You’ll have to explain the “utility you give up” framework.
Signaling loyalty and actually being loyal are pretty much the same here. We need other details to see if they diverge.
Arguably letting the farms close and replacing them with competitive industries for Mafraq would be cheaper and more loyal, but would signal less loyalty. But the Jordanians do not expect to succeed at such development projects anyway.
The method I am most familiar with for estimating the value of things that are intangible (like loyalty) is comparing the price paid vs. the one that could have been paid if the intangible value had not been a factor. The intuition is like branding in marketing, wherein the simple calculation is something like:
(price of Apple computer) - (price of non-Apple computer with same specs) = (value of Apple brand on the computer)
So in the water transfer example, it looks like:
$1B pipeline to prevent unemployment - $0 to cut Egyptian visas = $1B is the value of Northern Highland farmer loyalty.
The structure is intuitive, but it suffers from the usual problem of taking what people say their goals are seriously. Further, it isn’t at all clear (at least to me) whether this means that is the price overall or just right now, whether this is payment for loyalty rendered or an investment in future loyalty, etc. And this just gets worse the more factors I try to weigh because the same ambiguity applies to each other factor.
Granted, I might just be very bad at the method; separating signals out from regular transactions help make social questions easier to work with for me.
The datedness of the example reveals how old my last exposure to the literature was. I imagine people making current examples would at least switch to iPhone or something. Possibly one of those clothing brands that have long lines for about six weeks before the trend moves.
I am highly confident Robin Hanson addresses this somewhere, but it strikes me that in this case signalling loyalty and being loyal are identical.
I think the signalling framework is radically superior to the utility-you-give-up framework for establishing what social things people really value.
You’ll have to explain the “utility you give up” framework.
Signaling loyalty and actually being loyal are pretty much the same here. We need other details to see if they diverge.
Arguably letting the farms close and replacing them with competitive industries for Mafraq would be cheaper and more loyal, but would signal less loyalty. But the Jordanians do not expect to succeed at such development projects anyway.
The method I am most familiar with for estimating the value of things that are intangible (like loyalty) is comparing the price paid vs. the one that could have been paid if the intangible value had not been a factor. The intuition is like branding in marketing, wherein the simple calculation is something like:
(price of Apple computer) - (price of non-Apple computer with same specs) = (value of Apple brand on the computer)
So in the water transfer example, it looks like:
$1B pipeline to prevent unemployment - $0 to cut Egyptian visas = $1B is the value of Northern Highland farmer loyalty.
The structure is intuitive, but it suffers from the usual problem of taking what people say their goals are seriously. Further, it isn’t at all clear (at least to me) whether this means that is the price overall or just right now, whether this is payment for loyalty rendered or an investment in future loyalty, etc. And this just gets worse the more factors I try to weigh because the same ambiguity applies to each other factor.
Granted, I might just be very bad at the method; separating signals out from regular transactions help make social questions easier to work with for me.
While I don’t like MacOS very much, it seems to me strange to argue that the average value of it to people is zero.
The datedness of the example reveals how old my last exposure to the literature was. I imagine people making current examples would at least switch to iPhone or something. Possibly one of those clothing brands that have long lines for about six weeks before the trend moves.