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Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it fro

Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it from.

sfink 5y ago
No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.
- whitepaint 5y ago
  > No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general? > And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?
  - sfink 5y ago
    > Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general? Much of the financial sector. M&A firms. Lobbying. SEO. Fake web traffic generators. App/game companies that only clone others. Content mills. Collection agencies. Old growth loggers. Ticket scalpers. It's a little tricky because the most common scenario provides benefit to somebody, even if the overall social cost is far higher than that benefit. The customers of drug dealers want the product. Sleazy personal injury lawyers' clients gain from their services. Crypto miners. >> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. > What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out? Uh, I'm not sure how you got there from what I said. I could make an argument for regulation, but I didn't. We live an existence of partial information, and that's very exploitable. "Clickbait" is pejorative because it works but the expected payoff is not there. We are where the "free" market put us, though the market is not very free -- there's regulatory capture, information inequalities, and massive externalities that would not exist without the previous two. I don't need to propose a guaranteed-effective fix in order to make the point that much economic activity provides zero or negative value. If I had to point in the direction of a solution, I'd say that antitrust laws are vaguely the right idea, except they are based on very outdated notions of harm to consumers, and are also subject to regulatory capture. We need to make serious attempts at capturing more externalities. Even something as straightforward as a carbon tax is hard to define and implement, but it's the right idea; we need something similar for the massive damage done to people's time and attention, to civil society, to the commons. Capitalism got us here; it won't get us out. Although it's one of the tools that can and should be used.
isoskeles 5y ago
I'm mainly responding to the part of your comment noting jobs created and cheaper goods as an intrinsically net positive ("good") for society. I agree that the free market does not tend to create completely useless jobs, but such jobs can and do exist in a society. Most economies are not simply free markets, many are partly directed or interfered with (depending on your perspective) by governments. This can result in some pointless jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job) or mis-allocation of resources toward less productive work (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra). Or, let's say the jobs created are for producing more cigarettes and asbestos. Do you think that producing more cigarettes and asbestos, which requires more jobs, is "good" for society?

Free markets don't work like that. We would only be having billions of jobs filling dirt holes if it produced more value to the society than it extracted it from.

sfink 5y ago

No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in.

whitepaint 5y ago
> No, we would have those jobs if they produced more value to whoever is asking for those holes to be dug. Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general? > And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out?
- sfink 5y ago
  > Can you provide example of businesses where employees produce value just for the owners of the business but not the society in general? Much of the financial sector. M&A firms. Lobbying. SEO. Fake web traffic generators. App/game companies that only clone others. Content mills. Collection agencies. Old growth loggers. Ticket scalpers. It's a little tricky because the most common scenario provides benefit to somebody, even if the overall social cost is far higher than that benefit. The customers of drug dealers want the product. Sleazy personal injury lawyers' clients gain from their services. Crypto miners. >> And that's the reality we presently live in. It's not holes, it's watching ads and reading things that aren't worth our time and buying things that don't provide us value. Click on a link, dig a hole. Read the mindless alarm-inducing article, fill the hole in. > What are you proposing? That some entity tells what to read, what to buy, what to do? Why not just leave it to individuals to figure it out? Uh, I'm not sure how you got there from what I said. I could make an argument for regulation, but I didn't. We live an existence of partial information, and that's very exploitable. "Clickbait" is pejorative because it works but the expected payoff is not there. We are where the "free" market put us, though the market is not very free -- there's regulatory capture, information inequalities, and massive externalities that would not exist without the previous two. I don't need to propose a guaranteed-effective fix in order to make the point that much economic activity provides zero or negative value. If I had to point in the direction of a solution, I'd say that antitrust laws are vaguely the right idea, except they are based on very outdated notions of harm to consumers, and are also subject to regulatory capture. We need to make serious attempts at capturing more externalities. Even something as straightforward as a carbon tax is hard to define and implement, but it's the right idea; we need something similar for the massive damage done to people's time and attention, to civil society, to the commons. Capitalism got us here; it won't get us out. Although it's one of the tools that can and should be used.

isoskeles 5y ago

I'm mainly responding to the part of your comment noting jobs created and cheaper goods as an intrinsically net positive ("good") for society. I agree that the free market does not tend to create completely useless jobs, but such jobs can and do exist in a society. Most economies are not simply free markets, many are partly directed or interfered with (depending on your perspective) by governments. This can result in some pointless jobs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make-work_job) or mis-allocation of resources toward less productive work (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra). Or, let's say the jobs created are for producing more cigarettes and asbestos. Do you think that producing more cigarettes and asbestos, which requires more jobs, is "good" for society?