On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor

13 Post author: ChrisHallquist 27 November 2013 05:08AM

Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.


Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:

  • It's a tidy example of a failure to apply consequentialist / effective altruist-type reasoning. And while it's probably true that the people I'm critiquing aren't consequentialists by any means, it's a case where failing to look at the consequences leads people to say some particularly silly things.
  • I think there's a good chance this is a political issue that will become a lot more important as more and more jobs are replaced by automation. (If the previous sentence sounds obviously stupid to you, the best I can do without writing an entire post on that is vaguely gesturing at gwern on neo-luddism, though I don't agree with all of it.)

The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)

My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:

In state after state, the largest group of Medicaid recipients is Walmart employees. I'm sure that the same thing is true of food stamp recipients. Each Walmart "associate" costs the taxpayers an average of more than $1,000 in public assistance.

Or Bernie Sanders:

The Walmart family... here's an amazing story. The Walmart family is the wealthiest family in this country, worth about $100 billion. owning more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people, and yet here's the incredible fact.

Because their wages and benefits are so low, they are the major welfare recipients in America, because many, many of their workers depend on Medicaid, depend on food stamps, depend on government subsidies for housing. So, if the minimum wage went up for Walmart, would be a real cut in their profits, but it would be a real savings by the way for taxpayers, who would not having to subsidize Walmart employees because of their low wages.

Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).

Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.

But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.

This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.

Comments (510)

Comment author: DanielLC 02 December 2013 12:36:18AM *  1 point [-]

This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state).

Funny. I think minimum wage is a terrible policy precisely because we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income. I think welfare is a terrible idea, for the same reason.

They all have the same intentions, but guaranteed basic income is the one the meshes the best with the invisible hand. Even if you have no idea if you should be helping the poor, minimum wage is the wrong way to help the poor, so clearly you shouldn't have minimum wage.

Comment author: drnickbone 03 December 2013 07:42:31PM 2 points [-]

It is of course possible to have both. Set a minimum income guarantee for everyone (so that even those who are not working, don't starve), allow the minimum income to be retained by those in work (so avoiding a high effective tax rate on low incomes), and add a minimum wage as well (so discouraging low-productivity work, and incentivizing training for higher productivity work).

By the way, the major political value of describing Walmart as a "welfare queen" is that welfare recipients are stigmatised, and this line of rhetoric redirects the stigma (and tends to dilute it). It is unfair to Walmart, but perhaps no less fair than calling anyone a welfare queen.

Comment author: DanielLC 03 December 2013 11:22:47PM 3 points [-]

You can have both, but minimum wage is still a bad idea. You're better off just having a higher minimum income guarantee.

Comment author: drnickbone 04 December 2013 05:11:46PM *  -2 points [-]

Why a bad idea, though? I guess you are disputing this point:

(so discouraging low-productivity work, and incentivizing training for higher productivity work).

Here's a simple model. Assume that full-time employees cannot live on less than $8 an hour (they starve, can't pay rent etc.) Also assume that an employer can offer untrained staff two sorts of job:

Job 1 has very low productivity, total value of $6 per hour, but a pay-rate of $3 per hour. $3 a hour is too low to live on, but employees will accept it where that supplements a minimum guaranteed income.

Job 2 has higher productivity, total value of $14 per hour, but staff must be trained to do it, and because they now have transferable skills, the employer must offer $10 an hour to retain them. The training costs average at $2 per hour over the typical duration of the employment.

The employer offers staff Job 1 because that gives a higher profit ($3 per hour, rather than $2 per hour). Staff take it because $3 is better than nothing. But there is more economic value created if employers offer Job 2 instead. A minimum wage requires them to do that. You can argue the details, but that's the general principle.

There is clearly a counter-argument that the minimum wage is a market intervention and can cause inefficiencies (it may result in some folks who just can't be trained losing their $3 per hour jobs). But the counter to that counter-argument is that the minimum income guarantee is already a market intervention which is encouraging employers to offer Job 1 (as it allows employees to accept it). So a corrective intervention is needed.

Comment author: advael 04 December 2013 06:57:47PM 1 point [-]

My knee-jerk assumption is that Job 1 would actually not be accepted by almost any employees. This is based on the guess that without the threat of having no money, people generally would not agree to give up their time for low wages, since the worst case of being unemployed and receiving no supplemental income does not involve harsh deterrents like starving or being homeless.

Getting someone to do any job at all under that system will probably require either a pretty significant expected quality of life increase per hour worked (which is to say, way better than $3 per hour) or some intrinsic motivation to do the job other than money (e.g. they enjoy it, think it's morally good to do, etc.)

It's more likely that a well-implemented basic income would simply eliminate a lot of the (legal) labor supply for low-wage jobs. I both see this as a feature and see no need for a minimum wage under this system.

Comment author: Nornagest 04 December 2013 06:31:14PM *  4 points [-]

There is clearly a counter-argument that the minimum wage is a market intervention and can cause inefficiencies (it may result in some folks who just can't be trained losing their $3 per hour jobs).

That's an inefficiency, but it seems to me that a far more central one is embedded in the assumptions of your toy model: how many unskilled jobs ($3) funge against skilled or semi-skilled ones ($10). In practice, it seems to me that the kind of jobs an employer can offer are often narrowly constrained by business requirements.

A factory owner, for example, might be able to retrain unskilled line workers (fitting Subwidget A to Subwidget B) to do semi-skilled work (operating a widget-fitting machine) for higher total productivity; that's consistent with your model's assumptions. But if you run, say, a hardware store, someone's got to stack shelves, mop the floors, and run the registers, all of which take roughly the same level of training, and there's only so many places you can squeeze out more per-body productivity by investing more. Anyone you have to fire because of minimum-wage laws there represents an economic loss: they aren't getting paid, and you aren't running as efficient a business as you could be.

Comment author: drnickbone 04 December 2013 08:16:56PM *  1 point [-]

OK, a fair criticism of the "toy" model, which was simplified to make the point. There are always multiple choices of productivity and wage level, and big moves (more than doubling employee productivity, while simultaneously quadrupling the cost of labour) usually can't happen quickly.

Back in the real world, I did a quick look at the economic evidence, and was surprised. The latest evidence base is that the minimum wage has surprisingly little effect on anything. It seems to have no discernible effect on employment levels - see here - but it has no clear net impact on training levels either - see here.

One problem is that minimum wages tend to be varied only marginally, so it is hard to see a big effect. However, the UK provides a more dramatic experiment, where minimum wages were abolished in the 1990s, then re-introduced a few years later. Some UK assessment here on employment and on training. Again, not a big impact in either case, though training levels apparently did increase among groups affected by the minimum wage. This suggests the toy model is not totally daft.

Comment author: Nornagest 04 December 2013 08:58:38PM *  2 points [-]

Interesting reading, although I'm always leery of relying on a single meta-analysis of a politically charged subject. For the sake of argument, though, let's take it as given that increasing the minimum wage has no or only a small effect on employment rates. Where's the money coming from, then, and what would we expect that to do to the economy?

  • First option: It's a free lunch; the money would otherwise go to line the pockets of (spherical, behatted, cigar-chomping) capitalists. This is implausible to me on priors, but we can put bounds on how far we can stretch it: most businesses run on margins of 15 to 20%. I'm having a slightly harder time finding figures on personnel costs, but Google informs me that 38% is a decent payroll target; factor in benefits and such and let's call it 50% for all personnel-related expenses. This suggests that minimum wage laws could increase average wages by 10 or 20% without cutting too much into business owners' cigar budgets, although we should really be thinking on the margins here.

  • Second option: It's being passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. On average people are making more but also paying more; this means inflation. There are institutions trying to control inflation, though, so the costs probably end up being taken out in lower interest rates or in subtler ways. Note that higher costs of consumer goods work a lot like a mildly regressive tax; lower-income people buy more in consumer goods as a share of income.

  • Third option: The balance of labor changes. Jobs that can't economically be done at the lower wage points move to places that have less stringent laws, and trainable or higher-skilled jobs move in to fill the employment gaps. I don't think I'm economist enough to analyze this fully, but it looks like we'd expect wages for those higher-skilled jobs to go down in the affected jurisdiction as a consequence of supply-and-demand issues, probably after a time lag. In any case someone's still doing crappy jobs for crappy wages; they just don't show up in the statistics. Frictional costs also arise; outsourcing isn't cheap.

  • Fourth option: Something's masking the effect. Either the changes are slow enough that they don't show up in the available statistics, or something I haven't thought of is going on.

