lots of people would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money
Because of how money works, it seems much more likely to me that any one very poor person, on the margin, would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money, than that all the very poor people would be better off, in a way that didn’t make others substantially worse off, by executing that trade.
There’s offering a trade, and there’s extortion. Sometimes people are honestly uncertain or mistaken about which one is happening, or correctly believe that something described as the former is in fact the latter.
When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay. Except now they’ve all been through an elective surgery and have less kidney. (Artist’s depiction of the thing.) This is the sort of thing it’s hard to see inside the trade intuition, but easier to see if you think about the systems involved.
When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay.
I am very grateful to this sentence – before I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with the kidneys-want-to-be-free!-argument but no idea what, and not sure whether or not I should trust the intuition. And now I have a pretty gears-level-understanding of why it might be bad. (Still not sure if I should trust that reference class of intuition – I think my intuitions about sweatshops came from a similar place and now I have a more gearsy/empirical belief in the opposite direction)
On sweatshops in particular, my sense based on Chris Blattman’s research is that it depends a lot on the concrete details of the case, and sweeping judgments that “sweatshops” are “good” or “bad” are just not granular enough to ground out in material reality.
Thank’s for that. I think this applies to a lot of things that people put in the “sacred” category by intuition. The problems are not with the item/action being transferred, but with the state of the world and participants. There are certainly some people who should be prevented from making long-term decisions like borrowing money for college or selling a kidney. But the transactions and topics aren’t sacred—some participants are.
Yuppers – I had read that, and that was why your short sentence was enough for things to fully click for me. I just hadn’t made the connection that this was a reason why kidney selling may not help people if fully realized.
Wait, what?! How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants? I have a hard time reading this as anything other than “poor people are trapped and can’t be trusted to make decisions”. I’m sure that’s not your intent, nor is “let’s hold rich people with kidney problems hostage until they fix the system”.
I totally get that there are some people who are unable to make good choices for multiple reasons, but the correlation between that and poverty is low, and the causality is very unclear. It’s certainly the case that not all of those who’d like to sell a kidney would be harmed.
How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants?
In the rent-seeking model cited by Benquo above, various bad actors are constantly trying to extort as much rent (in the economic sense) as possible from poor people, so giving a poor person money has the effect of mostly slightly enriching these rent-seekers.
Worse, it might have the effect of breaking a Schelling fence around not offering poor people money for their organs, and to the extent that there’s free energy available here, people are going to show up to extract all of the available free energy (offering to buy all of the organs that people—poor, desperate people—are willing to sell). There’s a plausible story where this sort of thing is bad for poor people in the same way that predatory loans are. Choices are Bad, etc.
The toy model: The poor person rents an apartment that he can barely afford. He discovers that he can now sell his kidney, but so does his landlord. Suddenly his landlord raises everyone’s rent by the price of a kidney, so they all sell their kidneys to pay the increased rent. He and everyone in his situation are now worse off than before; only the landlord and the kidney buyers are better off.
Also… if you’re up for it, could you just sort of ramble a bit about what this video is about, on the object and meta level? (I wouldn’t have put effort into interpreting it if I’d come across it randomly, it’s now elevated to my attention as something I might want to be put effort into interpreting, but I think given time constraints I’m more interested in hearing what it means to you.)
The protagonist is fixated on an image that’s been marketed to her by someone wealthy enough to control a planet. The image isn’t very high-content, and she’s willing to undertake a dangerous and arduous journey, which implies that things aren’t very good at home.
She’s in a world where travel is expensive. Somehow, improbably, in outer space, she has to pay a toll. This should clue us in that something sketchy is going on. Tolls are one of the classic modes of rent extraction, second only to land rents in their centrality as an image. There’s a plausible excuse for tolls on improvements like bridges, but you don’t need bridges in space—you can only collect the toll by preventing people from going around you. This should inform how we interpret the subsequent interactions where she pays for fuel, repair to her spaceship, and repair to her body; it’s not obvious how much of the price is needed to pay for the cost of the service, and how much is a rent extracted by a predatory monopolist.
At each stage, the protagonist sacrifices capacity (in the form of mobility affordances, maybe the most concrete and central instance of capacity, from the Latin capere, meaning to take hold of something—she trades away her hand, then her leg, then her remaining limbs, then her spaceship (albeit getting a fully functioning body back as far as we know)) for some progress towards her destination. Then, once she gets there, she finds that she’s traded away her ability to move, for relocation to a place that’s no longer providing the service it advertised. It’s true at each point that you wouldn’t be helping her by preventing her from making the trade, but focusing on that aspect of the situation makes one a price-taker in a case where that attitude doesn’t actually unlock any value.
The resort planet owner likely never colluded with the toll collector, the fueling station, the repair station, or the rescue team. They just imposed complementary negative externalities. The resort planet owner doesn’t pay the price of disappointed customers who arrive after the resort shuts down, so they simply don’t bother pulling their ads. The other actors don’t need to know why people want to go from point A to point B, they just know that they can interpose themselves in the middle and take resources they want.
It’s important to bear in mind that no one overtly cheats anyone else in this scenario—all the parties are operating as honest traders, at least when considered within the bounds of the specific transaction they’re executing. And yet, the whole situation is horrible in a way that the trades don’t actually alleviate.
Because of how money works, it seems much more likely to me that any one very poor person, on the margin, would be better off with one fewer kidney and lots more money, than that all the very poor people would be better off, in a way that didn’t make others substantially worse off, by executing that trade.
