And there is pragmatic justification for this habit: if I want to determine who should receive a good, dollars are probably the best measure of strength of preference. If I gave the good to someone for whom it “meant more” but who was willing to pay less, I could implement a Pareto improvement by giving the good to the person who was willing to pay more and then performing an appropriate monetary transfer.
So a homeless man with no income prefers a McDonald’s cheeseburger less than a person with a comfortable income and a moderately-successful standard of living, who prefers it less than a very wealthy person making $5 million USD annually? It costs a dollar no matter who’s buying it...
But not everyone values it for a dollar? People who don’t buy burgers value them for less than a dollar, and people who buy them value them for more, so people who eat at McDonald’s value it more than millionaires. I gave the standard economic justification for using dollars to quantitatively estimate desire.
There is a moral question here: should I take money from rich people to give it to poor people? Reasonable people I know tend to say yes, at least in the world as it is today, and I agree. But this is a moral question, not a factual question, as far as I can tell.
There is a moral question here: should I take money from rich people to give it to poor people? Reasonable people I know tend to say yes, at least in the world as it is today, and I agree.
My own answer is “Yes, with caveats, and acknowledging the real-world context we live in makes a difference to this question.”
In a purely abstract sense I find it, well, problematic at best, but I also take note of the fact that most functional, somewhat wealthy (in their own ecological and economic context if not by present-day Western standards) societies existing prior to capitalism had gentle, largely-voluntary methods that had normative rather than authoritative sway over people. Potlatch, for example—throwing a fantastic party and giving away your stuff is socially upvoted, but it’s not actually compulsory, and the population sizes and living patterns ensure you’re going to to benefit from someone else’s potlatch later, so it’s in your own interests if you’re wealthy to trade permanent access to specific material items for reputation, secure in the knowledge that you will get back items you need to make your living and accrue wealth later.
We don’t have anything quite like that in Western culture; our own tax system seems to be more a mutation of the feudal “tribute-paying” behavior set, which is quite different (everyone pays a portion of their production into a central pool, leaders decide what to do with it, only now we have some democratic legislative access built into that). Redistributive mechanisms seem to stabilize a society, and enable the generation of collective forms of wealth (case in point: the national highway system here in the US); I don’t think everyone having the exact same outcome is a realistic, achievable or even desireable goal, but I do think that everyone being genuinely able to choose freely is—the difference between myself and most free-market advocates there being I do not think our current state of affairs looks much like that, or that it’s even achievable from our current standpoint until there’s no significant cluster of people unable to vote with their dollar about life necessities (just as you cannot make an uncoerced choice at the barrel of a gun, neither can you do so when you’re starving or facing death from a treatable disease).
I also don’t think the vast inequalities in say, the US result from purely Malthusian factors (much less conditions like global food unavailability), beliefs I’m willing to defend here if asked for sources but which at any rate seem to conflict with the majority consensus here.
I also don’t think the vast inequalities in say, the US result from purely Malthusian factors (much less conditions like global food unavailability), beliefs I’m willing to defend here if asked for sources but which at any rate seem to conflict with the majority consensus here.
Why do you believe this conflicts with the majority consensus here?
I also don’t think the vast inequalities in say, the US result from purely Malthusian factors
I don’t know what this means, because I can think of several interpretations of it.
I do know that characterizing your position as being not “purely” the result of one factor, in “conflict with the majority consensus here” is almost certain to be denotationally incorrect. People are reasonable and you do not distinguish yourself by thinking a result stems from more than one cause.
You might say that you mean to say that they ascribe more importance to these factors than you do, and that meaning was clear. My point, other than not knowing exactly what “Malthusian” means here, is that you are phrasing your position in a way that makes your opponents wrong almost by definition—it’s a dark art thing to do, even if it can be inferred that you mean to say you only disagree about how much more important they think a factor than you do.
genuinely able to choose freely...uncoerced
This is a spectrum of conditions.
the difference between myself and most free-market advocates
I think you put this very well because the idea of a free market is almost independent from questions of distribution. A society could, for example, heavily tax, incomes, property, and sales and provide no or few services other than a large stipend to each individual. So it is a matter of demographics alone, “most” people’s beliefs, rather than being essential.