Comment author: drnickbone 04 December 2013 09:32:51PM *  1 point [-]

Interesting reading, although I'm always leery of relying on a single meta-analysis of a politically charged subject.

My first reference above was more of a "meta-meta-analysis" since it surveys the results of several meta-analyses! At a high level, it is going to be quite difficult to argue that there really is a big impact on employment, but somehow all the analyses and meta-analyses have missed it. As I said, I found it surprising, but this is the full evidence base.

For the sake of argument, though, let's take it as given that increasing the minimum wage has no or only a small effect on employment rates. Where's the money coming from, and what would we expect that to do to the economy?

This is the main question addressed by the Schmitt paper. To quote the exec summary.

"The report reviews evidence on eleven possible adjustments to minimum-wage increases that may help to explain why the measured employment effects are so consistently small. The strongest evidence suggests that the most important channels of adjustment are: reductions in labor turnover; improvements in organizational efficiency; reductions in wages of higher earners ("wage compression"); and small price increases."

One of the other hypotheses considered was a reduction in profits (which is what the toy model would suggest: the low-wage "Job 1" maximizes profits rather than productivity, and moving to "Job 2" increases productivity but lowers profits). However, Schmitt found not many studies and not much evidence of this, except in the UK following introduction of the minimum wage from nothing. Again, I found that very surprising: if anyone is losing out by paying the minimum wage, you would expect it to be the Walmarts of the world. But not so, apparently.

Comment author: Strange7 21 September 2015 12:13:09PM 0 points [-]

Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment, since they have resources and motivation to lay out more comprehensive contingency plans than anyone else. That extra productivity from "Job 2" doesn't just vanish into the aether. Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.

The ones who lose out from a higher minimum wage would be the middle managers, who are then less free to treat bottom-tier workers as interchangeable, disposable, safe targets for petty abuse. With higher wages, those workers will have more of the financial security that makes them willing to risk standing up for themselves, and specialized skills that make them more expensive to replace. That's what wage compression, reductions in turnover, and improvements in organizational efficiency look like from the trenches.

Comment author: James_Miller 21 September 2015 06:16:16PM 2 points [-]

Managers are more likely to abuse minimum wage workers the higher the minimum wage. At a higher minimum wage workers will value their jobs more and so will tolerate more abuse before quitting, and managers will value having the worker less because employing the worker is more costly.

Comment author: Nornagest 21 September 2015 05:38:25PM *  2 points [-]

Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.

The poorest people do not directly benefit from minimum wage, because they don't have jobs. Many participants in the informal economy are also very poor.

One option I didn't think of in the ancestor is that people pushed into the informal sector may still be showing up as employed in the sources being referenced: people making a lower-than-minimum-wage living as e.g. junk collectors are sometimes counted as such depending on methodology. We could pick out this effect by asking for personal earnings as well as employment status: if higher minimum wages are coming out of corporate margins somewhere, we'd expect average earnings (at least in the lower segment of the workforce) to go up, but we wouldn't expect that if it's pushing people into the informal sector. A survey would probably have to be carefully designed to have the resolution to pick this up, though.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2015 04:51:59PM 1 point [-]

Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment

If you can formulate that claim sufficiently precisely to be falsifiable, it shouldn't be hard to test it.

Comment author: drnickbone 04 December 2013 07:15:44PM *  1 point [-]

Someone downvoted your reply, Nornagest, which I really can't understand: I upvoted it myself.

The parent is now at -2; one more down and it will disappear from view, and we will get a heavy tax for continuing.

What is happening here? Are we just not allowed to have discussions on this forum about the possible economic gains and costs of minimum wage or minimum income policy?

Comment author: Nornagest 04 December 2013 07:26:41PM 4 points [-]

Someone's probably downvoting everything in the thread, most likely on grounds of being too political for the forum. My other comments here have taken the same hit.

Obviously I don't agree with that policy as it's applied locally, but I can't really blame them either. This exchange has been relatively sane, but the discussion under other comments has had points of low quality, and I'm not totally convinced that we're better off with the thread as a whole.

Comment author: Sanji 01 December 2013 09:55:54PM *  0 points [-]

I have noticed a contrarian position on the whole minimum wage thing. One that advocates buying from sweatshops, because they say "at least those people working in the sweatshops aren't homeless".

Possible solution to the whole minimum wage thing: model the thing as a math problem where you minimize the cost to taxpayers? Like, if (current minimum wage * current number of jobs) - (hypothetical minimum wage * resulting number of jobs) < 0, then the taxpayers would want to switch to the hypothetical minimum wage.

And to keep experimentation in that from being too harmful to people who have jobs, a possible solution: a limited number of sweatshops, where there is no minimum wage. The limited number is important, so that it doesn't become a viable option for companies like Walmart to start their own sweatshops and flood the market with jobs, contaminating the experimental results.

Actually a sort of "sweatshop fallback net" might be a good idea.

Comment author: gjm 23 September 2015 04:12:17PM 0 points [-]

minimize the cost to taxpayers

You can of course do that, or any number of other things where you pick a metric and optimize it. The question is: how well does that metric capture what we actually want? For me, at least, optimizing (min wage * #jobs) doesn't seem like it matches my values terribly well, though it's probably better than maximizing either factor on its own.

a limited number of sweatshops

That's an interesting idea (though it feels rather horrible), but I'm not sure how it's supposed to work.

  • If they are meant to be the only safety net for people who can't find work at minimum wage or above: why would we expect it to be sufficient? Some people may be unable to cope with working conditions in the sweatshops; some people may simply not be able to do the work; and if the amount of sweatshop work is limited as you propose, there's no reason why there should be enough for all the people unable to find minimum-wage-or-better work.
  • If there is meant to be some further safety net: why then would anyone work in the sweatshops? The usual answer would be something like "because people like to work; it gives them more sense of dignity and purpose", and indeed people do mostly like to work rather than depend on government benefits. But now we're talking about working conditions and pay that are almost illegally bad, so much so that the government doesn't allow more than a very limited number of people to be stuck with them; I would expect a lot of people to prefer depending on government handouts to that, and I don't think I'd blame them.
    • So maybe they'd be some kind of coercion? You don't get your government benefits if you refuse a sweatshop job, or something. But now (1) this is not reasonable for people who, e.g., are physically incapable of doing that work, and (2) since sweatshop places are scarce, it means that some benefit claimants will (arbitrarily?) be required to work in the sweatshops and some won't, which will surely cause resentment. I suppose you could require everyone in receipt of benefits to work in the sweatshops some fraction of the time?
Comment author: Strange7 23 September 2015 08:53:51AM 0 points [-]

"at least those people working in the sweatshops aren't homeless"

Bizarrely enough there are many people who have jobs, yet cannot afford housing. Something about rising real estate prices.

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 December 2013 02:04:28AM *  -1 points [-]

I haven't scrolled through all the existing comments to see if someone else has already raised this point, but while, in general, I would agree that it's usually better for people to have poorly compensated employment that leaves them in need of some public support than to have no employment whatsoever and be even more heavily reliant on public support, I think this is not necessarily the most useful context in which to view institutions like Walmart.

In general, Walmart doesn't create jobs where, otherwise, no jobs would have existed. Instead, it usually displaces jobs that would otherwise be created by smaller stores or chains which it can undercut by being able to more effectively employ economies of scale. While those economies of scale can deliver genuine benefit to consumers, in offering its employees such low pay and benefits that they need public assistance, Walmart creates an illusory benefit to consumers over smaller stores, by lowering prices and thus making themselves a more appealing shopping destination, but making the public shoulder the hidden cost of the employees' low level of compensation.

Comment author: drethelin 01 December 2013 04:44:16PM 1 point [-]

wait, in that case isn't Walmart mostly a subsidy to disadvantaged people? The vast majority of taxes are paid by the wealthy, but the vast majority of Walmart customers are the poor. This means that they get the benefit of cheaper products while paying little to none of the costs.

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 December 2013 06:04:19PM *  -2 points [-]

Well, the majority of taxes aren't paid by the lower class, but I wouldn't say the majority of taxes are paid by the wealthy; for those who have enough money, there are sufficient tax loopholes for them to pay less taxes by proportion of their income (Warren Buffet has for some time now been paying a lower proportion of his income in tax than his secretary). So Walmart would mostly be subsidized by the middle and upper-middle classes.

While Walmart's customer's certainly skew lower class, as to whether the "vast majority" are lower class, I couldn't say.

