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.
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.
Your kind words honor me.
You often see the Doctor say “I’m not going to doom innocents to save a greater number” and something saves everyone anyway
I find that undermines a lot of enjoyment for me. A Hard Choice is presented, the Doctor does something that seems deontologically virtuous but consequentially absurd, and then deus ex machina the consequences of the Hard Choice are wiped away.
Perhaps he knows he is living in a just universe where moral realism proves deontology correct, and ignoring consequentialism leads to the best consequences. Depending on the writer.
Easy way to fight akrasia with respect to saving: when your income increases, put half in savings. Do so through automatic paycheck deductions like a 401(k) to avoid needing to think about it. If you are currently getting by well enough, you don’t strictly need that extra money, and the way to avoid unthinkingly frittering is away it to unthinkingly save it. If you get a 2% raise, increase your withholding by 1%. You still get a bit of a raise, and your savings increase.
This assumes “you are currently getting by well enough.” If you have debts, paying down the debt is your savings. The interest rate on your credit card balance is higher than anything you can get through investing; stop the bleeding.
Related engineer joke: “anybody can build a bridge that won’t collapse–but it takes a real engineer to build a bridge that just barely avoids collapse.”
Gordon [Tullock] was on my dissertation committee. After reading all 252 pages of my dissertation within twelve hours of my submitting it, Gordon caught me in the Public Choice hallway at Virginia Tech to give me his assessment: “Minimal but acceptable.” To which I replied, “Optimal. Done!”
-- Richard McKenzie, quoted on Econlog
When you talk in terms of black and white all the time, it is very easy to forget that you don’t think that way.
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.