Please comment or send me a message if you need any accommodations for the meetup.
Zubon
Karma: 1,394
I would expect the second effect to be small in practice with respect to water because of the small quantities involved. My demand for water for drinking and cleaning is inelastic within the relevant margins, and even large changes in the price of tap water would have minimal costs to me. My use of water for lawns would be more price sensitive, so green lawns in California would become more of a luxury good, and I am with James_Miller in seeing that as a good thing in the American Southwest. As you suggest, some sort of price tiering or progressiveness in municipal water costs would minimize effects.
The larger effect will be on those using large quantities of water, farmers. Which is the goal. We can discuss the plight of the poor farmer, but that quickly seems to become a cover for agribusiness lobbying rather than a targeted intervention for independent farms.
I’m not sure I understand the distinction.
Most people seem to have an “established specific preference” with respect to coffee or tea. They have a standard order at Starbucks/whatever, or morning coffee is always made the same way. (And I must say, pre-caffeine is an optimal time not to need to think about things.) Most people have more “open” preferences with respect to restaurants. They will try different things on the menu, rather than ordering the same thing every time. “What am I in the mood for today?”
I have a little gnome in the back of my mind...
This sounds like an atypical experience, depending on your scope of “insignificant,” although others in these sorts of discussions have mentioned feeling like they were passive observers of choices being made, rather than actively making choices.
What do you consider a significant choice? I don’t spend much time thinking about clothing after I buy it, for example, but I know others who will spend several minutes picking out outfits every morning. They consider that a significant decision. Similarly, many people spend a lot of time thinking about “what to say” and “which words to say it with,” some to the point of having trouble communicating because of obsessing over how to communicate; at the other extreme, there are people with absolutely no internal monologue who do not know what they are going to say until it comes out of their mouths.
Meetup : Ann Arbor, MI Discussion Meetup 6/13
I’m presuming you do not sell things, much or often? Because finding buyers is a big transaction cost, especially if you are mass producing something. The expertise needed to make 1000kg of soap is not the same expertise needed to find 1000 people who each need 1kg of soap and sell it to them.
Can I presume you do buy things? A grocery store is one of those traders. Alice produces bananas, you are Charlie, and Bob the grocer buys bananas from Alice and sells them to you. But wait, that is Alice1. Alice2 grows peaches, Alice3 grows wheat, Alice4 grows… It would be very inefficient for you to visit every Alice to do your grocery shopping, especially when they are spread around the country and the world, and you can imagine the cramp it would put in Alice’s production to try to be available to sell to you whenever you needed in whatever quantity you needed. That is what Bob does: he talks to all of those Alices, brings all of those products together, and makes them available to you in arbitrary quantities and convenient hours. Bob is a trader.
Individuals connected directly to each other is nice for some things but misses out on a lot, such as economies of scale. Alice specializes in producing things, and Bob specializes in collecting things from producers and getting them to consumers. This is like how the water company brings water to your house; you are partly paying for the water, but mostly you are paying for the availability of water. If you want to get rid of the water trader, get a bucket and go to the stream.
I see it as a distributed computing resource allocation system.
Yes, good. Markets are a means of exchanging information via price signals. Prices distill a lot of information about production, distribution, and consumption into a single number. All the effort behind “I, Pencil” is output in the price of a pencil, and I can compare my need to that cost.
See also the economic calculation problem.
This is important. On an absolute scale, sweatshop jobs are not great jobs. But they are better than many of the jobs that most of humanity has worked over the centuries, both in terms of labor and reward.
Many people are enthusiastic about eliminating sweatshop jobs. Eliminating bad options does not create better ones. If a sweatshop job is the least bad option around, and you eliminate it without creating a better option, you have just worsened someone’s life.
I wouldn’t want to work in a sweatshop. I don’t want anyone to need to work in a sweatshop. But we should recognize that bad options are the best options available when all the other options are even worse. You can’t just get rid of bad things. You must also create something better to replace them.
