It’s just moronic Justhink-speak. Once he starts in with his tripple-posted giberish, it’s time to move on.
I’ve been accused of not making sense from just about every post I’ve made to SDMB. Aparently, I am not capable of speaking properly.
I’ll try to address this though.
Every person on this earth has a suicidal breaking point.
The current problem with suicide is that it has not been publically accounted for with the same devotion to technological advance as murder has. This invariably means that it costs you much more pain and suffering to commit suicide than to murder someone.
Suicide ‘hurts’ for these reasons:
a.) It can hurt
b.) You can fail, at which point you become a slave to society or a pile of mush if you’re not so lucky.
c.) If you succeed, you will leave a body for some unsuspecting person to uncover against both of your consent.
These are the three primary reasons that people do not commit suicide when they are suffering.
There is much more leniency to work with in regards to the punishment that people will endure when these states do exist.
Obviously, these states do not need to exist. The only reason that suicide machines are not constructed is top maintain capital accumulation in small pockets without a system of accountability with regards to human consent as a check and balance.
The consent is still there as an option, but since vast technology has been allocated to abusing other people without feeling this abuse yourself (as opposed to abusing yourself without feeling that pain); there is a double standard created here.
It is this double standard which is used to exploit vast quantities of non-consentual human work for the purpose of one human being to enjoy the fruits of all of that labor.
It is actually a pretty narrow band being utilized here. A human being who has 300 million dollars and has tight painful security measures as punishment for complaining about this absurd theft; is playing with the suicidal tension line to keep slaves producing their luxury for them… so that they don’t actually do any work.
-Justhink
Scylla watching you go one on one with Justthink is like watching a man wrestle a greased anaconda, or Robert Novack do point/counterpoint with Yoda ("Yoda, you ignorant slut…).
Pure entertainment. Christmas came early. DO carry on! I shan’t interrupt again.
I came back to this after the weekend. I was enjoying the Scylla - elucidator jousting. I was prepared to jump in myself.
Then I got to page 3. And I’m not sure what I can say, really.
But without taking sides here - Scylla, you can’t invoke thermodynamics here. Entropy must increase only in a closed system. The earth is not a closed system. Where do you suppose that plants get their food from? Simply replace Justthink’s magic bugs with human chlorophyll if you want. Or make a similar argument concerning the replacement of oil with fabulously advanced solar power. There is certainly an interesting perspective in considering the threat to the economic power balance resulting from a suitably advanced technology jump.
An interesting exercise is also to consider the development of the perfect AI robot, maybe following Asimov’s three laws so that it seeks nothing but to serve us. It’s hard to see how our entire economic system as we know it could survive in such a world.
However, as the OP’er I’d suggest that this is all extremely tangential to the actual point of this thread.
Scylla, I still haven’t heard you address externalities once. And your response to market inefficiencies just seems to be more market dogma, that they correct themselves. This at least is certainly untrue - there are many inefficiencies that require a concerted and unnatural effort to correct. Imbalance of information is a classic example.
In particular, elucidator made one point that seemed to sum up the problem for me. That was the problem of cheap, affordable housing. You should know damn well that venture capital analysis involves attacking the project with the best risk/reward profile for your current portfolio. Cheap housing by its very nature may prove universally unattractive. What then do we do other than intervene in the market?
pan
kabbes:
That’s because externalities are pure bullshit, and not even a useful concept because you can’t do anything with it.
They’re nothing new either, and the effect of what is termed “externalities” is well understood in other terms.
Externalities generally fall into one of two categories:
- A seperate issue.
- A deferred cost.
Then again it may not. Cheap, and low income housing can be a pretty lucrative area to be involved in.
So, after knocking elucidator for knocking economic theory, you feel free to choose what parts of standardy economic theory you subscribe to yourself. “Well, I like the market theory but not the analysis of where it fails due to externalities and the like, so I think I’ll just throw that part away?”
Quite. Scylla, externalities are just as much a part of basic, well-understood economics as supply-demand is.
