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What an arrogant narrow minded ideology this researcher has "If you just use your money to, I don’t know, buy the tenth car for your garage, that will only stay

What an arrogant narrow minded ideology this researcher has "If you just use your money to, I don’t know, buy the tenth car for your garage, that will only stay in your garage. [...] there are just way more effective ways of enhancing the public good than being, in layman’s terms, “economically productive.”" You can afford the tenth car because you already contributed to the common good to earn that money! If you're supposed to also spend your money enhancing the public good then it's not really your money so how are you rewarded for the work you do?

googlryas 7y ago
Not only that, but it isn't like the money just disappears when you buy that car. What if I buy my 10th car, and the guy I bought it from goes out and donates that money to charity or whatever the author thinks is a moral use of money? From the public's perspective, the money still goes to enhancing the public good - the only difference is that there is now a car stored in my garage instead of some other fellows.
- macawfish 7y ago
  Look deeper than the money, at the relationships and realities it facilitates. Somewhere a factory worker traded time with their kids to work on that car, all so it could sit in a garage to satisfy some alienated rich guy's ego? At some point it's just waste and sacrifice.
  - nybble41 7y ago
    > Somewhere a factory worker traded time with their kids to work on that car... The factory worker most likely doesn't care about the car. They traded time with their kids for a paycheck, to be spent on those same kids or whatever else the worker desired. Even, potentially, a trophy car they don't intend to drive. If that car doesn't get sold then there is less work for the factory, less demand for factory workers, and fewer paychecks.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  The whole point is that that is not a minor difference. That same personal car, for that same money, would be much more useful if it was someone's first car instead of 10th. The money given for the car is the same either way, but the real utility that the car brings is not.
  - zchrykng 7y ago
    I don't think anyone is arguing that the value to society is the same in both circumstances. But unless you want some kind of authoritarian state, it isn't your business what someone else does with their money. Assuming they didn't break the law to get it and they paid whatever taxes they owed on it, they can do anything they want with it, including setting it on fire.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      Well, in particular, setting it on fire is actually against the law, on safety and environmental reasons. The same environmental reasons will probably have to apply in the near future for over-consumption in general. But that is all a different matter. The relevant discussion is not about trying to prevent people from spending their money for useless things. It is about the relationship between economic value and actual utility. Any transaction for a car seems to produce the same economic value, but can have vastly different social utility. Therefore, arguments that certain behaviors should be accepted because they produce economic value which must have social utility are wrong. So perhaps it does make sense to tax the rich, even though GDP or other economic value measurements will go down, because social utility will not go down proportionally.
  - chii 7y ago
    and therefore, the price you're willing to pay for the 10th car is probably a lot lower than the price someone else may be willing to pay for their first. The price you are willing to pay should be equal to your utility of the object.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
runninganyways 7y ago
I earn $100,000 a year writing god awful code for a doomed software company. Am I contributing more to the public good than the restaurant worker who cooks my food, the guy who changes my car's oil, or the guy who hauls all of my garbage away?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kgantchev 7y ago
  You may not be, but it seems that your employer is already doomed and they won't be around for long unless they do something to contribute to society. That's generally what happens to those that don't contribute: doomed to fail in the long-run.
- kofejnik 7y ago
  It doesn't really matter; the system works by everyone working for their benefit; and history consistently shows that it works better than alternates such as communism, where some powerful dude decides what's good for everyone (and will shoot you if you don't enthusiastically agree 100%) So yeah, you make decent living by writing awful code, good for you. If you think you don't deserve it, feel free to overtip your waiter. The alternatives are much much worse.
  - limomium 7y ago
    Aren't you describing a dictatorship? In communism, the state owns things, but the state can be the people; i.e. democratic communism. Isn't communism just the absence of private property? (that is, everything is public property)
    - glogla 7y ago
      And of course, collective ownership doesn't require central planning. Things can be distributed.
    - kofejnik 7y ago
mrow84 7y ago
