That’s why we have rules – to balance competing objectives. On the one hand, social life is about sharing; on the other hand, physical resources are exclusive, and you can’t create something as complicated as a lego city unless it’s clear who is in charge of what. On the one hand, school activities should be inclusive; on the other, the budding creative genius will eventually be discouraged if she has to keep re-writing a play every time a new person joins in.

It’s a challenge teaching kids to work out good rules to balance a range of competing principles. The lesson from the Hilltop affair seems to be that adults don’t easily grasp the point either.

Economic growth is good because it gives everyone the opportunity to consume more. And if the optimal system for generating growth also generates inequality, then that inequality is a good thing for everyone.

I’m afraid I must say that inequality is not good for everyone. Inequality is a fact of life yes. Some of us are beautiful, some ugly, most just average. The same goes for smarts of various kinds, prowess physically, courage, instinct and of course pure blind luck. But to say that the inequality of an optimal system is a good thing because the system itself is fundamentally sound (or at least the best we have) is to put a mental block on human progress and to be blind to social fault. It is, borrowing from Voltaire’s Candide, to say: this is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Inequality, particularly if it is not natural is not for the best. It is at the very least unfortunate and at the most a shameful injustice. And no this is not an argument for socialism. Socialism as the world has known it produces an entrenched inequality. The advantages of the market is that there is comparatively greater fluidity within the heirarchy. Still inequality is not good.

If you are ugly you would, if possible, wish to join the ranks of the ravishing but if not possible what kind or world would you dream of? One in which there was still beautiful people or one in which there were none? I suppose that would depend on the individual. Most of us would probably say that beauty is a good thing. But being that there are beautiful people and that that is universally good does not make it good to be ugly.

Under every economic system developed by humans thus far there have been winners and losers. The fact that there are still losers is perhaps unavoidable but it is not ‘good’ to be one. My way of stating the above quoted would be:

Economic growth is good because it gives everyone the opportunity to consume more. And if the optimal system for generating growth also generates inequality, then that inequality is an unfortunate consequence of the system which, despite its lack of perfection, creates the greatest good for greatest number thus far.

But seriously, any parent of more than one child often engages in this sort of levelling exercise. I routinely umpire cricket matches with deliberate bias, to keep it even and interesting for a bunch of kids of different ages and vastly different abilities. But you wouldn’ set the naturally gifted up to fail, as this bunch of teachers evidently did.

Property is theft! (Etc, etc, etc) .

If there were any justice in this world, all these legos would have been donated to poor little third-world children. Or something.

1. Big kids hog all the schools Lego to build themselves an elaborate fantasy town (as big kids will);

2. Teachers turn a blind eye to this for weeks;

3. Lego town gets trashed – teachers discover they’ve created a problem for themselves;

4. Instead of reminding the kids that the Lego belongs to the school (as them what bought and paid for it), they try a cock-eyed simulation experiment;

5. A few commentators that the big kids’ behaviour indicates that property acquisition is a natural instinctive behaviour.

Ah, the glories of the Internet!

I do have an anecdote to offer which relates to my daughters’ primary school which was at one of Melbourne’s ‘top’ private girls schools. My daughter is a fairly enterprising person and used to initiate activities. For instance she asked around to see who would participate in a play which the participants co-wrote. Quite a few girls took part and others didn’t. I think some of the ones that didn’t weren’t too impressed with this play and didn’t think it was going anywhere.

By and by (as they used to say) a buzz developed around the play as it took shape and moved towards production. Whereupon some of the girls that had taken no part in the rehearsals wanted to participate. But they were told it was too late. Thay had had their chance to sign up but hadn’t. Some of them thought that wasn’t fair. (Perhaps they argued that they had not had their chance. And perhaps they hadn’t. I don’t know).

But the school is very strong on the values it teaches – which it calls ‘habits of mind’ and one of these habits is ‘inclusiveness’. So Anna was told that everyone who wanted to be involved should be involved. This made the rest of the process a nightmare of disorganisation and political infighting.

I told my daughter that this kind of thing happenned in the middle ages and that in those days the people who turn up demanding a slice of the action were called ‘marauders’. (I doubt this is etymologically accurate, but that wasn’t my point). I tried to reassure her that, although this kind of thing would go on all her life, that it’s significance would diminish (two years into high school it already is) and that the time was coming in her life (in the workplace and in the market) when someone with her energy and enterprise would be more than amply rewarded for it. I also counselled her that she should try to keep her enthusiasm in tact, but that the kinds of ideas that were being promoted at the school would need to be managed carefully. She’d need to learn all those soft political skills that were required to do so. And those skills would also come in handy in the workplace, if not so much in the marketplace.

That said, it probably was postmodern, as it was more of an exercise in politics than economics and largely reflects what happens when a political party loses power.

Jacques, how is what the teachers were trying to demonstrate postmodern? If anything, surely its the opposite, a modernist approach?

I shook my magic 8-ball and got “Outcome Uncertain. Call it Pomo”.

I think comparisons with real world economics in this scenario are fraught for both left and right, because an economy is not kids playing with lego, and thank god never will be!

I find the original article fascinating. You can see so many ‘high’ economic concepts being grasped by the children, and being totally ignored by the teachers. For example, the Legos were part of a common pool. In order to avoid the ‘tragedy of the commons’ the children intuitively knew how to establish property rights (despite all the brainwashing of the teachers). They set up a market; and assigned value based on aesthetics, and scarcity. Each child was trying to maximize his or her ‘power,’ but in the ‘capitalist Lego Town the children were also maximizing their collective effort. The kids built huge buildings and an interdependent system of airports, firehouses and the like.

As I read the story, it seemed that the teachers conditioned the return of the Legos upon unanimous consent among the children on what the rules of distribution would be. Under this artificial constraint each student still sought to maximize his or her share of the Legos, thus resulting in an equal distribution of the Legos. The requirement of equality imposed transaction cost that rendered the building of huge buildings; airports; and firehouses cost-prohibitive. The maximum collective effort was not being achieved by the ’socialist’ Lego Town.

From an educators’ perspective, the difficulty arose when the children attempted to maintain their system of evolved rules once the Lego had been disassembled. My intuitive educator’s solution would be to have a bit of time out (maybe a week or so) and then make the toys available once again on the condition that the children once again have to come up with a set of rules, but that the old rules can no longer apply. There may be other methods, but that is one that (a)encourages creativity and problem solving and (b) doesn’t suck all the fun out of the activity, as the stupid exercise in price-fixing the teaching staff engaged in managed to do.

It is popular in certain circles to say that economic behaviour is too tightly bound up in social norms to be considered a reliable guide; that we prefer liberal economy not because it works so well, but because “society” or “media” or “power structures” or whatever dictate it. Personally I agree with Mises that this was the fallback position for Marxism when it was shown to be a dud. A bit like Christians saying “you can’t prove atheism, so we’re equally right, nerni nerni ner ner!”

What this little exercise demonstrated is that zero sum situations suck. As a simulation of economic life it was stunted by the inability to create wealth through trade and division of labour. It probably most closely resembled feudalism, which last time I checked was swept away by the industrial revolution.