Others have asked if you have any evidence of this profit going into political campaigns, I’m just going to report what I found looking at one of your examples, namely Interior design. The American Society of Interior Designers emphasis strongly on their pages that they think anyone should be able to practice interior design and call themselves an interior designer, with licensing being required to call yourself registered/licensed/certified and to offer some specific services. State laws for the couple of states I checked seem to be in line with this philosophy. Do you have a specific issue with the laws and the practice of those laws in some state, or was interior design just something you pulled off of someone else’s list?
Also, external licensing, whether mandatory or voluntary, is a huge boon to small business owners that HIRE hair stylists and interior designers and real estate salesmen…if not for these licenses they would have to spend huge amounts of time and money vetting employees and administering in-house testing - not to imagine the liabilities they would face if they screw up.
And licensing fortune tellers is just basic fraud prevention as it gives the state cause to go after fraudsters BEFORE they bilk your grandma out of her life savings.
I don’t know if it still works the way it used to, but I was never all that impressed by eBay’s feedback system. When I bought something and submitted payment, my part of the transaction was over. I should get my buyer feedback right away. Of course, I couldn’t leave feedback for the seller until the item arrived. But it didn’t seem to work that way; If I wanted feedback as a buyer, I had to leave feedback for the seller first. People will find ways to game the system.
If your kid died of cholera, would your first reaction be to go on Yelp and post a restaurant review?
Besides which, there’s this:
(from doctorswithoutborders.com)
So how would you even know where he caught it? If you’re going to publicly accuse a business of killing your child, I wouldn’t expect them to sit still for it. Even if you accused the right restaurant, you better be able to prove it.
I’m really not sure what your point is but you do realize I was making the argument that customer reviews are not an adequate replacement for government regulations, right?
Sheer bureaucratic oppression. You can’t have a hierarchless social revolution without a few broken nest eggs.
:rolleyes:
I do realize that. I was just trying to extend the tidy theoretical model suggested by the OP into some of the messy complications of the real world.
If you ever get the chance, and you haven’t, you should read “All The Devils Are Here”, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s look about the collapse of the housing bubble and the ‘Great Recession’. They look at a whole bunch of factors, and nobody really comes out very good, but one of the groups they look at are the credit rating agencies (Moody’s, S&P, Fitch). As you know, what credit rating agencies do is to evaluate companies or governments or whatever to determine credit risk, in other words, how risky is it to loan money to a company. Obviously, when this works right, its really informative, and gives individuals and banks the information they need to make choices about where to invest.
The problem was, what was happening in the years leading up to the crash was that the fact that the credit rating agencies were being hired by the companies they were evaluating, influenced them to inflate the ratings, because they wanted to keep the business. And then what was happening was that investors were getting something worse than ignorance…they were learning things that weren’t true. So, bonds and stuff were going out as AAA (the best rating), when they weren’t really very good, and people just took the word of S&P or Moody’s or whomever, and thought they were safe.
Obviously, that can be a problem with relying on government regulation too, and maybe it’s just part of human nature that we tend to trust people and groups set up as “authorities” to tell us the truth, even when they don’t.
I was skeptical that the licensing of fortune tellers was a real thing, but it is.
https://www.google.com/search?q=licensing+fortune+tellers
I can’t see how this can be justified other than as a way for the government to bring in revenue in the form of license fees. It’s not like it protects against fraud or assures competence. All fortune telling is fraud (at least if you charge for it), and there’s no such thing as a competent fortune teller. It isn’t like you can take classes to learn how to correctly predict the future.
Off topic, but your part in the whole transaction is not over as soon as you’ve paid, because the whole transaction is not over. There are numerous ways in which a buyer can behave positively or negatively after paying.
I disagree.
There are fortune tellers that will take your ten or twenty bucks and provide what is probably common sense advice wrapped up in some theatre. I don’t believe in it, I wouldn’t do it myself but it’s harmless entertainment. Some of those people may even take the advice and benefit from it.
Then there are the fortune tellers that pull scams, usually convincing people that their money is dirty and the cause of all their problems - these are the ones that scam people - often, older vulnerable people - out of their life savings . One of these things is not like the other
Uber is a terrible example. It’s added insurance coverage for its vehicles because the government told it that it had to, not because of customer feedback.
The fortune telling license appears to be an issue of public nuisance (which many communities consider it to be). Specially, for example, the one from Boston requires that neighboring homes and businesses be notified and offered an opportunity to protest.
There may also fraud check aspect, too. Fortune tellers often get a lot of personal information from not-very-bright people, and I am guessing much of their business is in cash. It’s an open invitation to commit fraud, and it would be even more open if the city didn’t at least have a list of people practicing. At least now, if you rip off some little old lady, she can easily tie it to a specific practitioner.
In other words, it’s not a certification that you are competent at telling fortunes. It’s a permit for a certain person to operate a certain type of business in a certain place.
In a way that’s actually good for consumers? It seems like it’s opened a market for “Will write good reviews for money” services and various extortion-like schemes. Based on various threads on the Dope in recent years, reviews from an average joe may not even show up, unless they go out and actually start writing reviews on a regular basis.
Such as? I suppose I could receive the item and then complain to eBay that I didn’t. I don’t think that’s a typical case, and the seller wouldn’t know that I hadn’t received the item.
In any case, someone has to get the last word, and that person can use it to influence the feedback from the other. I don’t see why that advantage should go to the seller.
Consumers can only respond to what they see, and do not have the authority to demand most information.
Consumers are untrained. There’s a reason for specialization in the world.
Consumers are limited in time. If we have to police the world, we will spend all of our time policing and little of our time actually doing other work.
Consumers are lazy. I don’t want to reinvent the damned wheel every day.
Critics are more likely to speak than fans, leading to bias.
Fans are more likely to speak than the indifferent, leading to bias.
Ratings are subjective, leading to bias.
Reality is not up for a vote.
Also, its drivers are regulated, in that they all must have drivers licenses. An Uber where you hope the driver knows how to drive would be a better example.
Well said, and same goes for jsgoddess in #35.
But the last word on this comes from the wisdom of the venerable xkcd, who explain all about star ratings, further illustrated by the Tornado Guard example.
But my favorite has to bethis one on “internet reviews”. 
To anyone who has ever looked at product ratings on the Internet, I don’t think anything more needs to be said.
See, for example: Sarah Winchester. The popular legend (disputed by her biographer) is that she was superstitious, and a fortune-teller told her that she would die when she finished building her fabulous mansion. The variation on this that I’ve heard from not-necessarily-reliable sources, and not mentioned in the Wiki page, is that she was conned by fraudsters into spending her life savings on that mansion.
This thread reminds me of this one that I created a few years ago:
No environmental and public health regulations =>universal healthcare
If we let the economy laissez-faire all over us, there WILL be health and safety issues to deal with. Anyone who doubts this only has to look to China . We can’t seriously talk about deregulation without also taking about how to mitigate the numerous downsides to deregulation. Like, how does a consumer ever hope to win a lawsuit against an unscrupulous business owner, when there is no one actually creating a paper trail of complaints against him? Government provides this function for the consumer. Take it away and you’re left with a “he said, she said” situation.
I remember years ago being on a tour of that place and it being pointed out that, aside from her obsession with the continuous construction, in many ways Sarah Winchester was a pretty astute lady and kept a tight rein on the staff and on her finances. She didn’t sound like someone who would be easily conned, and the pointlessness of much of the construction seems to indicate a superstitious and irrational obsession one way or the other.