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Relative Commonality
Have you ever run into somebody from school outside of school? Somebody that you don't know that well, and never really talk to? But you talked to them when you ran into them on the street? Isn't that weird? If you don't talk to them at school, then why did you talk to them on the street?
There are two possibilities:
1. You ran into them with your car, and were obligated to ask them if their hip was broken.
2. Relative Commonality. We interact with people with whom we have certain things in common. Shared hobbies, experiences, interests, race, etcetera*. The more important these common things are, the more likely we are to talk to the person who shares them. But what determines which things are important and how important they are? In part, the situation. Or more precisely, who else is around us.
Commonality is a relative phenomenon. Everybody we see in school is associated with the school, so there is nothing special about somebody at the school being associated with the school. So why talk to somebody if that is all you share? But on the street, very few people are associated with the school. In the given situation, that is a unique commonality. You have more in common with that person relative to other people.
My hypothesis: in a given situation, we interact with the people with whom we share the most unique commonality.
If I'm dressed in purple and so are you, then we'll probably say something to each other.
If everybody is dressed in purple, then the chances that we will speak go way down. But if we also are both wearing SF Giants hats, then again we will probably speak.
If everybody is in purple and wearing a Giants hat, then the chances go down again. But if we also both attended the same high school, then again we will probably speak.
If we are at the high school reunion, everybody is dressed in purple and wearing a Giants hat, then the chances go down again. But if we also played on the same soccer team for 4 years...
If we are at the soccer team reunion after-party... But if we also both love collecting stamps...
...and so on...
*I quite like the way "etcetera" looks. I'm going to discontinue abbreviating it.
USA! USA! USA! (or good evidence that our country IS the greatest)
Here, courtesy of Catherine Rampell of Economix, is a remarkable chart from Branko Milanovic's book The Haves and Have Nots. Along the horizontal axis are within-country income percentiles running from the bottom 5% (1st ventile) to the top 5% (20th ventile). Along the vertical axis are world income percentiles.
The graph shows that the bottom 5% of Brazilians are among the poorest people in the world but the top 5% are among the richest. Thus the vertical range of the curve tells us about within-country inequality.Comparing between countries we see that the poorest 5% of Americans are among the richest people in the world (richer than nearly 70% of other people in the world). The poorest 5% of Americans, for example, are richer than the richest 5% of Indians.
Sometimes, among the political crappiness, shootings, and obesity, it is easy to start longing for a better way of doing things. But don't let that longing turn to blindness. If our poorest citizens are better off than the some of the richest in other countries, then clearly we are doing something right.
Another lesson we can learn here is to not be overly swayed by the "evils" of income inequality. My freshman year of high school we had to take a class on Community Service Learning. We had a number of choices of topics, from environmental to women's issues. I chose basic human needs. Our teacher kept drilling us that there were too many people out there who didn't have access to the essentials of life. And I agreed. But then one class he told us how the essentials were always changing, how nowadays, for example, cell phones were becoming a necessity. That's where he lost me.
Every advance we make improves our lives to some extent. Every year our lives are getting better thanks to new technologies, medications, and institutions. But our basic human needs never change, because they are...basic. So while it might not be ideal that our richest are much richer than our poor, we cannot forget that our poor are doing pretty well compared to much of the rest of the world, and they are doing extremely well compared to 500 or even 100 years ago.
For more on this (sort of) subject, read this fantastic article by Marginal Revolution's Tyler Cowen.