The researcher is not expressing ideology, but rather making a point about the issues of using productivity to assess public good. His point is that by buying your tenth car you will contribute to productivity, but the use value of your tenth car is much lower than having those same ten cars (and thus the same productivity) spread across ten people. It is even more obvious in the extreme case: if a population of N people produced N cars, the total public good of every person having one would (I hope you would agree) be higher than the total public good of one person having all of them for their own use. However, in both cases the productivity is the same. Thus, whilst productivity is a useful measure, it does not account for everything we might be interested in when considering the effectiveness of our economies.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  This is one of the most ideological interviews I have ever read with an economist. Economists are unusually unaware of ideology, this is extraordinary: conducts limited research with limited applications (i.e. how people behave in lab conditions under unequal endowments), makes sweeping conclusions about tangentially related areas, makes sweeping conclusions about unrelated areas (most of the questions are unrelated to his research), and most of what he says just appears to totally random ideological musings about who adds value in society (this isn't even a question that economics can answer). You see this from economists who fail out of physics close to 100% of the time. They don't really understand anything about the private sector, they understand even less about the economy (they just want to do things that they enjoy rather than produce things for others), and they often have these very strong feelings about capitalism...without really having any evidence for these views (or any awareness of the trade-offs...again, this is the kind of thing you don't learn in physics/math class).
  - mrow84 7y ago
    You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but unfortunately this process is how our understanding of the world has increased so rapidly over the past several hundred years - laboriously proposing new models, often from intuitions we have derived from observations, and then trying to test those models by obtaining experimental evidence. If things bear out then we put more effort in, and conduct more thorough research. There are many instances of poor practice within that framework, but the process _as a whole_ has worked pretty well so far, and what is discussed here is pretty standard. As for the Nautilus post itself, it is just an interview with someone who works in the field, not a rigorous scientific document, and they are free (surely?) to express their views about whatever they and the interviewer wish to discuss. To your later points - I don't know what "understanding the private sector" or "understanding the economy" mean to you, but I would suggest that the person in question does have _some_ understanding of the economy (at least), inasmuch as they have contributed to a formalised understanding of the dynamics of the economy as we (humanity) currently understand them. I'm not entirely sure what else you want - perfect predictions or go home? Frankly it just sounds like you disagreed with what they said, but, as I already mentioned, you are as entitled to your opinion (as they are to theirs).
coldtea 7y ago
>You can afford the tenth car because you already contributed to the common good to earn that money You don't need to "contribute to the common good to earn that money", in fact you can actively undermine it (exploit monopoly, form a cartel, rent-seek and hog resources, buy political influence, fool people with BS ads and sponsored "research" to buy your shit, pollute and in general ignore all kinds of toxic externalities from your products, and so on...
- throwlaplace 7y ago
  i was going to respond with something like this but people who post like what you responded to willfully ignore such obvious things (because they are obvious after all). they argue that they're exceptions according to free market theology, or they argue that it's still ethical in some way, or they perform some other sort of acrobatics.
- wait-a-minute 7y ago
  You can definitely do bad things to earn money. But a doctor, an engineer, etc, would've already contributed to the common good even if they buy a tenth car that sits in their garage. So simply buying a tenth car that sits in your garage (and employs the people building the car) isn't in itself a bad thing or an indication that you're not contributing to the common good. In a free society, someone can spend their money on an extra toy if they want. Nothing wrong with that. It's a strange expectation to impose on others this notion of "spending only on the common good." It's not black and white what the common good is, and that is why an educated free market is a good proxy or mechanism for figuring that out. Rather than top-down centralized planning.
  - yodsanklai 7y ago
    > an educated free market "educated" is pretty vague. For instance, some people think that a 75% tax rate on high income is reasonable. The "market" doesn't have the right answer on what the right tax rate should be, and how everyone should contribute to the common good. This (and many parameters that already restrict the mythical free market) should be decided by the society. Besides, someone can earn money only if they live in a country that gave them the opportunity to do so. If the hypothetical doctor was born in the jungle somewhere, it's unlikely that he or she would have been able to make any money. In that sense, it's hard to argue that a high-tax rate is confiscatory, and I don't find it outrageous if they can only afford 5 cars instead of 10, if that can give more people access to health care.
gentaro 7y ago
> You can afford the tenth car because you already contributed to the common good to earn that money! I'm not trying to offend you, but the notion that your compensation is necessarily proportional to your contribution to public good is terribly naive. Surely you can agree that there are an endless number of unscrupulous ways to acquire money that don't contribute to public good, in fact, the opposite is often true. Take a corrupt public official, for instance, their contribution towards society is usually many times inversely proportional to their compensation.

