> so in either case we’re well into the law of large numbers.
True. But this doesn’t help with the part where a manager can outlast a given worker in a negotiation-war. Say a manager has 10 employees. Given a manager, an employee makes 10 widgets per year. Right now, the manager takes 1 widget from each employee per year. A person needs 7 widgets/year to survive. So the manager goes to the first employee and says, okay, now I’m going to take 2 widgets / year from you. Should the employee quit? They’ll have costs to look for another job, and maybe will have to move, and maybe they won’t even find a job that pays more than 8 widgets / year. Should they bargain, holding out for 9 widgets/year? The manager is already getting 9 widgets /year from the other employees. The employee, though, is starting to starve.
You’re saying that other managers will bid for the employee. They might… but I don’t see why it’s true in general that the managers bidding against each other for employees overpowers the incentive to lower wages. Do you? Can you give an argument, e.g. a toy example? Do you want to make a claim like “most businesses have conditions where managers can’t ‘exploit’ workers” for some appropriate value of “exploit”? For example, it seems like if managers can only manage up to 10 employees (e.g. because it’s hard to manage), then things are bad for the employees. Unless they can coordinate. But coordination might be hard in some cases. We could say, that’s not stable because there could just be more managers… but is that right? It could be a general fact, but I don’t see why, and I’m asking for arguments.
>I don’t think are good reasons to treat worker-employer relations as any different than seller-buyer relations for any other goods or services.
Yeah this really doesn’t make sense to me. Can you expand? Are you saying that you expect the equilibration dynamics to output “roughly the same” result, or “roughly the correct” result, or “roughly the best feasible” result, in most / all markets? Why would that be? It seems like parameters of the market, like asymmetric information, difficulty of collusion for different parties, cognitive costs of computing relevant stuff, transition costs between different options, iterative dynamics (e.g. starving to death, Matthew effect), etc. would make the equilibration look different in different markets, maybe drastically different, and maybe drastically bad / unjust / suboptimal.
>In general price caps....
Ok… but I’m not particularly arguing for any of that. I’m trying to understand what your (/people’s) models of how these things actually go. I wouldn’t guess that you’d agree with the very strong claim “a bunch of individuals making local causal best-responses produces trades that are optimal for long-term flourishing of humankind”, but I don’t know specifically how your models differ from that.
> so in either case we’re well into the law of large numbers.
True. But this doesn’t help with the part where a manager can outlast a given worker in a negotiation-war. Say a manager has 10 employees. Given a manager, an employee makes 10 widgets per year. Right now, the manager takes 1 widget from each employee per year. A person needs 7 widgets/year to survive. So the manager goes to the first employee and says, okay, now I’m going to take 2 widgets / year from you. Should the employee quit? They’ll have costs to look for another job, and maybe will have to move, and maybe they won’t even find a job that pays more than 8 widgets / year. Should they bargain, holding out for 9 widgets/year? The manager is already getting 9 widgets /year from the other employees. The employee, though, is starting to starve.
You’re saying that other managers will bid for the employee. They might… but I don’t see why it’s true in general that the managers bidding against each other for employees overpowers the incentive to lower wages. Do you? Can you give an argument, e.g. a toy example? Do you want to make a claim like “most businesses have conditions where managers can’t ‘exploit’ workers” for some appropriate value of “exploit”? For example, it seems like if managers can only manage up to 10 employees (e.g. because it’s hard to manage), then things are bad for the employees. Unless they can coordinate. But coordination might be hard in some cases. We could say, that’s not stable because there could just be more managers… but is that right? It could be a general fact, but I don’t see why, and I’m asking for arguments.
>I don’t think are good reasons to treat worker-employer relations as any different than seller-buyer relations for any other goods or services.
Yeah this really doesn’t make sense to me. Can you expand? Are you saying that you expect the equilibration dynamics to output “roughly the same” result, or “roughly the correct” result, or “roughly the best feasible” result, in most / all markets? Why would that be? It seems like parameters of the market, like asymmetric information, difficulty of collusion for different parties, cognitive costs of computing relevant stuff, transition costs between different options, iterative dynamics (e.g. starving to death, Matthew effect), etc. would make the equilibration look different in different markets, maybe drastically different, and maybe drastically bad / unjust / suboptimal.
>In general price caps....
Ok… but I’m not particularly arguing for any of that. I’m trying to understand what your (/people’s) models of how these things actually go. I wouldn’t guess that you’d agree with the very strong claim “a bunch of individuals making local causal best-responses produces trades that are optimal for long-term flourishing of humankind”, but I don’t know specifically how your models differ from that.