I don’t know what this means, because I can think of several interpretations of it
Put simply: I do not buy the idea that poverty in the society I live in is caused by scarcity as a limiting factor on available resources for them (there’s plenty of nutritious, nourishing food around, and enough land currently tapped agribusiness that in a purely abstract sense we already produce enough food for everyone currently alive on Earth to hypothetically be eating 3500 calories a day; there’s tons of land and even unoccupied homes), or that the numbers of people caught by it reflect primarily those who aren’t capable of making and doing something bigger and more value-creating for themselves and others around them.
Who disagrees with “in a purely abstract sense we already produce enough food for everyone currently alive on Earth to hypothetically be eating 3500 calories a day; there’s tons of land and even unoccupied homes”?
the numbers of people caught by it reflect primarily those who aren’t capable of making and doing something bigger and more value-creating for themselves and others around them.
You mean slightly different circumstances would see most people primarily in poverty be not caught in it, and people not caught in it caught in it? I think LW has some unusual beliefs about the relative unimportance of character traits in decision making.
But not everyone values it for a dollar? People who don’t buy burgers value them for less than a dollar,
Or they might not have the money to spare. Not all economic decisions are constrained by preference—there is a real point in life, occupied by a great many people even in the US, where the desire for a McDonald’s Cheeseburger is basically irrelevant to the fact that right now, you cannot afford it.
If you’re in that position, you could also probably really use it right now (since you have to be pretty broke to not be able to throw a dollar for a cheeseburger whenever you want); it might be the only food you get all day. I daresay someone who cannot reliably purchase a McDonald’s cheeseburger whenever they want to probably values it more, for its implication to their livelihood, than someone who has the money and eats lunch there every day.
Or they might not have the money to spare. Not all economic decisions are constrained by preference—there is a real point in life, occupied by a great many people even in the US, where the desire for a McDonald’s Cheeseburger is basically irrelevant to the fact that right now, you cannot afford it.
You don’t seem to be using the word “preference” in the same way I am (or economists do).
If I have only $2, and so can’t afford a $1 cheeseburger, then we say that I prefer $1 to a cheeseburger. You have a choice—either keep your $1, or get a cheeseburger—and you choose to keep your dollar. This seems perfectly clear.
In the extreme case, when everything you own and your labor is literally worth less than a cheeseburger, then this doesn’t exactly work: it may be that you would rather get a cheeseburger than a $1, so that you will buy a cheeseburger at literally the first opportunity. Very few people are this poor, and those who are don’t generally buy hamburgers as soon as they get $1. There are much better ways to spend a dollar: cheeseburgers aren’t worth $1 to the rational poor.
Now whether we interpret this as meaning that the poor care less about a cheeseburger, or as saying that they care more about $1, seems to me to be a question of semantics which no one cares about.
So a homeless man with no income prefers a McDonald’s cheeseburger less than a person with a comfortable income and a moderately-successful standard of living, who prefers it less than a very wealthy person making $5 million USD annually? It costs a dollar no matter who’s buying it...
But not everyone values it for a dollar? People who don’t buy burgers value them for less than a dollar, and people who buy them value them for more, so people who eat at McDonald’s value it more than millionaires. I gave the standard economic justification for using dollars to quantitatively estimate desire.
There is a moral question here: should I take money from rich people to give it to poor people? Reasonable people I know tend to say yes, at least in the world as it is today, and I agree. But this is a moral question, not a factual question, as far as I can tell.
My own answer is “Yes, with caveats, and acknowledging the real-world context we live in makes a difference to this question.”
In a purely abstract sense I find it, well, problematic at best, but I also take note of the fact that most functional, somewhat wealthy (in their own ecological and economic context if not by present-day Western standards) societies existing prior to capitalism had gentle, largely-voluntary methods that had normative rather than authoritative sway over people. Potlatch, for example—throwing a fantastic party and giving away your stuff is socially upvoted, but it’s not actually compulsory, and the population sizes and living patterns ensure you’re going to to benefit from someone else’s potlatch later, so it’s in your own interests if you’re wealthy to trade permanent access to specific material items for reputation, secure in the knowledge that you will get back items you need to make your living and accrue wealth later.