There’s offering a trade, and there’s extortion. Sometimes people are honestly uncertain or mistaken about which one is happening, or correctly believe that something described as the former is in fact the latter.
When you’re proposing a trade that gives the poor a fungible resource, you should wonder whether rent extraction will, in the long run, keep pace with their ability to pay. Except now they’ve all been through an elective surgery and have less kidney. (Artist’s depiction of the thing.) This is the sort of thing it’s hard to see inside the trade intuition, but easier to see if you think about the systems involved.
I am very grateful to this sentence – before I had a nagging sense that something was wrong with the kidneys-want-to-be-free!-argument but no idea what, and not sure whether or not I should trust the intuition. And now I have a pretty gears-level-understanding of why it might be bad. (Still not sure if I should trust that reference class of intuition – I think my intuitions about sweatshops came from a similar place and now I have a more gearsy/empirical belief in the opposite direction)
On sweatshops in particular, my sense based on Chris Blattman’s research is that it depends a lot on the concrete details of the case, and sweeping judgments that “sweatshops” are “good” or “bad” are just not granular enough to ground out in material reality.
Thank’s for that. I think this applies to a lot of things that people put in the “sacred” category by intuition. The problems are not with the item/action being transferred, but with the state of the world and participants. There are certainly some people who should be prevented from making long-term decisions like borrowing money for college or selling a kidney. But the transactions and topics aren’t sacred—some participants are.
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Michael Vassar got there first.
Yuppers – I had read that, and that was why your short sentence was enough for things to fully click for me. I just hadn’t made the connection that this was a reason why kidney selling may not help people if fully realized.
Wait, what?! How does making a poor person richer in money and less rich in kidneys possibly harm non-participants? I have a hard time reading this as anything other than “poor people are trapped and can’t be trusted to make decisions”. I’m sure that’s not your intent, nor is “let’s hold rich people with kidney problems hostage until they fix the system”.
I totally get that there are some people who are unable to make good choices for multiple reasons, but the correlation between that and poverty is low, and the causality is very unclear. It’s certainly the case that not all of those who’d like to sell a kidney would be harmed.
In the rent-seeking model cited by Benquo above, various bad actors are constantly trying to extort as much rent (in the economic sense) as possible from poor people, so giving a poor person money has the effect of mostly slightly enriching these rent-seekers.
Worse, it might have the effect of breaking a Schelling fence around not offering poor people money for their organs, and to the extent that there’s free energy available here, people are going to show up to extract all of the available free energy (offering to buy all of the organs that people—poor, desperate people—are willing to sell). There’s a plausible story where this sort of thing is bad for poor people in the same way that predatory loans are. Choices are Bad, etc.
The toy model: The poor person rents an apartment that he can barely afford. He discovers that he can now sell his kidney, but so does his landlord. Suddenly his landlord raises everyone’s rent by the price of a kidney, so they all sell their kidneys to pay the increased rent. He and everyone in his situation are now worse off than before; only the landlord and the kidney buyers are better off.
Inflation
Also… if you’re up for it, could you just sort of ramble a bit about what this video is about, on the object and meta level? (I wouldn’t have put effort into interpreting it if I’d come across it randomly, it’s now elevated to my attention as something I might want to be put effort into interpreting, but I think given time constraints I’m more interested in hearing what it means to you.)
Sure!
Here are a few interesting characteristic facts:
The protagonist is fixated on an image that’s been marketed to her by someone wealthy enough to control a planet. The image isn’t very high-content, and she’s willing to undertake a dangerous and arduous journey, which implies that things aren’t very good at home.
She’s in a world where travel is expensive. Somehow, improbably, in outer space, she has to pay a toll. This should clue us in that something sketchy is going on. Tolls are one of the classic modes of rent extraction, second only to land rents in their centrality as an image. There’s a plausible excuse for tolls on improvements like bridges, but you don’t need bridges in space—you can only collect the toll by preventing people from going around you. This should inform how we interpret the subsequent interactions where she pays for fuel, repair to her spaceship, and repair to her body; it’s not obvious how much of the price is needed to pay for the cost of the service, and how much is a rent extracted by a predatory monopolist.
At each stage, the protagonist sacrifices capacity (in the form of mobility affordances, maybe the most concrete and central instance of capacity, from the Latin capere, meaning to take hold of something—she trades away her hand, then her leg, then her remaining limbs, then her spaceship (albeit getting a fully functioning body back as far as we know)) for some progress towards her destination. Then, once she gets there, she finds that she’s traded away her ability to move, for relocation to a place that’s no longer providing the service it advertised. It’s true at each point that you wouldn’t be helping her by preventing her from making the trade, but focusing on that aspect of the situation makes one a price-taker in a case where that attitude doesn’t actually unlock any value.
The resort planet owner likely never colluded with the toll collector, the fueling station, the repair station, or the rescue team. They just imposed complementary negative externalities. The resort planet owner doesn’t pay the price of disappointed customers who arrive after the resort shuts down, so they simply don’t bother pulling their ads. The other actors don’t need to know why people want to go from point A to point B, they just know that they can interpose themselves in the middle and take resources they want.
It’s important to bear in mind that no one overtly cheats anyone else in this scenario—all the parties are operating as honest traders, at least when considered within the bounds of the specific transaction they’re executing. And yet, the whole situation is horrible in a way that the trades don’t actually alleviate.
woah.
Link was region-blocked for me, I guess this is the same thing.
Yes, thanks for pointing out the issue