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> I think we can have a society that rewards people for productive or otherwise socially valuable contributions while also taking care of the poor and those who

> I think we can have a society that rewards people for productive or otherwise socially valuable contributions while also taking care of the poor and those who can’t work. I find "socially valuable contributions" to be a disturbing phrase. First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Second, quite often society is wrong in what "it" values or finds popular. Finally, I use "wrong" from my point of view. Obviously there are many definitions of "wrong" based on your ethics, morality, religion (or lack thereof), values, and preferences. It sounds like yet another social credit system.. whoever runs it wins.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Not necessarily. I agree that having values dictated by fiat is a recipe for disaster - such arrangements are bound to get corrupted over time. But on the other end of the spectrum, there is some sense of social value - a sense in which e.g. garbage collectors, firemen and doctors do more socially valuable jobs than athletes and entertainers. A sense that's easy to convey - imagine if suddenly, any one of the former three occupations disappeared; the death toll and suffering would quickly overshadow the largest of wars. Meanwhile, even if both of the latter occupations disappeared, the culture would be a bit poorer, but the society would function just fine. Unfortunately, it seems that this concept of social value is very hard to robustly define. And if we can't define it, effectively optimizing for it is pretty much out of the question.
- lordnacho 7y ago
  What you are writing is another version of water/diamonds story. Basically WTF happened that diamonds, which nobody needs, are worth a lot, but water, which everyone needs, costs basically nothing? The answer was something called marginalism. Well worth reading about, and I can't do justice to it in a few sentences. Of course marginalism itself requires you to think about value in a certain way, often a very technical way (eg von Neuman-Morgenstern) that makes you forget that there are sometimes contradictions in how we think about value.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Thanks, I didn't know the term "marginalism", I'll look it up.
    - arundelo 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value#Marginalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value#Marginalism
- xkcd-sucks 7y ago
  Yes, but even these particular values embody subjective urbanist bias. For example, some towns run very effective volunteer fire departments, where the "payment" seems to be mutual aid and masculine pride. In some towns garbage disposal is mostly burn barrels and composting, which is bad for the environment but is not a service which can fail. And personally, having the privilege of education in biology, I feel like manufacturers of drugs and diagnostic equipment manufacturers are infinitely more valuable than doctors who are merely technicians trained in the use of these tools. Perhaps the concept of "social value" is only useful in the context of societies small enough so that all participants can agree on values?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Huh, you're right about my "subjective urbanist bias", I didn't even notice it in my thinking. Thanks! WRT. doctors vs. drug/diagnostic equipment manufacturers, a good point, but here I specifically picked my example - public health and safety vs. entertainment - to maximize the contrast. > Perhaps the concept of "social value" is only useful in the context of societies small enough so that all participants can agree on values? I think there might be a correlation between community size and the ease of agreeing on what is social value, but I wouldn't discount it for larger societies or even humanity as a whole. Humans do have a lot in common, and I feel you can get far in ranking jobs by social value by going along the gradient of reduction of suffering. And I say "jobs", not "professions", because IMO, professions are almost orthogonal to social value. For example, in terms of the social value, I'd rank a programmer working on diagnostic equipment > programmer working on a videogame > programmer working on advertising tech. The skillset and productivity may be similar or even the same, but these jobs occupy three very different point on the "making the world a better place" scale.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
michaelt 7y ago
> that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money. Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precisely with a lot of people’s personal values.
- clairity 7y ago
  yes, money is the mechanism we've defaulted to for measuring value, but economists admit that our economic systems, even capitalism, don't yet (properly) price everything that's valuable to humans (as you note). a charitable reading of the parent comment would find they're mainly against centralization of authority rather than how to value intangibles or how to engineer fairness into economic systems. but their first assumption that "'socially valuable contributions' [...] implies there's some sort of authority" is wholly unsupported. capitalism, for example, highly values rational resource distribution, but there is no central authority dictating that distribution. in any case, the crux of the problem is that with concentration of wealth comes concentration of power. we're all very wary of concentrations of power, for good reason. we need to decouple that pairing for a more stable and balanced society.
- nugget 7y ago
  Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.
  - noonespecial 7y ago
    >Great childcare and elder care is very expensive It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.
    - 7y ago
the_cat_kittles 7y ago
this comment is great because it is a good faith argument that reveals how blind many people are to the fact that theyve outsourced all their moral thinking to money. the things you are scared of all exist now. they are bad in large part because wealth distribution is historically bad. its amazing how readily you dismiss your own ability to identify good and bad things. you really dont think you could have figured out slavery was bad back in the day?
joe_the_user 7y ago
First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Are literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values? Right now, the justice system, the zoning system and the operations of private foundations, and beyond are engaging in leadership that makes value judgements about what is socially valuable. That is how society has worked historically and the US in earlier times made those judgements more explicit. Point blank denying this is actually calling for even more social change than the article.
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  > Are [you] literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values? No, I did not say that literally or figuratively.
neilwilson 7y ago
"First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."" There is. The opinions of other people in your society - generally expressed via the ballot box in a democracy. All authority is, or should, derive directly from that source of truth. That's sort of what society is - everybody else. Hence why we have social judgments on what is appropriate - like banning guns and the death penalty - and why we have different countries to encapsulate different views on those social judgments (my country bans the former, yours likely doesn't - but we both take a dim view of marrying off 12 year olds, something other societies are quite relaxed about). There is no objective truth here. It's all a social creation by a set of people who have chosen to co-operate with each other and call themselves a country.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Not necessarily. I agree that having values dictated by fiat is a recipe for disaster - such arrangements are bound to get corrupted over time. But on the other end of the spectrum, there is some sense of social value - a sense in which e.g. garbage collectors, firemen and doctors do more socially valuable jobs than athletes and entertainers. A sense that's easy to convey - imagine if suddenly, any one of the former three occupations disappeared; the death toll and suffering would quickly overshadow the largest of wars. Meanwhile, even if both of the latter occupations disappeared, the culture would be a bit poorer, but the society would function just fine. Unfortunately, it seems that this concept of social value is very hard to robustly define. And if we can't define it, effectively optimizing for it is pretty much out of the question.

