What is fair?

What do you think most about?

Money, freedom, relationships. Whatever it is, it’s more often than not about what you don’t have than what you do. It’s not a bad thing, it’s perfectly rationale to focus on your challenges. Focusing on what could be better is what pushed us to innovate and develop so much. But how should we think about fairness and how should we continue to incentivize growth and development?

What’s fair?

Is it the same start line? Is it the same outcome for the same effort? Neither is likely to happen in the real world.

Nassim Taleb had this idea to describe the type of economic system to use for expanding groups of people based on familiarity.

“With my family, I’m a communist. With my close friends, I’m a socialist. At the state level of politics, I’m a Democrat. At higher levels, I’m a Republican, and at the federal levels, I’m a Libertarian.”

It’s such an interesting idea to think about how political ideology and identity changes as the size of the group grows.

It also lays the foundation to the belief that the system that requires the least trust is most likely to succeed in the largest groups of people.