Comment author: drethelin 01 December 2013 07:35:41PM *  -1 points [-]

The top 1 percent pay 36 percent of taxes while only being 19 percent of total income. The loophole thing, despite egregious examples like buffet, is wildly exaggerated.

Comment author: Desrtopa 01 December 2013 08:57:57PM *  0 points [-]

Ialdabaoth already raised this point, but to put some numbers to it, while the the top 1 percent pays 36 of income taxes, people in that percentile make less than 40% of their income through salary and wages; most of the remainder comes from investments, which are not covered under the income tax and are taxed at a lower rate.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 01 December 2013 07:49:08PM *  -1 points [-]

Be careful that the same definition of "income" is being used in both cases; I believe that the definition Warren Buffet was using included capital gains (which is specifically not taxed as 'income', which is what your first link counts). Capital gains are still taxed at 15%, so if the top 1% gain most of their 19% share through capital gains (or if the share is higher than 19% when capital gains are included), then it's likely they ARE paying less.

Comment author: drethelin 01 December 2013 08:59:56PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Desrtopa 02 December 2013 02:04:41AM *  -1 points [-]

Which is still well below the top income tax bracket of 39.6%.

Given the income tax rates, capital gains tax rates, and the average proportion from both sources composing the income of the top 1%, the average rate of tax on people in that bracket, barring any use of additional tax limiting strategies, should be somewhat under 28%, the rate paid at the $87,851 - $183,250 income tax bracket. The very wealthy, whose income is more dominated by investment revenue, would tend towards a lower rate.

If we categorize the wealthy by total wealth rather than yearly revenue though, then the top 1% pays a much lower proportion of their total wealth in tax.

So while Walmart displacing jobs that leave employees in need of public assistance can be seen as a subsidy on the lower classes, it's not one where the wealthy are paying out either a majority or a disproportionate amount relative to their wealth.

Comment author: aquaticko 29 November 2013 04:14:26AM -1 points [-]

Sorry to make my first post on LW a political one, but I've been hearing too much about this discussion everywhere to stay out of it, here. I'll try to keep it short.

ChrisHallquist: I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.

Quite honestly, I think this is a confused concern, or at least a misplaced one.

I'm a philosopher by education (again, my apologies), but an urban economist/macroeconomist by trade and hobby. I don't think I'm saying anything new or surprising in mentioning that, as industrial economic growth decline, and economic growth shifts to less labor-intensive service industries, there begins a decline the growth rate of the employment-population ratio. Assuming the typical level of population growth rate decline associate with this economic transition (i.e. Western Europe/North America fertility levels, not East Asian/European fertility levels), you end up with a large ratio of low-wage/high-wage laborers. Because people respond intuitively to the two population segments with more visibly-dispersed levels of income, by claiming that this is unjust, you start to get a popular movement for social welfare. The confusion/frivolousness should be becoming somewhat apparent.

The income dispersion which is a product of the development of the economic system which created it cannot be solved by that same system; this is what leads to calls for things like living wages and other types of income redistribution--or even just labor welfare generally--through government intervention. However, these interventions in a market built around the production of capital only serve to reduce its efficiency by introducing new inflexibilities in the market, e.g., if I'm looking to start up a restaurant, I can only do so provided I have enough money to satisfy OSHA regulations. If I don't have enough money to do so, I can't begin to produce capital through food service, which not only deprives me of profit, but deprives local workers of (theoretically) sharing in that profit. When economic growth slows and population growth doesn't, it's bad for everyone.

I'm pretty strongly socialist, but I'm willing to admit social welfare and capitalism simply don't go together...though maybe that's less surprising than it seems to me.

I suppose this just hits on the fact that I agree with what a few other people here have said: I don't think that people who are genuine libertarian capitalists can actually have conversations about socioeconomics with non-libertarian socialists. We have different consequences we're trying to reach, and knowing that, we can move on and not worry about convincing each other. Frankly, it leads me to respect libertarians totally, even if I absolutely disagree with them.

But American liberals, and most European social democrats, are inconsistent. Whether or not they know it, they believe that human welfare (whatever their preferred sources of utility are) is Good, but they refuse to use a system that produces it because they believe that system--socialism--is Bad, though in their defense, it's mostly because they misunderstand what socialism actually is (not that I'll lay claim to an absolute understanding). Because the morality they use is deontological in nature, you end up with people creating rules AND goals (the latter because humans are planning things), separately and simultaneously(ish), instead of deciding on one starting point and letting what comes naturally happen without interference.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2013 01:52:46PM 1 point [-]

my first post on LW

Feel free to introduce yourself in the welcome thread and take the census/survey, if you haven't already.

if I'm looking to start up a restaurant, I can only do so provided I have enough money to satisfy OSHA regulations. If I don't have enough money to do so, I can't begin to produce capital through food service, which not only deprives me of profit, but deprives local workers of (theoretically) sharing in that profit.

I was going to say “Sure, fewer regulations means more, cheaper restaurants and more jobs for cooks and waiters, but also more cases of food poisoning -- and if you wonder why in a free market I couldn't just decide to avoid the kinds of restauraunt likely to give me food poisoning even if they're cheaper, I invite you to read Section 4 in this FAQ”, but reading on I gues you'd actually agree.

Comment author: shminux 27 November 2013 09:40:16PM 10 points [-]

I don't see why a vague argument against one of many political memes deserves a post in Main.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 28 November 2013 03:40:15AM *  -2 points [-]

Useful illustration of the kind of mistakes thinking in terms of consequences can help you avoid.

EDIT: To elaborate - I think LessWrong could really benefit from accessible posts applying LessWrong-type ideas to topics that people who aren't already hardcore nerds about typical LessWrong topics might have heard about and care about.

Comment author: shminux 28 November 2013 07:33:28AM 2 points [-]

I see. I guess I am having trouble following your conclusions from your premises.

Walmart is in a low-margin business and it employs unskilled labor, so naturally they put as much squeeze on the wages as they can get away with. I don't see anything immoral about it, it's just business. Corporations are well known to behave like psychopaths.

There is a 100 year-old solution to this issue, it is called organized labor. While unions are out of place in many other industries, Walmart is a perfect target for unionizing, since individual workers have zero leverage against the company, while a union can fight for reasonable wages and benefits. Same applies to Amazon warehouses, by the way. So, an alternative to increase in mandatory minimum wage (which ought to be increased, by the way, in the US it is currently lower in inflation-adjusted dollars than it was 30 years ago) and to a guaranteed basic income (which shifts the burden of paying the Walmart employees from the shareholders and the customers to everyone and adds some unnecessary overhead) is to enact policies making it easier to unionize unskilled labor.

Comment author: gjm 23 September 2015 04:52:36PM 0 points [-]

I don't see anything immoral about it, it's just business. Corporations are well known to behave like psychopaths.

It seems to me that either (1) individuals working for those corporations ultimately make the decisions that screw over their ill-paid workers, in which case those individuals may be acting immorally; or else (2) actually the entities with agency here are the corporations themselves, in which case they may be acting immorally. Neither of these makes moral questions go away.

(I say "may be" rather than "are" because these are complicated issues and it might e.g. turn out that one can't do better than Walmart's employment practices after all.)

I think I agree with everything in your last paragraph.

Comment author: Lumifer 23 September 2015 04:59:27PM 1 point [-]

It is rather complicated.

I am not sure I want the corporations to act morally because the moral system they pick might turn out to be one I strongly disagree with. Focusing on money keeps them safe and predictable. And if you want organizations to work towards moral goals, I see no reason for these organizations to be corporations.

Comment author: Strange7 21 September 2015 12:58:08PM 0 points [-]

A union makes sense when the workers have specialized interests, but for unskilled labor isn't it simpler just to work through the overarching government?

Comment author: V_V 21 September 2015 02:19:48PM 2 points [-]

The government represents different and competing interests, and it's often biased towards those of large corporations. A trade union of unskilled workers, instead, only represents the interests of unskilled workers.

Comment author: Sophronius 27 November 2013 03:17:07PM *  -1 points [-]

Chris, I agree with your observation that people don't think very consequentialist here. However, there is also something to be said for a solid application of common sense.