We don’t have anything quite like that in Western culture; our own tax system seems to be more a mutation of the feudal “tribute-paying” behavior set, which is quite different (everyone pays a portion of their production into a central pool, leaders decide what to do with it, only now we have some democratic legislative access built into that). Redistributive mechanisms seem to stabilize a society, and enable the generation of collective forms of wealth (case in point: the national highway system here in the US); I don’t think everyone having the exact same outcome is a realistic, achievable or even desireable goal, but I do think that everyone being genuinely able to choose freely is—the difference between myself and most free-market advocates there being I do not think our current state of affairs looks much like that, or that it’s even achievable from our current standpoint until there’s no significant cluster of people unable to vote with their dollar about life necessities (just as you cannot make an uncoerced choice at the barrel of a gun, neither can you do so when you’re starving or facing death from a treatable disease).
I also don’t think the vast inequalities in say, the US result from purely Malthusian factors (much less conditions like global food unavailability), beliefs I’m willing to defend here if asked for sources but which at any rate seem to conflict with the majority consensus here.
Why do you believe this conflicts with the majority consensus here?
I don’t know what this means, because I can think of several interpretations of it.
I do know that characterizing your position as being not “purely” the result of one factor, in “conflict with the majority consensus here” is almost certain to be denotationally incorrect. People are reasonable and you do not distinguish yourself by thinking a result stems from more than one cause.
You might say that you mean to say that they ascribe more importance to these factors than you do, and that meaning was clear. My point, other than not knowing exactly what “Malthusian” means here, is that you are phrasing your position in a way that makes your opponents wrong almost by definition—it’s a dark art thing to do, even if it can be inferred that you mean to say you only disagree about how much more important they think a factor than you do.
This is a spectrum of conditions.
I think you put this very well because the idea of a free market is almost independent from questions of distribution. A society could, for example, heavily tax, incomes, property, and sales and provide no or few services other than a large stipend to each individual. So it is a matter of demographics alone, “most” people’s beliefs, rather than being essential.
Put simply: I do not buy the idea that poverty in the society I live in is caused by scarcity as a limiting factor on available resources for them (there’s plenty of nutritious, nourishing food around, and enough land currently tapped agribusiness that in a purely abstract sense we already produce enough food for everyone currently alive on Earth to hypothetically be eating 3500 calories a day; there’s tons of land and even unoccupied homes), or that the numbers of people caught by it reflect primarily those who aren’t capable of making and doing something bigger and more value-creating for themselves and others around them.
Who disagrees with “in a purely abstract sense we already produce enough food for everyone currently alive on Earth to hypothetically be eating 3500 calories a day; there’s tons of land and even unoccupied homes”?
You mean slightly different circumstances would see most people primarily in poverty be not caught in it, and people not caught in it caught in it? I think LW has some unusual beliefs about the relative unimportance of character traits in decision making.
Or they might not have the money to spare. Not all economic decisions are constrained by preference—there is a real point in life, occupied by a great many people even in the US, where the desire for a McDonald’s Cheeseburger is basically irrelevant to the fact that right now, you cannot afford it.
If you’re in that position, you could also probably really use it right now (since you have to be pretty broke to not be able to throw a dollar for a cheeseburger whenever you want); it might be the only food you get all day. I daresay someone who cannot reliably purchase a McDonald’s cheeseburger whenever they want to probably values it more, for its implication to their livelihood, than someone who has the money and eats lunch there every day.
You don’t seem to be using the word “preference” in the same way I am (or economists do).
If I have only $2, and so can’t afford a $1 cheeseburger, then we say that I prefer $1 to a cheeseburger. You have a choice—either keep your $1, or get a cheeseburger—and you choose to keep your dollar. This seems perfectly clear.
In the extreme case, when everything you own and your labor is literally worth less than a cheeseburger, then this doesn’t exactly work: it may be that you would rather get a cheeseburger than a $1, so that you will buy a cheeseburger at literally the first opportunity. Very few people are this poor, and those who are don’t generally buy hamburgers as soon as they get $1. There are much better ways to spend a dollar: cheeseburgers aren’t worth $1 to the rational poor.
Now whether we interpret this as meaning that the poor care less about a cheeseburger, or as saying that they care more about $1, seems to me to be a question of semantics which no one cares about.