lordnacho 7y ago
What you are writing is another version of water/diamonds story. Basically WTF happened that diamonds, which nobody needs, are worth a lot, but water, which everyone needs, costs basically nothing? The answer was something called marginalism. Well worth reading about, and I can't do justice to it in a few sentences. Of course marginalism itself requires you to think about value in a certain way, often a very technical way (eg von Neuman-Morgenstern) that makes you forget that there are sometimes contradictions in how we think about value.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Thanks, I didn't know the term "marginalism", I'll look it up.
  - arundelo 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value#Marginalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value#Marginalism
xkcd-sucks 7y ago
Yes, but even these particular values embody subjective urbanist bias. For example, some towns run very effective volunteer fire departments, where the "payment" seems to be mutual aid and masculine pride. In some towns garbage disposal is mostly burn barrels and composting, which is bad for the environment but is not a service which can fail. And personally, having the privilege of education in biology, I feel like manufacturers of drugs and diagnostic equipment manufacturers are infinitely more valuable than doctors who are merely technicians trained in the use of these tools. Perhaps the concept of "social value" is only useful in the context of societies small enough so that all participants can agree on values?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Huh, you're right about my "subjective urbanist bias", I didn't even notice it in my thinking. Thanks! WRT. doctors vs. drug/diagnostic equipment manufacturers, a good point, but here I specifically picked my example - public health and safety vs. entertainment - to maximize the contrast. > Perhaps the concept of "social value" is only useful in the context of societies small enough so that all participants can agree on values? I think there might be a correlation between community size and the ease of agreeing on what is social value, but I wouldn't discount it for larger societies or even humanity as a whole. Humans do have a lot in common, and I feel you can get far in ranking jobs by social value by going along the gradient of reduction of suffering. And I say "jobs", not "professions", because IMO, professions are almost orthogonal to social value. For example, in terms of the social value, I'd rank a programmer working on diagnostic equipment > programmer working on a videogame > programmer working on advertising tech. The skillset and productivity may be similar or even the same, but these jobs occupy three very different point on the "making the world a better place" scale.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

michaelt 7y ago

> that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money. Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precisely with a lot of people’s personal values.

clairity 7y ago
yes, money is the mechanism we've defaulted to for measuring value, but economists admit that our economic systems, even capitalism, don't yet (properly) price everything that's valuable to humans (as you note). a charitable reading of the parent comment would find they're mainly against centralization of authority rather than how to value intangibles or how to engineer fairness into economic systems. but their first assumption that "'socially valuable contributions' [...] implies there's some sort of authority" is wholly unsupported. capitalism, for example, highly values rational resource distribution, but there is no central authority dictating that distribution. in any case, the crux of the problem is that with concentration of wealth comes concentration of power. we're all very wary of concentrations of power, for good reason. we need to decouple that pairing for a more stable and balanced society.
nugget 7y ago
Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  >Great childcare and elder care is very expensive It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.
  - 7y ago

the_cat_kittles 7y ago

this comment is great because it is a good faith argument that reveals how blind many people are to the fact that theyve outsourced all their moral thinking to money. the things you are scared of all exist now. they are bad in large part because wealth distribution is historically bad. its amazing how readily you dismiss your own ability to identify good and bad things. you really dont think you could have figured out slavery was bad back in the day?

joe_the_user 7y ago

First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable." Are literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values? Right now, the justice system, the zoning system and the operations of private foundations, and beyond are engaging in leadership that makes value judgements about what is socially valuable. That is how society has worked historically and the US in earlier times made those judgements more explicit. Point blank denying this is actually calling for even more social change than the article.

caseysoftware 7y ago
> Are [you] literally saying we should live a society without either values or institutions that make judgements about values? No, I did not say that literally or figuratively.

neilwilson 7y ago

"First, that implies there's some sort of authority - legal or otherwise - that determines "socially valuable."" There is. The opinions of other people in your society - generally expressed via the ballot box in a democracy. All authority is, or should, derive directly from that source of truth. That's sort of what society is - everybody else. Hence why we have social judgments on what is appropriate - like banning guns and the death penalty - and why we have different countries to encapsulate different views on those social judgments (my country bans the former, yours likely doesn't - but we both take a dim view of marrying off 12 year olds, something other societies are quite relaxed about). There is no objective truth here. It's all a social creation by a set of people who have chosen to co-operate with each other and call themselves a country.