Yes, the obvious economic argument is that Walmart is under no obligation to hire employees, and any employee is free to leave whenever, so they should be allowed to treat them any way they want. The underlying assumptions here are that the (job) market is efficient so that no single company can influence it, people can get new jobs instantly, people can rationally decide whether to switch jobs on the fly, etc. etc. Of course these assumptions are not correct. For example, if a company becomes successful by beating all competition, say by driving costs lower than anyone else can, and then one day the company fires all employees and packs up and leaves there is going to be a very real hit to the economy. There certainly is not going to be an identical company performing the same service there the next day. In the case of Walmart, they are one of the largest companies in the world. It would be extremely unrealistic to assume that if they don't pay their employees enough, everyone could just go and leave and it would be the same as if Walmart had never existed. The larger a company you are, the better a bargaining position you have, and the more capable you are of driving down wages to make a higher profit.

The point I'm trying to get across here is this: The reason many people object to Walmart's policies is because their moral intuitions tell them that there is something wrong when a company doesn't pay its employees enough for them to feed themselves. Yes, a lot of it boils down to "Companies Boo, people Jay!". No, it isn't very consequentialist. But you should probably not ignore that moral intuition, because a good helping of common sense is usually better than an overly simplistic economic argument based on unrealistic assumptions. At least in my experience.

Comment author: Sophronius 28 November 2013 02:45:17PM *  -2 points [-]

If possible, I would like to hear the reason for the downvoting of the above post. Specifically, whether the reason is:

1) It discusses politics (in response to an article about politics?)
2) The reasoning is fallacious
3) It was written by me
4) People don't like silly examples
5) It sounds vaguely leftish
6) The point I made is so obvious that it's redundant
7) people prefer to have their politics debates one-sided

Comment author: knb 01 December 2013 11:01:55PM *  0 points [-]

5) It sounds vaguely leftish

LWers are mostly socialists. If you're getting downvoted here while saying "leftish" things, what you're saying probably has some actual problems.

Comment author: Nornagest 01 December 2013 08:19:57PM *  3 points [-]

The single most important reason for my downvote was the invocation of "common sense", which I tend to read as "don't bother doing any analysis, just fall back on your learned heuristics"; I'm fairly sure this is a correct reading in context. Now, that's good advice in time-constrained or highly complex situations, but this is neither. To make matters worse, it's a politically polarized topic, which implies that the salient heuristics are very likely going to be split along ideological lines: half the people you're talking to are using their common sense, which just happens to say something different from yours. That in turn implies either that you aren't aware of this dynamic or that you're using rallying tactics, and I don't want to see either one on this site.

I also feel it's too long for its content. Additionally, it's in a political thread, arguing for a politicized stance, and both lower my threshold for downvoting.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 01 December 2013 07:58:17PM 3 points [-]

I've no idea who you are and I've just downvoted you because your post is a tedious wall-of-text.

Comment author: votesplainer 28 November 2013 04:26:28PM *  4 points [-]

8) It's too long, says very little and doesn't have a summary preceding it. 9) Almost all of your writing is either political or meta, which suggests you don't belong here and will only add noise. 10) You've clearly failed to learn from previous criticism.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 27 November 2013 12:12:29PM *  -1 points [-]

Instead of complaining, could this system be hacked to help the poor people? If you created a company for hiring currently unemployed unskilled people and providing them as good working conditions as possible, could you get the same subsidies Walmart does? Then those people would prefer working for you.

I imagine something similar to Mondragón Corporación Cooperativa, but focused on low-income people.

Comment author: Lumifer 27 November 2013 03:33:02PM 8 points [-]

No need to hack anything, anyone who wants to can step in and create such a company.

I predict rapid learning about reasons why these people are unskilled and unemployed :-/

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 28 November 2013 11:35:23AM *  1 point [-]

Not sure if it's my idea that is wrong, or just my way of presenting it. So here is a longer version:

We observe that some people are employed by a company that effectively pays them less than most people consider an acceptable wage. Some say it's less than living wage, but that's probably an exaggeration. Let's just say that the wage is considered so low that this fact offends many people, and for the purpose of this comment let's just call it "unacceptable" without providing an exact definition of what precisely that means. (The basic intuition is that we object against a specific amount of money being paid to a person living in a specific location, regardless of which specific company would pay the money, if the work is equivalent.)

Some people conclude that the company is "evil". Which I would translate as a moral obligation to stop doing such things, and either pay the employees an acceptable wage, or fire them. Other people conclude that the company is doing morally okay, because some people simply don't create enough value that would translate to an acceptable wage without a state subsidy. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to make both of these people agree on one specific answer; not merely about whether Walmart should but even about whether it could pay those people acceptable wages.

Instead of just expressing my allegiance to one of these tribes, I propose solving the problem experimentally.

If it is possible to employ the same people and give them higher wages than Walmart does, then do it. Actually, Walmart succeeds to do it while creating profit and big salaries for its management -- so if you would run the company without the explicit goal of creating a profit and big salaries for the management, you could use that extra money to improve the situation of your employees compared with the employees of Walmart. If you succeed to execute this project well, it could lead to Walmart going out of market, which (if you consider Walmart evil) would be a good thing to do. (I am not trying to solve all the society's problems here, neither from socialist nor libertarian viewpoint, just to improve one specific situation.)

On the other hand, if it is not possible to employ those people without using the same methods Walmart does (if your project predictably fails), then your only possible conclusions about Walmart's behaviour is either that it is okay, or that Walmart should fire those employees; because they don't have other choices.

I would prefer to see this resolved experimentally, instead of writing clever arguments on the internet. I can imagine both results, for example depending on which subset of the current Walmart's employees one would employ. I consider one of the results more likely, but I would prefer to have experimental data instead of a smart and mostly uninformed opinion.

Comment author: Lumifer 02 December 2013 04:18:02PM 1 point [-]

this fact offends many people

That's a rather interesting criterion.

By the way of comparison, let me point out that not baptizing your children also offends many people (because from their point of view you have just pushed your child into the pits of hell). Or, for another example, polyamory offends many people, too. So?

I would prefer to see this resolved experimentally

Um, and who's going to do it? And how would that work-- you'll set up a company which functions much like Wal-Mart? That will be pretty expensive and I am not sure you can do this -- arguably Wal-Mart competitors have tried and failed.

If you want to just employ these people doing whatever, well, there is the whole market economy out there which offers choices of employment. If someone is willing to pay these people more (in money and benefits) they would switch jobs, wouldn't they? Yes, of course there are frictions but at Wal-Mart scale the effect should be pretty obvious.

Comment author: Nornagest 01 December 2013 08:39:29PM *  2 points [-]

Some say it's less than living wage, but that's probably an exaggeration.

Confusingly, "living wage" in US parlance doesn't mean "the minimum you can live on", but rather the minimum needed to meet some set of quality-of-life criteria for the region after factoring in dependents. Exact definitions differ, but it usually hashes out to quite a bit higher than subsistence wages: when California was debating one a while back, I believe the number being tossed around was $13/hour in late-1990s dollars.

I don't know exactly what Walmart pays its employees but it probably doesn't qualify.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 01 December 2013 08:02:03PM -1 points [-]

Your idea sounds great in its short and long forms, and I think Lumifer's agreeing with you and telling you his prediction about how it will go, so you can falsify it.

Comment author: Vivificient 27 November 2013 02:25:55PM -1 points [-]

I'm not sure if I understand what you're suggesting. As I understand it, the argument isn't that Walmart is literally getting subsidies. It's just that Walmart employees are getting welfare, so Walmart doesn't have to pay to support them, reducing Walmart's costs hypothetically compared to an equivalent company which paid their workers a better wage.

So if you created a company which provided as good of working conditions as possible, your employees wouldn't need welfare, so you wouldn't be benefiting from the "subsidies". Also, your costs would go up, so you'd be more likely to go out of business than Walmart.

Comment author: zslastman 27 November 2013 10:23:39AM *  4 points [-]

Good article. I think an important part of the idea behind the anti-Walmartism is the idea that Walmart is not only offering low paying jobs to people, but in doing so eliminating higher paying jobs that those people could otherwise take in the stores which a re driven out of business. They can do so because their business model is efficient, and people like their lower prices. But the anti-walmart crowd would argue that the low prices hide a negative externality for society at large, which reduces equity, and is a net utility loss.

Comment author: katydee 26 November 2013 09:44:47AM *  10 points [-]

This post is almost the epitome of what I don't want to see on LessWrong, Discussion or not.

EDIT: This post was moved to Main after I made this comment. This makes me like it even less.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 28 November 2013 03:40:52AM -2 points [-]

Argument?

Comment author: Ishaan 28 November 2013 08:57:56AM *  6 points [-]

Note: I didn't mind it in Discussion at all and thought it was interesting. I am of the opinion that comments + discussion should not be heavily self-censored. However, I second the opinion that it shouldn't be in Main. I'm also a relatively new user (first handle was mid 2012) so you can take my opinions on what belongs in Main with that in mind.

