficiency, nor is it correct according to every definition I can find online. Feel free to link anything that shows agreement with your specific definition.

If your definition were correct, the entire concept would have no meaning because it would be impossible to make any Pareto improvements. There could always be one person who disagrees with any changes.

In fact, I would strongly disagree with the assumption you make, that any increase in material wealth by one person without a decrease in wealth for others, would be preferred by everyone.

If, magically, Elon Musk suddenly had one additional egg in his refrigerator, while nothing else in the world changed, I would consider that a Pareto improvement under the generally understood definition.

However, under your definition it would not be a Pareto improvement, because it would make me less happy for him to gain that egg, and I would vote against that outcome.

None of this is a correct presentation of my beliefs.

There are definitely instances where having more stuff clearly makes someone worse off.

Take for example a morbidly obese person who has no self-restraint regarding eating, even though I eating more makes him both less happy and less healthy. If this person acquires an extra donut, it is objectively, as well as subjectively, worse for him.

Nobody ever said that, hence the straw man. If s person from storm front went somewhere else and was told black people were human by multiple people, they would be better off reexamining their views.

This part of my previous post was incorrect, and I don't want it to confuse the issue.

However, it was just a theoretical, as again I don't think Pareto improvement includes one person's feelings about another person's wealth.

The problem is Lucy sees people as robots.
Lol feelings.

I’m beginning to think you don’t understand the point of hypotheticals.

Obviously not because I used one in the very post you quoted. The only difference between your and my use of hypotheticals is that I did it non-fallaciously

Yeah but you’re not isolating with respect to the analogous part we are trying to compare. You’re focused on the actual positions people are changing their mind from instead of focusing on the bandwagon argument.

But in the analogy that you offered, no just based off of the fact that 3 people tell the person they are wrong they don’t have a reason to change their belief. You have to actually give them an argument. It may be easier to change their mind if they’re not surrounded by virulent racists, but like in your example if the next 100 people they talk to are all racists they shouldn’t raise their credence in racism.

How could this be?

But you have been given arguments on why you're wrong. You just choose to respond with a straw man claiming that the argument is you must be wrong because people disagree with you when in actuality you are wrong because you're wrong and people disagreeing with you is a clue that you should think about this more.

Our friend Bayes should be able to help here.