> Even folks I disagree with vehemently are generally interested in fairness.

I tend to think this is the case as well...it seems that, if you can manage to get people into a proper state of mind, or carefully phrase questions to avoid triggering heuristics in the subconscious mind, in my experience "most" people have fairly substantial intuitions of compassion, group solidarity, a desire to do the right thing, and all sorts of other good stuff.

> What is a fair tax policy, then? Because the vast majority of tax policy debates I've seen are trying to craft a fair policy.

I wonder if a substantial part of the problem might be that the mental concept of "fairness" is inherently and extremely subjective - if we were somehow able to view the source code of the mind, I suspect each individual's implementation of FairnessCoefficient() for any given subject would involve an absolutely massive number of variables, some that would seem to have no obvious relevance to the matter, and the code would be utterly riddled with bugs. I estimate this to be the case based on observations of how people discuss ideas, and how their minds will produce different (and logically inconsistent) answers to the same question by making very simple changes to the variables you ask them to consider when asking a question - or, even using the exact same variables, but changing the wording of the question.

Another part of the problem of developing "fair" tax policy is linguistic: what does this word "fair"[1] mean? Like really mean, in the real world, the aggregate of all people's opinions? How might we know such a thing? Tax policy debates is one approach, but how accurate/optimal are the calculations these policies produce? Do they take into consideration the psychological impact it will have in a population, which in turn drives their behavior in a wide variety of ways (including voting), which in turn drives the real world success of the recommended policies? And, even if one assumes that these think tanks are producing fairly optimal (for the real world) recommendations, to what degree are they implemented consistent with their design? And where incomplete implementations occur (approximately always I would estimate), what are the downstream consequences of that - how far do the real world results skew from the model estimates when ~random changes are injected, or portions left out? How would we know the answers to such questions? How many people realize (like, really realize) how important these unknowns are? How many people actually think this level of detail is even worth acknowledging, let alone devoting some reasonable amount of effort into exploring? Perhaps some golden knowledge is located not too far below the surface? But how how would we know, if we don't even look? [2] I have no idea how, but it can easily be observed that most people seem to hold the belief that we do know such things (which is kind of interesting, if you think about it for a while.)

Regarding fairness being inherently subjective (a matter of opinion), and the obvious folly in outsourcing calculations to academics (and ultimately politicians) rather than letting those whose lives are effected decide, people often remark that "people aren't smart enough" to properly assess what is "fair". I think there's actually a lot of truth to this. But then, if one was to study a feral child, you might discover that they do not have the ability to do many things that we take for granted, like perform the most basic of mathematical operations. Similarly, if you rewind time sufficiently, you can also find a point where even the brightest minds on the planet were unable to design a machine that can transport people through the air. This suggests that human beings have a unique characteristic compared to other mammals: the ability to learn and understand very complex multivariate ideas, as well as the ability to pass this knowledge down to subsequent generations. Considering this, just as we discovered a way to consistently teach people how to perform mathematics (and some other things), might there also be a way to teach people to at least somewhat skilfully consider the complexities involved in economics?

But even if we did achieve that, there's still a problem in determining the aggregate of all people's opinions on the notion of economic fairness...how do we collect those opinions for analysis? As far as I can tell, this is widely considered to be a "solved problem" via two means: a) Democratic elections b) Public opinion surveys. My suspicion though, is that these two approaches may not actually be as optimal as we believe, in that several shortcomings should be fairly obvious with the mildest of examination. Despite this, it seems like these shortcomings are not considered noteworthy enough to do something about. Or, perhaps people don't actually consider ideas such as this, at all.

This structural/epistemic shortcoming (and the substantial unawareness of it) in our society seems to be not only limited to the topic of economic fairness. For example, I often read online (the news, forum discussions, serious academic papers, etc) assertions of the form "People believe <X>" - or even more generally, "<X> <Y> <Z>", where the values of X,Y,Z can be near anything describing the real world, and people seem to typically label these assertions as "the facts". A bit of problem with this system though, is that most people seem to not realize (and very often seem to have a very strong aversion to realizing, or even discussing) is that most of these things that we have categorized as facts, are nothing of the kind. Rather, they are estimates. Some of them are surely fairly accurate, and many of them are likely amazingly inaccurate (even backwards, the opposite of what is true)...but what they aren't, is "facts". And yet, we seem to believe the opposite of this (that they are facts), and we then act upon these false beliefs, and then proceed to complain endlessly online that "things suck", and attribute it to <x>, or <-x> (say, political parties), typically inline with other beliefs, which are also not true.

I wonder what a disinterested alien from another planet might think about the human species. Here we have these people who are able to achieve the most wondrous technological things, like splitting the atom, for example - and then with this knowledge, proceed to use it to design a weapon that can be dropped on other members of their species who live in far away lands, who happen to have different ideas than them (or something like that, the true causation may not be well understood).

They have the ability and the drive to see and understand the form of matter down to the quantum level, spending many of billions in the process, with no particular real world application in mind for this knowledge, but then simultaneously seem unwilling (perhaps, unable) to provide basic food and shelter for a substantial number of their species, or devote any widespread, serious/skilful mental energy into that arguably far more "important" problem (and this is just one example, there are many others).

They have the infinite curiosity required to develop technology that can see deep into the subatomic level of material reality, or light years into outer space - things that are at best mildly interesting to most people - yet simultaneously seem to have very little curiosity (if not an outright refusal) for attempting to understand that which causes widespread material discomfort (at home or abroad), things that have been complained about in widespread abundance, for centuries. They have seemingly endless energy and time for complaining about certain aspects of reality, but little time or curiosity for what actually causes it.[3]

What a curious species, these humans.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fair

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

[3] http://media.moronail.net/images/stories/dg_pictures/0905/13...