As said above, no economies are perfectly efficient, and traders make their money improving that efficiency. This is not a new revelation: we have over a millennium of history of people hating traders, moneylenders, etc. for “getting rich doing nothing” while they provide valuable efficiency improvements.
It gets especiallly blatant when a trader buys and sells the exact same good to generate a money advantage from its price fluctations.
Price fluctuations indicate real problems to be solved. That is what traders and middlemen do: resolve those problems. Prices fluctuate because the need for things varies over time and space and between individuals. “Buy low, sell high” means “buy something when there is so much that people want to get rid of it and sell when there is so little that people want more.” The profit in between is (1) recognizing that difference over time and (2) being willing to buy something you don’t want, hold it when you could be using that money for something else, and then sell it to people who want it more. If there were not value in that, you would just hold your surplus until you needed it. You can capture all the benefits that traders provide by just never trading (note: this is a bad idea).
The same applies with trading goods over space (excess in one area, dearth in another) or between individuals (finding the people who want to buy what you want to sell). The economy is not perfectly efficient, so the trader makes money by smoothing those inefficiencies and incurring the transaction costs of moving things across time and space, along with the risk of ″being wrong″ and losing the investment.
Choosing an Inferior Alternative
The Aldi’s chain of grocery stores takes a similar approach. They promise to do less: fewer products, fewer brands (often 1 for a product), fewer hours, lower prices.
But there are already enough people donating blood.
Citation?
In particular, I manage to dissolve a lot of philosophical paradoxes or arguments much quicker than I used to be able to.
Any particular approach you would like to cite there? I’ve found Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to be a good shorthand for a lot of that. “This is just word games with bad definitions.”
There are other things to optimize, and Less Wrong would cheerfully endorse your optimizing for some combination of:
happiness
fun
production/creation that focuses on your comparative advantages
Someone needs to do those things that the high-earning people are paying for, and if you don’t think you’d be happy with an earnings-optimized career, you might be that person.
Possible, conditional on your income. Assuming we need blood, unless your work creates an efficient blood replacement alternative, someone must donate blood. Less Wrong’s readership skews young with a lot of college students, who presumably have low income. If you’re reading this, you are probably someone who has a comparative advantage in donating blood rather than money.
True. I was suggesting that Stalin was “subtly worse” than Hitler, in that he managed to kill far more people without raising as much international outcry.
Arguably the institutions of Germany were not really that good.
Sorry I was unclear. I was characterizing the institutions of neighboring countries as being suppressed. I’m not sure how far you’d need to fall back to find something “working” in Germany (pre-Weimar, so pre-WWI, so … how far back do we want to go here?).
Big win for Western Europe, needed another 50 years to settle out in Eastern Europe due to that Stalin issue. And a significant cause of WWII was the epilogue of WWI. As a cartoonishly over the top supervillain that really happened, WWII Germany serves as an example of how this problem comes about, how just defeating the villain can go well when there were good institutions being suppressed, and how it can leave half a continent still oppressed by the next, subtly worse dictator for generations.
Rationalist Tumblr discusses politics and culture, but it is definitely not hard to find; the quality of discussion may be higher than the Tumblr average but probably not what you are looking for. On the plus side, most of us have different usernames there, so you can consider ideas apart from author until you re-learn everyone. Which happens pretty quickly, so not a big plus.
The Tumblr folks seem to mostly agree that Tumblr is not the optimal solution for this, but it has the advantage of currently existing.
I’m not sure if it says more about me or the context I’m used to seeing here at Less Wrong, but when I read, “Shall we just tell the Greeks to go jump into the Aegean sea?” I thought “Iliad” before “ongoing economic crisis.” If that order ever flips, we may have gotten too much into current events and lost our endearing weirdness and classicism.
Page 212-213 is even more on point.
He gives several examples relating to the physics of light and torque. The students give great definitions but have no idea how to apply the terms to any real objects, even when the objects are pointed out to them.