5 ms·

Financial incentives redirect labour from useful to profitable activities.

viro 6y ago
You mean labor is directed towards actions that produce more value than simply the labor put into them. Odd, its like you think that's a bad thing.
- anoncake 6y ago
  That is literally the opposite of what I wrote.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    I think this comes down to whether you agree that money == value, and that value == utility (i.e. that people will pay for things that they find useful)
- jascii 6y ago
  That statement only holds if you only define "value" as financial gain. I would consider that a dangerous simplification.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Since much of monetary value is related to scarcity, labor is directed to reduce scarcity, not to actions that produce social value. The pool of people who are capable of collecting garbage is non-scarce, so the price for labor is relatively small compared to the social value it produces. Advertising is so well rewarded because the attention of consumers is a very scarce resource, so companies put massive amounts of money into capturing some of that.
cubano 6y ago
you cannot possibly be postulating that profitable activities can never be considered useful, are you?
- jascii 6y ago
  I do not see OP stating that "useful" and "profitable" are mutually exclusive. I think it is widely understood that there is "usefulness" that is not satisfied by profit driven organisations, that is why we have non-profits and public institutions.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    Call me cynical, but most non-profits seem to be more interested in paying salaries and fundraising than in the actual thing they're supposed to be "about". And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.
    - jascii 6y ago
      Fine, I'll call you cynical... ;P There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.
      - wott 6y ago
        Note that he didn't say overpaying, just paying. It is true that in all organisations (including those associations), as time passes, professionalisation progresses, headcount raises, administrative and secondary tasks develop; and self-preservation, self-replication become a goal of its own. There is a whole range of people (I don't mean leaders or managers, but bottom/middle people) who make a career in all those non-profits, para-public and semi-public associations (all of them living mostly from subsidies), hoping from one to another. At least it goes like that in my country, it has developed a lot in the last 30 years.
fouric 6y ago
...and, since many (not all) profitable activities turn out to be useful, financial incentives still end up incentivizing useful activities. For instance: [IDE company] employees are incentivized to develop [IDE], I buy [IDE], [company] makes a profit, and the value that I get out of [IDE] means that their activities were useful. Good stuff.
- anoncake 6y ago
  Sure. But others are entirely useless or even harmful. If you want people to implement dark patterns, tracking, advertising, or walled gardens, you have to pay them.

viro 6y ago

You mean labor is directed towards actions that produce more value than simply the labor put into them. Odd, its like you think that's a bad thing.

anoncake 6y ago
That is literally the opposite of what I wrote.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I think this comes down to whether you agree that money == value, and that value == utility (i.e. that people will pay for things that they find useful)
jascii 6y ago
That statement only holds if you only define "value" as financial gain. I would consider that a dangerous simplification.
aidenn0 6y ago
Since much of monetary value is related to scarcity, labor is directed to reduce scarcity, not to actions that produce social value. The pool of people who are capable of collecting garbage is non-scarce, so the price for labor is relatively small compared to the social value it produces. Advertising is so well rewarded because the attention of consumers is a very scarce resource, so companies put massive amounts of money into capturing some of that.

cubano 6y ago

you cannot possibly be postulating that profitable activities can never be considered useful, are you?

jascii 6y ago
I do not see OP stating that "useful" and "profitable" are mutually exclusive. I think it is widely understood that there is "usefulness" that is not satisfied by profit driven organisations, that is why we have non-profits and public institutions.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Call me cynical, but most non-profits seem to be more interested in paying salaries and fundraising than in the actual thing they're supposed to be "about". And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.
  - jascii 6y ago
    Fine, I'll call you cynical... ;P There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.
    - wott 6y ago
      Note that he didn't say overpaying, just paying. It is true that in all organisations (including those associations), as time passes, professionalisation progresses, headcount raises, administrative and secondary tasks develop; and self-preservation, self-replication become a goal of its own. There is a whole range of people (I don't mean leaders or managers, but bottom/middle people) who make a career in all those non-profits, para-public and semi-public associations (all of them living mostly from subsidies), hoping from one to another. At least it goes like that in my country, it has developed a lot in the last 30 years.

fouric 6y ago

...and, since many (not all) profitable activities turn out to be useful, financial incentives still end up incentivizing useful activities. For instance: [IDE company] employees are incentivized to develop [IDE], I buy [IDE], [company] makes a profit, and the value that I get out of [IDE] means that their activities were useful. Good stuff.

anoncake 6y ago
Sure. But others are entirely useless or even harmful. If you want people to implement dark patterns, tracking, advertising, or walled gardens, you have to pay them.