That first one is bad mindreading—not bad because it’s unsuccessful, although it is (mindreading is dang hard though, so like I said, I don’t care). But because it’s written from your point of view. If you’re trying to mind-read, you should end up with something that’s written from the point of view of your model of the other person.
The second guess is closer. Here’s my take:
The consequences of charity are examined with skepticism and generalization, and then outcompeting local businesses is immediately proposed as a solution with no thought to the consequences. Each of these parts has their own problems, but writing them one after the other like that is bad out of proportion to the sum of the parts. Thus, *explosion noises*.
I was drawing on my model of another person- but my model was based on so little information that it was very likely to be wrong.
Building on ewbronv’s response: The starving man is best off if you open a bakery which can profitably sell him bread at a price he can afford. If there are starving people, it is because food is not available at a price they can afford.
It isn’t about driving other companies out of business, it’s about meeting an unmet need. If you can make a greater profit than the free market competition, it must be because you are filling needs more effectively- everyone who would have their personal needs filled more valuably by the competition patronizes the competition, driving their profits instead of yours.
Building on ewbronv’s response: The starving man is best off if you open a bakery which can profitably sell him bread at a price he can afford. If there are starving people, it is because food is not available at a price they can afford.
Right. So I am saying that businesses can affect both the price, and the affording.
In a trade balance sense, where imports are perceived to reduce the economic viability of an area and exports are perceived to increase it? Or are you saying that businesses that pay low wages are harmful compared to businesses which pay high wages, sell the same amount of the same product (at a higher price), make the same profit, and distribute that profit the same way?
The trade balance perspective is a pretty interesting one :P If the locals spend money at your store, how does it get back to the locals so they can buy more stuff? Is the entire cycle good for the locals (typical import/export), or is there a tragedy of the commons problem (the people hurt aren’t necessarily the same ones who shop at your store)?
But what I was mainly thinking of was labor distribution. The economy is (from the pragmatist perspective) a system for distributing goods and labor to where they’ll benefit people, better than a central planner could do it. If goods were previously produced locally, and now you import them, that’s not making the distribution of goods worse, but it can make the distribution of labor worse, imposing costs on the local economy. Moving people around is a pain.
The store hires locals to man it, and pays taxes at the local rates. The local currency (henceforth: lc, symbol #) can only be exchanged for foreign currency (henceforth: dollars, $) if there are things which can be purchased using the local currency that people who have foreign currency want. If the lc isn’t worth anything, nobody can make a profit buying bread for dollars and selling the bread for lc.
I think that it is overwhelmingly likely that the areas with the highest unemployment will have the lowest labor costs; If that is the case, the businessman imports wheat into that area, bakes it using local labor, and sells it in lc; he has now changed some amount of dollars into some amount of lc. He then invests that lc into a labor-intensive product and ships that product back home to sell for dollars.
Exactly the same thing can and does happen within a single currency: raw materials are shipped from where resources are plentiful to where labor is plentiful, and finished goods are shipped back out. The major hurdle is scarce raw materials limiting the number of factories that it is possible to operate, followed by political control of the economic system in order to ‘keep jobs’ within the privileged group.
On the contrary, a capitalist believes there is abundant evidence that increased competition in any market almost always generates positive externalities, and is a net benifit to the community. Endless volumes have been written on this topic, and while there have been some attempts to argue the opposite case none of the ones I’ve seen are especially convincing. So ‘open a business instead’ isn’t a thoughtless reflex, it’s a carefully considered opinion about what course of action has the highest likelyhood of generating positive results in an uncertain world.
The first half, of course, is a lot less firmly supported. While unearned wealth certainly has a tendency to produce negative side effects, there isn’t a lot of hard data on how strong this trend is. Certainly, it seems hard to argue that a starvig man is worse off if you give him a free loaf of bread.
Of course in reality it generally isn’t possible to give large amounts of resources to the needy, especially in poverty-stricken nations. Whever you try it the local kleptocrats will quickly arrange to steal the majority of your donations and use them to maintain their own power, so the real effect of most international charity is simply to prop up corrupt regimes and allow them to get away with oppressing their own people.
On the contrary, a capitalist believes there is abundant evidence that increased competition in any market almost always generates positive externalities, and is a net benifit to the community.
Hm. Well, this is reasonable—competition is pretty nice. But if you have a society that’s just plain old less efficient than ours—uses lots of human labor rather than industrialization, doesn’t have good economies of scale, etc etc—and I go in and open up some store that simply offers lower prices on widgets than the local stores can offer, this doesn’t particularly increase competition. The other stores aren’t going to build economies of scale overnight, they simply go out of business, and so now I have all the local widget sales.
