Wouldn't automatically abolish all requirements; maybe I'm not good enough in searching but to the degree I'm not an outlier:
This seems underappreciated here.
Flower safety isn't a thing. But having the next-best florist to for sure be a serious florist person to talk to, has serious value. So, I'm not even sure for something like flowers I'm entirely against any sort of requirements.
So it seems to me more a question of balance what exactly to require in which trade, and that's a tricky one, but in some places I lived seems to have been handled mostly +- okay. Admittedly simply according to my shallow glance at things.
Lived also in countries that seem more permissive, requiring less job training, but clearly prefer the customer experience in those that regulate, despite higher prices.
Then, I wouldn't want the untrained/unexamined florist to starve or even simply become impoverished. But at least in some countries, social safety net mostly prevents that.
Great you bring up Hoffman; I think he deserves serious pushback.
He proofs exactly two things:
Before I explain this harsh judgement, caveat: I mean not to defend what we perceive. Let's be open to a world very different to how it seems. Also, maybe Hoffman has many interesting points. But this doesn't mean, his claims are not completely overblown - which I'm convinced they, are after having listened to a range of interviews with him and having gone to lengths for reading his original papers.
Here three simple points I find compelling to put his stuff into perspective:
Broader discussions highlighting I think in part some fraudulent aspect of Hoffman: The Case For Reality, or also Quora Is Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception true?
In sum: His popularity proves an evolutionary theory for information where what floats around is not what is shown to be correct, but what is appealing; distracting voices debunking it being entirely ignored. I imagine him laughing about this fact when thinking about his own success: "After all, my claim seems to not be that wrong, they do not perceive reality, mahahaaa". According to google there are not merely a million people reading him, but literally millions of webpages featuring him.
Happy to be debunked in my negative reading of him :)
Musings about whether we should have a bit more sympathy for skepticism re price gauging, despite all. Admittedly with no particular evidence to point to; keen to see whether my basic skepticism could easily be dismissed.
Scott Sumner points out that customers very much prefer ridesharing services that price gouge and have flexible pricing to taxis that have fixed prices, and very much appreciate being able to get a car on demand at all times. He makes the case that liking price gouging and liking the availability of rides during high demand are two sides of the same coin. The problem is (in addition to ‘there are lots of other differences so we have only weak evidence this is the preference’), people reliably treat those two sides very differently, and this is a common pattern – they’ll love the results, but not the method that gets those results, and pointing out the contradiction often won’t help you.
I think as economists we can be too confident about how obvious it'd be that allowing 'price gouging' should be the standard in all domains. Yes, price controls often hugely problematic. But could full liberty here not also be disastrous for the standard consumer? It depends on a lot of factors; maybe in many domains full liberty works just fine. Maybe not everywhere at all.
Yes, "Prices aren’t just a transfer between buyer and seller." - but they're also that. And in some areas, it is easily imaginable how an oligopoly or a cartel, or simply dominant local supplier(s) benefit from the possibility to supply at any price without alleviating scarcity - really instead by creating scarcity.
The sort of cynical behavior of Enron comes to mind; can such firms not more easily create havoc on markets if they have full freedom to set prices at arbitrary levels? I'd not be surprised if we have to be rather happy about power sellers [in many locations] not being allowed to arbitrarily increase prices (withhold capacity) the way they'd like. Yes, in the long term we could theoretically entry of new capacity (or storage) into the market if prices were often too high, and that could prevent capacity issues, but the world is too heterogeneous to expect smoothly functioning markets in such a scenario; maybe it's easier to organize backup capacities in different ways. Similar for gasoline reserves; it's a simple to organize thing. Yes politicians will make it expensive, inefficient, wrongly sized; but in many locations in the world maybe still better than having no checks and balances at all in the market just for the hope the private market might create more reserves.
And, do we really need the toilet paper sellers[1] plausibly stirring up toilet paper supply fears in the slightest crisis of anything, if they know they can full-on exploit the ensuing self-fulfilling prophecy of the toilet-paper-run, while instead everything might have played out nicely in the absence of any scarcity-propaganda?
Or put differently with a slightly far-fetched but maybe still intuiting example: We hear Putin makes/made so much money from high gas prices, theoretically it could be an entire rational for the war in the first place. Now this will not have been quite the case, but still: we do not know how many times individual micro putin events - where an exploitative someone would have had their incentive to create havoc in their individual markets to benefit from the troubles he stirred - the anti gouging laws may have prevented. Maybe few, maybe many?
These points make me wonder whether the population is once again not as stupid as we think with their intuitions, and our theory a bit too simple. Yes we all like the always-available taxis, but I'm not sure it practically works out just so smoothly with all other goods/market structures. But maybe I'm wrong, and in the end it's so obvious price controls themselves have so bad repercussions anyway.
Placeholder. May replace with other goods that fit the story.
