Suppose you do some work and earn $100. The question from the rest of society’s perspective is
whether we got more benefit than the $100 we paid you.
We can get more than $100 if e.g. you spend your $100 on a Netflix subscription...
If you receive $100 for work, that means you have already provided at least $100 in value to society. That society might gain additional benefit from how you spend your money is merely coincidental.
That society might gain additional benefit from how you spend your money is merely coincidental.
I’m not sure what “coincidental” means here. The question is how much more or less than $100 of value you create by working, and that seems to depend about as much on how you spend your money as it does on how you earn your money.
if I am interpreting Zolmeister correctly, i think you are misunderstanding their point and/or are talking past each other.
If I get paid $100 to write software for a company, that company may earn far more than $100 from the software I write; the company then resells the software, creating a ton of wealth. The wealth creation happens through the work, not the macroeconomic details of how I spend the $100. Those macroeconomic details are the “coincidence” of which GP speaks.
When I work I create value for the world, which is ultimately measured in benefits to other humans. And when I go spend my money I impose a cost on the world which is ultimately measured in the effort those people put in to give me what I bought, or the other people who could have had the thing that did not, or whatever.
It seems like the question is about the balance between the value I create by working, and the value others lose when I consume, isn’t it? It’s relevant both how much other people value what I do for them, and how much other people value the effort they put in for me.
You could have a worker that faced a situation that if we doesn’t lower his pricer all the customers will go to the competitors. If people were completely farsighted and could factor in everything they would close shop immidietly. But it isn’t unheard off to run an activity a little while with loss or run it by overworking oneself outside of ones capacity. There are uncertainties and closing and opening a shop isn’t neccesarily frictionless. But that fricton can mask an area where activity is kept for inertias sake while actually being a little bit of burden.
Doing all the risk adjusments and opportunity costs and everything correctly is cognitively very challenging. Trusting that everybody does every decision always correctly might be handy for mathematical ideal land but for limited cognition agents it just means that everybody has a story how their deal makes sense. And like nobody is the villain of their story, everybody is the mastermind of their business. It doesn’t mean that everybody is a saint or that all business is suistainable.
Suppose that you write an ET game get paid for it. Your company sells the game to retailers. Turns out the game is utter trash and of no gameplay or cultural value. Retailers decide to dump the game cartidges under the ground as $0 worth items.
Under some definitions the game writer provided value to their company and the retailers destroyed value by finding a item they paid money to now be of worth 0.
By another definition nothing of value was created but some money transfer from retailers to game companies and game writers happened.
But that’s not what typically happens. Take a company like Google. Google has about 100000 employees, and their average annual salary is 117 000 $. Google’s yearly net income is 35 billion dollars. An average Google employee is creating value 4 times their salary. The effects of their spending on pollution etc. are negligible in comparison.
Any good that is “consumed” is in a state that has resale value of $0. If the ET game company made 35 billion it wouldn’t have guaranteed that the product actually had any use value just that some people are willing to receive it by buying with that cash.
If I save 3 lifes and get $100 in compensation does that mean that a life is $33 in value? Human lives seem like they would have value outside of their exchanged value.
If there was a homo economicus that could choose between spending a day chopping down trees to get $1000 or spend a day saving 3 people and getting $100 the result would be that trees would get chopped and people would be left to die. This would to many seem like a tragic allocation of world affecting power. In order to compare whether market prices line up with our utility function satisfaction we need to be able to model the situation where the prices are not aligned. if one is able to recast the options in utilons that might resolve the problem. But then a strategy being homo economicus efficient doesn’t tell whether the strategy is aligned with a value profile or not.
Doing service and getting paid well for it is a hint that it might not be totally frivolous but it is not staighforward to define that value via exchange. If somebody would do the same thing a google engineer did and didn’t get any compensation for it it woud be just as valuable. Or a piece of code written as freeware or as proprietary software has comparble use value regardless of the cost associated with aquiring it.
If I pay you 100$ for saving 3 lifes, it means I value these lifes at at least 100$. The payment is not equal to the value, it is a lower bound estimate. Granted, I could make a mistake and spend these money on a cure that didn’t work, or on a game I didn’t enjoy. Then I would give away more than I got in return. But if we’re talking about an established company that sells the same goods or services over and over again, people are going to learn what these goods or services are worth and stop making such mistakes.
If you receive $100 for work, that means you have already provided at least $100 in value to society. That society might gain additional benefit from how you spend your money is merely coincidental.