So ‘open a business instead’ isn’t a thoughtless reflex, it’s a carefully considered opinion about what course of action has the highest likelyhood of generating positive results in an uncertain world.
That first one is bad mindreading—not bad because it’s unsuccessful, although it is (mindreading is dang hard though, so like I said, I don’t care). But because it’s written from your point of view. If you’re trying to mind-read, you should end up with something that’s written from the point of view of your model of the other person.
The second guess is closer. Here’s my take:
The consequences of charity are examined with skepticism and generalization, and then outcompeting local businesses is immediately proposed as a solution with no thought to the consequences. Each of these parts has their own problems, but writing them one after the other like that is bad out of proportion to the sum of the parts. Thus, *explosion noises*.
I was drawing on my model of another person- but my model was based on so little information that it was very likely to be wrong.
Building on ewbronv’s response: The starving man is best off if you open a bakery which can profitably sell him bread at a price he can afford. If there are starving people, it is because food is not available at a price they can afford.
It isn’t about driving other companies out of business, it’s about meeting an unmet need. If you can make a greater profit than the free market competition, it must be because you are filling needs more effectively- everyone who would have their personal needs filled more valuably by the competition patronizes the competition, driving their profits instead of yours.
Right. So I am saying that businesses can affect both the price, and the affording.
In a trade balance sense, where imports are perceived to reduce the economic viability of an area and exports are perceived to increase it? Or are you saying that businesses that pay low wages are harmful compared to businesses which pay high wages, sell the same amount of the same product (at a higher price), make the same profit, and distribute that profit the same way?
The trade balance perspective is a pretty interesting one :P If the locals spend money at your store, how does it get back to the locals so they can buy more stuff? Is the entire cycle good for the locals (typical import/export), or is there a tragedy of the commons problem (the people hurt aren’t necessarily the same ones who shop at your store)?
But what I was mainly thinking of was labor distribution. The economy is (from the pragmatist perspective) a system for distributing goods and labor to where they’ll benefit people, better than a central planner could do it. If goods were previously produced locally, and now you import them, that’s not making the distribution of goods worse, but it can make the distribution of labor worse, imposing costs on the local economy. Moving people around is a pain.
The store hires locals to man it, and pays taxes at the local rates. The local currency (henceforth: lc, symbol #) can only be exchanged for foreign currency (henceforth: dollars, $) if there are things which can be purchased using the local currency that people who have foreign currency want. If the lc isn’t worth anything, nobody can make a profit buying bread for dollars and selling the bread for lc.
I think that it is overwhelmingly likely that the areas with the highest unemployment will have the lowest labor costs; If that is the case, the businessman imports wheat into that area, bakes it using local labor, and sells it in lc; he has now changed some amount of dollars into some amount of lc. He then invests that lc into a labor-intensive product and ships that product back home to sell for dollars.
Exactly the same thing can and does happen within a single currency: raw materials are shipped from where resources are plentiful to where labor is plentiful, and finished goods are shipped back out. The major hurdle is scarce raw materials limiting the number of factories that it is possible to operate, followed by political control of the economic system in order to ‘keep jobs’ within the privileged group.
On the contrary, a capitalist believes there is abundant evidence that increased competition in any market almost always generates positive externalities, and is a net benifit to the community. Endless volumes have been written on this topic, and while there have been some attempts to argue the opposite case none of the ones I’ve seen are especially convincing. So ‘open a business instead’ isn’t a thoughtless reflex, it’s a carefully considered opinion about what course of action has the highest likelyhood of generating positive results in an uncertain world.
The first half, of course, is a lot less firmly supported. While unearned wealth certainly has a tendency to produce negative side effects, there isn’t a lot of hard data on how strong this trend is. Certainly, it seems hard to argue that a starvig man is worse off if you give him a free loaf of bread.
Of course in reality it generally isn’t possible to give large amounts of resources to the needy, especially in poverty-stricken nations. Whever you try it the local kleptocrats will quickly arrange to steal the majority of your donations and use them to maintain their own power, so the real effect of most international charity is simply to prop up corrupt regimes and allow them to get away with oppressing their own people.
Hm. Well, this is reasonable—competition is pretty nice. But if you have a society that’s just plain old less efficient than ours—uses lots of human labor rather than industrialization, doesn’t have good economies of scale, etc etc—and I go in and open up some store that simply offers lower prices on widgets than the local stores can offer, this doesn’t particularly increase competition. The other stores aren’t going to build economies of scale overnight, they simply go out of business, and so now I have all the local widget sales.
It happens to be a claim that meshes with an identity as “capitalist,” and shows signs of being protected from details by the first good argument.