4 ms·

I think it's a story we're all quite familiar with: in the absence of someone keeping an industry honest, the industry tends to develop honesty problems, becaus

I think it's a story we're all quite familiar with: in the absence of someone keeping an industry honest, the industry tends to develop honesty problems, because cutting corners makes the decision-makers more money, and the externalities are just that: externalities.

fzeroracer 8y ago
Well said, I couldn't have put it better myself. I see all these people clamoring for the return of coal and coal miners, yet the amount of miners dying due to entirely preventable causes is infuriating. We're willing to throw away anything and everything for the sake of making slightly more money for people that already have too much to count.
munk-a 8y ago
I think in the modern political stage we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). Regulations exist to incorporate the costs of externalities into the cost of doing business. This sort of a market correction only receives criticism on an inter-industry level (and possibly with regards to imports if the cost is only applied domestically) because everyone in that industry is motivated to care about the well being of their workers without suffering an economic disadvantage for doing so (in fact, not caring is often a penalty beyond the cost to adhere to the regulation to make adherence an economically sound decision).
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). My argument is we've replaced a rich set of social controls with a single unitary one; money. And then wonder why we're constantly dealing with mal-externalities. If you consider that human societies are complex and industrial ones even more so, the idea that you can manage that with a single control input (money) is ludicrous.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    I think that may indeed be a problem, but I'd like to hope it isn't one. I think non-translatable social controls are too mysterious and arbitrary which leads to the ability for various social biases to be unaddressable. Ideally codifying these social controls into monetary penalties should allow easy verification of the fairness of the system and comprehensibility of the system to individuals who are not already well versed in the system.
  - derefr 8y ago
    Try to “charge” people in any other resource, and they’ll just convert the extra profits they make from the operation into that currency and then pay you in it. For example: stores that require people to wait in line to get a limited-availability thing on a first-come-first-served basis. Rich people just pay someone to wait in line for them. Entrepreneurs serve these rich people by putting a bunch of people in the line and then auctioning off the resulting purchases to make a profit. Now you’ve got scalpers, a loss of profits to middlemen that could have gone to the original seller (and thus subsidized production), and people wasting time in lines for no reason (because nobody is now getting the thing that wasn’t previously.) We internalize externalities using monetary penalties, because higher profits are what drive businesses to favor these strategies in the first place. If you cancel out the profit (with a tax or fine), you remove the motive, rather than simply redirecting it.
    - ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
      There is an incredible number of norms you and most everybody else adheres to every single day. Some of them even obviously ridiculous and without any objective basis, like "don't wear white socks and sandals". Nobody charges you money, not even if you ignore such norms. And yet you comply - and the corset of cultural norms is far tighter than you realize (unless you start thinking about it, but even then it's hard to see from the inside how many rules you actually follow, by now quite voluntarily). The human world outside "money" is far larger and the bonds also far stronger than inside of it, I would claim. It's just that one is mostly subconscious and the other one very often requires conscious attention, so guess which one you always notice.
- luckydata 8y ago
  Nobody has forgotten anything, it was a carefully orchestrated effort by people that understand the consecuences perfectly well and doesn't care. Everything else is propaganda carefully created to make dumbasses scream "job killing regulations" without understanding that regulation is good for them.
ars 8y ago
> in the absence of someone keeping an industry honest Aren't mines mostly unionized? Isn't that like the #1 reason for a union to exist?
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Unions don't exist to keep industries honest. Unions exist to look after employees. They are often but not always the same thing. But more practically speaking, unions clearly didn't solve the problem here, and unions' power over the economy has waned a lot over the years.

fzeroracer 8y ago

Well said, I couldn't have put it better myself. I see all these people clamoring for the return of coal and coal miners, yet the amount of miners dying due to entirely preventable causes is infuriating. We're willing to throw away anything and everything for the sake of making slightly more money for people that already have too much to count.

munk-a 8y ago

I think in the modern political stage we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). Regulations exist to incorporate the costs of externalities into the cost of doing business. This sort of a market correction only receives criticism on an inter-industry level (and possibly with regards to imports if the cost is only applied domestically) because everyone in that industry is motivated to care about the well being of their workers without suffering an economic disadvantage for doing so (in fact, not caring is often a penalty beyond the cost to adhere to the regulation to make adherence an economically sound decision).

Gibbon1 8y ago
> we've forgotten that regulations on industry is not a market distortion but a market correction (when done correctly). My argument is we've replaced a rich set of social controls with a single unitary one; money. And then wonder why we're constantly dealing with mal-externalities. If you consider that human societies are complex and industrial ones even more so, the idea that you can manage that with a single control input (money) is ludicrous.
- munk-a 8y ago
  I think that may indeed be a problem, but I'd like to hope it isn't one. I think non-translatable social controls are too mysterious and arbitrary which leads to the ability for various social biases to be unaddressable. Ideally codifying these social controls into monetary penalties should allow easy verification of the fairness of the system and comprehensibility of the system to individuals who are not already well versed in the system.
- derefr 8y ago
  Try to “charge” people in any other resource, and they’ll just convert the extra profits they make from the operation into that currency and then pay you in it. For example: stores that require people to wait in line to get a limited-availability thing on a first-come-first-served basis. Rich people just pay someone to wait in line for them. Entrepreneurs serve these rich people by putting a bunch of people in the line and then auctioning off the resulting purchases to make a profit. Now you’ve got scalpers, a loss of profits to middlemen that could have gone to the original seller (and thus subsidized production), and people wasting time in lines for no reason (because nobody is now getting the thing that wasn’t previously.) We internalize externalities using monetary penalties, because higher profits are what drive businesses to favor these strategies in the first place. If you cancel out the profit (with a tax or fine), you remove the motive, rather than simply redirecting it.
  - ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
    There is an incredible number of norms you and most everybody else adheres to every single day. Some of them even obviously ridiculous and without any objective basis, like "don't wear white socks and sandals". Nobody charges you money, not even if you ignore such norms. And yet you comply - and the corset of cultural norms is far tighter than you realize (unless you start thinking about it, but even then it's hard to see from the inside how many rules you actually follow, by now quite voluntarily). The human world outside "money" is far larger and the bonds also far stronger than inside of it, I would claim. It's just that one is mostly subconscious and the other one very often requires conscious attention, so guess which one you always notice.
luckydata 8y ago
Nobody has forgotten anything, it was a carefully orchestrated effort by people that understand the consecuences perfectly well and doesn't care. Everything else is propaganda carefully created to make dumbasses scream "job killing regulations" without understanding that regulation is good for them.

ars 8y ago

> in the absence of someone keeping an industry honest Aren't mines mostly unionized? Isn't that like the #1 reason for a union to exist?

munchbunny 8y ago
Unions don't exist to keep industries honest. Unions exist to look after employees. They are often but not always the same thing. But more practically speaking, unions clearly didn't solve the problem here, and unions' power over the economy has waned a lot over the years.