No, it means that there is at least 1 person prepared to pay $100 for the work. If you are manufacturing weapons that end up in the wrong hands. You might be doing quite a lot of harm to society overall. Your employer gains at least $100 in value. The externalities could be anything.
Gaining an item worth $100 and losing $100 in cash is value neutral. If you buy one banana for 10 million dollars that doesn’t make a banana 10 million worth to society.
Voluntary exchange only happens when both parties benefit from it. It creates value for both parties, and, if there are no negative externalities, it’s a utilitarian good.
A banana isn’t going to banana harder because it is in your hand instead of mine.
You could take any mistake that is persistent and just think that the “revealed preferences” tell that they are actually gaining value by having that financial behaviour.
One needs some kind of assumption to bridge thinking that you benefit to actually benefitting. If you suddenly start to resist a advertisements effect you might realise that you are perfectly happy and content without some kind of experience or good. Does that reveal you were making an error or does it make it an error to continue to buy the product? If you manage to deceive someone to opt into a value-extracting deal does it mean they benefit from the deal? The beliefs about whether your experiece is improved need to be competent and they are capable of being incompetent.
A banana isn’t going to banana harder because it is in your hand instead of mine.
I might like bananas more than you, or be hungrier than you. Than a banana has greater value to me.
If you suddenly start to resist a advertisements effect you might realise that you are perfectly happy and content without some kind of experience or good.
It think the left greately exaggerates the extent to which purchasing decisions are a result of some kind of deception or manipulation. For example, there was that movie that criticized consumerism, the Fight Club? The protagonist would spend every evening looking at ads, and then he’d change all furniture in his home all the time. That doesn’t remind me of myself, or anyone I know. Last time I bought a couch it was because the old one became uncomfortable to sleep on. Sometimes I make mistakes, like when I bought the “Where is my flying car” book, and it turned out to be deceptive. But these kind of things amount to less than 5% of my expenses. When I look at other people I know, it seems like they, too, are spending most of their income on food, clothes (when old ones get ruined) and other things they obviously need and weren’t tricked into buying. So I don’t understand why you think advertisements’ manipulation is a significant problem. When you look at people you know, do you see them wasting most of their money on worthless things?
A bananas value is created when it grows. Sure your brain might orgasm harder from bananas than my brain. But allocating it correctly rather prevents wastage than creates anything.
It doesn’t need to be a serious problem. “only happens” in a previous post seems to point at a definitional impossibility. A claim of “there is handful of lighting strikes each year” is a relevant rebuttal to “Lightning never strikes” even if one is not arguing that everybody should always be afraid of lightning when going outside. But for somebody that is building a house wondering whether they should add a lightning rod impossiblity vs seldomness is very relevant.
I see a lot of consumtion that is more of “what you are supposed to do” or being a kind of signal where what is the venue of signaling isn’t significant. This is not an insignificant or round-offable force.
Advertisement is an example of a constructed cognitive state that when I am in it I don’t need outside coersion and I am doing “voluntary stuff” for most purposes. However parties that don’t have my larger values so close to their heart have vested interest in constructing it. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Certainly that I do doesn’t mean that I should.
Both instant gratification and delayed gratification schemes can be used to rationalise consumption behaviour. However they tend to give contradictory recommendations. A greek philosphers advice to live a happy life can be taken to mean that having stable relationships and finding deep purpose of furthering science. Or a naive sensual hedonist might think that means drink wine every night and have a hang over every day. Just because one identifies wine making oneself to have a pleasant feeling doesn’t mean that correct answer to “drink or not to drink” is to drink. If one has an accounting scheme that does recognise the raveness of orgies but doesn’t recognise the satisfaction of progressing human knowledge then an option that gives a little better orgies but wastes a lot of knowledge potential gets more aggressively selected. Somebody that wants to make a name for themselfs as organising great parties might actively want for people not to understand feelings of progress so that their parties have greater attendance and more central role in society.
Holidays like black friday mean some cultural things for some. But as the cultural meanings are somewhat foreign to me I do note how marketers use it as a standard sale promotion period. Given that it is associated with trampling deaths it seems mostly parasitic for the “actual activities” if there are any left under this simulcra.
The teorethical foundations for microeconomics as far as I understand it means that you need to first know what you want in order to determine a value. Having a thought mode where you determine what you want based on “produced value” puts the cart before the horse.