If you were me, arguing with someone flat-out denying elementary economic theory, how would you now respond?
pan
No Kabbes, I think externalities are a much abused notion as a result of that book Tragedy of the Commons (I think that was it.)
I’m just going from general personal experience that once externalities come into play the debate seems to end because prices tend to becom infinite, and all kinds of things get tossed into the mix as externalities.
But, perhaps I am being hasty and it won’t be that way with you.
At any rate, you correct. It was wrong of me to just pooh-pooh externalities out of hand without exploring the concept.
Are we talking about externalities in terms of that book (IIRC?) That’s a book that’s also in a box.
Since it was my mistake to be dismissive, I’ll pay for it and do some work telling you my view of externalities, and we can see what common ground we have. I’ll use a generalized example example simplified to convey the concepts as I see them.
Let’s say we have a company, call it Big Wheel. They make and sell tires, and they have a plant in which they do it. They sell their tires for $15 each.
For each tire that they make they pump an amount of toxic waste into an estuary that will cost $5 to clean up if and when it is cleaned up.
We’ll also say for purposes of argument that that waste does another $5 worth of damage to the usability of the estuary where it is pumpled per decade that it sits there (we’ll consider this to be everything, loss of wildlife, people getting cancer for eating contaminated fish, loss of swimming and other uses of the estuary due to pollution. I’m not trying to be accurate with this value but just assigning one arbitrarily.)
Let’s also say that that tire causes where on roads, erosion and other things.
Let’s also say that that tire may have a disposal cost. I say “may” becuase who knows. That tire might end up being a resource for somebody else and serve a useful purpose with value after it’s useful life as a tire is over. Maybe it will be hung up as a swing, or made into a retread, or recycled.
But, I have no problem saying that the ultimate disposal of that tire will cost another $2.
So, where are the externalities?
I would maintain that the toxic waste is not an externality, but rather a deferred cost (assuming the corporation is dumping legally.) The present value of cheap tires now has been deemed (perhaps irresponsibly) as more valuable than the cost of lost usage of the estuary and a cleanup later.
The tire really costs $25 assuming the waste is cleaned up in a decade. $10 of that is being deferred.
Who pays that deferred cost is not known. Big Wheel may be held responsible and have to do it, or the tax-payers may have to do it. In either case both parties have received a benefit from this deferral. Big Wheel gets competitive prices and taxpayers get cheap tires.
I don’t consider this an externality because the extra money in the manufacture is an actual part of the manufacturing process that is simply not presently paid, but deferred to a hypothetical later point.
Road wear and erosion are not a part of the manufacturing of the tire, but a function of driving, and cannot really logically be considered a cost of the driving.
Disposal is also not a part of the tire. When the tire’s useful life is over, it is now something else other than a tire. It may be garbage, it may be property, it may be a resource. It’s not a tire anymore.
The only other externality I potentially see is the use of the resource pool in the materials needed to manufacture the tire. It seems to me that those costs are already born in the cost of manufacture and purchase of resources. Any potential externalities there are not attributable to tire manufacture, but to corporations or individuals that create the components of the tire. There may be deferred costs there as well.
What am I missing. Where are the externalities?
[recoils in horror] Externalities are really important. They are costs and/ or benefits not accounted for by the market. The efficiency of competitive markets depends on buyers capturing all the benefits and sellers paying all the costs. If they don’t (as long as the externality is relevant at the margin) then a competitive market will produce an inefficient amount of the product. It’s not that the cost is “deferred”, it’s that some of the costs are ignored by markets.
In the absence of externalities, competitive markets produce what people want (if we accept their preferences as reflecting their wants) at the lowest cost to society (in terms of other goods evaluated by individual preferences). But if some benefits or costs are unpriced by the market, the market will produce inefficient outcomes.
How big these externalities are and how we might deal with them is controversial, and has been since their classic treatment in A. Pigou’s The Economics of Welfare in the 1930s. Coase’s The Problem of Social Cost is the wellspring of recent thought on the matter.
Not that this has much to do with meritocracy.
hawthorne:
Ok, but I’m ocnfused as to how they’re so important if we can’t tell what they are and what their effect is.