I think the rule of thumb is, that a post should possess at least one of the following qualities:

1) About epistemic rationality (ontology, epistemics, ethics, AI, bias reduction, scientific method, semantics, etc)

2) About instrumental rationality (self improvement, happiness, willpower, organization, social behavior, etc)

3) Furthering the Reader's Interests (Effective Altruism, textbook recommendations, etc)

4) Meta, announcements, and notifications about things of interest to LW or closely affiliated with LW.

--

I think politics can fall into any of these. News (News! not opinions!) about some political activity or press release relating to the Singularity institute or other prominant figures on LW would fall into 4. An analysis about whether or not voting is rational would fall into 3. Descriptions of how political groups behave would fall into 2. The psychology of politically induced biases, how to do science for economic policy, etc... would fall into 1.

So your post is interesting (for me, because I follow politics), not particularly mind-killing, etc...but it's not meeting the criteria for making me more rational or furthering my interests. It's not simply that it's about politics, boo on talking about politics, etc.

I can't actually do anything about the Wal-Mart meme. Knowing about it doesn't further my instrumental goals, nor does it improve my epistemic skill, nor can it really effect my behavior or thinking in any way. I might get hedons from reading and Learning about a Cool Thing, but that's moving away from the stated purpose of Lesswrong.

Edit: Looking over other posts in main, I can see that there are quite a few other which did not meet my stated criteria (including some by prominent posters like Eliezer and katydee). So I suppose my stated criteria don't actually describe things as they actually are or how they are intended to be, but how i think they aught to be.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 26 November 2013 11:53:43AM *  9 points [-]

It has a reasonable argument at its core: giving government benefits to low-income workers effectively means subsidizing the companies that pay low wages (and there are huge companies profiting from this). That's an irony, because even the voters who want to give money to low-income people usually don't want to support companies that profit by paying low wages. Giving money to low-income people regardless of their employment (via basic income or otherwise) would have a similar result, except for requiring people to work for companies that profit by paying low wages.

It has a mindkilling title: "evil" is a loaded word, and even if we insist on using it, why not use it instead on politicians and voters who enable this behavior? The problem is, each tribe has their preferences about who should be called evil, therefore the usage of the word necessarily follows the party line.

The mindkilling effect of politics is not just that it's difficult to write a reasonable article about politics... but that even if you succeed to write a moderately reasonable article on a political topic, it is still very likely to cause unreasonable comments in the discussion. -- This is why we need more strict criteria for political articles. As it is, it is in my opinion barely okay for the Discussion, and unfit for Main. I upvoted it in the Discussion, because I appreciate the information (I am not American, so I learned something new about Walmart, which may help me understand the American culture better), but would downvote it if it moved to Main.

Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics

This reminds me of an advice for authors: don't tell me, show me. Specifically: write an article in a way that does not scream your tribal affiliations, and then you will not have to excuse yourself.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 28 November 2013 03:48:37AM 2 points [-]

Oh, and another thing:

it is still very likely to cause unreasonable comments in the discussion

Is that prediction correct? I think that this thread is full of non-mindkilled comments. The only really bad comments have been downvoted appropriately.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 28 November 2013 09:49:09AM *  4 points [-]

Yes, you are correct and I am surprised.

Now the question is, how much this is reproducible. That is, how much of the quality of the discussion can be attributed to the fact that discussing politics is a taboo here, so people breaking the taboo are extra careful because they know they will be judged more ciritically. Also, the website policy until now may have filtered away those people who enjoy mindkilling debates; having the political debates more often might invite them back.

But compared with the typical internet political discussion, this one is extraordinarily reasonable. (I also appreciate fixing the title.) I still feel afraid that having this kind of atricles more often would make things worse. But maybe we already passed some critical treshold where the existing community is sane enough to downvote the mindkilling comments even when their author is "fighting for the same side".

EDIT: Another thing that I am afraid of, is that after writing a political article arguing (sanely) for one tribe, people from the opposing tribe would feel an urge to write an article (or preferably two articles) describing the situation from their tribe's point of view. Which would lead to an arms race in the number of articles, and the quality would gradually go down.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2013 06:41:20PM 1 point [-]

Giving money to low-income people regardless of their employment (via basic income or otherwise) would have a similar result, except for requiring people to work for companies that profit by paying low wages.

That's a big “except”.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 26 November 2013 04:36:03PM 0 points [-]

"Evil" seems a fair description of how some people seem to view Walmart, though I'll probably remove it anyway on re-write.

As for the rest, I'm just going to drop a link to what I've previously said about "politics as mindkiller." (And say how depressing it is that so many people in this community seem to have given up on doing better.)

Comment author: katydee 27 November 2013 02:25:41PM 1 point [-]

I've seen what you've previously said on this matter-- suffice it to say that I disagree. The fact that this is now in Main makes me sad for LessWrong.

Comment author: Vaniver 27 November 2013 05:42:05AM *  4 points [-]

And say how depressing it is that so many people in this community seem to have given up on doing better.

Better at... wasting time? (I don't know who you think is better off having the opinion "Grayson and Sanders are wrong about Walmart" than the opinion "I don't care what Grayson and Sanders think about Walmart." Anyone I can think of who benefits from having that opinion can easily determine so by social cues from people they want to impress, without having to think it through.)

Comment author: Ishaan 25 November 2013 09:51:03PM *  0 points [-]

I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.

I don't understand why you are worried that the anti-wal-mart meme would cause anyone, let alone a leftist, to oppose GBI ... a GBI reduces the incentive to work for low wages. If it's true that welfare is benefiting Wal-Mart and other low-paying companies, then the reason is that in the current system you lose your benefits if you don't get a job. This is just the natural consequence of our method of imbedding an incentive to work within the welfare system.

I suppose someone who didn't like GBI and thought work-dependent welfare was an acceptable alternative might be driven to oppose welfare in addition to GBI upon learning about this side effect.

Comment author: CronoDAS 25 November 2013 07:37:55PM 6 points [-]

In terms of actually existing politics, which do you think people in general would dislike least: subsidizing would-be freeloaders with taxpayer money, or using that same taxpayer money to hire people (or subsidize hiring people) to do largely unproductive jobs that the market wouldn't pay them a living wage to do? There seems to be a general feeling that it's wrong to let people (figuratively) starve, but also that it's bad to give people things they don't deserve.

If the answer is "I think people in general would rather make people work for their money, even if the work itself isn't actually worth what we're paying" then we might as well let Wal-Mart do the hiring rather than have the government do it directly.

(Aside: The textbook example of unproductive make-work is digging ditches and filling them in again. A slightly less obviously ridiculous way to employ low-skilled workers is as "taxi drivers" for people who would rather spend their daily commute doing something other than driving but wouldn't go to the expense of hiring a driver themselves. After all, driving is a skill that most adults actually do have...)

Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2013 06:09:27PM 10 points [-]

I used to have rock-paper-scissor preferences for that kind of thing (if A = “John is paid to do nothing, i.e. basic income guarantee”, B = “John is paid to do something useless, e.g. digging ditches and filling them again”, and C = “John is not paid at all”, I preferred B to A to C to B). I realized that and forced myself to resolve this when reading this post and its comment thread.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 28 November 2013 10:20:19AM *  1 point [-]

I would be most happy to see the option "A+" = "John is paid to do nothing; and then John uses his free time to do something useful but unpaid for his community". Because there are so many things that need to be done.

Once I saw an example on a TV: there was a village that had two big problems: a) many unemployed people, and b) no kindergarten. The local government solved this problem by paying a few local women to take care of the local children kindergarten-style at their (the women's) homes. And I was like: "OMG, that's the most logical solution; so obvious in hindsight! Why doesn't this kind of stuff happen more often?" (The women were first given some quick education about various activities they should do with the children, and they had a coordinator. So the solution had a support from outside; it just relied on the work of local people.)

But to make this happen more often, there are some problems, both on the side of the local governments and on the side of the people. Every kind of work needs to be organized somehow, and organizing the work is also work, and rather difficult one; not everyone can do it well. There must be someone who does it well, and that person needs to be paid. On the other side, I can imagine that many people would try to cheat the system by pretending to do something useful for the community, but really optimizing for their own maximum convenience at the expense of everything else.

I can imagine a local non-profit organization, literally paying people for doing useful stuff, or just paying them for doing nothing when nothing needs to be done. However, when there is a work to do for the community, and a person refuses to do it or is obviously cheating, that person would be removed from the list. I can also imagine this solution would have a lot of problems, getting the money being one of them but not the only one.