You can cause more than a dollar of damage to society for every dollar you spend, say by hiring people to drive around throwing eggs at people’s houses. Though I guess in total society is still better off by a hundred dollars compared to if you had received them via UBI.
If you receive $100 for work, that means you have already provided at least $100 in value to society. That society might gain additional benefit from how you spend your money is merely coincidental.
I’m not sure what “coincidental” means here. The question is how much more or less than $100 of value you create by working, and that seems to depend about as much on how you spend your money as it does on how you earn your money.
if I am interpreting Zolmeister correctly, i think you are misunderstanding their point and/or are talking past each other.
If I get paid $100 to write software for a company, that company may earn far more than $100 from the software I write; the company then resells the software, creating a ton of wealth. The wealth creation happens through the work, not the macroeconomic details of how I spend the $100. Those macroeconomic details are the “coincidence” of which GP speaks.
I may still be misunderstanding.
When I work I create value for the world, which is ultimately measured in benefits to other humans. And when I go spend my money I impose a cost on the world which is ultimately measured in the effort those people put in to give me what I bought, or the other people who could have had the thing that did not, or whatever.
It seems like the question is about the balance between the value I create by working, and the value others lose when I consume, isn’t it? It’s relevant both how much other people value what I do for them, and how much other people value the effort they put in for me.
You impose no such cost, as those willing to exchange your money for their services do so profitably.
It is possible to trade oneself to be bankcrypt.
You could have a worker that faced a situation that if we doesn’t lower his pricer all the customers will go to the competitors. If people were completely farsighted and could factor in everything they would close shop immidietly. But it isn’t unheard off to run an activity a little while with loss or run it by overworking oneself outside of ones capacity. There are uncertainties and closing and opening a shop isn’t neccesarily frictionless. But that fricton can mask an area where activity is kept for inertias sake while actually being a little bit of burden.
Doing all the risk adjusments and opportunity costs and everything correctly is cognitively very challenging. Trusting that everybody does every decision always correctly might be handy for mathematical ideal land but for limited cognition agents it just means that everybody has a story how their deal makes sense. And like nobody is the villain of their story, everybody is the mastermind of their business. It doesn’t mean that everybody is a saint or that all business is suistainable.
Suppose that you write an ET game get paid for it. Your company sells the game to retailers. Turns out the game is utter trash and of no gameplay or cultural value. Retailers decide to dump the game cartidges under the ground as $0 worth items.
Under some definitions the game writer provided value to their company and the retailers destroyed value by finding a item they paid money to now be of worth 0.
By another definition nothing of value was created but some money transfer from retailers to game companies and game writers happened.
But that’s not what typically happens.
Take a company like Google. Google has about 100000 employees, and their average annual salary is 117 000 $. Google’s yearly net income is 35 billion dollars. An average Google employee is creating value 4 times their salary. The effects of their spending on pollution etc. are negligible in comparison.
Any good that is “consumed” is in a state that has resale value of $0. If the ET game company made 35 billion it wouldn’t have guaranteed that the product actually had any use value just that some people are willing to receive it by buying with that cash.
If I save 3 lifes and get $100 in compensation does that mean that a life is $33 in value? Human lives seem like they would have value outside of their exchanged value.
If there was a homo economicus that could choose between spending a day chopping down trees to get $1000 or spend a day saving 3 people and getting $100 the result would be that trees would get chopped and people would be left to die. This would to many seem like a tragic allocation of world affecting power. In order to compare whether market prices line up with our utility function satisfaction we need to be able to model the situation where the prices are not aligned. if one is able to recast the options in utilons that might resolve the problem. But then a strategy being homo economicus efficient doesn’t tell whether the strategy is aligned with a value profile or not.
Doing service and getting paid well for it is a hint that it might not be totally frivolous but it is not staighforward to define that value via exchange. If somebody would do the same thing a google engineer did and didn’t get any compensation for it it woud be just as valuable. Or a piece of code written as freeware or as proprietary software has comparble use value regardless of the cost associated with aquiring it.
If I pay you 100$ for saving 3 lifes, it means I value these lifes at at least 100$. The payment is not equal to the value, it is a lower bound estimate. Granted, I could make a mistake and spend these money on a cure that didn’t work, or on a game I didn’t enjoy. Then I would give away more than I got in return. But if we’re talking about an established company that sells the same goods or services over and over again, people are going to learn what these goods or services are worth and stop making such mistakes.
