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Check out this story. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/ TL;DR: a thought experiment: for

Check out this story. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/social-injustice/ TL;DR: a thought experiment: for an exam, take the average of every student's grade, and give it to all students. By, say, the 3rd exam, all of the class will fail.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
What does an apocryphal story about a highly simplified and disingenuous demonstration of socialism have to do with anything?
- bordercases 5y ago
  The logic generalizes fairly well to the problems you have with all collective goods. Unless everyone acts optimally from the goodness of their hearts, which no one does, to shunt the load of producing the collective good, you need coercion, since at that point there is no individual incentive to contribute to a collective good if others are doing so. This is true for unions and undergrad experiments, as it is for centralized planning states, which unsurprisingly are often oppressive dictatorships. If you want to eliminate the need for coercion (which bears long-running costs onto the state), you need to appeal to individual selfishness, which implies competition. As markets have their own problems, you ultimately need a mixed-economy state, something China has become despite its communist roots, and ditto the USA despite its uber-capitalism. The economist Mancur Olson goes into this dynamic of collective action for Western states and beyond. He attempts to explain the general case of the rise and fall of efficiency in capitalist nations, as well as the outlier performance of some communist nations (all short-run) despite this model. https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigidities/dp/0300030797 https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid... https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 Cultural upbringing can make up some of the difference, but only in small scales or when the groups are tight-knit. Even in China, where on the surface Confucian culture totalizes the individual to the collective, there is also a culture of skillful deception and intrigue in Chinese politics that has flourished domestically and abroad in the 21st century.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Ok, cool. Despite Snopes saying that never happened, China doesn’t do that; in fact they have more billionaires than the US. It’s almost like they learned from the failures of other communist states and adapted their system. What they have done is create a base standard of living that is dependent on location. They can’t move every rural farmer to urban population centers all at once, so they’ve been doing it gradually over time. Do a lot of Chinese live in poverty? Yeah, but they’ve been living in poverty for a few hundred years. A lot fewer live in poverty in 2021 than in 1990.
- dangerface 5y ago
  Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city? Trying to force this doesn't make sense to me.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Because agricultural modernization universally requires at least an order of magnitude less labor, and society is then better served by those workers being in urban centers where they can work first in factories then transition to a service economy for the ones who'll work unskilled labor, and concentrate access to quality education for the ones that can contribute intellectually. Those "ghost cities" that the media pearl clutched for a while there have for the most part been slowly filled in with previously agrarian workers making the urban transition.
    - bordercases 5y ago
      China is deficit in arable land for food. If those farmers aren't reskilling (or even if the labor pool on a whole isn't reskilling, presuming your intellectual contributions don't mean farming) then it's an overall waste of labour.
jtbayly 5y ago
In ninth grade my biology teacher took a vote about whether to do this for one test. I voted against it (in the minority). It didn’t take three tests to see the effect. Immediately people stopped studying for the test. We failed. The teacher cheated and gave us all a C.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

What does an apocryphal story about a highly simplified and disingenuous demonstration of socialism have to do with anything?

bordercases 5y ago
The logic generalizes fairly well to the problems you have with all collective goods. Unless everyone acts optimally from the goodness of their hearts, which no one does, to shunt the load of producing the collective good, you need coercion, since at that point there is no individual incentive to contribute to a collective good if others are doing so. This is true for unions and undergrad experiments, as it is for centralized planning states, which unsurprisingly are often oppressive dictatorships. If you want to eliminate the need for coercion (which bears long-running costs onto the state), you need to appeal to individual selfishness, which implies competition. As markets have their own problems, you ultimately need a mixed-economy state, something China has become despite its communist roots, and ditto the USA despite its uber-capitalism. The economist Mancur Olson goes into this dynamic of collective action for Western states and beyond. He attempts to explain the general case of the rise and fall of efficiency in capitalist nations, as well as the outlier performance of some communist nations (all short-run) despite this model. https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigidities/dp/0300030797 https://www.amazon.ca/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid... https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0465051952 Cultural upbringing can make up some of the difference, but only in small scales or when the groups are tight-knit. Even in China, where on the surface Confucian culture totalizes the individual to the collective, there is also a culture of skillful deception and intrigue in Chinese politics that has flourished domestically and abroad in the 21st century.

wayoutthere 5y ago

Ok, cool. Despite Snopes saying that never happened, China doesn’t do that; in fact they have more billionaires than the US. It’s almost like they learned from the failures of other communist states and adapted their system. What they have done is create a base standard of living that is dependent on location. They can’t move every rural farmer to urban population centers all at once, so they’ve been doing it gradually over time. Do a lot of Chinese live in poverty? Yeah, but they’ve been living in poverty for a few hundred years. A lot fewer live in poverty in 2021 than in 1990.

dangerface 5y ago
Why would you want to move farmers to cities where they cant farm? who would do the farming then? why not just pay farmers what you would pay a factory worker in the city? Trying to force this doesn't make sense to me.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Because agricultural modernization universally requires at least an order of magnitude less labor, and society is then better served by those workers being in urban centers where they can work first in factories then transition to a service economy for the ones who'll work unskilled labor, and concentrate access to quality education for the ones that can contribute intellectually. Those "ghost cities" that the media pearl clutched for a while there have for the most part been slowly filled in with previously agrarian workers making the urban transition.
  - bordercases 5y ago
    China is deficit in arable land for food. If those farmers aren't reskilling (or even if the labor pool on a whole isn't reskilling, presuming your intellectual contributions don't mean farming) then it's an overall waste of labour.

jtbayly 5y ago

In ninth grade my biology teacher took a vote about whether to do this for one test. I voted against it (in the minority). It didn’t take three tests to see the effect. Immediately people stopped studying for the test. We failed. The teacher cheated and gave us all a C.