Can you give me an example for my understanding of an externality that isn’t simply a deferred cost like in my tire/waste example?
Scylla:
What your “deferred cost” argument is missing is the fact that the costs must be captured between buyers and sellers or too many tires will be bought relative to the amount that an efficient market would say ought to be bought.
Well, no, it may do away with the naive notion that costs are easy to quantify but I don’t think the costs become infinite. The estimates for the subsidization on a gallon of gas, for example, is rougly in the range of $2-$10. That is not infinite.
I don’t understand when people say that they believe in the market but what they really mean is not that they believe in market economics but rather that they believe in markets as a religion…i.e., the unregulated market is always correct or at least the best way to go.
What does this have to do with the debate at hand?
THis doesn’t have much to do with meritocracies but:
Here’s an example of Externalities and Public Goods as they relate to the environment:
http://www.ems.psu.edu/MnEc/environm.html
Summary: If I create a tower in my yard so I can watch sunsets but obstructs your view of the sunset, i have created an externality. I have made you worse off without considering you in my economic decision. There is no cost associated with the sunset because it is a private good. No company will ever make money selling sunsets because…well…there it is. The government needs to step in to provide and protect those public goods.
Problem is that there is a cost associated with anything the government does. Government workers need to be paid just like everyone else. Cleaning up the environment (or in this case, enforcing a zoning rule) also costs resources.
This doesn’t have much to do with any rational thought but:
Well that and…most of us aren’t suffering from severe depression.
People work to improve their lives. They don’t work because a life of work is less painfull than suicide. We do have painless suicde machines on every cormer. It’s on every 10+ story building, powered by gravity, and only has one moving part.
Explain to me why people tolerate slaverty or inprisonment under the worst conditions imaginable over suicide?
Because the machine wasn’t there. Because the suffering was minimal.
When you turn up the suffering a bit, like in concentration camps of German fame, people were known to take the painful method of running for the electric fence quite often.
A bullet is going to hurt, especially is someone decides to be sadistic about it for a few moments.
The gas chambers are going to hurt.
The electric fence is going to hurt.
The problem is that people were basically mush by the time they were extracted as being unfit workers and designated for the gas chamber. The idea of working another few weeks into a state of mush so you can be hauled to a gas chamber might not seem desirous… not to mention, that electric fence always loomed in the minds perimeter.
The ten story building eh? Just like a capitalist to require that suicide be considered a selfish act, or a painful only act.
What do you think becomes of that splat on the ground after the person is dead? Is a 10 year old kid going to walk up and be the first to discover it?
What about those people who stuck it out in the concentration camps; those who didn’t run for the fence… those who were eventually freed to tell the tale?
Are they your bastions of all that is glorious on this earth, that they were freed before they become human mush piles? Do you ultimately consider it admirable that human beings adapt to robotic slavery? I wonder how many would have lasted if there was a painless suicide machine in the camp…
Those dollar bills are units of labor, and the consent for allowing large quantities of it to accumulate in small pockets would cease to have a resource if these machines were placed everywhere.
What ultimately comes down is something similar to your stance…
“That’s absurd, only super depressed and totally irrational people and crazy people commit suicide, and even then, only when they’re on drugs.”
That’s the denial of a counter-intelligent personality speaking… that one of their children may wander off, their spouse, their ‘friends’, their co-workers…
“But I gave them so much, I offered them a living. Why couldn’t they talk to me about it, ask me to give them more? The interest off of my last years salary alone could have created and covered a pension plan for every person employed here for the rest of all of our lives… it’s their own damn fault for not asking. Stupid greedy lazy bastards, they don’t even deserve it, I wouldn’t have given it to them anyways.”
Counter-intelligent people don’t have issues with severe depression because they take the wages out of personality consent; which is a seperate topic.
The general point is that it is suicidal tension which is being utilized to generate wealth in small pockets.
-Justhink
Justhink, I kinda like you. But you are one strange buckaroo.
I disagree with your conclusion here, but not your authority along this regard.
We could cancel one military program and solve this problem right now. I don’t see it is a far off, far fetched thing off into the distant future or odd luck of having another genius be born.
