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Lumifer comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
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Comments (234)
You don't think that the 'demand' part has anything to do with value? That's a novel idea.
Eh, probably not what he had in mind, but it's certainly possible to make money doing things which have negative net value. You just have to do something which some people want enough to pay you for, and other people really want you not to do. As long as the people who want you not to do it can't prevent you from doing business, you can make money dealing with the people who want you to do it, even if the negative value to the people who want your business to stop is greater than the positive value of the people who want it to continue.
To use an example which was already on my mind, suppose that the people playing drums in the New York subway system (of whom there are many) mostly irritate rather than entertain people. Say that a tenth of the crowd is willing to pay them for their music, four tenths are indifferent, and the other half of the crowd would rather pay them to stop. But the people who want the noise to go away can't pay them to stop, because even if they could cooperate with each other in order to provide a greater incentive than the people who're willing to pay for music, it would just encourage people to blackmail them by showing up and getting paid to not play music.
When a business has both negative and positive demand from different people, it generally takes much more difficult coordination for the people with negative demand to influence the business than positive demand, so the two often do not cancel properly.
Negative net value aggregated over a sufficiently large number of people, e.g. the whole humanity? Sure, it's easy and very widespread. Basically you're talking about anything with a large enough negative externality. A favorite theme of environmentalists, by the way.
Haven't the examples I have given covered that? There can be moderate demand for high-value givers and moderate demand for no-value givers. Also, value doesn't tell you much about supply.
What does "value" mean if it's not what's determined by demand?
In the employment market, demand is whatever someone is willing to pay for, howver mistaken they are about what they are getting for their money.
People who are consistently mistaken about what they are getting for their money tend to lose over time if not their willingness then their ability to pay.
No, they have not. I agree that, of course, supply and demand matter. What I don't agree with is your claim that "Value has little to do with it". Not to mention that "financiers" not producing "anything noticeable" isn't really relevant to anything.
If you want to find examples of situations where people's income is not dependent on the value they provide, the easiest direction to look is direct power, for example government power.
Surely the easiest would be to look at someone with measurable economic value that happens to be negative.
Also, if TheAncientGeek is a pure though concealed troll - as another recent comment would in fact suggest - then people should stop responding and just downvote.
I don't have an opinion on whether TheAncientGeek is a troll, but speaking generally, outed trolls are pretty harmless and can be countertrolled for fun.
Demand has to do with value to whoever's paying. This can be very different from value to society overall. If a doctor saves your life then (aside from the effort and cost of doing it) that's a substantial gain to the world as a whole. If a hedge fund manager in charge of your money makes you $10M richer without adding anything to the overall size of the economy, then the value to you may be comparable to that of saving your life (kinda) but the value to the world is rather close to zero.
Value to employers is surely correlated somewhat with value to society, but they're far from the same.
I don't think I understand your point. Society is perfectly capable of paying for the "value to society overall", theoretically that's what the government budget is for.
Yes, sure, I can imagine the creation of some value that's so widely distributed in so tiny pieces that no single entity wants to pay for it, but so what?
I may have misunderstood the thrust of your argument (beginning "if you're going for equality, do note...") but it looks to me as if at least part of what you're saying is that much of the inequality we presently see is just and right and good, because what's happening is that people are being rewarded in proportion to the value they create. (Which might be just and right and good (1) because that means people are getting what they deserve, and/or (2) because it's a good thing for there to be strong incentives to create value.)
I agree that there's a lot to be said for inequality proportional to created value. But if, as seems to me to be the case (and as I think TheAncientGeek was arguing, albeit somewhat trollishly), (a) people get rewarded not for actual value created but for value delivered to the people who pay them, and (b) these two can (and often do) diverge sharply -- well, then, I think the argument becomes very much weaker: the existing inequality is less in accordance with actual good done, and less something that we want to incentivize more of.
Now, we should still expect some correlation between value to society and value to employers. And, indeed, society is capable of paying for value-to-society, and that that's something governments can and should and sometimes do do. But if you look around at who gets paid most and who least, I have to say the correlation between value created and reward received seems to me ... not that great.
I accordingly suggest giving this particular argument against trying to reduce inequality less weight than one might otherwise be inclined to give it. (Still some, for sure, and in particular this still seems like a decent argument against outright communism. But, e.g., Scandinavia seems to be doing well enough to suggest that having somewhat less inequality than eli_sennesh encounters in California might work just fine.)
Incidentally, if whoever downvoted my earlier comment (whether Lumifer or someone else) would like to explain why they found it worthy of downvoting rather than (only?) counterargument, I'd be interested and grateful.
My position is weaker: I don't make claims about what is "right and good". It's really an observation that different abilities of people to create value will "naturally" lead to inequality unless someone (like a government) takes explicit active measures to counteract this.
I don't know what "actual value" is. I treat value as subjective -- different people can and do assign different value to the same thing. For the same reason I find "value to society" a suspect concept.
I generally don't up- or down-vote comments in threads in which I participate. Specifically, I didn't vote on any comments in this thread.
Then yes, I agree with that.
Me too. What I wrote should be regarded as shorthand for something like this: "net value to society, which of course different people will assess in different ways; I have mine, Eli has his, Lumifer has his or hers, etc. I expect these different assessments to be similar enough that it isn't worth filling this discussion with metaethical digressions about how different people have different values". Perhaps there's some way I could have put it that wouldn't have given the impression I was talking about magical Objective Real Moral Value without filling the thread with metaethical digressions, but I didn't happen to spot one :-).
I'm not sure I understand this. It looks to me as if the following two questions are basically independent: (1) Is there one true way of assessing value, that isn't dependent on any particular valuer's values? (2) Is there, for typical ways of assessing value, a meaningful way to aggregate costs and benefits to lots of different people into an overall "value to society"? I answer "almost certainly no" to #1 but "yes, at least roughly" to #2.
Useful to know. (Neither do I, FWIW.)