Comment author: satt 28 November 2013 01:25:59AM 4 points [-]

Upvoted for uncovering a psychologically plausible, real-life example of cyclic preferences.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 27 November 2013 06:56:27PM 5 points [-]

The traditional argument for B over A (that is, make-work over basic income) used to be that idleness is a vice and industriousness a virtue; that it is better to work than to sit on your ass. This seems like a lost purpose, though — the reason that work is usually better than idleness is that work accomplishes something useful. Work without purpose features prominently in depictions of hell, from the myth of Sisyphus to The Far Side.

A fourth alternative, D, might be "John is paid to take classes and learn skills." John enrolls in art school and learns to make decorative pottery; or goes to math school and learns category theory; or goes to woodsman school and learns to build log cabins and tan squirrel hides; or goes to media-critic school and learns to write essays about reality television; or something else. Sure, there may not be a lot of demand for potters and squirrel leather, but that's okay since the robots provide pretty much everything there is demand for.

However, I realize that in proposing D, I'm probably exposing my own bias for learning as a leisure activity ....

Comment author: jaime2000 28 November 2013 01:09:13AM *  11 points [-]
Comment author: ialdabaoth 28 November 2013 04:29:14AM *  9 points [-]

give them lots of freedom and they simply use it to destroy themselves and others.

From that link:

Moreover, political authority in the countries in which I worked was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt. In Tanzania, for example, you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone. Tanzanians were thin, but party men were fat. The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man's wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.

Yet nothing I saw—neither the poverty nor the overt oppression—ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England. In a kind of pincer movement, therefore, I and the doctors from India and the Philippines have come to the same terrible conclusion: that the worst poverty is in England—and it is not material poverty but poverty of soul.

I don't understand how one can say "The party representative in my village sent a man to prison because the man's wife refused to sleep with him. In Nigeria the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers.", and then one paragraph later say "I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live, that I see daily in England."

It seems to me that giving a man a choice to give you his wife for sexual favors, or go to prison, involves a significant loss of dignity, and a significant amount of self-centeredness. What is causing this disconnect? Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it's exhibited by the lower classes, than when it's exhibited by the ruling elite?

Comment author: [deleted] 23 May 2014 07:21:12PM 0 points [-]

What is causing this disconnect?

Ideological mind-projection. The writer who hates the English welfare state has somewhat different values from all the Third World people who want to protect their female family members from rape and eat meat once in a while. The writer therefore believes that rather than wanting to be English poor people - with food banks, benefits, and council houses - the Third World people are much better off the way they are.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2013 08:27:11PM 7 points [-]

Yvain mentioned that here:

These are real costs, and they are certainly worth taking seriously; nevertheless, the crowds of emigrants trying to get from the Third World to the First, and the lack of any crowd in the opposite direction, suggest the benefits outweigh the costs.

Comment author: Vaniver 28 November 2013 07:33:39AM 1 point [-]

I think this depends on how you read "I never saw the X." Consider something like "I never saw the death due to accident in England that I see in Tanzania." If you view this as the claim that no one ever dies in accidents in England, then obviously this is wrong. If you view this as the claim that death due to accident is qualitatively different in England and Tanzania, and worse in Tanzania, then it seems sensible.

Comment author: jaime2000 28 November 2013 05:00:28AM *  6 points [-]

Is it simply that such vacuity is more problematic when it's exhibited by the lower classes, than when it's exhibited by the ruling elite?

This is not as implausible as you might think. In the spirit of Yvain's Versailles-building czar, imagine a king of lousy moral character who likes to go around randomly raping the wives of men. In fact, he does this every week, so in a single year there are 52 men who have had to suffer the indignity of having their wives so violated. Sounds horrible, right?

Now, Wikipedia tells me that the rape rate in the U.S. is around 27 per 100,000 per year. The United States has a population of 320,000,000 or so, which works out to around 86,000 rapes per year. If the aforementioned king came to power in the United States and enacted policy changes which reduced the rape rate by even 1%, he would have paid for himself 16 times over.

What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man. I know that, in practice, the most powerful politicians and the richest of celebrities in the U.S. could probably make my life pretty damn miserable if they wanted to, maybe because I somehow pissed them off or because they have sadistic predilections they just randomly decided to satisfy at my expense, and yet, I am not nearly as afraid of them as I am of the members of the underclass I occasionally pass by on the street.

Comment author: EE43026F 28 November 2013 07:27:07AM 0 points [-]

That's assuming a leader's vices somehow correlate with enacting positive societal changes (when the contrary would seem more likely). Otherwise choosing instead one of the many, just as competent and not as corrupt potential leaders is still a superior choice.

Comment author: jaime2000 28 November 2013 03:17:00PM *  2 points [-]

The article was comparing societies where the population was horribly poor or subjected to tyrannical leaders but still had their drive, human dignity, and joie de vivre, with the nihilistic U.K. underclass who did not have such problems but who used their freedom to do little more than eat, sleep, fuck, fight, and dope, and deciding that the former was preferable. Obviously if you can have a functioning population without vicious leaders, that would be best, and the article made no claim that this was impossible or unlikely.

Comment author: Nornagest 28 November 2013 05:40:09AM 2 points [-]

It's true that one person committing personal crimes with impunity doesn't have much measurable effect on crime rates in a society of any size, but that's neither surprising nor particularly informative. No matter how shiny that person's hat.

Comment author: Moss_Piglet 28 November 2013 04:34:22PM 2 points [-]

You'd be surprised how quickly even normally very rational people go to the "but... Versailles! Droit du seigneur!" emotive argument when someone suggests that there can be socioeconomic benefits to a high level of inequality.

The same scope insensitivity which makes people care more about a single sick puppy than millions of starving people makes it very difficult to see that the highly-visible opulence of the elite costs much less than the largely invisible 'welfare' superstructure which provides our underclass their bread and circuses. Not to mention that one produces value for society while the other annihilates it.

If a rationalist knows anything it should be how easy it is to forget to multiply or use inappropriately anchoring null hypotheses, especially when ideological sacred cows are involved.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 28 November 2013 05:19:04AM *  5 points [-]

What does this tell us? That a society where vast swathes of the population suffer from social pathologies is probably going to be worse than one where a tiny fraction of elites occasionally indulge themselves in transgressions against the common man.

But that isn't a society in which "political authority ... was arbitrary, capricious, and corrupt", or where "you could tell the representative of the sole and omnipotent political party, the Party of the Revolution, by his girth alone", or where "the police hired out their guns by night to the armed robbers" - that is a society in which a vast majority of elites, not a tiny fraction, indulge themselves regularly in a wide range of transgressions against the common man. And that isn't merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped; it's a society in which all but one in a million people have to suffer poverty and malnutrition, and arbitrary death due to poor conditions, poor safety regulation, and poor concern for welfare in general. I think that a slight risk of street crime from the underclasses pales in comparison to the kinds of organized depravations inflicted regularly on the populace in such places.

If we're still talking consequentially, that is.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 November 2013 10:19:44PM 7 points [-]

And that isn't merely a society in which one in a million people have to suffer their wife being raped;

It's also a society in which an equivalent number have to suffer being raped.

I'm a little bit appalled to find a line of argument here that implies that only men are people!

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2013 11:27:54PM 6 points [-]

It jarred me too, but I don't like to point out factor-of-two mistakes in arguments relying on orders-of-magnitude differences because this.

(Well, that may be problematic for different reasons too, but I was stunned speechless by the fact that a discussion mentioning rape had managed not to mindkill anybody thus far, and was afraid that calling that out could break the spell.)

Comment author: ialdabaoth 30 November 2013 12:26:38AM *  -1 points [-]

Scratch everything I just said, army1987 just summed up my position far more succinctly than I did.

EDIT: Really?

Comment author: ialdabaoth 29 November 2013 10:48:04PM 1 point [-]

It's also a society in which an equivalent number have to suffer being raped.

I'm a little bit appalled to find a line of argument here that implies that only men are people!

The problem with letting yourself be distracted by that kind of phrasing, is that you spend so much time crusading for Right Thinking that you never get to make your actual point. Clever debaters will notice this, and will start deliberately trolling you just to see how many times they can derail you.

Also, declaring that only men are people is a statement of value, not a statement of fact. Oftentimes, when you find someone whose values you disagree with, it is more fruitful to take their value system as given and find discongruities WITHIN it, or discongruities between that value system and the behavior of the person espousing it, than it is to merely declare that you are appalled by that value system.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 29 November 2013 11:41:23PM 2 points [-]

Couple of things.

