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Vaniver comments on Imagining Scarcity - Less Wrong Discussion
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Television actually has gotten noticeably smarter over the last century, with institutions like HBO occupying the 'smart and rich' niche. But you'll note that HBO still targets a low enough degree of intelligence that it can sell lots and lots of subscriptions, because that's the profit-maximizing thing to do.
While that may be true, I feel that the TV got noticeably dumber over the last decade or so as the "smart and rich" decamped for the internet.
Very possibly--I, for one, watch very little in the way of new television, and what I do watch I watch over the internet.
What's HBO producing that's smarter?
This states roughly the argument I had in mind.
Complexity = smarter?
I go back into time and try and persuade Adam Smith to include a section on pragmatarianism in his Wealth of Nations.
"Hey Adam Smith... if your invisible hand is good enough for the private sector... then why isn't it good enough for the public sector?"
The story is pretty simple... but the topic is smarter.
I'd be willing to pay a lot more for this story than pretty much all the stories mentioned in that article you shared. The problem is that there isn't a mechanism for me to do so. So the question is... how could we create such a mechanism?
Right now we have a private sector (for-profit sector + non-profit sector) and a public sector. Imagine if we created an entertainment sector. Everybody would have to contribute 10% of their income to this sector... but they could choose which content they paid for. This would create a mechanism by which the supply of smarter content would come to more accurately reflect the true demand for smarter content.
But why 10%? Why not 5% or 25%? Clearly we're really screwed if we have to spend too much money on entertainment! We wouldn't have enough money left over for more important things. But if we spend too little on entertainment then we'll all be kinda sad.
The solution? We simply label "entertainment" a public good and move it into the public sector. Then we allow taxpayers to choose where their taxes go. This way we can ensure a more optimal proportion/balance.
A car is a private good because it's rivalrous and excludable. There are expensive cars and cheap cars. A movie isn't rivalrous but clearly we've figured out how to make it excludable. You have to buy a ticket to watch it in a theater. You have to buy the DVD to watch it at home. Or pay for Netflix. But these mechanisms all fight against the movie's true nature. As a result, movies all cost consumers pretty much the same amount of money and we end up with a huge disparity between supply and demand. We could eliminate this disparity simply by...