googlryas 7y ago

Not only that, but it isn't like the money just disappears when you buy that car. What if I buy my 10th car, and the guy I bought it from goes out and donates that money to charity or whatever the author thinks is a moral use of money? From the public's perspective, the money still goes to enhancing the public good - the only difference is that there is now a car stored in my garage instead of some other fellows.

macawfish 7y ago
Look deeper than the money, at the relationships and realities it facilitates. Somewhere a factory worker traded time with their kids to work on that car, all so it could sit in a garage to satisfy some alienated rich guy's ego? At some point it's just waste and sacrifice.
- nybble41 7y ago
  > Somewhere a factory worker traded time with their kids to work on that car... The factory worker most likely doesn't care about the car. They traded time with their kids for a paycheck, to be spent on those same kids or whatever else the worker desired. Even, potentially, a trophy car they don't intend to drive. If that car doesn't get sold then there is less work for the factory, less demand for factory workers, and fewer paychecks.
tsimionescu 7y ago
The whole point is that that is not a minor difference. That same personal car, for that same money, would be much more useful if it was someone's first car instead of 10th. The money given for the car is the same either way, but the real utility that the car brings is not.
- zchrykng 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is arguing that the value to society is the same in both circumstances. But unless you want some kind of authoritarian state, it isn't your business what someone else does with their money. Assuming they didn't break the law to get it and they paid whatever taxes they owed on it, they can do anything they want with it, including setting it on fire.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Well, in particular, setting it on fire is actually against the law, on safety and environmental reasons. The same environmental reasons will probably have to apply in the near future for over-consumption in general. But that is all a different matter. The relevant discussion is not about trying to prevent people from spending their money for useless things. It is about the relationship between economic value and actual utility. Any transaction for a car seems to produce the same economic value, but can have vastly different social utility. Therefore, arguments that certain behaviors should be accepted because they produce economic value which must have social utility are wrong. So perhaps it does make sense to tax the rich, even though GDP or other economic value measurements will go down, because social utility will not go down proportionally.
- chii 7y ago
  and therefore, the price you're willing to pay for the 10th car is probably a lot lower than the price someone else may be willing to pay for their first. The price you are willing to pay should be equal to your utility of the object.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago

runninganyways 7y ago

I earn $100,000 a year writing god awful code for a doomed software company. Am I contributing more to the public good than the restaurant worker who cooks my food, the guy who changes my car's oil, or the guy who hauls all of my garbage away?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kgantchev 7y ago
You may not be, but it seems that your employer is already doomed and they won't be around for long unless they do something to contribute to society. That's generally what happens to those that don't contribute: doomed to fail in the long-run.
kofejnik 7y ago
It doesn't really matter; the system works by everyone working for their benefit; and history consistently shows that it works better than alternates such as communism, where some powerful dude decides what's good for everyone (and will shoot you if you don't enthusiastically agree 100%) So yeah, you make decent living by writing awful code, good for you. If you think you don't deserve it, feel free to overtip your waiter. The alternatives are much much worse.
- limomium 7y ago
  Aren't you describing a dictatorship? In communism, the state owns things, but the state can be the people; i.e. democratic communism. Isn't communism just the absence of private property? (that is, everything is public property)
  - glogla 7y ago
    And of course, collective ownership doesn't require central planning. Things can be distributed.
  - kofejnik 7y ago

mrow84 7y ago

The researcher is not expressing ideology, but rather making a point about the issues of using productivity to assess public good. His point is that by buying your tenth car you will contribute to productivity, but the use value of your tenth car is much lower than having those same ten cars (and thus the same productivity) spread across ten people. It is even more obvious in the extreme case: if a population of N people produced N cars, the total public good of every person having one would (I hope you would agree) be higher than the total public good of one person having all of them for their own use. However, in both cases the productivity is the same. Thus, whilst productivity is a useful measure, it does not account for everything we might be interested in when considering the effectiveness of our economies.

