2/ Imagine that you're a non political baker in Germany. You never voted for Nazis, you never collaborated with Nazis, and the war the Nazis started resulted in your bakery being bombed. Now you are taxed to send money to a set of people, some of whom didn't suffer under Nazism
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3/ I have zero doubts it had benefits! Receiving money is always great. My question is specifically about the set of people who pay it, and the set of people who receive it. If we taxed you $10k and gave it to me, there'd be "substantial benefits"!https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1102667707059703808 …
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4/ If we could tailor a reparations strategy that taxed former members of the Nazi party and gave the money to former concentration camp inmates, I'd applaud it.
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5/ Disaggregation is hard, but it's worth doing. The problem is that it's often expensive. So deadweight losses exist. One great thing about about the growth in IT is it reduces transaction costs. In 2019 it's trivial to figure out how much you use the roads and pay for that.
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7/ In theory, people in favor of reparations should join me in favoring tailoring both the payers and the recipients to the correct sets of people. However, if their motives are NOT equity / torts, but instead power machinations or building political power bases, then not.
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And yet, this testimony suggests that it had substantial benefits, just the sort of benefits we usually hope that law can give in settling disputes.
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Plus, is anyone going to pretend that the Holocaust was put behind us? This is the biggest example as to how ineffective reparations are.
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I worked out some numbers for slavery reparations a bit ago: ~5M slave working-lives stolen (1860 census), 5c/hr wages for unskilled labor, total working life of 50 years is a total appropriation from slaves of ~$37.5B as of 1864.
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Compound interest on that at 1.8% from 1864 to 2017 gives a present value of $589B. 74.5m Af-Ams (mostly descended from American slaves) gives $7,905 per. Honestly that seems pretty cheap.
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