No, it means that there is at least 1 person prepared to pay $100 for the work. If you are manufacturing weapons that end up in the wrong hands. You might be doing quite a lot of harm to society overall. Your employer gains at least $100 in value. The externalities could be anything.
Gaining an item worth $100 and losing $100 in cash is value neutral. If you buy one banana for 10 million dollars that doesn’t make a banana 10 million worth to society.
Voluntary exchange only happens when both parties benefit from it. It creates value for both parties, and, if there are no negative externalities, it’s a utilitarian good.
A banana isn’t going to banana harder because it is in your hand instead of mine.
You could take any mistake that is persistent and just think that the “revealed preferences” tell that they are actually gaining value by having that financial behaviour.
One needs some kind of assumption to bridge thinking that you benefit to actually benefitting. If you suddenly start to resist a advertisements effect you might realise that you are perfectly happy and content without some kind of experience or good. Does that reveal you were making an error or does it make it an error to continue to buy the product? If you manage to deceive someone to opt into a value-extracting deal does it mean they benefit from the deal? The beliefs about whether your experiece is improved need to be competent and they are capable of being incompetent.
I might like bananas more than you, or be hungrier than you. Than a banana has greater value to me.
It think the left greately exaggerates the extent to which purchasing decisions are a result of some kind of deception or manipulation. For example, there was that movie that criticized consumerism, the Fight Club? The protagonist would spend every evening looking at ads, and then he’d change all furniture in his home all the time. That doesn’t remind me of myself, or anyone I know. Last time I bought a couch it was because the old one became uncomfortable to sleep on. Sometimes I make mistakes, like when I bought the “Where is my flying car” book, and it turned out to be deceptive. But these kind of things amount to less than 5% of my expenses. When I look at other people I know, it seems like they, too, are spending most of their income on food, clothes (when old ones get ruined) and other things they obviously need and weren’t tricked into buying. So I don’t understand why you think advertisements’ manipulation is a significant problem. When you look at people you know, do you see them wasting most of their money on worthless things?
A bananas value is created when it grows. Sure your brain might orgasm harder from bananas than my brain. But allocating it correctly rather prevents wastage than creates anything.
It doesn’t need to be a serious problem. “only happens” in a previous post seems to point at a definitional impossibility. A claim of “there is handful of lighting strikes each year” is a relevant rebuttal to “Lightning never strikes” even if one is not arguing that everybody should always be afraid of lightning when going outside. But for somebody that is building a house wondering whether they should add a lightning rod impossiblity vs seldomness is very relevant.
I see a lot of consumtion that is more of “what you are supposed to do” or being a kind of signal where what is the venue of signaling isn’t significant. This is not an insignificant or round-offable force.
Advertisement is an example of a constructed cognitive state that when I am in it I don’t need outside coersion and I am doing “voluntary stuff” for most purposes. However parties that don’t have my larger values so close to their heart have vested interest in constructing it. Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Certainly that I do doesn’t mean that I should.
Both instant gratification and delayed gratification schemes can be used to rationalise consumption behaviour. However they tend to give contradictory recommendations. A greek philosphers advice to live a happy life can be taken to mean that having stable relationships and finding deep purpose of furthering science. Or a naive sensual hedonist might think that means drink wine every night and have a hang over every day. Just because one identifies wine making oneself to have a pleasant feeling doesn’t mean that correct answer to “drink or not to drink” is to drink. If one has an accounting scheme that does recognise the raveness of orgies but doesn’t recognise the satisfaction of progressing human knowledge then an option that gives a little better orgies but wastes a lot of knowledge potential gets more aggressively selected. Somebody that wants to make a name for themselfs as organising great parties might actively want for people not to understand feelings of progress so that their parties have greater attendance and more central role in society.
Holidays like black friday mean some cultural things for some. But as the cultural meanings are somewhat foreign to me I do note how marketers use it as a standard sale promotion period. Given that it is associated with trampling deaths it seems mostly parasitic for the “actual activities” if there are any left under this simulcra.
The teorethical foundations for microeconomics as far as I understand it means that you need to first know what you want in order to determine a value. Having a thought mode where you determine what you want based on “produced value” puts the cart before the horse.
You can cause more than a dollar of damage to society for every dollar you spend, say by hiring people to drive around throwing eggs at people’s houses. Though I guess in total society is still better off by a hundred dollars compared to if you had received them via UBI.