First, it might well be that fubarobfusco does not believe that your value system actually embeds the idea that only men are people, and therefore your suggestion about what is more fruitful to do when such a value conflict arises might not seem apposite to them. They might have instead been (as they said) objecting to the implications of the line of argument itself.

Second, do you mean to imply that fubarobfusco was actually allowing themselves to be derailed/distracted from something in this case? Or are you just expressing your concern that they might hypothetically be in some other, similar, case? (Or is this just an indirect way of suggesting that their comment was inappropriate for other reasons?)

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 November 2013 02:19:11AM *  3 points [-]

We're likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the "work paradigm" indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.

So, if humans need work, we are doomed; because productive labor aims to extinguish itself. Moreover, the extinction of labor is already in progress.

My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2013 08:37:05PM *  3 points [-]

We're likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the "work paradigm" indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.

Well, EY says

I sometimes think that futuristic ideals phrased in terms of "getting rid of work" would be better reformulated as "removing low-quality work to make way for high-quality work".

(But the difference might be more about where you draw the line on the map between what you call “work” and what you call “play” than about where you think people in the territory should do in the future.)

My question is: How shall the extinction of labor be distributed? I see no reason to declare that the people who currently own the robots should get to be the ones to move into a post-labor civilization, and everyone else can go to hell.

See here (and followup here).

Comment author: TheAncientGeek 02 December 2013 06:22:30PM 1 point [-]

I award myself five points for guessing that quote was from Dalrymple.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 November 2013 02:56:07AM 0 points [-]

See here (and followup here).

Very relevant ... and there's a few particularly amusing points in there, including in the comments. For instance — If a lifestyle without work reliably breaks people, then why aren't retirees/pensioners reliably broken?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2013 09:16:32AM 1 point [-]

OTOH ISTR that lottery winner are pretty often broken. So I guess a lifestyle without work breaks certain people but not others, and whether it does depends not only on individual personality variance but also on circumstances, in some non-totally-obvious-a-priori way.

Comment author: gattsuru 28 November 2013 03:19:08AM 3 points [-]

We're likely to end up in a society where human labor is unnecessary one way or another, simply because of the advance of automation and ultimately AI. We do not have the choice of preserving the "work paradigm" indefinitely — that is, unless we end up in a Bad Ending where the future of humanity is vastly warped or curtailed.

I lack the information necessary to evaluate what is likely, but barring very specific definitions of the word "unnecessary" I don't think it's obvious that it's impossible without massively curtailing the future of humanity. If the importance of the work paradigm exists and is fundamental to parts of human nature we like(1), there are a number of imaginable ways for those to be made necessary even if it could be made unnecessary. While some of these possible futures are dysutopian (Brave New World), not all of them need be.

(1) I'm not sure this is the case. Some sort of act-or-unpleasant-things-happen seems necessary to get a good future, but this may or may not circumscribe the work paradigm.

Comment author: Dias 28 November 2013 12:14:36AM 3 points [-]

John sits resentfully in a class with a disinterested teacher, both fully aware they are wasting their time...

You could solve this by making the free money conditional on passing exams, but that would be unfair on those who failed.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 November 2013 12:27:52AM *  0 points [-]

Which just elucidates that the point of the exercise should be to provide humans with the abundant wealth generated by technological advancement — not to sort humans into deserving ones and undeserving ones, then send the undeserving ones to hell.

Comment author: Moss_Piglet 28 November 2013 01:03:37AM *  0 points [-]

I understand the desire to make sure people aren't suffering, but can't we think about the suffering of future generations as well?

Paying for people to do nothing incentives doing nothing; fewer people will participate the more comfortable laying around gets compared to actual work. Worse, removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people means they will reproduce and leave the next generation with even more unproductive people for every productive person remaining to have to support. With IQ now negatively correlated with fertility, that's a recipe for genetic disaster and societal collapse.

Buying the happiness of our generation's underclass at the expense of who knows how many of their descendants when the system finally collapses under it's own weight is the opposite of compassion; it's just pushing the suffering far enough into the future that you hope you can't see it anymore. If we really cared about making people comfortable, why shouldn't we look for a solution where we promote the traits which lead people to build their own happiness in the long run?

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2013 02:24:15PM 2 points [-]

I thought my other comment was way too terse, and was going to elaborate, but it looks like two people disagree. But anyway: my point is that there are ways to help people now which don't also help them reproduce; education would be the most obvious one. (“Removing the natural selective pressures against low-IQ / high time-preference people” is not what has lead to the observed negative correlation between IQ and fertility; it's not that stupid people have more children than they used to, it's that smart people have fewer.)

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2013 08:44:01PM 1 point [-]

Subsidize the hell out of IUDs, or something like that.

Comment author: jaime2000 29 November 2013 01:53:46PM -1 points [-]

You mean paying people for implanting IUDs, and covering the costs involved? That could work, I suppose.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 November 2013 02:16:39PM -2 points [-]

Yes, the subsidies may be so large that the cost to the end users becomes negative.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 26 November 2013 08:10:36AM *  14 points [-]

Imagine that you are designing a Prisonner's Dilemma game. When all the numbers are ready, you have an additional option to increase the reward for defecting when the opponent cooperates. Would you do it?

If you expect that the player's future decisions are already fixed and your numbers will not change them, then increasing the reward adds more value to some players, while removing value from none. Thus it would be good to increase the reward.

But if you expect that people look at the payoff matrix and choose accordingly, increasing the reward for defecting will lead to less cooperation. By increasing the reward for defecting, you are reducing cooperation... and it's not obvious what will be the result.

Now let's add another complication. Let's assume that some players' voting mechanisms are broken, so they always vote to defect, and are unable to change that. It feels moral to punish those who defect voluntarily, but it feels immoral to punish those who merely randomly received a broken voting mechanism. -- I am speaking about people who are too stupid to do the kind of work that is important in a modern society. As opposed to people who could do the work, but are too lazy, if the system allows them. Both of them are mixed in the category of unemployed, with no easy way to distinguish between them.

Unfortunately, trying to set the numbers so that no one chooses this option voluntarily, and yet those who don't have an option of escaping it are treated well... seems like a contradiction.

(There is a sci-fi "Limes inferior" about a society where all people have to do public IQ tests, and those above some value are legally required to work, while those below the value are not. Everyone gets a basic income, the smart people get a bonus for being smart, and the working people get another bonus for work.)

Comment author: CronoDAS 27 November 2013 09:04:50AM *  -2 points [-]

Now let's add another complication. Let's assume that some players' voting mechanisms are broken, so they always vote to defect, and are unable to change that. It feels moral to punish those who defect voluntarily, but it feels immoral to punish those who merely randomly received a broken voting mechanism. -- I am speaking about people who are too stupid to do the kind of work that is important in a modern society. As opposed to people who could do the work, but are too lazy, if the system allows them. Both of them are mixed in the category of unemployed, with no easy way to distinguish between them.

/me shrugs

Disability screening in the real world isn't perfect, but it works at least tolerably well. ("Tolerably", in this case, means that nobody appears to be making a political issue out of it not working.)

Comment author: Dias 28 November 2013 12:18:51AM 4 points [-]

nobody appears to be making a political issue out of it not working.

It is an issue in the UK - the conservative government made a big issue about it, because it turned out that (off the top of my head) 75% of those on disability benefits were actually fit for either full or part-time work.

Comment author: CronoDAS 28 November 2013 12:28:11AM 5 points [-]

I stand corrected, then.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 November 2013 08:37:21PM 3 points [-]

Disability screening in the real world isn't perfect, but it works at least tolerably well.

Well the number of disabled people seems to increase whenever the economy goes down or disability benefits increase.

("Tolerably", in this case, means that nobody appears to be making a political issue out of it not working.)

Of course, think of the horrible optics of trying to make a political issue out of it.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 November 2013 04:28:07PM 2 points [-]

trying to set the numbers so that no one chooses this option voluntarily, and yet those who don't have an option of escaping it are treated well... seems like a contradiction.

I think I'm missing your point.

It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform. This admittedly does not have the structure of a Prisoners Dilemma game, but I'm not sure why the PD structure is important.

If I find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to under my incentive structure, I can experiment with my incentive structure... different people are best motivated by different things, after all.

If despite that I still find that some people who are capable of doing that work consistently choose not to... well, that means less of the work I want people to perform will get done than if they chose otherwise. Which might be a huge problem, if that work is much more valuable than the stuff they choose to do.