Appreciate actually the overall take (although not sure how many would not have found most of it simply common sense anyway), but: A bit more caution with the stats would have been great
Agree that cued FNs would often be useful innovation I've not yet seen. Nevertheless, this statement
So, if you wonder whether you'd care for the content of a note, you have to look at the note, switching to the bottom of the page and breaking your focus. Thus the notion that footnotes are optional is an illusion.
ends with a false conclusion; most footnotes in text I have read were optional and I'm convinced I'm happy to not have read most of them indeed. FNs, already as they are, are thus indeed highly "optional" and potentially very helpful - in many, maybe most, cases, for many, maybe most, readers.
That could help explain the wording. Though the way the tax topic is addressed here I have the impression - or maybe hope - the discussion is intended to be more practical in the end.
A detail: I find the "much harder" in the following unnecessarily strong, or maybe also simply the 'moral claim' yes/no too binary (all emphasizes added):
If the rich generally do not have a moral claim to their riches, then the only justification needed to redistribute is a good affirmative reason to do so: perhaps that the total welfare of society would improve [..]
If one believes that they generally do have moral claim, then redistributive taxation becomes much harder to justify: we need to argue either that there is a sufficiently strong affirmative reason to redistribute that what amounts to theft is nevertheless acceptable, or that taxation is not in fact theft under certain circumstances.
What we want to call 'harder' or 'much harder' is of course a matter of taste, but to the degree that it reads like meaning 'it becomes (very) hard', I'd say instead:
It appears to be rather intuitive to agree to some degree of redistributive taxation even if one assumed the rich had mostly worked hard for their wealth and therefore supposedly had some 'moral claim' to it.
For example, looking at classical public finance 101, I see textbooks & teachers (some definitely not so much on the 'left') readily explaining their students (definitely not systematically full utilitarians) why concave utility means we'd want to tax the rich, without even hinting at the rich not 'deserving' their incomes, and the overwhelming majority of student rather intuitively agreeing with the mechanism, as it seems to me from observation.
Core claim in my post is that the 'instantaneous' mind (with its preferences etc., see post) is - if we look closely and don't forget to keep a healthy dose of skepticism about our intuitions about our own mind/self - sufficient to make sense of what we actually observe. And given this instantaneous mind with its memories and preferences is stuff we can most directly observe without much surprise in it, I struggle to find any competing theories as simple or 'simpler' and therefore more compelling (Occam's razor), as I meant to explain in the post.
As I make very clear in the post, nothing in this suggests other theories are impossible. For everything there can of course be (infinitely) many alternative theories available to explain it. I maintain the one I propose has a particular virtue of simplicity.
Regarding computationalism: I'm not sure whether you meant a very specific 'flavor' of computationalism in your comment; but for sure I did not mean to exclude computationalist explanations in general; in fact I've defended some strong computationalist position in the past and see what I propose here to be readily applicable to it.
I'm sorry but I find you're nitpicking on words out of context, rather than to engage with what I mean. Maybe my EN is imperfect but I think not that unreadable:
A)
The word "just" in the sense used here is always a danger sign. "X is just Y" means "X is Y and is not a certain other thing Z", but without stating the Z.
... 'just' might sometimes be used in such abbreviated way, but here, the second part of my very sentence itself readily says what I mean with the 'just' (see "w/o meaning you're ...").
B)
You quoting me: "It is equally all too natural for me to still keep my specific (and excessive) focus & care on the well-being of my 'natural' successors, i.e. on what we traditionally call"
You: Too natural? Excessive focus and care? What we traditionally call? This all sounds to me like you are trying not to know something.
Recall, as I wrote in my comment, I try to support "why care [under my stated views], even about 'my' own future". I try to rephrase the sentence you quote, in a paragraph that avoids the 3 elements you criticize. I hope the meaning becomes clear then:
Evolution has ingrained into my mind with a very strong preference to care for the next-period inhabitant(s) X of my body. This deeply ingrained preference to preserve the well-being of X tends to override everything else. So, however much my reflections suggest to me that X is not as unquestionably related to me as I instinctively would have thought before closer examination, I will not be able to give up my commonly observed preferences for doing (mostly) the best for X, in situations where there is no cloning or anything of the like going on.
(you can safely ignore "(and excessive)". With it, I just meant to casually mention also we tend to be too egoistic; our strong specific focus on (or care for) our own body's future is not good for the world overall. But this is quite a separate thing.)
Spurious correlation here, big time, imho.
Give me the natural content of the field and I bet I easily predict whether it may or may not have replication crisis, w/o knowing the exact type of students it attracts.
I think it's mostly that the fields where bad science may be sexy and less-trivial/unambiguous to check, or, those where you can make up/sell sexy results independently of their grounding, may, for whichever reason, also be those that attract the non-logical students.
Agree though with the mob overwhelming the smart outliers, but I just think how much that mob creates a replication crises is at least in large part dependent on the intrinsic nature of the field rather than due to the exact IQs.