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"I agree that it sounds ludicrous to say a 0.000003% differential is unfair, while a 0.000001% differential would be okay." Good. It is. Even when taking into account my own innumeracy and screwing up the calculations so the difference is in fact between 0.000003% vs. 0.0000003%. It is clear indeed that the issue should be framed in terms of a percentage differential. $100 is a big deal to the guy who sweeps your office, but not so much to the guy who owns it. When asking for a raise, the dollar amount you seek is based on a percentage of your income, not the amount independent of your income: you ask for a $1000 or $10,000 raise, not a $100 one. It makes sense because when you _are_ dealing with large orders of magnitude, you don't maintain the notion that values significant to small orders of magnitude are still relevant (you may waffle over the price of a single doorknob for your home, but not for your office building). I'm not sure how to present a persuasive argument that what is, is. If you're dealing with millions/billions of dollars, a hundred dollars isn't a concern - but if you're scraping by in poverty, it is. Maybe the best argument is that when I plugged in 0.0000003%, 0.0000017% and 0.0000033% as applied exponentially over a large population into Excel (to wit: applied percentages .01%, .05%, and .10% to a population of 100, then scaled to the US population), the resulting graph looked _exactly_ like the one in the article (save for perhaps some slight real-world distortions). The theory, with little effort, matches the reality. Sure, the question of whether a 0.000003% or 0.0000003% differential makes for the best society becomes quite important, for exactly the reasons you agree to: such a tiny difference in percentage has enormous consequences when iterated over hundreds of millions of people. My concern is what you overlooked in my post: a century of trying to adjust that natural reality resulted in some 100,000,000 deaths under Communism. |