If Employer A is paying blonds much more than everyone else, then Employer A gets the pick of the blonds,
If Employer A is paying blondes any more than the others, not 'much more'. They get the pick either way.
other employers have a severely reduced range of possible employees, and they therefore have reason to offer more if they ever find a blond person they want to employ.
One employer isn't usually going to make that big a difference, but yes, that's how it works: since Employer A is bidding up the price of blondes, the other employers will need to offer more to remain competitive.
An employer who pays currently-exploited workers more isn't like a consumer who won't buy things made in sweat shops, but like a consumer who buys things made in sweat shops but sends extra money to the sweat-shop employees when s/he does.
No, the analogy was otherwise. Imagine the consumer who, having flunked Econ, watches a TV report about horrible t-shirt sweatshops, and resolves to buy only fair-trade certified Mother-Jones-approved t-shirts; these t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently (if sweatshop t-shirts were worse, then they'd all go out of business and it wouldn't be a concern anymore) / be inferior, so the consumer will buy less t-shirts (and possibly quite a bit less depending on elasticity). And there goes the export-driven economy which was slowly pulling up that third world country. If I have $17 to pay a bunch of blondes and blondes usually get paid $0.8 and I pay them $0.85, then I can hire 20 blondes, but if I bought into this idea that I owed them some theoretical wage of $1, then I can only pay <17 because I raised prices on myself for no good reason, and the other 3 blondes must go pound dirt or work for employers who will treat them worse.
Instead of being polite to other people I could be brusque and rude for the sake of efficiency, make a bit of extra money with the time I gain, and send the proceeds to AMF.
(No, you probably couldn't, since IIRC low levels of Agreeableness are not too good for your career earnings.)
(2) the heuristic of treating others decently even if it means passing up some chances of making extra money to feed starving people or prevent malaria does have its advantages.
This isn't a question of whether you're treating them decently: you're giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that's quite decent. The question is whether to lavish even more money on them.
any more than the others, not 'much more'.
Again, that might be true in a textbook-economics world, but in reality people have other criteria besides salary when choosing a job, and don't always know about all the available options, etc. A company that pays blond-haired people slightly more will have an advantage when hiring blond people, but I wouldn't expect it to be the sort of advantage that means they simply have the pick of the best.
yes, that's how it works
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rath...
LW readers have unusual views on many subjects. Efficient Market Hypothesis notwithstanding, many of these are probably alien to most people in finance. So it's plausible they might have implications that are not yet fully integrated into current asset prices. And if you rightfully believe something that most people do not believe, you should be able to make money off that.
Here's an example for a different group. Feminists believe that women are paid less than men for no good economic reason. If this is the case, feminists should invest in companies that hire many women, and short those which hire few women, to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs. And I can think of examples for groups like Socialists, Neoreactionaries, etc. - cases where their positive beliefs have strong implications for economic predictions. But I struggle to think of such ones for LessWrong, which is why I am asking you. Can you think of any unusual LW-type beliefs that have strong economic implications (say over the next 1-3 years)?
Wei Dai has previously commented on a similar phenomena, but I'm interested in a wider class of phenomena.