People wroking together can more than compensate for their losses of having a genius of these innovations not be here to ‘help’ them. The question really boils down to priority.
The answer is right in front of us every day when we read the paper or watch the television.
To the point of your OP, if it is not the goal of the meritocrisy to disassemble the dependancy upon a meritocracy (not that we really have a meritocracy!), then there’s no point towards participating in the meritocracy unless you are severely mentally handicapped.
-Justhink
-Justhink
Not much time left before Christmas now, so this may well be my last post in this thread before the 30th. In which case, I’d first like to wish you all a merry Christmas and thank you for making this an entertaining thread.
Now onto the meat and stuffing.
Externalities
Let’s look at your tyre* example Scylla. The price of that tyre is $15, but the true cost is $25, right?
So what happens? Well as you well know, there is a supply-demand curve associated with that tyre. Picture the downward-sloping demand curve and the upward-sloping supply curve. If the cost had been the true $25 then the number of people that would have been willing to pay that price would have been X. However, since the cost is actually $15, the number of people is X+Y.
What’s wrong with this? Only that for Y people, they are not deriving the economic benefit from the tyre that would be justified by paying its full cost. They are only deriving between $15 and $25-worth of benefit from that $25 tyre. This means that there is an output shortfall across the economy of somewhere between zero and 10.Y dollars.
In other words, people have made a decision that benefits them (they are, after all, getting a tyre at a rate that suits them) but is inefficient across the economy.
In short:
For a person who derives $30 of benefit from the tyre, the value added to the economy by purchasing the tyre is $5.
For a person who derives $20 of benefit from the tyre, the value added to the economy by purchasing the tyre is -$5.
By subsidising the tyre we are encouraging people to make the latter type of decision.
It’s a very similar situation to price caps or subsidies. Draw a horizontal line on your supply-demand curve at $15 which falls below the equilibrium point of $25. The area between the two graphs represents the waste to the economy of the externality.
So the problem with externalities, as jshore and hawthorne have said, is not with the cost in and of itself, but with the inefficient economic decisions that get made as a result of them. As a free-market laissez-faire conservative, you should recognise the dangers that such constraints on the market impose.
pan
*I’m afraid that I will have to insist on spelling this the way God and the English intended.
Justthink:
But we cannot disassemble* our dependency on something, at least not at our current technology rate. And to devote all our efforts to doing so would be a colossal gamble - what if it is simply not possible to eliminate scarcity of resource? We would have spent an inordinate amount of waste on the alchemists’ dream.
We have to work within our physical constraints. For now - for now - with our current dependency on scarce resources, capitalism makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go all-out for unfettered market fundamentalism. Indeed, it is demonstrable that such a system is not the most effecient economically. And aside from pure efficiency, it seems to me that some form of meritocracy in which the losers of society are not punished too harshly for losing is a reasonable balance.
pan
*No disassemble Jonny 5!
How do we absorb the cost of not making efficient use of human resource?
It seems that every person has the potential to contribute something to society. When these people become homeless or on welfare or in prison, society loses their personal contribution plus additional costs are going to be attached. All people have merit from the time born. When they are infants, we behave, generally speaking, with this belief. At some point this changes and we place upon them a set of expectations. Then the belief begins to change. If this person meets our expectations…1) prepare, 2) work, 3) create something we value, etc,… we assign merit. If they fail to meet these expectations, we devalue them.
It makes sense for society to provide a standard of living for all. It makes sense for many reasons. It’s not just about being good for the sake of being good. I agree that the possibility of living in poverty is an incentive / effective punishment. However, poverty must not mean absence of opportunity. If people living in poverty are unable to recognize opportunity, they become hopeless and poverty becomes permanent. This goes for an inefficient use of human resource… across generations. Society serves itself when it emphasizes opportunity to the degree that makes it impossible to dismiss or ignore. The more affluent are able to recognize and take advantage of opportunity with a measure of ease. Risks are taken with the confidence that is based on prior successes. This is not the case with those that have fewer opportunities.