3 ms·

If by "intuitively absurd", you mean "counterintuitive", sure. Many things are. Firstly, when you speculate on something like Candy Crush Saga, you're really s

If by "intuitively absurd", you mean "counterintuitive", sure. Many things are. Firstly, when you speculate on something like Candy Crush Saga, you're really speculating on what the brand and assets can yield you in terms of the rent gained from its unit services stretching out through the future. The risk is high, yet so is the anticipation of high yield. It might seem so stupid and trivial when seen superficially (it's "just" Candy Crush Saga), but what a brand like that can mean in a modern economy is surprisingly far-going. Human labor is different because you can't reliably account for an individual productive laborer being there over some prolonged period of time without turnover. Otherwise, you'd be a slave owner, essentially. So, ceteris paribus, some estimate of a worker's marginal value product (marginal physical productivity discounted by the rate of interest) has to be made, which in a real-world economy is of course difficult and never really converging. This provides ample opportunity for bargaining. Of course, this is all a ceteris paribus condition. State policies, institutional factors and unionization all severely complicate things.

bpchaps 11y ago
I really want to write a long winded post on why I completely disagree with the way you think, but nah. Your post has a complete air of self-masturbation. It's annoying, sad and reduces complexity to something more than it is. Get over yourself, seriously. Yes, this is a complicated issue and yes, this post reeks of ad hominens, but fuck it. Find the fucking "Gordian Knot", you twat.
geofft 11y ago
Thanks, I did not expect this response and I'm thinking through it. I suppose Candy Crush Saga being valued at $X quite literally means that (some people believe that) if one were to purchase all of Candy Crush Saga, it would be able to generate about $X in value, either by collecting revenue or by reselling it or whatever. And at that point you could spend the resulting $X on nurses or schoolteachers or whatever. I think my reservations with that are largely about how that interacts with "created" wealth, and whether created wealth is fungible for nurses and schoolteachers, but I don't think I have a well-formed response here yet.
thuuuomas 11y ago
This is a language problem: people with emotions hear "value" & recognize a (for lack of a better term) moral component to the implied judgement, where finance people are happy to confuse "value" with "wealth" or "profit" or "money" or "power" or "IGMFU". This confusion allows economic arguments to fall back on economic arguments when confronted with moral opposition & it's worked for centuries.

bpchaps 11y ago

I really want to write a long winded post on why I completely disagree with the way you think, but nah. Your post has a complete air of self-masturbation. It's annoying, sad and reduces complexity to something more than it is. Get over yourself, seriously. Yes, this is a complicated issue and yes, this post reeks of ad hominens, but fuck it. Find the fucking "Gordian Knot", you twat.

geofft 11y ago

Thanks, I did not expect this response and I'm thinking through it. I suppose Candy Crush Saga being valued at $X quite literally means that (some people believe that) if one were to purchase all of Candy Crush Saga, it would be able to generate about $X in value, either by collecting revenue or by reselling it or whatever. And at that point you could spend the resulting $X on nurses or schoolteachers or whatever. I think my reservations with that are largely about how that interacts with "created" wealth, and whether created wealth is fungible for nurses and schoolteachers, but I don't think I have a well-formed response here yet.

thuuuomas 11y ago

This is a language problem: people with emotions hear "value" & recognize a (for lack of a better term) moral component to the implied judgement, where finance people are happy to confuse "value" with "wealth" or "profit" or "money" or "power" or "IGMFU". This confusion allows economic arguments to fall back on economic arguments when confronted with moral opposition & it's worked for centuries.