I have a bunch of options at that point. E.g., I can figure out other ways to get that work done (e.g. automation). Or I can figure out ways to force people to do that work.

Or I can rethink my initial conditions and stop treating everyone well whether they work or not... I can instead treat people well if they do the work I want done, and poorly otherwise, and count on that differential treatment to provide the missing incentive.

But that last option is far from the only option, nor is it clear to me that it works better than the alternatives.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 26 November 2013 06:27:12PM 5 points [-]

It seems that one approach to this is for me to treat everyone well whether they work or not, and for me to provide additional incentives to people for doing the kind of work I want people to perform.

This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining "treating well". However well you treat one group of people, if you treat everyone else better, the former will complain. These days in first-world countries the unemployed people are treated much better than an average working person was centuries ago. But that's irrelevant. We see that they are treated worse than other people are today, therefore they are not treated well.

Even if you start treating poor people much better than they are treated now, even better than the average people are now, just wait 10, at most 20 years, and they will start comparing you to Hitler, if they see that someone else is treated even better.

I agree that we should experiment more. Preferably many different experiments in smaller regions, so it is easier to stop things when they go horribly wrong. Seems to me a good first step would be giving more independence to regions; decentralizing the state power.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 November 2013 10:05:50PM 4 points [-]

Expanding on my "yup" above a little... it's certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining "treating well" that isn't entirely relative.

For example, nation A could assert that A's unemployed people are being treated well if they have better conditions than the unemployed in nation B (by which standard the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well). Or that A's unemployed people are being treated well if their children don't demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people. Or various other standards.

The difficulty I'd expect to face when proposing such a standard isn't that the unemployed under it would be worse off than the employed and therefore I'm Hitler, it's that most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well, and evaluate the standard based on whether it gives the right answer to that question.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 27 November 2013 12:47:33PM *  3 points [-]

it's certainly conceivable that we could adopt an approach to defining "treating well" that isn't entirely relative

Yes, we could. And then some people would get political karma for insisting that this isn't the true definition of treating well, and instead is just a part of conspiracy for oppressing people.

unemployed people are being treated well if their children don't demonstrate significantly higher levels of deficiency-based illnesses (due to malnutrition, exposure, etc.) than the children of their employed people

I can imagine a situation where there are illnesses typically attributed to poverty (and some people get political karma for insisting on the poverty hypothesis), even if material poverty is not the cause. For example, you could give people tons of money to buy healthy food, and yet they could decide to spend it all on junk food and alcohol. You measure their childrens' health, and it becomes obvious the children are not fed properly. This article describes it better than I could.

I agree that it would be great to have an absolute definition of "treating people well", which could be reached, first in one country, and then perhaps globally. But I predict that the closer we would get to it, the more people would insist that it's a wrong definition.

most people have already written their bottom line about whether (for example) the U.S. unemployed are generally treated well

I think that in a long term it's even worse: the bottom line depends on information the people get. In a totalitarian state, you just have to insist that everything is great, and imprison everyone who says otherwise, and after a few years people will believe that it really is great. But if you have freedom of speech, someone will always make political karma by insisting that people should have more (who wouldn't like that?), and that not having more is completely unbearable.

Comment author: Jiro 27 November 2013 02:23:10PM *  0 points [-]

I am not convinced your article shows an example of "poverty" not being caused by real poverty.

The examples in the article tend to include both poverty-related factors and non-poverty-related factors. For instance, certainly failing to press charges against an abusive, criminal, boyfriend is something that can be done by someone of any income level, but on the other hand, poor people are more likely to steal money (like this boyfriend did), more likely to be unable to treat mental illness that might result in violence, and more likely to be frustrated in ways that lead to violence. In this case the guy was a burglar and had no job (poverty leads to no money and people with no money and no job are more likely to burgle). Those aren't 100% due to poverty (clearly frustration at poverty is only a contributing factor to violence and the person won't be violent unless something else predisposes him to violence), but poverty affects them at the margins. Not to mention that even though each individual decision to stay with a boyfriend who has no job is technically not poverty-related, poverty cumulatively leads to a high rate of joblessness.

Poor people are also less likely to be educated and therefore more likely to make poor life decisions.

Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people--poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc. Poor people also are less likely to have a supermarket with cheap non-junk food within easy commute distance. Again, none of this is 100% caused by poverty--this just raises the relative cost of non-junk food, it doesn't make it completely non-affordable--but it certainly has an effect.

Comment author: Nornagest 28 November 2013 01:08:07AM 1 point [-]

Even buying junk food is related to poverty because junk food has a lower time expenditure than other food and time has a greater relative cost to poor people than to rich people--poor people often work long hours that leave them exhausted, must spend a lot of personal time on child care, etc.

A while back, a friend of mine informed me that poorer Americans consume junk food because it's one of the few pleasures aside from alcohol that's easily and cheaply available to people of that socioeconomic stratum, and that what she referred to as "food politics" is therefore symptomatic of privilege.

It sounded like rationalization to me at the time, and I still find the availability and time constraint arguments more convincing, but she'd have had more personal experience than I.

Comment author: fubarobfusco 28 November 2013 02:27:14AM 1 point [-]
Comment author: gattsuru 02 December 2013 12:04:38AM 7 points [-]

There seems to be some evidence that the article is at least describing a general case, and not the author's immediate experiences, or worse

Comment author: [deleted] 28 November 2013 09:12:51PM 1 point [-]
Comment author: Viliam_Bur 28 November 2013 09:37:57AM *  3 points [-]

Great article! In this specific case, replacing a state-subsidized work (if the author has one of those) with state-subsidized free time would be an obvious improvement. At least replacing one of these two jobs.

I am a bit confused because my first idea of a poor person is a person who can't find a job, not a person who has two jobs (and therefore has no time to optimize their lives using the typical middle-class methods). I wonder how much should I update, and how much of this is a cultural difference. Or different kinds of poverty. Perhaps "having two jobs" is just a little bit higher economical level than "not having a job" (which explains why people keep doing it, instead of giving up). But maybe it's something completely different than I am not aware of.

Reading the article again, I don't quite understand why a person with two jobs complaining about a lack of time is also attending a school. Okay, it would make sense if the school is necessary for getting a better job in the future. But even then this is probably not a situation of a typical poor person.

EDIT: Everyone who was influenced by this article, please update! It is actually a hoax.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 27 November 2013 05:17:15PM *  3 points [-]

Well, it's complicated. For poor people, some "smart" options are not really possible. On the other hand, I also see many relatively rich people making the stupid options voluntarily. Poverty can cause "stupid" (from our point of view) choices, and also stupid choices can cause poverty.

I would like to see a society where no one is forced to make the "stupid" choice. (Organizations helping poor people to press charges against criminals, providing them food and refrigerators, etc.) But even in such society I expect many people making the stupid choices voluntarily. (And then complain about an unfair society. So if we could get halfway to such society, judging from people's reactions it would seem there was no improvement.)

Comment author: TheOtherDave 26 November 2013 07:34:03PM 3 points [-]

This seems to me almost what we have now. Yes, there is a problem about defining "treating well".

Yup.

I agree that we should experiment more.

I'm all in favor of experimentation.

And if we're already experimenting to the limits of our existing regional independence, such that increased independence will relax the rate-limiting constraint on experimentation (which I doubt we are, but is I suppose possible), then yes, increased regional independence would make sense as a next step. Though perhaps it's best to do so in a small region, so it's easier to stop things if it goes horribly wrong.

Of course, if we believe for_ other_ reasons that decentralizing state power is a good idea, then we should endorse doing so for other reasons, but that's something of a nonsequitor.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 November 2013 12:28:35AM *  3 points [-]

I would actually say it's definitely better, if you're stuck subsidizing someone's survival, to subsidize them as a "freeloader", aka: someone with actual leisure.

If you're thinking that this is an incentive against the work-ethic, yes, it is. I believe our culture currently overemphasizes work-ethic, and this is all part of my sneaky evil plan to convince people to value work less.

Comment author: CronoDAS 27 November 2013 09:11:40AM 0 points [-]

That's one data point. What's your guess as to what people that aren't you think about this?

Comment author: [deleted] 27 November 2013 01:34:57PM 3 points [-]

I wouldn't venture to guess at other people's thoughts. I'd rather just ask them.

Comment author: Ixiel 27 November 2013 04:59:06PM 2 points [-]

I strongly agree. Just to be another data point :)