hogFeast 7y ago
This is one of the most ideological interviews I have ever read with an economist. Economists are unusually unaware of ideology, this is extraordinary: conducts limited research with limited applications (i.e. how people behave in lab conditions under unequal endowments), makes sweeping conclusions about tangentially related areas, makes sweeping conclusions about unrelated areas (most of the questions are unrelated to his research), and most of what he says just appears to totally random ideological musings about who adds value in society (this isn't even a question that economics can answer). You see this from economists who fail out of physics close to 100% of the time. They don't really understand anything about the private sector, they understand even less about the economy (they just want to do things that they enjoy rather than produce things for others), and they often have these very strong feelings about capitalism...without really having any evidence for these views (or any awareness of the trade-offs...again, this is the kind of thing you don't learn in physics/math class).
- mrow84 7y ago
  You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but unfortunately this process is how our understanding of the world has increased so rapidly over the past several hundred years - laboriously proposing new models, often from intuitions we have derived from observations, and then trying to test those models by obtaining experimental evidence. If things bear out then we put more effort in, and conduct more thorough research. There are many instances of poor practice within that framework, but the process _as a whole_ has worked pretty well so far, and what is discussed here is pretty standard. As for the Nautilus post itself, it is just an interview with someone who works in the field, not a rigorous scientific document, and they are free (surely?) to express their views about whatever they and the interviewer wish to discuss. To your later points - I don't know what "understanding the private sector" or "understanding the economy" mean to you, but I would suggest that the person in question does have _some_ understanding of the economy (at least), inasmuch as they have contributed to a formalised understanding of the dynamics of the economy as we (humanity) currently understand them. I'm not entirely sure what else you want - perfect predictions or go home? Frankly it just sounds like you disagreed with what they said, but, as I already mentioned, you are as entitled to your opinion (as they are to theirs).

coldtea 7y ago

>You can afford the tenth car because you already contributed to the common good to earn that money You don't need to "contribute to the common good to earn that money", in fact you can actively undermine it (exploit monopoly, form a cartel, rent-seek and hog resources, buy political influence, fool people with BS ads and sponsored "research" to buy your shit, pollute and in general ignore all kinds of toxic externalities from your products, and so on...

throwlaplace 7y ago
i was going to respond with something like this but people who post like what you responded to willfully ignore such obvious things (because they are obvious after all). they argue that they're exceptions according to free market theology, or they argue that it's still ethical in some way, or they perform some other sort of acrobatics.
wait-a-minute 7y ago
You can definitely do bad things to earn money. But a doctor, an engineer, etc, would've already contributed to the common good even if they buy a tenth car that sits in their garage. So simply buying a tenth car that sits in your garage (and employs the people building the car) isn't in itself a bad thing or an indication that you're not contributing to the common good. In a free society, someone can spend their money on an extra toy if they want. Nothing wrong with that. It's a strange expectation to impose on others this notion of "spending only on the common good." It's not black and white what the common good is, and that is why an educated free market is a good proxy or mechanism for figuring that out. Rather than top-down centralized planning.
- yodsanklai 7y ago
  > an educated free market "educated" is pretty vague. For instance, some people think that a 75% tax rate on high income is reasonable. The "market" doesn't have the right answer on what the right tax rate should be, and how everyone should contribute to the common good. This (and many parameters that already restrict the mythical free market) should be decided by the society. Besides, someone can earn money only if they live in a country that gave them the opportunity to do so. If the hypothetical doctor was born in the jungle somewhere, it's unlikely that he or she would have been able to make any money. In that sense, it's hard to argue that a high-tax rate is confiscatory, and I don't find it outrageous if they can only afford 5 cars instead of 10, if that can give more people access to health care.

gentaro 7y ago

> You can afford the tenth car because you already contributed to the common good to earn that money! I'm not trying to offend you, but the notion that your compensation is necessarily proportional to your contribution to public good is terribly naive. Surely you can agree that there are an endless number of unscrupulous ways to acquire money that don't contribute to public good, in fact, the opposite is often true. Take a corrupt public official, for instance, their contribution towards society is usually many times inversely proportional to their compensation.